Saying that it sucks less than the execrable mess that is Windows doesn't prove anything.
Apple appears to be chasing Microsoft down the toilet. Its exhumation of the circa-2002 "transparent" UI fad is one example, coupled with other baffling UI regressions.
Mac OS examples: Apple removed the "get new mail" button from the Mail toolbar. So all those millions of people who log into their bank accounts and are told to check their mail for 2FA are left hunting for it or simply waiting for Mail's next poll. There's no excuse for removing one of the most-used buttons from a sparsely-populated toolbar. What is driving this attack on usefulness? It used to be Jony Ive.
Then take a look at Music. Apple moved the playback controls from the empty area at the top of the screen to the bottom of the content browser, and made them "transparent." Now they overlap and blend with the thumbnails and text in the content browser.
Garbage like this is scattered all over the UI now. I needn't beat the dead horse of the hated System Preferences panel here.
Meanwhile, Spotlight still doesn't show you WHERE it found stuff, and neither does the inappropriately-named Finder. "Location" or "path" isn't even an OPTION in the column headers you can add to the results list. So you can't discriminate between identically-named files or irrelevant volumes or backups as you scan the list to find what you're looking for, or sort by location.
The removal of Launchpad is another blunder. Apple didn't even replace it with anything. So now you have no comparable way to group your applications.
"Center Stage" is a profoundly defective POS that ruins my family's weekly Zooms by randomly swooping the camera view around and cropping one of my parents out, when they're sitting side by side. Utter trash that there's no universal way to disable, shoved on all users by default without permission. That's Apple today.
> Apple appears to be chasing Microsoft down the toilet. Its exhumation of the circa-2002 "transparent" UI fad is one example, coupled with other baffling UI regressions.
Windows 11 is perfectly cromulent. I don't prefer it, but with WSL, it's like a slow almost-MacOS. The anger over the transparency is I guess personal, I genuinely don't notice it. I certainly haven't stumbled over it. (I might have changed a setting?)
> Then take a look at Music. Apple moved the playback controls from the empty area at the top of the screen to the bottom of the content browser, and made them "transparent." Now they overlap and blend with the thumbnails and text in the content browser.
I just hit Play and the music comes on. I'm not crazy about their search, but it's not that big a deal. The Podcasts app now... THAT is a complaint I can get behind. I would use something else but for the integration with the car.
> Spotlight and Launchpad
Spotlight seems good enough to me. I tried Alfred and Raycast, but never used any of the helper functionalities. Just used it to open apps and files.
I never used Launchpad. I do forget the names of apps, but I just open Applications.
I am a long time mac user and I agree with all of their points. I guess you disagree, but I am not sure why you are being dismissive. Each point is a legitimate criticism from many peoples' points of view.
I acknowledge the complaints, I love a good complaint! My issue is that these superficial, and in many cases, easily remediable annoyances add up to a "crappy OS". MacOS has to satisfy a very diverse userbase from Paris Hilton-types to grumpy Hacker News readers (but thankfully not Bank of America), and I think they do a better than decent job at it.
I don't consider the Mac's less-than-half-assed search facilities to be a superficial problem. I don't see how you can argue that a search that doesn't show WHERE it found hits is competent. Beyond that, it often just doesn't work. You can be sitting in a directory full of JPEGs and search for .jpg and get zero results. Zero.
And dismissing the asinine removal of the "get mail" button from Apple's default E-mail program because YOU don't happen to use it isn't exactly respectable, is it?
Mac OS DID satisfy a great many people; I've seen no credible (or even incredible) argument that the recent raft of faffing about with the UI has brought new users into the fold. That's the foundation of so many people's outrage over it: The changes offer no improvement and don't address any longstanding user requests. But it IS demonstrably regressive, and subjectively dated and tacky.
"Transparent" UI came and went 20 years ago for good reason.
Yep. The secret "gestures," the peek-a-boo UI, and now "transparent" UI that overlaps other junk on the screen.
It's not even consistent with itself. Example: On iOS, bring up the list of open pages in Safari; each thumbnail has an X in the corner to close it. Pretty intuitive and standard. But now bring up the list of apps running on your phone. There's nothing. No X or other affordance. Who the hell would guess he has to flip the thumbnail up off the top of the screen to quit the application? You've probably forgotten how stupid this is, but that's just complacency for hideous design setting in.
Except Jobs approved the design of that screen, which hasn't fundamentally changed since early versions of iOS (iPhoneOS). And it's that way because quitting apps isn't supposed to be something you do very often, if at all. Nowadays people clear the app history by habit, but it was really only supposed to be for misbehaving apps that were burning your battery, so having an affordance to make it easy was never the point, despite how people use it today.
