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Comment by saagarjha | Hacker News Reader

The App Store app isn't particularly great, either. There are many UI paradigms it ends up breaking, and of course, it still goes for that sidebar/main window layout that all the Marzipan apps use.

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I much prefer the new MAS than the old one, which was a poor WebView hackfest. That one feels more native than the brand new News/Stocks/Voice Memos apps, as described in the article: search box roundrects are correct, search focus and clear behaviours are consistent, titlebars are displaying content title, not app name.

There are a number of buttons that do follow iOS style though. Also, "Redeem" and "View information" open up views that were previously unavailable except through iTunes, and you can see a mishmash of styles there too.

The two things that infuriate me though are the font size of the sidebar, and the laughably placed "Done" button on the top right when you're viewing a story.

Apples been trying to push the sidebar thing for a few years now on general Mac apps. It started as an evolution of the Finder sidebar and was named “source lists” for a short while and now it’s just called Sidebar in the default View too menu for new apps. Every time I go to use Notes on Mac I get confused by the two sidebars. Hopefully they calm down on their sidebar mania a bit soon. The web is a great proving ground for hierarchical organization of widgets and information, and I hope Apple can be humble and take notes from conventions that are popping up and sticking around about how to do “multiple sidebars” a little smarter.

Any particular sites/webapps you like as examples of hierarchical design? I am a tech lead and struggle to come up with anything better than Material Design's nav drawers with sub-items, or equivalent.

Not the OP, but one thing that springs to mind when talking UIs and web/native is the use of breadcrumbs online. For example, if seeing a list of all other notes in the same folder isn't a key use case, an alternative could be to hide that list but make it visible when activating the list's parent. This reduces the noise so the individual note can be focussed on.

Having said that, I suspect the use cases of notes are quite varied, so a one-size-fits-all approach might not be straightforward.

>Every time I go to use Notes on Mac I get confused by the two sidebars.

You mean the actual sidebar (with the top level note folders) and the notes list? That has been the norm in 99% of note apps (and similar 'bucket' apps) for ages, across platforms...

>and of course, it still goes for that sidebar/main window layout that all the Marzipan apps use.

So?

It's not a particularly inspired design; for whatever reason it just seems really out-of-place to me. I know there are some apps that utilize the sidebar/main window thing, but they all feel like native Cocoa apps while these have different spacing, search fields, etc.

It's more about the UI than the specific layout; no-one ever complains about Finder's 'uninspired' sidebar/main content layout. The inconsistencies which make the App Store feel alien on the Mac are what gets me. Also, I don't know if it's just me, but the App Store seems almost entirely keyboard-unaccessible.

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