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Comment by AnIdiotOnTheNet | Hacker News Reader

It's like modern developers are slowly rediscovering things we knew when the Macintosh was released in 1984. Maybe in a few decades we can have computers that don't suck again.

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Totally agree. Who thought that hiding regular menus is a good idea or using flat styles without any hint about what is a UI element you can click/interact with.

The problem is that each new generation of managers/ designers have to try to change shit around just to lesve their mark. "Lead the redesign and modernization of XYZ" looks much better in the CV than "maintained status quo" even if it means just coming up with total shite.

Maintain the status quo should be sold as maintained existing functionality and increased profit. Or something like that...

The Macintosh had most commands hidden in menus. The lucky thing was that there wasn't space for a lot of commands. The writer of this article would probably recommend toolbars, which were introduced much later, possibly by Microsoft in one of their Windows applications.

The original 1984 Mac used toolbars in MacPaint and MacWrite, just that I can recall. I wouldn't be surprised if they dated back further to Xerox PARC's GUI research in the '70s.

Hidden is an interesting way to descibe menus. The UX people at the time called that making all options visible since you could click on the menus and look at all the options. They also recommended the menus not remove options but just gray them out if they weren't available.

This was in contrast to lots of software at the time which was all hot-key based such that the only way to know what options there were was to look in a paper manual.

One of the motivations for toolbars (and the ribbon) is that there is a large group of users who never look inside any menu. Many users do not know about Undo. Many word processing users are unaware of things like tab stops, automatic indentation, line spacing, and styles. I have known an otherwise intelligent user who did not know that the shift key could be held down to get a capital letter - they used the caps lock key to get a capital and turned it back off after typing it. It's pretty amazing what is not obvious.

I think that's overly optimistic.

iOS 13 has moved even further away from Obvious UI (and more broadly, iOS since 7).

nah, we'll just do it all again.

waves and roundabouts

Hallelujah

The OS X GUI was (and still is) a big step down from OS 9.

How so?

Probably the biggest one is that there was no more spacial file manager.

Have you tried Finder in combination with say Amethyst?

Do you have a link to more info on this? As someone who's never used OS 9 I have no idea what a spacial file manager is and would love to learn.

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