Also, please stop doing this, it breaks apps. It's unnecessary and just forces your apps to cold launch every time you use them.
Steve Jobs opposed the idea of real applications on the iPhone in the first place. And Jobs also personally insisted that stuff be misspelled in the iTunes UI... if you believe the pushback in the bug report on it. So who cares if he approved another bad idea?
Quitting apps is something you need to do sometimes. And making it impossible to do, through obscurity, is stupid; as that can leave the application permanently disabled. This is not something I ever want as a developer.
Not to mention that people who don't need to quit an application won't go hunting for a way to do so, and thus the problem solves itself. That's why the vast majority of arguments for crippling things to shield users from "scary complexity" fail: Novice users will not even imagine that these functions are available, let alone go hunting for them.
And I quit apps BECAUSE I want them to "cold launch" next time. But my mom isn't ever going to do that. So rest easy: Your glass-jawed app is safe from the general public.
Is there still no way to export and import your filters in Thunderbird? This is why I shunned it 20 years ago. The absurd idea that you're going to manually run around to all your computers all the time and manually set up (and maintain) mail filters should have been rejected in version 1.0.
Thanks. But expecting end users to go online and perform a search to find out where the filters are stored on their platform (or platforms, if the source and destination are different) and copy them is pretty inexcusable at this point.
I don't understand the opposition to filter import/export.
I hear you, but for everybody who wants to export filters, there's somebody who wants to export just something else (address book, messages, settings, etc.). There really is no end to it, and it's a PITA to cover all those cases. I'm pretty sure that's what plugins are for: if there's enough demand for a filter exporter, somebody could write a plugin.
Most people just want to export everything (e.g. to transfer their acct to another computer), and for that they can use the build-in full export (Tools -> Export).
I think there's a broader indication of an arms race between noise cancellation systems and things that want to be heard, like advertising. And this just-happening-to-exist bandpass that the DuoBell is depending on could easily become collateral damage in that fight.
I was going to make a joke about advertisers working in some kind of ultrasonic modulation to their audio so it breaks ANC (I'm aware this wouldn't really work) but then thought, whats more likely, advertisers doing that, or advertisers partnering with 80% of ANC chip makers to just let them by-pass with specific tone markers...
Then we'll be hacking our headphones with specific 3d printed clip-ons that involve a particular brand of coffee filters that happen to attenuate the "clear freq" enough for the headphones to miss it.
Did you ever think it was good? Aside from the tight integration with other Apple products enabling extra features, I never liked it better than Android. Switched for work, not really a choice. Still use “DROID!” from the OG Moto Droid as my text tone.
Yeah, it was pretty good, even without the "tight integration." The most important integration I can think of is answering texts on my computer. This is a huge win. And it does suck that Android still lacks a central syncing facility like iCloud.
I do think we benefit from competition. I also have a Moto Droid and it was OK, but there was some janky UI. And the noises... talk about infuriating. The phone was always making noises with no indication as to WTF was making them or what they meant.
It strikes me as odd that boxes are placed precisely using pixels, but the size of text is not specified, as far as I can tell. So you use real pixels to specify boxes, but still can't render a canvas exactly/consistently?
Apple appears to be chasing Microsoft down the toilet. Its exhumation of the circa-2002 "transparent" UI fad is one example, coupled with other baffling UI regressions.
Mac OS examples: Apple removed the "get new mail" button from the Mail toolbar. So all those millions of people who log into their bank accounts and are told to check their mail for 2FA are left hunting for it or simply waiting for Mail's next poll. There's no excuse for removing one of the most-used buttons from a sparsely-populated toolbar. What is driving this attack on usefulness? It used to be Jony Ive.
Then take a look at Music. Apple moved the playback controls from the empty area at the top of the screen to the bottom of the content browser, and made them "transparent." Now they overlap and blend with the thumbnails and text in the content browser.
Garbage like this is scattered all over the UI now. I needn't beat the dead horse of the hated System Preferences panel here.
Meanwhile, Spotlight still doesn't show you WHERE it found stuff, and neither does the inappropriately-named Finder. "Location" or "path" isn't even an OPTION in the column headers you can add to the results list. So you can't discriminate between identically-named files or irrelevant volumes or backups as you scan the list to find what you're looking for, or sort by location.
The removal of Launchpad is another blunder. Apple didn't even replace it with anything. So now you have no comparable way to group your applications.
"Center Stage" is a profoundly defective POS that ruins my family's weekly Zooms by randomly swooping the camera view around and cropping one of my parents out, when they're sitting side by side. Utter trash that there's no universal way to disable, shoved on all users by default without permission. That's Apple today.
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