schmatzler wrote:

SirNickity wrote:

The UI elements are inconsistent

Not really. Windows is just using two design philosophies at the moment - their flat "Metro style" applications that are pushed through the store and are available in light or dark color schemes and the legacy Win32 applications we've been used to since at least Windows 95.

Uh, so, did we just say the same thing just then? I don't mind having a BC layer, but when they can't even be bothered to make the OS itself follow a unified design philosophy, then it's not ready to be thrust upon innocent bystanders yet. It just reeks of an attitude of "eh, who cares anyway.."

And then there's stuff like this:

dr_st wrote:

There are certain system configuration options that are accessed through the modern UI, and then some that are accessed through the legacy UI.

schmatzler wrote:

That is really annoying! As much as I like Windows 10, Microsoft had so much time to put everything in one place by now and they just didn't do it! It looks like they abandoned this approach after copying over most of the settings and just left it that way.

Every time I install Windows 10 on a new PC I always have to look for the option to put the My Computer icon back on the desktop. I know it's somewhere in the Appearances setting, hidden in a small text link on the right sidebar. But it's so stupidly placed, I always forget where it is.

A complaint I have as well. Where did it go? Does it even exist anymore? Can I not be trusted to change things like that now, or is it just buried in some "legacy" settings dialog fifteen related-item clicks from here?

I know liking the aesthetics of an environment you use for 8 hours a day is superficial and all, but there are things about the UI I would really like to tweak. And AFAICT, you just can't. You get backgrounds, screensavers, and your choice of "accent color." I guess that's progress..?

And there's stuff like this:

DosFreak wrote:

What I'm more worried about is when mmc snapins get dropped like with Exchange. Then the noobs have to use the shitty web interface or be advanced enough to use powershell whereas at least MMC was familiar enough for point and click.

Taking away features is NOT an improvement. If you can't think of a better way to design it, maybe just don't redesign it. Often, their decision is to just nix it entirely. Uhm, I was using that....

I had a client ask me once if I could help them with a mail problem. I'm not a MS enterprise software guru, but I've admin'd Windows systems in the past, so I figured... sure.. I'll take a look and see if I can help. Nope. It's all 100% PowerShell now. The one thing Windows had going for it over Unix systems was that at least you can crawl around a GUI and maybe find what you need to change. Now, you have to know the clumsy "everything is an object" metaphor and noun/verb syntax of PS. That put a huge learning curve in front of what should have been... I dunno, a quick change of MX records or whatever it was.

dr_st wrote:

What I see is that more and more of these arguments boil down to people just defending what they're used to.

I find it interesting that technology follows more the fashion methodology, than the tool methodology. Nobody is out there trying to redefine the screwdriver. But polka-dots and a defining border around a clickable element were soooo last season. I was really puzzled why the W10 Explorer window had two identical icons with a file folder in the top left corner, until I figured out that one was the control menu icon (forgot about those, since they only exist in about 50% of the applications anymore) and the other was New Folder. Right next to it, which is... I guess(?) a logical place for a commonly accessed function?

I've been a lot more comfortable since moving to OS X for my day-to-day work, because the UI doesn't get in the way. I don't have to guess what something does. Settings are nearby, they're generally not hidden in a way I have to go looking for them (unless it's truly the kind of stuff you ought not to be fiddling with, without a good think beforehand -- in which case it's probably a CLI thing or in a preferences file. Fair enough.) And interestingly, despite that High Sierra (what I'm using at the moment) feels fresh and new, it's not really that big a departure from Cheetah... 10.0... released something like 20 years ago. You could pretty much upgrade from 10.0 to 10.14 and it wouldn't take any time at all to adapt, because it's fundamentally the exact same. Sans brushed metal and bubbly buttons.

Meanwhile, Microsoft can't figure out if my computer is a wristwatch or a conference room presentation board or a desktop PC, and so the interface is stretched like taffy to be all things to all people... ending up being a poor touch UI, and a not very well optimized mouse / KB interface. I could get used to it, but after half an hour in the toilet you get used to the smell of poo. That doesn't make it a desirable scent.

SirNickity wrote:

I've been a lot more comfortable since moving to OS X for my day-to-day work, because the UI doesn't get in the way. I don't have to guess what something does. Settings are nearby, they're generally not hidden in a way I have to go looking for them

I hear that so often, but Apple sometimes hides too much.
Take Apple Mail for example: If you have a mail server that works with a username that is not your e-mail address you can't enter it.You first have to enter your mail address and password, then wait for it to fail and then it will display an extra field for entering the username.
Also, if you don't want your attachments to automatically get embedded into e-mails you have to open up the terminal and hack something in.

