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?
No one is complaining A is not B. Everyone is complaining that macOS lacks some fairly basic UX options and is being neglected by Apple which corrects these flaws at a glacial pace.
I'm not sure. Yes, latest macOS versions do have their share of misguided decisions, but at least most of the time it still feels like it's built by people knowing what they're doing and what their users need. It feels like there's some sort of contention going on between those who want shitloads of whitespace and other attributes of "UI like an art piece", and those who want their users to have great, empowering, and easy to use tools.
For something that the selling point is it looks like MacOS, it doesn't actually look anything like MacOS in the ways that someone who cares about that would care about.
People who care about how their OS looks and feels are extremely detail orientated in whats correct and what isn't in their OS. E.g there absolutely should not be in window menus for anything trying to replicate MacOS.
No, MacOS is an opinionated OS, well known for the droves of armchair UI designers smugly criticizing it while they keep buying the hardware. It has been that way since forever.
Based on this one comment, I think you should learn to disambiguate between facts and your subjective opinion.
We all have our preferences, obviously, but to assert that MacOS UI is 'a masterclass in bad design and lackluster features' is a grandiose exaggeration stated as fact.
Apple is seen as a company that cares about simplicity and user experience. If a feature is confusing to many, mostly because the behavior depends on application and window size, we should expect them to refine it. Claiming that such users are "wrong" because it works fine for somebody who has used Mac for the last 20 years completely misses the point.
It would be interesting to have some insight into how much UX / UI goes into macOS and Windows releases, especially if things are tested with representative, non-technical users and then sent back for changes. My cynical take aligns with yours, for every clever small touch there seems to be a half-dozen awkward design choices to work around.
> following the Apple guidance, where all apps should look like they were made by the same company
Mac users don't want all GUI apps to look alike; however, they should follow macOS UI/UX guidelines regarding copy/paste, drag and drop, keyboard conventions, etc. The whole point is to not have users having to relearn these basics for every new application.
Developers generally get these conventions "for free" by using the frameworks built-in to macOS. That doesn't prevent developers from creating custom, stylized interfaces if that's what's needed.
Even Apple's pro apps (Final Cut, Logic, etc.) look quite different from those that are bundled with macOS such as iMovie and Garageband.
I think the point he's making is that a lot of the UI elements don't quite look or feel right, kind of like how a lot of Adobe CS apps have "native" dialogues full of weird mistakes.
Sometimes little look and feel things have a huge impact on how people react to apps: I remember (and I could be wrong, it's been a while) pretty much instantly not liking Opera on OS X when I first tried it since it had smooth scrolling turned on by default, something almost no Cocoa apps do.
That doesn't even bother me as long as things work properly.
You can accept my unqualified opinion or not as is your wont. The failings of recent releases of MacOS are well documented online if you do a search for them.
with every release macos introduces design elements that are inconsistent with apples own design language, and/or simply horrible (like the notifications icon in preferences _with_ a dot).
esp big sur moved in a big way to a more fisher price look.
that it all seems more consistent than all the rest is just a sad statement more about them than apple...
I gotta say, most of these things complaining about macOS UI read like people expecting it to behave exactly like Windows, rather than any objective flaws in how it works.
The design choices to be different really grind my gears. For example the window close buttons. There's no reason for a western user group to put action buttons on the top left of the window, but Mac did it, to be different.
Comparing to the level of inconsistencies that you see in Windows (terrific), that slight UI bugs are almost unnoticeable. Imagine that you will see “aqua” buttons and striped background when you open some built-in app or UI in Mac OS? It absolutely impossible.
The thing is, I just don’t see the problem. I upgraded from Mojave last week, noted that the UI is slightly different, and… that’s it. Everything still works fine, the UI looks a little more similar to the iPad, and I figured that was probably the main reason - since people will be running iOS apps on Macs going forward, there’s been an effort to introduce some more consistency. I find it incredibly hard to get worked up about it.
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