[HN Gopher] Habits, UI changes, and OS stagnation
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Habits, UI changes, and OS stagnation
Author : naetius
Score : 67 points
Date : 2021-07-21 16:52 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (morrick.me)
(TXT) w3m dump (morrick.me)
| makecheck wrote:
| To be blunt, while the macOS 11 UI is not all bad, it contains
| _very_ serious design _mistakes_ , ruining things that everyone
| has no choice but to use (like notifications and alerts). Somehow
| Apple doesn't get how terrible this trend is, and that it is
| damaging their entire _brand_. I can only assume the hierarchy at
| Apple is broken to the point where the people in charge are
| either unreachable, or unresponding to feedback, while having
| entirely too much control.
|
| And as far as dumbed-down tools, it really feels like literally
| no one inside Apple even _uses_ their tools (or they have access
| to better stuff and don't care). For instance, "Console" - once
| the simplest imaginable concept with an implementation that
| everyone would expect - is now a pointless mess. An app that
| _should_ have obvious behavior and usability is now just
| confusing every time I open it, leaving me feeling defeated
| because I cannot even find what I need. They messed it up and
| _moved on_ , like many other things.
| gknoy wrote:
| > macOS ... contains very serious design mistakes
|
| Would you be willing to elaborate, or link to articles
| supporting this? I'm sure that they have them, but since I swap
| between windows and mac daily I might just not be noticing
| them.
| thom wrote:
| Ironically, the thing that first got me really into Linux (which
| I consider a functional and pragmatic system at its core) was
| having lots of window managers, some of which did frivolous
| things like having waves lapping on my desktop. I think there are
| worse things than operating systems looking pretty. Your computer
| might be a tool, mine's the spaceship I spend most of my life
| inside.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| > Your computer might be a tool, mine's the spaceship I spend
| most of my life inside.
|
| If that's the case, then OS developers should spend less time
| making it fit some designer's aesthetic of beauty and instead
| make it super mailable, so users can make it look pleasing to
| them instead.
|
| Not surprisingly, 90s OS did that better too.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| I'm reminded that Windows 3.1 had dark mode in the early
| 1990s, and not simply inverting colors. Theming was so easy
| compared to today that it's embarrassing.
| vincent-manis wrote:
| Absolutely. I love that about Linux: it offers the user choice.
| That's why I use i3, no frivolous waves for me!
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| > "Is this really bad UI, or is it just you who are averse to
| change?"
|
| _It doesn 't matter!_
|
| The funny thing about human-computer interfaces is that they are
| used by _humans_. Humans are adverse to change; ergo, a
| constantly-changing interface is also a _bad_ interface.
|
| When you change something--be it a GUI or an API--you need to
| take into account not _just_ whether the change is better, but
| also whether it 's worth the _very high_ inherent cost of change.
| I don 't think the modern tech industry does this anywhere near
| enough.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _Humans are adverse to change; ergo, a constantly-changing
| interface is also a bad interface._
|
| That's... not an ergo.
|
| You seem to be extremely overestimating the cost of change. A
| few people can complain loudly for 24 hours, and then
| everyone's practically forgotten what the old appearance was
| even like.
|
| Kids can be adverse to eating their vegetables, it doesn't mean
| we stop giving them to them. Similarly, when consumers actually
| benefit from the changes, it's not always immediately apparent,
| so they complain until they realize that son of a gun, the app
| is actually better/faster/easier now -- and then they rarely go
| back and talk about how great the new way is, they just use it
| without comment.
|
| Using "humans are adverse to change" as an argument to not
| change is a pretty terrible way to go about things.
|
| I'm not saying change for change's sake is good... but that
| people are actually happy for positive change even when it's
| small, even if they gripe about it at first. Remember, actions
| (continued usage) are louder than words.
| tshaddox wrote:
| > The funny thing about human-computer interfaces is that they
| are used by humans. Humans are adverse to change; ergo, a
| constantly-changing interface is also a bad interface.
|
| The trouble with that epistemology is that it makes it
| impossible to discern (or at least pointless to discuss) any
| qualities of a user interface except how popular the interface
| is or how much humans enjoy using the interface.
|
| > When you change something--be it a GUI or an API--you need to
| take into account not just whether the change is better, but
| also whether it's worth the very high inherent cost of change.
