It’s real. Not that System Preferences was blowing anyone away, but System “Settings” is Apple answering the question no one asked: what if we had iPhone Settings but on the Mac?
It was all clearly grouped before, but also had visual anchors. The new groups don't satisfy the WCAG contrast ratio guidelines. The new view is definitely 'cleaner', but in this case, that's worse. This isn't an artistic effort, this is a human interface. Did the 40 years of HCI research just turn up the wrong answers before? And the all-along more obvious approach is now the supposedly better approach? Unlikely.
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.
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 adds consistency, and grouping within gradient boxes is more aesthetically calmer to my eye. Just my $0.02, to each their own.
One of us misunderstands what visual anchors are. I consider the staggered drop downs visual anchors.
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.
New UIs are less contrasty because old UIs were designed for low-quality TN LCD screens. Modern LCDs and OLEDs have better black points, so the UI gets grayer to make up for it.
There's a lot of accessibility options like "increase contrast" and "differentiate without shapes" if you don't like it though.
Are you referring to macOS generally or Ventura specifically?
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.
> left-justification of text and right-justification of controls improves UI consistency
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.
Not sure how I feel about detaching controls from their label like that. I thought we learned our lesson with this when we switched to HiDPI displays, but oh well...
Yeah I can see the argument for keeping the checkboxes on the left and their explainer text immediately adjacent on the right.
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.
> and create an inconsistent layout when combined with the check boxes.
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.
This makes sense if you came from touch ui. Mouse and keyboard UI favours the old design because the way you hit things with the mouse is different. It is also bad to compare the two screenshots because the sizes are not in the same scale.
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.
> The new grouping is not a clear cut, like why is the position of the docked grouped with window behaviour?
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.
I like the new one more. Looks kinda cluttered and unorganised with the checkbox version.
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.
What's wrong with WinXP UI? Apart from not being touch-ready (though Microsoft also had pen-driven "Tablet PC" and "Pocket PC" UI's in the same style) or usable with mixed-DPI display settings. I for one find it quite modern and intuitive at the same time. Those old-style UI's were rigorously tested using focus groups of "average" folks, so practicality was very highly valued.
Nothing's wrong with it, if you turned off the Fisher-Price theme. It was usable and simple, and displayed information clearly. It wasn't suitable for mixed-DPI, but a replacement easily could be without losing anything. Instead, we get the garbage that is Windows 11. All three desktop platforms have been taking leaps backwards in usability.
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.
IME most people IRL also think XP was the peak of UI design. Personally I prefer Windows 98 (really FVWM if given the choice, and I am given the choice so that's what I run.)
I hate this converging of touch interfaces and desktop interfaces. I get that it's easier than ever to share codebases between your desktop and mobile app, but all you get out of this trend is interfaces that are neither good for touch nor for desktop. They're just... passable and occasionally annoying for each.
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.
I like, well not convergence exactly, but certainly coherence. TBH the old system preferences with its array of icons is more iOS like and the transition should have gone the other way.
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.
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.
Oddly, the settings panel in Ventura looks closer to what Gnome Settings looks like. Just without the "Buy Apple Music! nudge" or "credit card offer" elements.
And the atrocious disregard for performance over the last few years. My 2014 OSX 10.14 home Mac Mini is so much faster and more responsive than my 2021 OSX 12.4 work Mac mini (with no notable difference in features) it is difficult to conclude anything other than malice.
My M1 Mac blows away my 3 year old desktop outside or raw graphics output due to the desktop having a 1080. It's such a massive power leap, it's difficult for me to believe that you bought a M1 Mac. I suspect you have hardware, or PEBKAK issues.
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.
There is probably something wrong with the machine. If it's M1 it really shouldn't be slow unless it's under serious memory pressure. If it's Intel, it's more possible, but could still be dust in the fans or low disk space or such things.
Since recent versions, macOS now phones home and gets apple's permission over the internet before allowing you to open a binary. This is a synchronous blocking operation.
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.
It doesn't need to apply to above post, it can apply just as well to your statement that it means there's something wrong with the machine if it's an M1. If a slow or laggy connection affects responsiveness in launching desktop apps, that's definitely a reason it could feel slower that doesn't mean there's something wrong, as it would be completely by design.
My home Mac mini (2018 Core i5) running 12.4 runs dramatically faster than my work MacBook Pro (2019 Core i9) running 12.4-ish. It's malice, but not by Apple. It's from my company installing so many agents that typing becomes problematic. Some days it is down right unusable and I have to reboot every 2 days just to try and make it better.
