Comment by nine_k

Comment by nine_k 2 days ago

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What's jarring is not even that macOS Tahoe has such weird shapes of windows. What really astonishes me is that nobody seems to have anticipated how users would try to resize windows, and did not reshape the corner drag area (which I would expect to be a quarter-circle, or a quarter-ring along the rounded edge). This can't be a mistake, this can only be deliberate cutting corners by management in order to ship ASAP. And then nobody cared to issue an update.

Verily, the last UI redesign that was based on honest research and watching real users act was WinXP.

dfunckt a day ago

What feels plausible to me is changing the underlying 19x19 px control would break layout of many existing apps, and the design team was hell bent that window corners had to be that round. I’d say it’s simply form over function, and that likely a meta-level argument about user empowerment or whatnot won.

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  • AlanYx a day ago

    There's also the problem that not every window in Tahoe has the same corner radius. Some people thought this was laziness/lack of polish or a bug, but Alan Dye confirmed on a podcast that it was intentional.

    So then they're left with a conundrum: do they adjust the 19x19 region on a per-window basis, depending on the per-window corner radius, or do they stick with one standard drag region? Probably it should be the former, but that comes with its own set of issues.

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    • fluoridation 19 hours ago

      That's like asking, "if the title bar can have different sizes, should we make the hot area for moving the window also of different sizes?" The answer to both questions is "obviously yes!" The shape of the thing and how it responds to user input do not match by coincidence.

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    • alargemoose a day ago

      Do you recall what podcast? I know hearing him say this was intentional is only gonna make me frustrated, but I’m dying to hear the justification for such a bad decision.

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  • nine_k a day ago

    Exactly my point. It was too hard to make the grab box different. It was not too hard to pretend that the hyper-rounded corners would also make some layouts look and maybe act problematic. It was not too hard to splurge time and effort on liquid-glassing the entire UI toolkit.

    In a word, it's hubris. It's not care about the user, it's not even care about market domination or setting a fashion trend; both have been flunked. It looks like somebody's ego needed an affirmation, or someone's grip on corporate power needed a demonstration. It's a bad, bad sign of a deadly corporate disease.

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    • dfunckt a day ago

      Agreed. I think you may be too generous with hubris -- that requires agency, but it may just be incompetence. I don't generally like the "old days" argument, but this is consistent with overall trends -- it's frivolous.

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      • hopelite a day ago

        I get a sense that this is ultimately a matter caused by the board. It would have been briefed on and likely been the ultimate leader on the overall product and services strategy and pipeline. All this frivolous Tahoe Liquid Glass smoke and mirrors redesign, and even the unified OS release numbering gives me the impression that they’re either out of ideas or there’s a blank spot in the pipeline/timeline. I think there’s a case to be made that the helm lacks some direction now that Steve Jobs’ pipeline seems exhausted and momentum needs to be generated without him.

        Considering how Vision Pro rollout and the AI development went, I’m having doubts about Apple adapt to an AI world, e.g., fundamentally rethinking what hardware means if you no longer need to interact with a screen or hardware in a similar fashion anymore, i.e., keyboard and GUI manipulation.

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debo_ a day ago

I hope "cutting corners" in this context was an intentional pun.

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morshu9001 a day ago

It did seem like they fixed iOS slowly after 7, where they went too far with flatness.

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choppaface a day ago

It’s not cutting corners. Apple does most of their testing using strictly internal resources, like secret “mini malls” in the Silicon Valley area. They fail because this testing biases their sampling; users must sign draconian NDAs to participate, among other things. These samples are effectively biased due to Apple’s corporate culture regarding secrecy and competition. So, Apple actually works very hard. It’s just they culturally prefer a lot of techniques that their competitors (e.g. Google and Facebook) have throughly proven as inferior.

But is Google better? Not really, they killed a lot of good products like Reader.

But is Facebook better? Not really, Cambridge Analytica and Metaverse and .. facebook products are disposable.

But I think these Apple UX bugs are misdiagnosed. Yes they are atrocious. But think about how atrocious and non-representative and non-competitive Apple’s testing population is.

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  • nine_k a day ago

    This all is pretty curious! But my point is that every developer involved would notice how crazy the end result is. No need for a focus group to demonstrate that emperor's new clothes barely cover the body, and don't match the body parts.

    But nobody from likely hundreds of people inside Apple involved in the project was able to effect a change towards sanity. I'm afraid many just didn't feel like speaking.

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    • hopelite a day ago

      In the spirit of not being intimidated, I am going to just say what I’ve been wondering; if this could be a result of the oppressive nature of all the “DEI” stuff at Apple having turned into a kind of intimidation cudgel. Are you going to speak out and point out the emperor has no clothes if doing so will have your head?

      The circular self-congratulation of DEI introduces an intimidation factor where the objective and scientific truth is inherently no longer the basis for decision making because there are multiple layers of a kind of aristocratic privilege that cannot be questioned, let alone criticized, because critique of their actions equals critique of their divinity, i.e., becomes heresy.

      So we end up with this point where no one pointed out the increasingly ridiculous reductions of the emperor’s clothes, only ever cheering on with positive affirmations, to the point that everyone’s intimidated to even point out the emperor is walking around stark naked.

      I could see how a combination of the DEI intimidation tactics with the advent of AI, the hash economic factors, and general desire to not rock the personal benefit boat could have resulted in institutional paralysis.

      Is there anyone with a force of personality left at Apple? Ultimately, this is on Cook as the Chief Executive Officer poorly executing. It really makes you wonder if the leadership doesn’t actually use any of their own company’s products. How do you not notice these glitches immediately like everyone else if you are using them? I could see Cook not having even regularly used an iPhone or actively interacted with any Apple product himself in years as his real life Siris around him do every single thing for him every day all day, besides maybe giving him briefs on screens that happen to be iPhones and iPads. At that level you actively have to make choices to remain connected to the ground. I doubt Cook finds being grounded comes easy.

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      • fireflash38 a day ago

        Why do you immediately jump to saying DEI?

        You say DEI then describe brown nosing. That's a thing that happens in any org.

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