That's terrible. Apple is dumbing down their interface so much to make it look clean that you have to go out of your way to do simple things. Every time I'm on OSX I feel like the operating system wants to dictate how I must be using the computer. It makes me feel...weird. Like I'm not really in control. I don't like this approach.

Windows can be criticized for a lot of things, but it doesn't do that to such a big extent.

🤣 -- I know how you feel. 😀 But ironically that's how I feel with Windows. It feels like I'm removing the warranty sticker with a blowtorch just to change a network interface from DHCP to static, while on OS X, the Network panel can be accessed directly from either the Apple menu or the WiFi menu. I'm a fairly new convert to Mac, and I thought it was going to be a tough transition. It was more of a relief.

Their apps, though -- Mail, Photos, all that stuff -- are definitely "de-cluttered" a bit too far. If you just go with it, you get about 80% of what you want, and it's super intuitive. You can claw your way to 90%, if you really put in the effort. Beyond that, just give up and use something else.

schmatzler wrote:

Also, if you don't want your attachments to automatically get embedded into e-mails you have to open up the terminal and hack something in.
...

WTH? How can you guys even settle for this kind of shit?

appiah4 wrote:

WTH? How can you guys even settle for this kind of shit?

Something about Apple's ecosystem somehow conditions the users to love the walled garden, or as they say in Russian - "step right, step left, get shot". Apple does the things they do well so well, and the things they don't do well so terribly, that the path of least resistance seems to be to embrace the path chosen for you and learn to live without the others. Sort of "stop worrying and love the bomb".

What to do when Windows 7 support ends in a few weeks time?

Panic, lots of panic. Drink heavily.

Oh come on. I have zero complaints about the OS X. I use the Mail at work and it just works. I easily added a custom signature for me and for other employees that also use it. It doesn’t work differently to other email apps. If you still don’t like it, try my boss preferred app, Spark. He also uses the iOS version of Spark. I prefer to use the native apps where possible though. I do the same when I manage to use Windows if the automatic updates let me do something, meh...

Why can't we all just use Linux please?

appiah4 wrote:

Why can't we all just use Linux please?

Because choice is good? Oh no wait, that was the argument to use linux.

Scali wrote:

appiah4 wrote:

Why can't we all just use Linux please?

Because choice is good? Oh no wait, that was the argument to use linux.

Touche.

appiah4 wrote:

schmatzler wrote:

Also, if you don't want your attachments to automatically get embedded into e-mails you have to open up the terminal and hack something in.
...

WTH? How can you guys even settle for this kind of shit?

That's just one application. If you don't like it, just use another e-mail client (ironically, there are more e-mail clients for macOS than for Windows nowadays).

I personally don't use Mail.app (stopped using it when they had a particularly buggy release several years ago) but it's really silly to judge an OS by its built-in apps. FWIW, Mail.app still runs rings around Windows Mail, but not a single person in their right mind would say "Oh, Windows is terrible because Windows Mail is such a mess".

It applies to every other built-in app, really: they're here for convenience, sometimes they do a great job (e.g. Photos on macOS is very good for a free photo editing app, it's even a full-featured RAW converter!), but nothing stops a user from using something better if he/she so desires.

I personally found macOS to be more customizable than Windows, my favourite feature is its ability to redefine keyboard shortcuts both globally and within individual applications. I've never seen anything like this on any other platform, and I use this feature extensively to map same/similar functions in different applications to the same keys (e.g. by default, shortcuts for resizing an image, cropping etc in Preview.app are different to, say, Photoshop; well, not on my mac!). Another killer feature is that the whole OS is thoroughly scriptable using built-in tools. On Windows, you have to use a 3rd party app (AutoHotKey) to approach this level of scriptability, and on Linux... well... I'm not aware of any comparable solutions for GUI scripting on Linux.

schmatzler wrote:

Isn't everyone changing their designs over the years?

Yes, but end users (especially the less knowledgeable or more casual users) tend to dislike or even hate change, unless the change can be seen as being obviously for the better. And I've yet to meet anyone who says they like the new (well, a few years old now) 2D flat style of interface that is so prevalent, for example.

appiah4 wrote:

schmatzler wrote:

Also, if you don't want your attachments to automatically get embedded into e-mails you have to open up the terminal and hack something in.
...

WTH? How can you guys even settle for this kind of shit?

I'm not really sure what he's talking about, to be honest. Someone would have to explain what alternative to "embedded in an email" you have with attachments. Aren't they always embedded in an email? That's how they're transferred... I'm obviously missing something. It might be obvious if I had ever used Mail on Mac, but I haven't. I use the iPhone app for about 99% of my personal email needs, and that works fine. When I need to, I use webmail. I use Outlook 2016 for my work email, since, if you have Exchange, you're really better off using the MS client anyway.