Unfortunately I don't have a choice. They silently push all kinds of things to the system. Every week my fans spin up and I look at the Activity Monitor to find a new agent using all my CPU.
I have a MBP with M1 Pro, but that doesn't have any work junk on it so I haven't had the need to do any real comparisons. The only thing I could really do is check my FPS on Minecraft, but I don't play it enough or obsess about FPS enough to bother.
Are we moving towards a tablet-laptop hybrid Apple device in the next few years I wonder? (similar to MS Surface).. I know there's the issue of cannibalisation but I think such a device could be awesome (but hard to do right)
It’s been obviously on the radar for years but it’s moving very slowly - the macbook is now arguably a iPad with a keyboard now so the main thing left is the software unification.
I will not be happy until my Surface Book 2 is a pile of slag.
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.
This comes up every year and people still don't listen to the original justification for why Apple used iOS instead of OSX given they had a choice.
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.
> OSX is designed for a keyboard and mouse. iOS is designed for a finger.
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.
iOS is a much more modern OS with secure basis. Keyboard and mouse vs touch is mostly just a “userspace” decision, but from Apple’s point of view, OSX has quite a bit of technical debt in several areas that are possibly impossible to fix, like security.
Yea, the memetics of "apple get HCI" is long, long dead. Apple does whatever the hell it wants, and loyalists defend it. Your case of "re-validate to spend" is the classic example of gui gone wrong. The box has validated me time out of mind, and even to get to the door of the store I had to validate but no: it wants to ask again. And again. And again. Oh, and microsoft.app again. and again. Oh, and all those other things, except wierdly ssh in the keychain is just.. fine!
There are soooo many UI inconsistencies recently. It seems that makes it’s being developed by iOS developers who have no clue about keyboard shortcuts, common features, etc.
It’s getting worse and worse with each component that’s being replaced.
> The incoherent design, weirdly bipolar automation efforts, letting the command line rot
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)
> The HIG has merged its platform-specific guidance into a unified document, making it simpler to explore common design approaches while still preserving relevant details about each platform
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 all looks like an attempt to keep their design language to themselves while asking others to implement their own
Can you elaborate more? Most of the 'specificity' I see missing just lives inside SwiftUI and IB now. The platform/OS manages so much layout automatically these days I think the 'design' work is moving up the abstracting ladder as well, or are you talking about something totally different?
That quoted bit seems more like, IMO, that they're just unifying their HIG since the design across macOS, iOS, watchOS, and tvOS are converging, partly due to the unified developer process for all of these platforms. It doesn't seem any more generalized than it has in the recent past. It's just that each platform previously had their own distinct design languages, which have been gradually reaching a shared state.
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.
fair point, but i still don’t see what the benefit of shared design system is when you have 4 different screen-sizes (iPhone, iPad, Mac, Watch) with unique capabilities for each platform?
Agreed, I'm not a huge fan either because something's gotta give and in my opinion, it's macOS in this case with how they've been iOS-ifying it year after year.
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.
Funny as I've seen iPad users complain that their iPads are getting too much like Mac OS. At it's core Mac OS is not getting iOSified. Some elements are borrowing ideas from the other platforms. Some things that have been in need of change for a while are getting addressed. I think it is a good thing that Mac OS is finally getting some TLC.
Sorry, I should have been more clear. By iOS-ifying, I meant in terms of aesthetic (e.g. flat design), not necessarily in terms of workflow. I think that the flat, iOS-like design is worse for UX in a desktop context; just not to the point that it significantly changes the workflow. There's also iOS-ifying in regards to things like being more locked down, the introduction of the horrendous Touch Bar, redundant & useless Launch Pad, dumbing down apps like the iTunes >> Apple Music transition, etc.
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.
The benefit is consistent design and branding across platforms.
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
Seems unfair at times. macOS Ventura is currently being developer beta tested—it’s not even the public beta yet. The tiny UI inconsistencies are to be expected in developer beta 1. It’s not a finished product—it’s three months from even being out. Why criticise such small things as the button outlines?
The gripes with System Settings are not just with the button outlines. It is the entire design of it; replacing an easily-clickable platter of icons with a scrollable list of them which takes much longer to search if one is looking for a settings pane.
Regarding switches vs checkboxes: it seems natural that switches should belong to standalone settings, whereas checkboxes should belong to a family of related settings. For instance, "enable notifications for this app" should be a switch, but then the related sub-settings "badges", "sounds", "show on lock screen" etc should be checkboxes.
non-iOS users probably have a better time trying to view it than I do. For me, my iPad tries to open it in the photos app (which I rejected, because it’s a website and I just want to view it as a website), and the dialog says “<your full name> shared this”. Hope you’re ok if everyone that has an iOS device sees your full name right now.
