Hacker News Reader

Comment by jacurtis | Hacker News Reader

I agree completely. The only real gripe I feel is that excessive padding.

It is sort of like scrolling through Dribbble app mockups. The layouts look amazing as a mockup, but when you actually go to make or use the app it isn't as practical as you want.

On a desktop, with a mouse, I have near-perfect precision. I don't need overly-padded icons and windows because I have the precision of a mouse. The extra padding just wastes screen real-estate and makes me move the mouse more to get between tools or options in the menu.

I would much rather have less padding, which might not look as beautiful, and use the extra space for the content of my application as opposed to the toolbars.

View on HN

> On a desktop, with a mouse, I have near-perfect precision. I don't need overly-padded icons and windows because I have the precision of a mouse.

You do, but not everyone does. Consider the accessibility needs of people with motor-degenerative diseases like Parkinson's or Huntington's. Won't they be better-served by larger click-targets?

That is why Apple provides an accessibility panel in system settings.

Normally, yes; but sometimes the change required to help one group doesn't hinder anyone else, and also is very hard to automatically derive the "accessible" version of the UX in a way that doesn't cause more harm than help (by e.g. accidentally pushing critical buttons out of visibility into a slide menu; or breaking a menu onto two lines such that there's less viewport left than originally designed for at minimum height.)

In such cases, it makes a lot of sense to just give the change to everybody, so that you can design the UX once, with the change in place.

See also: modern TV shows and films that make sure to not put anything important where closed-captions would appear—they're designing once, assuming captioning.

doesn't hinder anyone else

Complete BS --- it absolutely slows down those who don't need elephantine UI elements to use a computer.

In this particular case, the new design is just trading element-internal padding for inter-element margin or element-group margin. The total space that each element-group takes up is the same. The only change is that more of the previously "dead space" around each element is now clickable, because it's now considered an internal part of the element.

It's a bit like making the UI into a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voronoi_diagram — any area on the UI chrome becomes "associated" with the nearest interactive element.

Like I said, I don't see how that hinders anyone.

I don't understand what you're inferring this from. To me it looks like the opposite is happening and dead space around elements is increasing (e.g. see the comparison of finder between 10.16 and 11.0).

Edit: It's also quite clear from the comparisons that the number of elements visible on-screen is decreasing because each element is getting larger and the padding between elements is increasing.

Edit2: Also, the idea that this UI is more accessible is contradicted by the removal of various visual elements that help separate and differentiate UI elements and the loss of contrast in the UI in general. Visual impairments are much more common than Parkinson's and none of these decisions help with that.

> they're designing once, assuming captioning.

At the cost of shrinking everyone's effective screen size.

No? They still put stuff down there. Just not critical stuff (e.g. establishing-shot location text, which instead tends to get displayed centered or center-left in modern visual design, since nobody ever sets their captions to the middle.)

If you want to make a UI more accessible to people that can't point easily the fix is a mouse with filtering and keyboard UI control, and crucially a way to click without moving the mouse. Not making the buttons slightly bigger.

Just make it customizable. There is no one size fits all.

Unfortunately, Apple (and not just Apple, others are sadly doing it too) would rather change the users to fit its designs than the opposite.

You can always slow down the pointer movement itself to compensate for that loss in precision. With a well-chosen acceleration curve, that doesn't hinder you from covering even large, screen-wide distances with just a quick flick of the pointing device.

This is clearly not about accessibility but about trackpad users.

Are we to believe that the UI is designed for people with disabilities or just hoping that this one aspect will make things slightly easier as an unintentional byproduct in between the time they roll it out and some future time when they change it?

Although 930k individuals in the US suffer from Parkinsons given the economic cost including medication, lose of income etc which averages about 24k per individual it seems likely that few of them are enjoying mac laptops even compared to the general population that is 10 times more likely to run windows.

https://www.michaeljfox.org/sites/default/files/media/docume...

Indeed this recent article is replete with references to cheap and budget not retina and style

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/askjack/2020/jan/23/w...

> Although 930k individuals in the US suffer from Parkinsons given the economic cost including medication, lose of income etc which averages about 24k per individual it seems likely that few of them are enjoying mac laptops even compared to the general population that is 10 times more likely to run windows.

I would note that many people with disabilities use iOS devices. The layer-stack of iOS APIs has been top-to-bottom engineered with accessibility considerations in mind, rather than it being worked in after-the-fact; so accessibility features on iOS are a lot more “universal” than ones on other OSes. iPhones are basically “the” phone for the blind, for one thing.

Not saying that rebuts your other points. Just pointing out that when you have a disability, “cost” becomes just a matter of how long you need to save up for it; while “has the particular benefit” is the difference between the device being at all useful for you, vs. not. There’s no point in buying something that’s half the price if you can’t use it.

This might be for apple to introduce touch screen on macs.

It's about time.

Might be good for laptops with a touchpad though. I don't know the sales split, but I assume Apple sells many more laptops than desktops.

I actually feel like I have even more precision on a touchpad because I'm not sliding around a weighted object

Reply on news.ycombinator.com