I’m surprised at all the negative takes. I thought it was refreshing, they’re reintroducing colours and icons, cleaning up and using a consistent design language across platforms, and introducing new, well tested convenience features.
Apple announces something you don't want? They are ignoring the vital issues and focusing only on dumb superficial things which just proves they are going down hill.
Apple announces something you do want? Should have happened years ago, and the fact that they've only gotten to it now just proves they are going down hill.
Has it, though? I've never understood how people had a bad time on macOS when it came to development.
I'm developing Python, Go, Terraform, Ansible, and more, on macOS just fine. I've used Vim, gVim, VSCode, GoLand, and more without any issues. iTerm2 helps too.
What issues are you facing?
Changes for changes sake are negative for users. The last thing you want to do is change something that was working for users without giving them anything for it.
However a lot of actively developed software today changes because they want it to be "fresh and exciting". Basically because of desire to use changes to market it. But changing anything for that reason hurts usability.
Any change means the user will have to adapt to that change. You want to minimize the user having to adapt to anything. When you do make them adapt you need to give them clear value for that adapting.
As they say, "Apple: Going out of business since 1984."
Macs usually have large screens, and are driven by a pixel perfect input mechanism. Yet they will now be required to live with a design scheme that is largely designed for devices that would fit in a MacBook touchpad and the primary input for which is a fat finger.
Also, the icons seem to be completely stripped off colors, so I’m not sure where the reintroduction of colors is coming from. Unless you’re talking about the Vista Aero translucent sidebars that are only gonna make things harder to see.
Good thing nothing about that is changing. macOS apps continue to be macOS apps.
> Also, the icons seem to be completely stripped off colors, so I'm not sure where the reintroduction of colors is coming from
Sidebar icons in macOS Catalina and a few releases prior don't have any colours. At all. Those got stripped out a long time ago, maybe as far back as Yosemite but don't quote me.
Now, sidebar icons can inherit an app's accent colour with edge cases designated by the developer or use the system-wide accent colour if the user has selected one.
There is a lot I liked the look of and a few things I didn't like so much but might look better on a real system. Just have to wait and see what it is like to actually use.
From what we saw I don't hate it though. I think it looks quite clean, good spacing (possible touch Macs in the pipeline?), consistent, new icons look good, etc.
I think this really was a historic day as Tim said. After almost twenty years OS X is over. I do kind of wish they had jumped to macOS 14 to align version numbers with iOS and its children.
Yikes.
Apple harps on every year about how their Apple Watch is the most personal device they sell. Personal. Intimate. Love. Magical.
Yet, we still buy the things because we find our own sense of value in it.
Clearly, we don't pay much attention to buzzwords in the marketing. I don't know why you'd start now with some random comment on HN.
Which means that design conventions that happened to be well-optimized for the platform on which they arose are going to suffer.
But don't worry! All the lost productivity will surely be worth the sacrifice if it only provides the one thing that matters above everything when it comes to product and UX decisions: whether it can be used as a positive bullet point on resumes while they're managing up.
This is not a positive. A laptop is not a big iPhone and shouldn't use the same design language. One of the worst thing about Windows 10 is its use of huge, touch-friendly interfaces in an OS most commonly used with a keyboard and mouse. MacOS appears to be headed the same way (and it doesn't even support touch screens).
If not, then I see no reason why the default OS apps that come pre-installed shouldn't look and feel the same.
The same as each other, or the same as their mobile touchscreen counterparts?
There's certainly ways to screw that up, I won't deny that. But I think it's an inherently good direction to aim for. In my mind, that means (1) making sure that functionality is synced whenever possible (the lack of iMessage functionality on macOS after it was enhanced on iOS has bugged me for years), and (2) matching the look and feel to make the macOS version (or iOS version) feel familiar the first time you use the app if you've previously used the alternate platform's equivalent.
But they should behave different to take advantage of different devices strengths and limitations. Spotify does a pretty okay job at this.
In a business setting, sure, but I think you underestimate how much consumers are using touchscreens nowadays, even on their laptops.
That's only true to an extent. It stops being true when the low-density UI re-design forces the user to take more actions to accomplish the same task. If I have to dig through a deeper menu structure, or flip back an forth between pages instead of having the information all on-screen at once, that change is touch-friendly but hostile to desktop and many laptop users.
Particularly on that subject, density is mostly orthogonal to touch-friendly outside of touch target size, and that's something that Microsoft has been very honest about as a series of lessons learned between Windows 8 and Windows 10.
Keep in mind a lot of the density changes in Windows 8 weren't about touch-friendliness, they were about good typography and reading friendly white space. They tried to optimize the basic app templates for comfortable reading patterns as if every app needed to be a well typeset newspaper with good strong margins between columns/articles. On the surface it was a lot of good ideas individually, but the criticisms were valid that it led to some very sparse designs by default and that they made overriding the defaults a little too hard, the defaults a little too hand-holding.