|
| This sounds dangerously close to the awful epistemology that is
| the precautionary principle. Both are saying that if there is
| some proposal for which we don't have any good knowledge about
| its potential downsides, we ought to reject the proposal. Your
| variation seems to be that we should assign the proposal some
| baseline cost (and thus reject the proposal unless we have
| knowledge that the benefit exceeds the cost). I simply don't
| think there is any way of establishing that baseline cost.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| Why not instead of "change" just make a new interface and give
| users the _option_ to switch if they want. This approach seems
| too rare.
|
| Has anyone ever counted the number of times that Firefox has
| changed its UI. I would bet they have people working on a new
| one right now.
|
| What do we call it when people keep "fixing" things that are
| not broken. When people misuse the word "broken" to signify
| their dislike for something.
|
| If we dig down deep enough in the source code of things, I am
| sure we can some interfaces that do not change much.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _Why not instead of "change" just make a new interface and
| give users the option to switch if they want. This approach
| seems too rare._
|
| Because it duplicates options, separates the users in two
| camps, adds 2 (or more if you keep doing it) interfaces for
| the dev team to keep supporting, and so on...
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| Give users the option to keep using the "familiar"
| interface, but without any "support". I suspect many user
| actually require "support" _because of_ interface changes.
|
| IME, observing other users, it is the forced change that is
| offensive to some. They do not complain about "lack of
| support" (many want to be self-suficient and do not want to
| keep asking for "support"), they complain about changes
| that they see as unnecessary and that will just require
| more effort to learn.
| loopz wrote:
| This is exactly right. Producers get hyper-optimized on change,
| while users want either _no change_ , or obvious improvements.
| Majority of incentives and goals of producers rarely align with
| every individual user.
|
| In this regard, I find Linux XWindows and WMs to strike a good
| balance. It allows me to _choose_ Xfce, or even i3. It gets
| most of the bad bits about modern computing (notifications,
| desktop sounds, panels, popups, windows-fiddling, desktop
| icons, shortcuts, ads, whatever will they come up with next),
| to just go away and not torment me anymore.
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| This is why I abandoned Mac and Windows...
|
| My computer is a workstation, not a playground, and I don't
| need things randomly rearranged for me.
|
| I resisted for a long time, because Linux seemed like a
| "hassle", but once I'd had to reconfigure everything several
| times after upgrades, I realized that I was essentially going
| through the same process, only on someone else's schedule and
| not by choice.
|
| After trying out a couple of WMs and choosing one to become
| familiar with, I've NEVER AGAIN had that experience. Even if a
| distro has a different default setup, it's a matter of copying
| the config file I already have saved from a previous install.
|
| What a load off my shoulders!
| coldtea wrote:
| > _This is why I abandoned Mac and Windows.._
|
| For what? Linux is even worse on that aspect.
|
| First for the OS GUI (Desktop manager, finder, launcher, and
| config apps) - both Gnome and KDE and Canonical and others
| have the tendency to remake it (usually worse) every few
| years and every major release. Then there's the fact that key
| things keep missing in action (like image preview in the file
| selector in Gnome iirc).
|
| And that's for the core desktop (launcher + config apps). It
| gets worse with regular apps. Some being GTK and others
| KDE/QT based, some use bizarro or legacy frameworks, some
| with custom cross-platform UIs that kind of match the look of
| just GTK apps usually, and so on.
|
| Sure, as you did, you can always go with a minimal setup
| (just some terminals and a very simple window manager), and
| that will stay stable, but that's really retreating from UI,
| not a holy grail of stable UI. And it doesn't include your UI
| apps (which suffer from what I described above).
| antisthenes wrote:
| I'm very glad to see this line of reasoning being the top
| comment.
|
| A change in UI must generally be so good, as to completely
| overshadow the costs of change. Hence, most changes will NOT
| pass that high bar, and are thus bad changes.
|
| Unless some UI/UX feature you're considering received
| overwhelming support from your users (both regular and power-
| users), it's probably not worth doing and you should be
| directing your efforts anywhere else.
| seumars wrote:
| > Now you have overpaid """designers""" that need to show
| """impact""" every year, so they have to reinvent the wheel over
| and over.
|
| This is such an ignorant and oversimplified argument. The only
| reason one could assume that it's the designers at Apple who
| "need to show impact" instead of PR project management
| shenanigans is if you've never worked with design at a large
| scale. I'm pretty sure some random designer at Apple has already
| redesigned something like Mission Control (which has been pretty
| much unchanged in the last few OS iterations) but it just isn't
| the right time to launch said upgrade so it just sits on the back
| burner for years.
| ajconway wrote:
| As a software engineer, who hasn't felt like "I definitely know
| how to make everything better by rewriting the whole thing!"?
