Bring Back Idiomatic Design

It's not amazing, but it remains better than most of the alternatives. A few examples:

• Command-c really does copy everywhere, including the terminal. Command-shift-option-V is paste-as-plain-text everywhere.
• Core menu layout and shortcuts for macOS apps remains consistent.
• Command-` is the preferences dialog in every application that has a preference dialog, and these all apply without an confirm step and support undo (except Qt apps, which is one of the reasons these stick out).
• Drag and drop works to the degree that not working is unusual. For example, all NSDocument apps on macOS still have a document proxy in the menu bar and you can send a reference to the document by dragging that. Want to attach a document that you're working on to an email? Drag from there to the email compose window. Want to interact with it in the terminal? Drag it to the terminal window. Microsoft Office apps display an icon there but it isn't a file proxy, and that's one of the big reasons their apps feel weird on macOS.
• Very few apps roll their own widgets.
• Including the above, NSTextView is a very powerful text editing widget and so nothing except Electron apps and MS Office rolls their own. This means that you have a consistent spell checking dictionary across apps, the same keyboard navigation works, and so on. Command-shift-t toggles it between rich and plain-text editing modes, and that shortcut works in Mail.app and TextEdit, in spite of the fact that they've very different applications (and in any other app that supports both modes).
• Dragging a document to an app's icon in the dock opens that document with that app, irrespective of the app (assuming it can open documents).
• A bunch of things like calendar, address book, password store, and so on, are provided as services, so apps don't roll their own incompatible versions.
• Spotlight and QuickLook have a plugin infrastructure so most apps support full-text search of their document types and previews in Finder (this includes things like being able to scroll through a PowerPoint slide deck without opening it).
• Dialog boxes have the buttons the right way around (forward is right, backwards is left), consistently.
• Dialog boxes have verbs on the buttons, consistently.
• Almost all apps (there's a theme here, I bet you can guess the exception) support Sudden Termination, so they'll autosave as they go, a crash doesn't lose data, and they can be killed without notice, both in low-memory conditions and when the OS wants to reboot for security updates.

There's a lot they get wrong, but that baseline is something I haven't seen anywhere else.

This feels like a perfect moment to reference this article on Apple's consitency.

I'm not the biggest fan of Liquid Glass, but it does feel internally consistent. At least when it isn't bugging out.

This, too, is a form of enshittification: caring more about the company's goals than the user's goals. That's our default state of things in the software world now.

Enterprise software isn’t really defined as software that feels nice to use.

Yeah, I use Figma pretty often and it can be a very frustrating experience. Especially when they change how the app behaves for the 10th time already for something that feels less intuitive or against what I want it to do, all the while neglecting a lot of quality of life features found in other apps (I'm pretty frustrated at its Bézier curve editor, no function to set a symmetry axis (counting pixels manually for the 1000th time, ugh...) or not having a perceptual colour picker).

I believe some capacitive touchscreens can detect fingers just above the surface, but attempts to use this for tooltips failed because:

• It's hard to hold your finger just above a surface, consistently, without accidentally tapping it.
• Your finger is in the way of the UI element you want to read.

Many Android apps show tooltips when you long press a button. After the tooltip is shown, releasing your finger will not activate the button.

Seeing as 'tooltip on hover' is hard to do on mobile, perhaps we could bring back the 'What's This' button? It showed a mouse pointer with a question mark; you'd click the button, and then click the thing you wanted to know about. That'd work fine on touchscreens.

I can't find a screenshot of the button... has anyone else got better search-fu? But here's the pointer-and-question-mark cursor, at least. (Second image, they call it the 'Help Select' cursor.) https://www.axialis.com/tutorials/what-is-a-cursor.html

There is precisely one good thing about the Outlook web app: It isn't the Outlook Windows app.