| ▲ | paxy 2 hours ago |
| This Apple devotion is really something else.. Looking at all their design missteps and corrections in recent releases my only takeaway is that they are making it up as they go along just like the rest of us. |
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| ▲ | bunderbunder 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| I think it might be somewhat generational. There was a time when Apple famously put a lot of effort into HCI research and experimentation, and prioritized it above so many other concerns. When Apple chose to do UI differently from everyone else, it was a strong indication that they made the decision based on empirical research and not just making it up as they go along like everyone else. A single menu bar at the top of the screen, for example, was chosen because they found that users could locate and click on them much faster than they could menus at the top of the window. I can’t remember exactly how much but I think it was something like 1/3 - 1/2 as much time. But that was in a different millennium. |
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| ▲ | efortis an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | IIRC Bill Atkinson said that it is at the top because it was easier to code. at any rate, it’s true that screen edges and corners are easy to click because their hit region becomes infinite in one or two directions | | | |
| ▲ | an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | [deleted] |
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| ▲ | andai an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > they are making it up as they go along just like the rest of us. "Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that are no smarter than you. And you can change it. And you can change it. You can influence it. You can build your own things that other people can use." —Steve Jobs Full clip slightly longer, worth watching. https://youtube.com/watch?v=kYfNvmF0Bqw |
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| ▲ | cromka 13 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The serious downgrade of how dismissing popups worked is what drive me back to Linux (GNOME). It's not perfect here but having an ergonomic design and replacing it with a substantially worse one is rather unheard of in this world. |
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| ▲ | herpdyderp 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| There are a lot of us that aren't making it up as we go. There is plenty of knowledge and experience on how to do these things and Apple used to be the king of it. For some reason they started throwing it all away with Liquid Glass. |
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| ▲ | kibwen 26 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Decades before Liquid Glass. They had begun throwing it all away by the time they got rid of scrollbars (and the rest of the industry followed like gormless lemmings). | | |
| ▲ | LtWorf 16 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Ah yes, I experienced a designer who hid scrollbars, and also decided that the title was NOT part of the page so a scroll action there would not scroll anything. I remember wasting a couple of hours trying to find where a certain setting had gone. Of course the setting in question was literally the most important one, and of course it was hidden at the bottom of the page, outside of my non-designer-too-small-screen, after things like picking which colour and which emoji you wanted to use. |
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| ▲ | youniverse 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Apple is/was regarded as the gods of design and ux. Does anyone know what it takes to get hired there as a designer now? Are the original designers with actual vision still there? I imagine they would need to really be conscious of not hiring average designers who just have a resume of top companies they have worked at but need the type of people steve jobs would have hired himself. Easier said than done so it's not surprising they have atrophied in their former genius but im curious. |
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| ▲ | glimshe 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| And on every misstep and their correction, the same people will be defending them. Like "icons on every option is so much more intuitive", just to argue the exact opposite a couple of years later. |
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| ▲ | happytoexplain 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Criticisms of the format, "the same people", are virtually always irrational/tribalistic, and based on the "invented enemy" internet trope that happens when interpreting groups of people as being one person. I'd like to leave such common tropes outside of HN. | | | |
| ▲ | angiolillo 27 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > And on every misstep and their correction, the same people will be defending them. That doesn't match my experience. Personally I've found Apple fans (not just Gruber and Nielsen but regular Apple users) to be the most vocally critical of their design missteps. | |
| ▲ | an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | [deleted] |
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| ▲ | happytoexplain 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| This is the opposite of logical. Missteps and corrections are a sign of conscientiousness, not "making it up". If somebody always gets everything right in your opinion, you should be suspicious of your own values, not of the people who don't achieve constant perfection. |
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| ▲ | bitpush 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | I think you're trying to find meaning when there's no meaning what so ever. Large phones were a bad idea because you cant use it with one finger, until iPhone Pro Maxes came out. Installing apps from the internet is scary because viruses, yet Macs let you do that no questions asked. Ads are bad and dangerous, until it shows up on Apple Maps. Apple is just a simple company, existing to make as much money as possible. They make beautiful devices though - but no reason to put them on a pedestal. | | |
| ▲ | OnlineTux 23 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | > Installing apps from the internet is scary because viruses, yet Macs let you do that no questions asked. Even before Gatekeeper, macOS/OSX File Quarantine prompted you when you went to open a .dmg or .zip you downloaded. These days anything not singed by an Apple Developer certificate refuses to open unless you remove the file attribute. > Apple is just a simple company, existing to make as much money as possible. They make beautiful devices though - but no reason to put them on a pedestal. Apple certainly exists to make money, but I don't think they exist solely to do that. They have long had a culture of enabling their users to do things that were previously the purview of big business or specialised fields. They don't sell you just hardware, they give you a whole office suite, audio production tools, development tools etc. all on top of high quality hardware. With a MacBook and iPhone you can be a filmmaker, take and edit professional-quality photographs, record and produce your own music out of the box. Maybe they used to be better at it than they are today, but Apple tends to spend more time putting their customers first than their competitors do. | |
| ▲ | bunderbunder an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | This reads like the corporate edition of the goomba fallacy. The individual at Apple who decided to try and keep phones small, for example is probably not the person who decided to make them big. I feel confident saying this because the person who was supposedly the driving force behind keeping them small died in 2011, and they didn't start releasing phones that are too large for comfortable one-handed use until 2014. |
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| ▲ | readthenotes1 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| By recent, you mean since just after the iPhone 3s? The iPhone 4 was such a letdown... |
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| ▲ | pornel 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 4 still shipped with buttons my mum could recognise. Apple's design never recovered from the flattening of iOS 7. | |
| ▲ | yreg 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | *3GS |
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| ▲ | amelius an hour ago | parent | prev [-] |
| It's the Reality Distortion Field. Best known from The Bible, Steve Jobs, Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler. |