| UI/UX designers feel the same way. It's never the answer, but
| it's not the end of the world if someone does it; after some
| time and feedback the product becomes useable again.
| smoldesu wrote:
| It's pretty ironic to review Jobs' goals to "Make the next great
| personal computer operating system", since they precisely
| highlight some of the biggest issues with MacOS today. Apple is
| no longer shipping a "single OS", they're maintaining a series of
| progressive LTS releases that seems to be a middle-ground nobody
| can appreciate. MacOS's metaphorical "plumbing" is far from
| state-of-the-art, too: the networking APIs are continuing to be
| gimped, while the userspace continues to be overhauled in
| confusing, highly abstracted ways. Oh, and killer graphics? MacOS
| has the least-supported, most esoteric graphics interface
| available today. I've heard people say that it's easier to write
| graphics code for the Nintendo Switch, because at least that
| doesn't force you to use Metal.
|
| All for all, I wholeheartedly agree with what's being said here.
| After Mojave was released, I get the feeling that Apple started
| to panic, and began some unnecessary design regressions that
| _really_ drove people like me away. They started gutting 32-bit
| apps and libraries, bloating one of the most space-efficient UIs
| on the market, and undoing a lot of the personalization options
| that I loved MacOS for. One day, I hope that Apple can put this
| all aside and make a genuinely great computer. They 're holding a
| lot of the cards, but I still can't recommend the M1 to others
| yet, much less integrate it into my own professional workflow.
| blacktriangle wrote:
| Apple is still killing it in the hardware space, but I think
| the writing was on the wall for Apple software when Forstall
| was forced out.
| handrous wrote:
| ... oh damn, that _does_ match up to when I felt iOS abruptly
| lost its way and headed down the road to becoming a
| complicated, full, multitasking GUI OS, rather than a light
| & simple thing-becomer.
| hota_mazi wrote:
| Bit odd to see the author of this article seems to be so vested
| in all things Apple and he still spells macOS incorrectly.
|
| Anyway:
|
| > First, we're going to have a single OS strategy at Apple. We're
| not going to have a dual or a triple or a quadruple OS strategy
| like some others. We're going to have one OS, and that's very
| important to us.
|
| And twenty years later, Apple still doesn't have a single OS.
| etchalon wrote:
| Jobs was specifically targeting Microsoft there. Back then,
| Microsoft had two distinct operating systems ... Windows 2000
| (based on the NT kernel) and Windows ME (based on Windows 9x
| and MS-DOS). Windows 2000 was the "professional" operating
| system and ME was the "home" version.
|
| PLUS there were multiple versions of each of those.
|
| There were actually rumors and concerns that, moving forward,
| Apple would do the same with the NeXT stuff. Because they did
| do the same with the NeXT stuff.
|
| For a year, Apple had Mac OS 9 (Classic) and Mac OS X Server
| (which was based on NeXTStep).
|
| Amazingly, saying, "We're just gonna ship one thing to
| everyone, and change the features depending on the
| distribution" was actually novel.
|
| That same basic strategy persists today, since macOS, iOS,
| iPadOS and tvOS are all ostensibly the same operating system
| with different interfaces.
| OldTimeCoffee wrote:
| >But making previous features or UI elements less discoverable
| because you want them to appear only when needed (and who decides
| when I need something out of the way? Maybe I like to see it all
| the time) -- that's not progress.
|
| It seems it's a trend to make everything require more clicks for
| 'cleanliness'. In the end, it just makes everything frustrating.
| You end up having to add search to make anything usable. Windows
| 10 and Android settings are both great examples of this.
| blacktriangle wrote:
| "More clicks for cleanliness" nails it exactly.
|
| Namecheap's old UI was perfect, info dense, you could do
| everything. Now they try and hide everything useful from me in
| the name of looking like every other hipster inspired UI. It's
| not bad enough I've bothered moving off of them but I've
| stopped using Namecheap for new names simply because of how
| much I hate their new UI.
|
| All they had to do was literally nothing and I'd still be a
| happy customer.
| [deleted]
| sumtechguy wrote:
| Well said.
|
| The #1 rule I used to follow is I am on this control what can I
| do here and is it clear. The #2 rule is What is my next step
| from step #1 and is it easy to find where I currently am.
|
| Break either of those and the GUI will be confusing.
| Disappearing controls makes you think something is wrong. I
| would typically go with disabled and a clear indicator of the
| something else needing to be filled out. If that was not
| achievable a tooltip on the disabled control to tell the user
| what to do.