But basically, ShovelKnight said it best. It's like judging Windows based on Outlook Express. It's a freebie. If it's not your cup of tea, pick something else. It wasn't meant to be the end-all mail application. *shrug*

Kerr Avon wrote:

schmatzler wrote:

Isn't everyone changing their designs over the years?

Yes, but end users (especially the less knowledgeable or more casual users) tend to dislike or even hate change, unless the change can be seen as being obviously for the better. And I've yet to meet anyone who says they like the new (well, a few years old now) 2D flat style of interface that is so prevalent, for example.

This, a thousand times. Redecorating for the sake of it... is just immature. It's coders and designers and marketing people who are bored, or easily distracted by shiny objects, or just trying to justify their existence and a version bump for a $99 upgrade fee. Tweaks are fine. Overhauls without purpose are counter-productive.

A good example of this was when I was working with a client -- a small, rural ISP -- and they were having some issues with their upstream DNS server. I suggested deploying an instance of BIND either temporarily, or permanently if they felt comfortable maintaining it. So I grabbed a copy of Ubuntu Server or CentOS -- whichever one it was they requested -- and fired up a new VM. That's when I found out, not only had the migrated to systemd, but had also thrown away ifconfig entirely for the new ip utils. Something that used to work the same for literally decades just suddenly different, when we've got a whole region of customers with spotty Internet access, and I'm reading novel-length man pages on the new kitchen sink network configuration utility. FUN! Now will somebody please get to the point and show me how to configure a %$@!% IP address??

Nobody's going to reply "why so scared of change?" when somebody complains about a building designer hiding all the light switches under a three-seashells fixture above the door frame. You expect to walk in, reach to the side of the entrance, and find a light switch. It's convention, it works, there's no need to mess with it unless there's a problem that legitimately needs to be fixed.

SirNickity wrote:

I'm not really sure what he's talking about, to be honest. Someone would have to explain what alternative to "embedded in an email" you have with attachments.

If you attach images to your mail in Apple Mail, the mail will automatically be converted to HTML and all of the images get embedded into it.
That's a bit tedious for users outside of the Apple ecosystem - for example, if someone with Outlook opens that e-mail they can't just download all of the images at once because they're not attached to the mail, they're INSIDE the content of the mail. So you have to scroll through the mail, click on every image and save that hand by hand. Sometimes it's very obvious Apple doesn't want to think about the people outside of their walled garden and yeah - it's manageable, but still a bit annoying. 🤣

ShovelKnight wrote:

I personally found macOS to be more customizable than Windows

My personal opinion is, that it restricts me too much. For example: I don't understand why I need to buy a commercial application just to be able to tile my windows properly. On Windows I can just drag a window to the edge of my screen and it will be resized to 50% of its size. Or I drag it to the corners and it takes up 25% of the whole screen. That's really easy and convenient.
On OSX I have to find the green button, keep it pressed and then it might work or it might tell me that the application is not supported. That is really tedious when I'm working with multiple applications at once.

I also don't like that there is only one menu bar at the top for the program currently in focus. If I have two programs next to each other and I want to use their functions I always have to bring one into focus, get to the menu at the top and then switch back and do the same all over again. It takes ages to do that and whenever I'm sitting in front of a Mac my workflow is severely restricted because of that.

Sometimes it feels like the OSX UI concept was created years ago and no one has thought about improving it since then.

SirNickity wrote:

Nobody's going to reply "why so scared of change?" when somebody complains about a building designer hiding all the light switches under a three-seashells fixture above the door frame. You expect to walk in, reach to the side of the entrance, and find a light switch. It's convention, it works, there's no need to mess with it unless there's a problem that legitimately needs to be fixed.

THIS!!! THANK YOU SO MUCH!

schmatzler wrote:

I don't understand why I need to buy a commercial application just to be able to tile my windows properly. On Windows I can just drag a window to the edge of my screen and it will be resized to 50% of its size. Or I drag it to the corners and it takes up 25% of the whole screen. That's really easy and convenient.
On OSX I have to find the green button, keep it pressed and then it might work or it might tell me that the application is not supported. That is really tedious when I'm working with multiple applications at once.

You don't actually need to buy - There's Spectacle, it's free and works exactly like Magnet.

Apparently you're probably (I am talking this based on your posts solely) a bit too lazy to search for free applications. I do have a good amount of free apps on my Mac and they're all amazing. Some are much better than paid ones. But yeah, don't worry, I do understand your point, some features should've been made built in. Actually I had Spectacle before macOS Catalina, and I tend to use more only two windows side by side, which is what Catalina brought with the feature you mentioned, along with an option to move the window to another monitor or make it full screen.

