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Apple love to preach "the UI gets out of the way of your content" with each new redesign, but how true is that in practice? Let's compare the total height of the Safari UI with a toolbar, favourites bar and tab bar visible, across the three latest Mac OS design languages – Yosemite, Big Sur and now Tahoe. I've added a red line for emphasis.
It sure looks to me like the UI is eating more into my content with each redesign.
Holy shit, the new controls are massive.
I hate how this needs to be read right-to-left. First thought that the ui took up less and less space.
/c/afterandbefore
Apple isn't alone in that. More and more sites and programs are become space inefficient.
Not all of us have dual 36" ultra high rez monitors for you to waste the space with more and more area round every element. I know you're proud of your UI design skillz, but it's getting really ducking annoying.
I had to send in a screenshot of one Google page for editing contacts. 90% of the screen was fixed sized menus and the contacts photo. The last 10% was a tiny scrollbars box for editing a very long list of options. The devs responded basically "meh", though a few months later it adjusted to be a bit better. Do they ever test anything that's not on a huge screen before rolling to prod?
Speaking as someone who works with two 32” 4K displays, if you want to run them at a decent resolution, the buttons, text, tabs, and everything else become ridiculously tiny—so much so that it almost defeats the point of having large monitors in the first place. You’re stuck squinting and making precision mouse movements just to hit these microscopic UI elements, and you can’t resize them without lowering the entire display resolution.
Do they ever test anything that's not on a huge screen before rolling to prod?
I feel this way all the time. I used to have to tell my (often less experienced) coworkers "that's unusable on a device, which is how 75% of our traffic will consume it."
It was usually because it looked nice on a huge monitor, and in an emulator.
I really want Apple to just stop redesigning things
They should bring back Mountain Lion or whatever. I heard it was peak
Leopard and Snow Leopard had vastly better virtual desktops than Lion onward. You actually had a grid of them and could navigate up/down/left/right with shortcuts; afterwards you only got a linear list of desktops.
Gridded desktops were great. I had a 3x3 grid, of which five cells were used. My main desktop was "centered". Thunderbird was right. My IRC and IM clients were left. iTunes was down. I don't remember what was up; it's been a while.
Holy shit, I forgot all about this. That feature was genius; I loved it! They don’t build them like they used to I guess.
Leopard was peak Mac OS X.
Even if people had dual 36" monitors or whatever, most sites or programs seem to focus more and more on making things fit into as small a horizontal space as possible. Even if you have a vertical mo it or you'd have huge swatches of white space along the edges of the screen.
This shit really pisses me off. But a lot of the things they're doing with their new GUI piss me off.
Download the Feedback Assistant app and file complaints with well-thought arguments for why this hurts functionality / usability. Any changes that might be made to improve it have to come now, before they're locking changes to ship this fall.
I’ve been using the iOS beta. I can’t speak to the Mac beta. For iOS, the execution needs work, but I think I actually agree with the sentiment that content should own the entire screen and the controls should float over the content. However, there are some serious readability concerns that they need to sort out. But think of Instagram from 5 years ago compared to TikTok. TikTok really demonstrated how the content should take over the screen, and now every major social media app has a TikTok style vertical feed that fills your entire screen. I don’t use TikTok, but I enjoy apps that let content take up the screen. Apple does things that are genuinely really frustrating like refusing to redesign the Magic Mouse or putting the power button on the bottom of the Mac Mini. But in this case, I think maybe we should let Apple Cook - pun intended - but push back on obvious flaws like readability.
Oh, it's a cool theme, to be sure. But they overshot and need a lot of feedback to correct the mistakes. Let them know the places where this doesn't work so they can improve it. The same was true several years ago when they last overhauled the UI (a lot of errors got fixed that summer), only this is far more ambitious and they need as much feedback as they can get.
Beta 1 definitely doesn’t represent the final UI product. If you compare it to the WWDC Liquid Glass video, they’ve got tweaking to do. However with that said, LG is so much better in person and in use than pictures and video portray.