|
| The way to achieve it is to pretend you are on 2 hours of sleep
| and not very computer savvy.
|
| Now you can go too far and make the whole thing a busy mess and
| then it is unclear where to even begin. A good rule of thumb
| with that is left to right top to bottom, keep scrolling to a
| minimum. Most people get that. One I was using just yesterday
| was jumping around in the page and the 'finish' control was in
| the top left and scrolled off the page.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| It's a reaction to the Word-like screen-filling toolboxes of
| the late 90's. And while the toolbox not taking your entire
| screen would be a real improvement, what we got was a smaller
| set of larger buttons with plenty of negative space to make
| them look nice, taking approximately the same area as before,
| but with added clicks and discoverability problems.
|
| Eventually the problem did go away because of larger monitors
| in a higher resolution. But well, nobody would ever think about
| going back into those ugly interfaces!
|
| Oh, and count me as another previous Namecheap customer that
| isn't anymore mostly because of their interface. "Mostly"
| because I had one domain that needed DNSSEC when they didn't
| support it, and that's what started my migration, but what made
| me move everything was the interface.
| etchalon wrote:
| I do not understand what this author is talking about.
|
| Apple has always been focused on superficial interface changes.
| Every single release of OS X has had minor, sometimes major,
| revisions to the interface.
|
| Remember when Sheets were gonna be a thing? And Drawers? And
| Metal (the UI, not the GL)?
|
| Show me an OS release and I'll show you things Apple moved
| around.
|
| Go back further, and you'll see it's always been the case.
|
| System 7 was a massive change from System 6. Mac OS 8 was a HUGE
| departure from System 7. Mac OS 9 had substation changes from Mac
| OS 8.
|
| This whole "remember the good ole days when nothing changed?"
| schtick people pull to make bad points is insanely frustrating if
| you actually pay attention to things as they change.
| peatmoss wrote:
| I feel like Apple has generally done a good job containing churn
| to the superficial parts of the OS. That said, I wish the
| Linux/BSD mindshare had chosen to invest its desktop efforts into
| creating a rock solid OpenStep implementation.
|
| Had GNUStep or something like it been able to marshal the
| resources that have been poured into multiple rewrites of Gnome &
| KDE, I think we'd have the basis for the low-churn system we wish
| Apple had provided us.
|
| Maybe if someone like this had come along 20 years ago things
| would be different https://github.com/trunkmaster/nextspace
| amelius wrote:
| It's like fashion. When is skeuomorphism coming back?
| webmobdev wrote:
| My friend was trying to pitch anal sex to me, and one of the
| things he said was - _" Well, the anus might adjust and
| accommodate to you inserting stuff in it, but it doesn't mean it
| likes things shoved into it."_
|
| That's exactly how I feel about the crappy design changes that
| Windows and macOS have been increasingly forcing on us. We get
| used to it not because we like it, but often because there is no
| other way.
|
| As a long time Windows user migrant to macOS, I find this more
| true of macOS now (it really pisses me off that you still can't
| maximise a window consistently on macOS). Both get a lot of
| things right, but I feel Windows UI still has an edge (if you
| choose to ignore Windows 8). (For the Apple lovers - I say this
| confidently after I deliberately chose not to customize macOS to
| be like Windows And really embraced the whole _" Apple way of
| doing things"_ to really experience if it is better. I can
| honestly say no, it isn't.)
|
| But just as the Americans stubbornly decided to drive on the
| right when the the rest of the world drove on the left, Windows
| and macOS too deliberately choose different UI paradigm and
| approach more for business reasons than functional ones.
|
| It's often irritating because sometimes it feels as if the
| changes in UI are just a way to try to differentiate the products
| without any improvement in usability - it took me nearly a year
| and half to get as comfortable with macOS as I was with Windows.
| But I still feel Windows UI is more productive, and less
| irritating, than macOS. (The only thing I like on the macOS
| desktop environment is the unified Menubar on top and Spotlight.)
| willyt wrote:
| Option click plus window button in top left of window to
| maximise without going into full screen. Everywhere except
| Britain and Japan drives on the right.
| jeffreyrogers wrote:
| At work I mostly use Linux and at home mostly a 2017 Macbook Air.
| I do have a Windows PC that I put together in ~2012. I recently
| used the PC again because there was some Windows only software I
| needed to use and it was shocking going from Mac to that. Windows
| gets a lot of shit, but it felt way more responsive than Mac. I
| think due to the lack of animations on everything.
|
| The author of the article is on to something with regards to
| Apple focusing on what demos well rather than what is good to
| use.
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