New Human Interface Guidelines
developer.apple.com
developer.apple.com
An example: in the Reminders app on macOS, using the Tab key to navigate from one input to another (like date, time, location, etc.) is so broken in the tab order that it begs the question if Apple has:
1. a development team that knows macOS and cares about productivity
2. a QA team
3. a QA team that understands keyboard usage, tab order and other navigation elements
I recall seeing similar brain damaged (yeah, I’m really annoyed that I’m using such terms in frustration) tab order implementations in Finder and elsewhere.
Some companies decline gradually before they look like a creature with an entirely different DNA, and that’s been happening with Apple ever since the convergence between iOS and macOS started. Doesn’t matter what the top execs like Craig Federighi say about the Mac being important. The user experience and user friendliness cultivated over decades has been eroding over time, and that’s sad to see because the competition doesn’t seem to be doing better either, though on other fronts.
Things weren’t completely perfect in Apple’s Mac operating systems in the past either. But it was close to getting to that, and I will remember it as “the golden age”. The M1 chips are phenomenal, but crippled by this cavalier attitude to software.
News doesn't work properly on macOS either.
Some macos apps have become very mouse hostile too. Example is activity monitor. You cannot right click anywhere. Even though it would be natural to use that for killing a process.
Same in the App Store app. There is no keyboard short cut to go back to the main list.
Command-[, just like the browser. Just tested to confirm. The App Store app is basically a bunch of webviews.
It would be great if apple documented that in the Help menu.
On the programming side, SwiftUI looks pretty cool.
I am impressed whenever I see posts about classic Macs and Think C, but there have been some improvements since then.
- No text reflow, no text resizing. So I'm standing at the bus stop with my phone awkwardly in landscape. On the other hand, on my 32" monitor, columns are way too narrow.
- Can't copy images in most PDF readers.
- Text selection so bad that it has a 50% chance of selecting some random unrelated characters on the page.
- Not to mention needless page breaks which further complicate selection and highlighting.
- Hyperlinks often don't work. When reading citations I don't even bother to click links anymore.
- Hyperlinks within documents make it difficult to go back. Some readers have a history function, but it is inconsistent.
> [...] then PDF will never die.
- Documentation is usually written in nice HTML pages and optionally browsable through Apps like Dash.
- EPub is standard for books
- Academia is the last bastion, but scientific journals already publish HTML versions of papers.
Sure, it is not a great UX, but it is not like text reflow would produce meaningful results unless explicitly planned for, so the alternative is just shitty text reflow. I much rather rotate my phone.
> Can't copy images in most PDF readers, text selection, hyperlinks
These are all inherent to PDF generators, nothing to do with the format itself. For every shitty PDF, there is a well-formatted book with proper hyperlinks, beautiful typography, etc. Also, text selection usually doesn’t work when it is either an OCR or deliberately obfuscated which can just as well be done in web tech (by rendering to a canvas for example).
Other than text-only books, epub is nigh useless if you have even a single figure in the text. And then there is the question of changing page numbers (depending on font rendering), and the text rendering is still nowhere near as good as what LaTeX generates.
I only see one visual anchor in the old one, the horizontal rule at the bottom separating Menu Bar. Everything else is just jumbled together.
The new one at least attempts visual anchors with gradient background boxes and by right-justifying all the controls.
I grant you the contrast ratio is worse and Apple should read Contrast Rebellion. And I personally don't care whether they use a checkbox or a switch, as long as its placement is convenient and aesthetic. I use Linux with Gnome 4 on my workstations, which uses switches for settings, and a MacBook laptop with checkboxes, and iPad with switches, and none of that makes any difference to me.
But otherwise I prefer the layout arrangement of the new one. Vertical and horizontal spacing are more orderly, left-justification of text and right-justification of controls improves UI consistency, and grouping within gradient boxes is more aesthetically calmer to my eye. Just my $0.02, to each their own.
I don't disagree with a single point you made about the anesthetics, and still passionately believe the ux is worse now. The new one would look better in a luxury furniture catalog but humans using it would take longer to complete tasks and produce more mistakes.