"But, why can't we all use Linux?" Well, to be fair, even Linux has the need for kinda the same amount of work to customize something small like that. Ubuntu for example, I hate the dock on the left side. I would rather have it similar to macOS dock, but I also need to download some third-party app to have this or use another distro like elementaryOS which has the same dock. Funny, eh?

schmatzler wrote:

I also don't like that there is only one menu bar at the top for the program currently in focus. If I have two programs next to each other and I want to use their functions I always have to bring one into focus, get to the menu at the top and then switch back and do the same all over again. It takes ages to do that and whenever I'm sitting in front of a Mac my workflow is severely restricted because of that.

Sometimes it feels like the OSX UI concept was created years ago and no one has thought about improving it since then.

Again, it just takes 0.5 seconds of your life to bring an app to focus (or just a keystroke, CMD + TAB, similar to the ALT + TAB on Windows). You won't die or be slow at work because of that. I hate the ribbon menus on Windows, its like a cluttered menus carnival and I can't find what I want. Having to focus on a window in macOS helps me to find it. But, fine, maybe we should tell Apple to make it built in for you as an option, so those who prefer the menu bar at the top use it, those who prefer your way can also enable it and use it this way.

bfcastello wrote:

You don't actually need to buy - There's Spectacle, it's free and works exactly like Magnet.

Thank you, that looks very useful! You're probably right that I'm not doing super-intensive research for free applications, since MacOS is not my main system. 😀

Again, it just takes 0.5 seconds of your life to bring an app to focus (or just a keystroke, CMD + TAB, similar to the ALT + TAB on Windows).

That's true and I hear this argument very often. But when you're switching very often between applications, these keystrokes and mouse pathways add up to an extreme amount of time. Apple could just avoid that by having the application menus where they belong - inside of the applications. But that will probably never happen. 😁

Probably not, but I think mostly because your primary interaction with a window should not be through its menus. Apple's always been pretty good about having a UI with most of what you need, not much of what you don't. Exceptions to this mean the UI could probably use some work -- or you're doing something atypical maybe?

bfcastello wrote:

"But, why can't we all use Linux?" Well, to be fair, even Linux has the need for kinda the same amount of work to customize something small like that.

I really adore Linux, but as a desktop, it's pretty hopeless. The WM guys seem hell-bent on erasing the whole board and starting over every time they get almost feature-complete. I could be biased, as I'm a KDE guy. I love KDE, but I can't stand KDE's development team. KDE 3 was solid when I first started using it. Then they came out with KDE 4, and it took YEARS to get even somewhat usable. They've only recently gotten it almost as stable as KDE 3, just in time to throw it out and start working on KDE 5 -- which is just embarrassingly fragile. There are frequent times when my clipboard doesn't work. Clipboard. I mean... that really ought to be figured out by now.

The same "let's change it!" attitude has trickled down into the networking and RC systems. Gentoo has teetered on the edge of a cliff with Portage several times. MySQL has daddy issues and periodic identity crises. For a long time, GRUB 2 took a simple, reliable, workhouse boot loader and decided to go all mini-OS on it. Unix has always had a wonderful "do one thing, do it well" philosophy. But all this new blood with their agile sprints and language-of-the-day (Java! no, Python! no, Ruby! no, Go!!) habits ... ugh. Now it's more like "do everything, poorly" except oh, sorry, that feature hasn't been implemented yet. 😉

I have to agree with your last paragraph. Nowadays is more like release something incomplete and update later. Terrible

Kerr Avon wrote:

Yes, but end users (especially the less knowledgeable or more casual users) tend to dislike or even hate change, unless the change can be seen as being obviously for the better. And I've yet to meet anyone who says they like the new (well, a few years old now) 2D flat style of interface that is so prevalent, for example.

huh? I think quite the opposite is true, especially the less knowledgeable and casual users are almost always welcoming new interfaces and designs because to them everything new is automatically better, especially if it looks "fancy", they don't really care about usability and function because they don't use their devices for complex tasks anyways, and usually also don't care about things like system settings or customization at all.

and unfortunately since that is most probably the larger demographic by far, those are also the people that software and the like gets catered to, and so interfaces and UIs adapt to the casual user more than to someone who is actually knowledgeable and wants to go to greater lengths working with their system and adjusting stuff.

I don't hate change, I don't hate new things... I hate when they make things worse and more difficult to use for anything other than the most basic tasks. and that is most often what "change" amounts to nowadays, especially in UI design.