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Comment by avidphantasm | Hacker News Reader

I'll take Puma's System Preferences, pinstripes and all, over what we have today. Blech!

I hear ya. I was so in love with that interface back in the day. I thought it was beautiful. If I have to stare at a screen all day I want it to be attractive. Everything is so flat, muted, and boring now. A button is so much less intuitively discovered these days. Tabs are hard to determine due to limited perspective. Window borders are gone and it's so difficult to determine the boundaries of applications. I'd gladly take back some skeuomorphism please.

Remember how cool those confirmation buttons were? Nice blue pill that said "Click me!" They really looked like you could touch them. If only Apple hadn't taken away the customization capabilities of the UI. Remember themes with Shapeshifter? I would love to have that back now to get some old school OS X widgets.

Agreed. I think the new System Preferences was a big step back.

And for what reason? There were things that were so easy to do - like change network interface priority by reordering the list of interfaces - that have obvious method anymore (I want to prefer ethernet when it’s attached, for example).

I can no longer navigate to settings I frequently used and need to search for just about everything. Perhaps I shouldn’t expect things to stay the same after 20 years(!), but for long time users, it’s bewildering.

It's just a big dumb list that I now have to use search to find anything in. My guess is that someone doesn't want to spend developer and designer resources curating the old design. Now they can more or less shove new things into the list and call it a day. Sad.

One thing that I think makes System Settings much worse than it has to be is how indistinguishable its sidebar icons are. They all have the same shape, some share the same background color or have very similar background colors, their glyph shapes are thin, and the white glyph color has extremely bad contrast with some of the background colors.

If the icons were more akin to 10.6 Snow Leopard sidebar icons[0] it'd give the sidebar items much more substantial visual anchors. Heck even the more muted sidebar icons of 10.7 Lion[1] would be a substantial improvement.

[0]: https://www.versionmuseum.com/images/operating-systems/mac-o... [1]: https://512pixels.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/10-8-Mounta...

I've used macOS since the early betas and could never find what I wanted in the big dumb grid. Had to use search every time.

IMO the sidebar is more usable as I can just scan down to find the right option, or just use the search as before.

I don't dispute your experience. However, for me the old grid provided a two-dimensional spatial hierarchy (if that's a thing) that made it easy for me to quickly drill down to what I wanted. The new list version has a one-dimensional flattened hierarchy with many more categories to consider at the top level. With so many choices my brain shuts down and I just resort to search.

I’m a long time user (pre-OS X) and I prefer the new settings. It always took me longer to find things in the icon grid.

Yes, the old grid layout was not good for anything that you didn’t access frequently. It was sometimes hard to find things if you didn’t already know where to look.

I agree that the actual settings controls and panel layouts are not as good as before. They are more autogenerated while the old panel layouts were more carefully planned. some of the controls seem poorly suited to the data they are controlling.

It might have been better if the navigation were changed but the original controls retained.

maybe they can take a hybrid approach and have grid for favorites and a mile-long list for everything else (with just a plain alphabetical ordering or logical grouping perhaps)

> I frequently used and need to search for just about everything

Because why couldn't they put it in alphabetical order? I want to adjust my Keyboard settings ... where the eff is Keyboard ...

I still miss the "Unix Expert" checkbox from NeXTstep, and would give a lot to have it back.

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