There's a lot of accessibility options like "increase contrast" and "differentiate without shapes" if you don't like it though.
No. Just no. You make these things readable and accessible by default. You don't bury it in a setting somewhere.
I have 20/20 vision and I felt compelled to turn high contrast and button shapes on because the OS is so goddam unreadable.
On calibrated monitors I haven't had an issue, but I could see it being a problem if the contrast is too high on a display. I've been using macOS since Snow Leopard but I have not tried Ventura yet.
True, but it also makes it harder to see which text corresponds to which switch, by separating them all with different distances. Before, there was no ambiguity about what each box did. Now, you have to scan the left column to find the item you want; and then either scan right to see the switch (which is error prone because there are no lines to follow) or scan the right column from the top and hope you counted correctly. It is more pleasing aesthetically, but less useable.
I guess the way to have both controls and labels to line up without separating them would be to put the labels after the controls. But it is not great to have the explanation of what a button does after the button. And there would still be issues with drop downs with different widths.
But the problem is that the choose-boxes and radio buttons at the top can't be treated the same way, and create an inconsistent layout when combined with the check boxes.
Moving all the text to the left, and all the controls to the right, and boxing each choice together with its text using gradient background boxes, feels overall cleaner, more consistent, and better organized.
This is not a Wes Anderson movie where everything has to be symmetric. You're free to mix controls. To put them in grids. To put them in multiple columns. Just go and look at your System Preferences now.
The new grouping is not a clear cut, like why is the position of the docked grouped with window behaviour? The older makes it trivial to discover that the dock moves unlike the newer one.
My view is that the design is much less refined and have a lot of space to improve. It isn't bad, the potential is there if you consider a touch + mouse ui. So let's wait I guess.
Both seem faulty in that regard. Both cram Dock and Window behavior into the same section, when each should be a separate section similar to the Menu Bar section at the bottom. But that's not a fault of the design language here, and can be fixed without changing it.
But I think I’m general HN tends to hold a very conservative view on UI while the general public does not. The feeling I get is that most users here believe that windows XP was the peak of UI and everything after was worse. Which is not at all what the average person would say.
The general public spends too much time peck-typing or fighting with ads/spam/etc to even begin to feel limited by the UI "improvements". The problem however is that by removing power-user features and dumbing everything down to the lowest common denominator it also prevents those users from ever levelling up.
Only hip designers think coming up with new UI design ideas every year is a good idea.
From almost complete arpanet dominance to utter obscurity.
It's why I'm against the idea that so many have put forward of bringing macOS to the iPad. It just means that macOS will be forced into being a touch-first OS (since many people use iPads without keyboards, so every interaction now needs to be doable without one) and it'll just be a worse experience for a keyboard and mouse setup.
OTOH I agree that the Mac should retain and maintain the primacy of kbd-and-mouse interaction and ipad/phone the finger interaction. Jamming one metaphor into the other is terrible and lazy, which I think is what you were getting at.
Omni group’s apps are good examples of getting it right. The app icons aren’t the same but they rhyme; the visual metaphors are the same but the interactions are appropriate to the tools (kbd/mouse or finger) and sizes of the various devices.
Pity Apple can’t go to the same effort. It’s newly great, or even that great at all.
In 2022 the first experience with a computer is, for most people, a smartphone. It feels natural removing checkboxex for toggle buttons.
After all isn’t the web UI all about converging touch and non-touch (aka “desktop”)?
Not that Apple is even following their own guidelines...
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2022/06/08/system-settings/
The incoherent design, weirdly bipolar automation efforts, letting the command line rot, and a new-feature focus on lock-in are making the platform increasingly something I just don't care about anymore.
Not to mention every time I get another Buy Apple Music! nudge or deal with their bratty "not now" dismissal of the fucking credit card offer makes me actively dislike Apple a bit more.
