921–930 of 984 posts
However I guess the real pain is that there's still nowhere to go. Switching to Windows or Linux means giving up the efficiency of M-series chips, losing key apps, and losing the consistent menu-bar. It feels like an abyss.
It's hard to justify Liquid Glass in general. The wastefulness of flat design (in terms of space) married with the visual excess of skeuomorphism, but without even providing any affordances (does the sidebar being raised give you any new information on how to use a sidebar? No). If you're a designer at a top 10 S&P 500 company making 6 figures, you owe it to yourself to have some love for your craft. If a PM tells yo…
The only UI change that I've found useful since Yosemite was Mojave's introduction of a dark mode. They made the fonts look worse on non-Retina displays, threw out the Preference pane in favor of a weird list that can only be resized vertically, added transparent everything, and banned any icon that's not in a squircle. Such UI, many differentiation, much insanely great, wow!
Anyway, I bought a ThinkPad.
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Do they sell many Apple Watches? Maybe it is an euro thing but I only very rarely see people wearing one. I would see 9 garmins for 1 Apple Watch for instance and many more people wearing cheap casios or no watch at all.
I'm in India and the Xiaomi watches are everywhere (they probably don't sell those in the States/EU?) But also Apple and Samsung.
I really hope the recent changes at Apple mean this will get completely overhauled and they'll return to their roots as design leaders. It will be such a shame if this mess is allowed to continue
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I agree, but I'm pointing out why UI changes happen. Apple could certainly do UI changes as part of a cleanup release though. Basically start with getting back to consistency pointed out in the article. But, having worked with users I've seen first hand out tons of internal improvements are ignored while one small UI change makes 'everything seem new'.
Don't you feel that the circumstances are similar though? There was a pressure (expectation and competition) for new features. There were rapid changes in the UI and UX. But also bugs. And IIRC Mac OS X upgrades were still paid-for. It was a brave move to spend a major release without adding feature. And people were grateful for it, once it happened.
The analogy I use is that no one thinks about plumbing until it's not working. I could stand up and tell people we have the best plumbing ever, it's been improved, is less likely to break, etc... and as long as it works at a surface level it seems the vast majority of user don't care. We actually save little UI tweaks/fixes to point to when doing major behind the scenes upgrades so users 'see' we're doing something. It's silly, but /shrug.
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>How do they justify their job if they can't roll out huge visible changes? This is the core rotting value in so much of big tech. So much of your bonus, performance review, promotion package, etc is hinging on "delivering impact" (ie: doing the flashy stuff). Imagine a world where some internal R&D team took a risk on liquid design but then thought it was okay to not ship it because it didn't work out.
To push the problem up a level, why can’t the company change the incentives to “happy customers”?
To prove that, you need some data to compare before/after. Hm, how about how much time people send in the software? Seems like a decent proxy. Well, plenty of people are very unhappily addicted to social media. and yet that’s what companies and investors frequently look at.
It’s very hard to come up with an incentive where just keeping things the same is acceptable. I mean it’s basically an admission that you as a company cannot innovate or invent better ways for people to interact with a computer.