Comment by lateforwork 2 days ago
This behavior is similar to Windows 11. You have to position the mouse just outside the window. It is non-intuitive and awful.
These are problems humanity solved over 35 years ago (see NeXTSTEP). Why are these designers breaking basic features that worked for over 35 years?
Fun fact: NEXTSTEP went 10 years without shipping a basic design refresh, except in prereleases (4.0PR1 and traces in 4.0PR2.) This was because it was a good fucking GUI that did its fucking job, and had "usability before aesthetics" as a core design tenet in its developer documentation.
Steve's brain fell out when he got back his throne at Apple. Aqua was a mistake.
Honestly, for me, the loss of resource forks in the transition from Classic Mac OS to Mac OS X was a real sore spot for me. Sure, a UNIX-based OS like OS X was going to facilitate a different paradigm for file handling by default, but Apple really should have found a way to keep resource forks as a thing. I loved how intuitive file handling was in Classic Mac OS. No pesky three letter file extensions driving program associations and the like.
This is probably not a coincidence. I can pretty much guarantee you a developer said something to a designer like "hey, most of this is outside the window, is that fine?" and the designer said back "well, I think so, but let's check what Windows did," and then they okayed the decision at least in part because Windows did it.
The macOS style popups are arguably worse.
Windows Vista may have been plagued by programs assuming administrator access for everything but at least it isolated the security prompt.
You can verify that you're interacting with a real UAC prompt (by pressing ctrl+alt+delete for instance, which can be configured to he required before approving a prompt).
Any program can replicate the macOS security dialogs. You just have to hope that you can safely enter the password to your account into one, or activate TouchID when prompted.
Engineers (hopefully) come to learn the value of Chesterton's Fence young, because engineering failures tend to make themselves known quickly and loudly.
Designers probably have perverse incentives. Showy new designs get promotions. Even when they hurt usability, it's often only in insidious ways.
Yes, this. I've worked with designers who only see the product as a personal art project for their portfolio. Business and user problems are secondary to them.
Do not hire visual designers as UX designers - unless you know what you're doing.
The best UX designers design to solve business and user problems and work within constraints.
Quickly and loudly is pretty good. It's much preferable to loudly with a five year delay.
> overall, the young copy the elders and contend hotly with them in words and in deeds, while the elders, lowering themselves to the level of the young, sate themselves with pleasantries and wit, mimicking the young in order not to look unpleasant and despotic.
"Socrates", in Plato's Republic
None of us are immune to cycles in fashion, and the need to differentiate ourselves and our work from what came before, even if what came before was pretty much a solved problem.
Maybe it's humanity's way of escaping local minima, or maybe it's an endless curse which every generation must bemoan.
> None of us are immune to cycles in fashion, and the need to differentiate ourselves and our work from what came before, even if what came before was pretty much a solved problem.
I am. If it isn't broke, I don't fix it. And I suspect others are as well. The problem is that too many people are not immune, so it doesn't matter if some are.
I think that’s unnecessary waffling. Of course there are exceptions, but the prejudiced negative views that the old and the young hold of each are generally wrong.
For example, the constantly recurring critique that the music of the young is not about musicality[1] is always wrong. It's as wrong today as it was about Elvis.
IIRC, win8 was the last windows to have thick graphical window borders, and that was after they got rid of the texture/aero look from vista/7, so at that point you at least had something graphical to grab onto which (mostly?) matched where the cursor was. Then in win10 onwards they shrunk the border down to one pixel with the zone around it where you can click off the window but still affect it.
On the back of my mind I think part of this was the move to fit scaling to large resolution monitors (i.e. 4k+) work better, as a graphical border of a fixed pixel width will shrink proportionally compared to a border that is as thin as it can be. For a while I've felt that it's a missed opportunity on high res displays to not use more detailed art for window chrome as pixel wide will only get smaller and more difficult to distinguish, such as the minimize/maximize/close icons which remain pixel wide line art even at big scaling.
My guess is that both Apple and Microsoft people see this as a tradeoff.
If the anchor point for window resizing was more inside the window, then you encounter an annoying problem where youre trying to click or drag content, but you end up just resizing your window instead.
The obvious solution is to just keep the old bezel that separate the content from the scroll wheels / resizing handles and make it visually obvious what you're doing, but apparently they think that's too ugly.
the inability to just hold win+mouse1 to move or win+mouse2 to resize is driving me insane compared to KDE
Call me cynical but I think designers need to occasionally break things that were already solved long ago to justify their continued relevance. Explains a lot of redesigns that make things only worse, reshuffling interfaces, hiding things behind menus in form over function redesigns, etc.