Weird, my iPhone just opened it in the browser without issue. I have to agree it's fucking weird to have your full name attached to your public iCloud links.
No. From Monterey to Ventura, they changed checkboxes to switches, which they explicitly recommend against in their Human Interface Guidelines.
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 happened all the time when Steve Jobs was alive. See the brushed metal thing, for example, or the selective application of skeuomorphism in iOS 1 to 6.
How did this language find its way to User Interface guidelines?
> Gender identity
> Throughout history, cultures around the world have recognized a spectrum of self-identity and expression that expands beyond the binary variants of woman and man.
No actually. This gender fluidity and "non binary" thing is pretty much limited to the sphere of afluent western countries.
If you go to any other culture on the globe and talk about non-binary gender, you will either be met with confusion, or just straight up mockery.
Any instance in history where you can find a similar trend, it tends to be at the decline stage of civilizations / empires.
We're talking about choice of gender, not sex. Sexes are male and female, and to be fair, hermaphrodite should be a third option. Gender can be any random combination of man and woman.
People confounding sex and gender has caused a great deal of rhetoric. You can't choose your sex, that's in your DNA, but you can choose your gender.
Bisexual is sexuality, not gender. Since you asked. It’s not super complicated and they’re completely different things. A bisexual person likes both men and women. That has nothing to do with gender of the person who is bisexual.
That is just one definition of gender. There's confusion over its usage because it has a number of different and conflicting meanings.
In her book Material Girls, which thoroughly and thoughtfully explores this topic, Kathleen Stock describes four senses of the word:
> GENDER1: A polite-sounding word for the division between men and women, understood as a traditional alternative word for biological sex / the division between biological males and females.
> GENDER2: A word for social stereotypes, expectations and norms of 'masculinity' and 'femininity', originally directed towards biological males and females respectively. These can and do differ from culture to culture, though there are many overlaps too.
> GENDER3: A word for the division between men and women, understood, by definition, as a division between two sets of people: those who have the social role of masculinity projected onto them, and those who have the social role of femininity projected onto them.
> GENDER4: A shortened version of the term 'gender identity'. [A] common idea is that it is the 'private experience of gender role' - roughly, whether you relate to yourself psychologically as a boy or man, girl or women, or neither, in a way that has nothing directly to do with your sex.
Up until recently, the colloquial sense was GENDER1. Now this is shifting partly towards GENDER4, amongst some but certainly not all English speakers.
When you refer to people "confounding sex and gender", I expect you're simply observing the conflict between different people understanding the term as GENDER1 or GENDER4.
One of the most unnecessary additions to the collection, since officially is a way to express you ate too much [1], but unofficially I guess it will be used by female-to-male trans when they talk about being pregnant? Everything is political these days.
Gender is a "social construct", such things exist as an emergent phenomenon of society, society does not agree on all of the constructs, therefore the existence or non-existence of certain aspects, or asserting same, is inherently a social and political act.
There are people who think that trans people are simply non-trans people with psychological illness, for example. Whether that is true or false, people with those beliefs exist, and they reject such social constructs as non-ill trans people existing, so asserting that they do (which is what publishing an OS with such emoji in it implicitly does) is a political act (in conflict with the beliefs of those people).
If everyone agreed on all social constructs and narratives, then nothing would be "political". Given that no two people share precisely the same mind and context and social constructs, every action that involves other people or society in some way is political.
It's also political because it has specific implications regarding sex-based rights, free versus compelled speech, issues of medical consent - all of which were existing and contentious political issues already.
And also because opposing political groups are using it as a dividing line. Though interestingly, left-wing radical feminists have been consistently the most critical, which is at odds with most others who identify as left-wing politically.
> Any instance in history where you can find a similar trend, it tends to be at the decline stage of civilizations / empires.
You know what? I'm just not that worried that accepting humans are kind of messy and don't fit into boxes is going to lead to the decline of our civilization.
Most complex genetic traits are multimodal, gender is no exception.
Bimodal is not binary. Obviously there are two ‘modes’ - ie peaks in the probability distribution function, male and female, but there’s a lot of overlap in between. The term ‘multimodal’ doesn’t mean ‘bimodal with overlap’ lol, it means that there are multiple distinct peaks in the probability distribution function.