Here’s some tips.
macOS 26 Dev Beta 1 does not have Compact Mode. But I am confident it will be added back before release. Feel free to save this comment so you can dogpile me if I’m wrong.
Seems a bit odd the complain about screen real estate while representing the UI at its largest form, instead of its smallest.
There is a compact mode? Where do I find the setting?
Safari Settings>Tabs
Welcome to modern operating systems, apps, browsers, websites... just buy a high-dpi 30" screen :D
Negatory. The buttons become so tiny it’s a chore to click the right thing, and you generally fail the first 2 out of three tries.
Any recommendations?
Expanding like that usually is indicative of moves to make the UI more touch friendly. But since Apple seems to be firmly against touchscreen laptops for some dumb reason, who knows what their justification is. Probably something with the word magic or courage.
for some dumb reason
ive never understood why anyone would want a touch screen on a laptop? If its a foldable to a tablet type laptop, sure. But a regular laptop? why?
As someone who has used both, it’s super cool being able to flip your laptop around into a tablet-like interface if you want to, and even use a stylus if you want to. I would love it if Apple laptops did this. Admittedly, I did not know how cool it could be until I actually used one on the daily.
Keyboard, mouse, track pad, track point, all of them have limits. Sometimes just touching what you want to do is more convenient. And if you don't want to use it, then you can ignore it with no adverse effect. It isn't something that's in the way or prevents you from using other input methods.
And at this point the technology is so cheap there's no reason not to include it. Well unless your company's entire profit structure is based on charging exorbitant amounts for minor upgrades and making the lowest cost option almost always have some sort of glaring deficiency to try to push users to pay hundreds more than they need to for the "optional" upgrades that should have just been included and cost pennies on the dollar for the company. Then using your cult like user base to gaslight each other and outsiders into believing they don't actually want something you don't provide.
I don’t understand - what limitation does a keyboard and mouse have which is directly solved by a touchscreen?
Gestures like pinch to zoom or swiping photos are easier with touch. Drawing a shape or writing a signature are another thing.
Multitouch is something a mouse can’t do at all. Macs have quite a nice set of gestures that can be used with the touchpad. A touch screen could use similar gestures.
For laptops touch screens are useful. Especially on convertible laptops, that transform into a tablet when folding over the screen completely. Also when you’re using it with more than one person at the same time.
For desktops, I don’t really see much of a benefit. Apple’s touchpads are pretty nice for that use case. I used to have a mouse on the right and a touchpad on the left of my keyboard.
Apple has completely failed to build a great convertible laptop for many years now. Windows laptops do it somewhat okay, but this is the product category where Apple could actually build something great. Apple Pencil on a convertible MacBook would fly off the shelves.
Since Tim Cook’s reign started there has been little vision regarding product design.
Apple should go beyond iOS, iPadOS, macOS to a unified operating system with an adaptive UI. I want to connect my phone with an M-series chip inside (or watch) to a thunderbolt hub and have a full desktop experience. iOS/iPadOS are too neutered. macOS is too neglected. VisionOS is a dead end toy.
I don’t want synchronization between four devices, I want one device that does everything and connects to various peripheries.
I want that too but with Linux + Waydroid on software, Convertible form factor + VoLTE + x86 on hardware side
iPhone+++ with a screen 10x bigger than iPhone 15! Buy now! Buy now! Buy now! Buy now!
It’s exactly the opposite on iPhone. Most of the chrome is now extremely minimized. He’s just bitching about macOS.
Not an Apple user here, but I saw it on the front page.
Is it me or does the leftmost one on the screenshot really looks the best anbd most consistent?
The person who posted this image must read right-to-left. They put the newest version on the left, oldest in the right.
If you read the thread, they mention that the top left corner of the window was the best place to demonstrate the issue and they would have gone left to right otherwise.
I think it’s up to personal taste.
A third of those screenshots is the Favorites Bar. Is that turned on by default these days? Turning that off helps slims things down a bit.