I'm clearly not the customer Apple wants, and all good things come to an end. It just saddens me a bit - I've been using Macs for over 30 years now. Watching them become more annoying and arrogant than IBM sucks.
how so?
Same for pushing ads through Notifications.
Apple's road to hell is paved with OS-embedded advertising and user manipulation in the name of service and subscription revenue.
But the newer OSes do feel more bloated and indeed are sometimes slower. My 12-inch Macbook (low-powered dual-core i5) on Mojave feels much faster at opening built-in applications and simple tasks than my M1 running Monterey, and yet I can't think of any Monterey feature that I actually use over what Mojave already had - my workflow is exactly the same but now I seem to have to withstand a performance tax.
If you are on a high latency network, eg weak wifi signals, you'll be waiting 200-300ms.
Those on super fast internet don't notice, and think it's a problem with you, but no, it's Apple.
I live in a rural area, city under 40k. We don't have amazing internet.
Pretty sure this is only on first time launch to verify the notarisation.
It doesn't happen every time.
If your ping is 30ms, you don't notice it.
If your ping is 300ms due to say weak wifi, you do notice a 300ms wait when you open an app.
But it might be the best effort yet of unifying mobile device and desktop experiences.
The industry just needs to keep trying is all. Eventually someone is going to get it right. It's anyone's game, and all the major players thus far have fucked it up multiple times.
OSX is designed for a keyboard and mouse. iOS is designed for a finger.
They have wildly different semantics e.g. precision, gestures that you can't abstract without ending up with a horribly compromised experience e.g. Windows tablet mode. And that's just not in Apple's DNA.
That line has been becoming blurrier for years now. iPadOS supports keyboard and mouse inputs, and the UI is moving closer to replicating a desktop experience on every release. macOS has supported touch gestures for a long time, and the UI is moving closer to resembling a mobile experience.
It's not hard to imagine full convergence of both OSs and the devices that run them. As usual, Apple can claim to be the innovator in this change, even though competitors have been doing it, admittedly worse, much earlier.
Which is a real shame because their hardware had started to be excellent again. What's the point of having a cool machine like a M1 Macbook Air if, in the future, you'll feel as an alien on it? (I mean, from the pov of a programmer)
Something a well organized PDF doesn't suffer from, just saying.
P.S. I hope non-iOS users can view this link... I didn't really know where else to put it easily.
Apple talks big on privacy, but fails in the details.
It's OK in this case I guess...
Then just use the cloudflare gateway to share the link.
i’m very much against this approach of generalizing design
instead of strict rule set they now offer some opaque suggestions
this is how material design lost its meaning
hopefully this decision won’t result with everyone implementing their own design language rather than using the standard the platform dictates
frankly, same design language across all apps is what makes me choose Apple software
this looks like an attempt to keep their design language to themselves while asking others to implement their own
One can certainly argue against the merits of said convergence though. However, I don't see how this is any indication of them hoarding their design language for themselves.
With that said, I do see the benefit if you primarily develop for Apple platforms to take advantage of their push for the "universal app" development where you can share most of the same code base and have a consistent UI/UX across all of their devices.
With all that said, I should also supplement that the convergence does bring some nice enhancements like consistent experiences across things like iMessage, complimentary features like Sidecar, shared workflows like the upcoming Stage Manager for macOS and iPadOS, etc. Heck, there's even some iPadOS features that I wish macOS had, like Slide Over app instances. I'd love to have a small floating Safari instance that I could slide in and out of view while I'm primarily working in one app full-screen.
They're not eliminating design that leverages the unique capabilities of each platform, they're standardizing inconsistent shared design. It says as much in the second part of the text you quoted:
> making it simpler to explore common design approaches while still preserving relevant details about each platform
Having said, I don't think 100% consistency is a useful goal anyway. The Ventura design is usable, and the guideline is useful. Gap between the two can be operational "debt" (like technical debt) which is not theoretically ideal, but practically useful to keep making/shipping progress.
It’s true, but the disregarding of the HIG was a source of much anguish and whining on Mac forums and HN too for many of the early years of OS X.