Were the Romans thinking it was only gay if you were on the receiving end a sign of cultural strength or decline?
Of course, even though they're one of the more famous cultures to have "declined", that's only if you artificially don't consider Byzantine Rome, and there's plenty of people living in Rome to this day.
Pseudohermaphrodism exists in humans (people born with multiple sets of genitals). That doesn't fit into your claim of only bimodal and this is just the external presentation of gender. I would encourage you to explore the topic more. It's not as simple as boy/girl only. https://science.jrank.org/pages/3310/Hermaphrodite-Hermaphro...
This comment does not show a lot of curiosity - even a quick read of the Wikipedia article for gender identity refutes this argument. Gender has been differentially and socially constructed throughout human history.[1]
It is hilarious that a site that claims to be full of interested, intelligent people have upvote the fact-free, unresearch, ignorant comment that you've responded to, and downvoted something as simple as a started for ten.
Arrogant STEMlords comfortable in bigotry and ignorance shouldn't surprise me here, but of course there's always some new facet to it.
> If you go to any other culture on the globe and talk about non-binary gender, you will either be met with confusion, or just straight up mockery.
India’s not an affluent country, and irrespective of their legal status (Google it, it may surprise you), nonbinary people have a distinctive identity and place in society.
This is not to say that how affluent western countries approach trans rights is better or worse, it just means trans people do have a place in other cultures I’m familiar with. Perhaps others can share examples from other cultures.
> Any instance in history where you can find a similar trend, it tends to be at the decline stage of civilizations / empires.
Elizabethan England wasn’t very affluent or educated compared to today, but even a cursory glance at their literature shows that authors and audiences understood what we’d call intersex or nonbinary identity today (I frequently mix up the terminology.) I don’t think their idea of rights was quite as legalistically driven as modern Western society, but I don’t think being nonbinary was a death sentence either.
In the context of interface/product design, gender identity is just another data point for marketing purposes. I cant think of many products that are genuinely gender specific.
When data collection and manufacturing supply chains were more crude, it was easier to make blue and pink gi joes and barbies.
Now we have the abilitiy to collect more nuanced data about peoples preferences and efficiently service the long tail, it makes sense to let customers define their likes on a spectrum rather than as binary choices.
I dont see why you would feel so strongly about restricting how people choose to define themselves.
I mean they have a whole paragraph on gender, which feels like an almost completely irrelevant standard shoehorning of gender into a place it doesn't belong. I don't really see much to complain about here though and I'm usually the first.
So you agree with their human interface guidelines, then?
"You can help everyone feel welcome in your app by avoiding unnecessary references to specific genders. [...] Most apps don’t need to know a person’s gender, but if your app requires this information — such as for health or legal reasons — consider providing inclusive options, such as nonbinary, self-identify, and decline to state."
For example, if the app is a period tracker the rec here is to not assume everyone using it identifies as a woman.
These are all worthy engineering-related accomplishments. That's sort of the problem. Apple has lost touch with the Mac user. The Mac user is a sophisticated creative or professional who strongly relates to the spirit of quality that Jobs invested into the Mac. The Mac has Presence the way a work or art does. Apple is trivializing the Mac and demeaning The Mac Presence by eliminating the stylistic difference between the Mac and iOS devices.
Here’s hoping that app review enforces the Inclusion section. Once some religious app gets rejected for traditional depictions of families, that will be more fodder to get rid of Apple’s App Store monopoly.
One thing that really annoys me is how keyboard hostile the apps, including Apple’s apps on macOS, have become. The apps developed lazily with Catalyst are probably the worst, but I’m guessing it’s a general issue with the newer SDKs like SwiftUI.
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.
Using control + arrow keys with multiple screens is a nightmare. It always moves the focus to the other screen so if I change some code -> arrow key back to chrome and refresh it refreshes (or whatever other command) the window on my other screen.
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.
Yeah Photos app doesn’t do well with keyboard operation either. If you are in full screen mode, and you have gone from the grid to view a single photo, you might expect that the Esc key will take you back to the grid view, but no, it just exits full screen mode.
Same in the App Store app. There is no keyboard short cut to go back to the main list.
How is reading them wasting time? Also, until any alternative manages to provide properly aligned/justified text, or the ability to truly nicely format for example a scientific paper, then PDF will never die. Also, it is not a bad format, some modern extension of it is stupid, but otherwise it is really cool and it is a pleasure to read a nice PDF book on a big enough screen over an epub format for example that pushes figures around like nothing.
- 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.
> 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.
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.
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