For reading-only "information" the density of an app can be the same, touch-friendly or not. It's the control targets that should be adjusted just that little bit bigger. The difference in size between a past mouse-only target and touch-friendly is a lot smaller than people think, people are fairly comfortable at touching some very small targets (have you seen how dense most smartphone apps are today?). Even there too, Microsoft found out and admitted that user comfort for touch-friendly allows for far more density of touch targets than they at first recommended in Windows 8. (There's some interesting debate if those changes in UX Research Study results over the lifetime of Windows 8 and early Windows 10 testing were due to increased user familiarity with touch surfaces over those intervening years or some interesting unanticipated bias in the earlier studies.)
The density of the UI should be a factor of the user's ability to focus on said UI more than a "touch-friendly" concern. Even after Microsoft greatly adjusted their design guidelines on density in Windows 10 they keep a lot of their own apps UI at low density not because they "have to" for touch-friendly, but for various concerns like user friendliness, good typography, and analysis paralysis when the user is confronted with too many choices at once.
Nothing about macOS is being made touch-friendly. Nothing about macOS is being made into an iPhone.
If anything, this release makes it easier for iPad apps to become non-touch-friendly by making it easier to bring iPad apps to Catalyst without having to do complete restylings to match other macOS apps.
That's the benefit of consistent design language. iPad apps become better macOS apps, not the other way around.
The Mac is still a Mac. Desktops are desktops. Laptops are laptops. Separately, in iPad land, tablets are tablets. Nothing about the new design language changes that.
The less I think about my keyboard layout or system UI widgets the better. I can see why someone might like the novelty of those changing but for me they are just a means to an end. Any time I spend hunting around menus that have changed or fiddling with a novel keyboard means less time for things that I actually care about.
The reason Windows 8 was a disaster was because Microsoft suffered from the same misconception.
That's exactly what Catalyst is for — to take iPad apps and make them good macOS citizens. Is that not exactly what you want?
A consistent design language makes it easier for iPadOS apps to come to macOS via Catalyst without having to be almost completely restyled whilst also preserving everything makes the Mac a Mac.
Your laptop remains a laptop. Your desktop remains a desktop. Ported apps respect the form factor, not force it to become a tablet.
> "using a consistent design language across platforms"
Apple famously refrained from doing this at first, because for platforms with fundamentally different form factors, use cases and input methods it doesn't make much sense.
I do appreciate some parts of the redesign, but others like reducing the information density make things look nicer but make them less functional. We get it, whitespace is good to let things "breathe". Nontheless:
- I use those buttons that seem to be MIA in the screenshots of the new Finder though (to switch between views, the sort menu, the cog icon with extra actions). Will I have to change my workflow?
- I use a lot of items in the macOS sidebar. In the current Finder, my sidebar can show 12.5 items without scrolling. In the screenshots, it's showing 9. Am I going to have alter my workflow here too?
All of these seem like minor things, but they add up. There's a reason some people still download and learn Vim— the 5 seconds it can save you from each time you reach out to a mouse adds up. It might just be 5 seconds, but you do it _all the time_.
Like vim, this doesn't matter for many people, but for people who use an OS mostly for work, not for excitement or leisure, it can be worrying and annoying.
> "introducing new, well tested convenience features."
My worry here is that they might be popular in iOS, but that doesn't mean they are well-tested per se. Launchpad was a "well-tested" iOS feature (the home screen), but when it first arrived in Lion, it was terrible:
1. It was very buggy, as new software tends to be.
2. It was poorly thought out for the Mac.
- It didn't have a search bar, which makes sense in iOS but not in macOS.
- The only way to edit it was with click and hold, which makes sense on touch devices but is unseen in pointer devices.
- It uses the whole screen, which makes sense in single-app environments but not really on large screens with multiple apps are used. Coincidentally, Apple has realized full-screen experiences are dreadful when attempting to multi-task and changed some of these (Siri, calls on iPad) on the latest iOS.
3. It was in general unnecessary. macOS already has a bunch of ways to open apps: the Finder, Spotlight, the Dock, for some users, the Desktop. This is subjective though.
There's a lot of power-user tidbits on the way some of macOS feature's are implemented right now. You can option-click the Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and Sound task bar items to bring up extra options or information. People like me who constantly need to read the IP address or access the Bluetooth debug menu rely on these little power features for our workflows. I sure hope Apple hasn't gotten rid of these with the introduction of the Control Center.
[1]: https://photos5.appleinsider.com/gallery/36343-67506-000-lea...
No, because those icons are all still there. The cog button has become a … button, but it's the same menu.
> - I use a lot of items in the macOS sidebar. In the current Finder, my sidebar can show 12.5 items without scrolling. In the screenshots, it's showing 9. Am I going to have to alter my workflow here too?
No, just use smaller sidebar icons. System Preferences -> General.
> 3. It was in general unnecessary.
Depends what you consider necessary. I really think Apple wants to start pushing SwiftUI and Catalyst apps.
One issue with both of these is that apps written in either make completely different looking apps for Catalina and iOS 13.
In Big Sur and iOS 14, they'll look less different, which may help adoption. A Catalyst app with no specific changes made to be a good macOS citizen looks naff on Catalina but looks acceptable on Big Sur — so this helps lower the barrier for iPadOS developers to adopt proper macOS design language.
> I sure hope Apple hasn't gotten rid of these with the introduction of the Control Center
The Control Center demo showed dragging those items out to the menu bar so that they could work just like they did before.