The struggle of resizing windows on macOS Tahoe
142 points by runxiyu
142 points by runxiyu
Living on this planet for quite a few decades, I have learned that it rarely works to grab things if you don’t actually touch them:
That part was hilarious.
Thank goodness the executive responsible for Liquid Glass (Alan Dye) went to Meta last month. He just has neither taste nor any idea of usable UI/UX. Or, as someone on the internet wrote: „The average IQ of both companies has increased.“
It's not uncommon for one bad decisionmaker to screw things up across the board but in this particular case I think the hope and joy are... well, not misplaced, but overoptimistic. Apple's HCI has been going downhill for a long time, and it's frankly on par with how it's been going throughout the commercial world (and, by popularity envy, in the FOSS world) for the last decade or so. It's on-brand even by mechanism: Dye's background was in visuals and print, not design, and it shows. I don't think Dye's departure will improve things in Apple land past the immediate removal of that braindead Liquid Glass thing, which seems to be almost universally hated.
Frankly, despite its braindead implementation, LG isn't even entirely a step in the wrong direction. Lack of visual and spatial cues has plagued modern UIs for a long time. LG is a completely misguided attempt at doing what otherwise isn't the wrong thing. IMHO it speaks of a wider-scale, i.e. systemic, inability to make better UIs, where people are stuck between a lacunary high-level understanding of the major problems they're grappling with and a general lack of capacity to break with poor, but by now iconic (heh) design choices.
The thing I find the most encouraging is reports that old-timer UX people at Apple who disliked Dye like his replacement. Tho who knows how true that is; and even in the best case, righting a ship the size of Apple will necessarily take time.
I guess it's not an unequivocally bad sign, but we're just reading the tea leaves here. It's standard corporate practice to replace someone who was poached with someone entirely outside their immediate circle, or even someone who was at odds with them. If you choose someone they were close to instead, there's a non-zero chance that that new person will join their former boss within a couple of months, or at the very least that you'll find yourself locked in a bidding war. This isn't necessarily a sign that anyone "up top" recognises Apple's UI (and design in general) has been going downhil for fifteen years and they finally picked someone who understands computers.
This piece:
https://lmnt.me/blog/and-stay-out.html
covers more of the lineage, though I also agree with you that it started before Ive got quite so elevated. It's more encouraging that they've both moved on and that the remaining decision makeres were not aligned with them quite so much.
I haven't worked at Apple, so maybe they're different, but my experience in the corporate world is very different from what I read in these articles from Apple's fan base. I'm sure Ive, Dye, and Lemay all have their visions about how products are meant to be, but the Apple blogosphere constantly ignores the very real external factors and the non-technical internal factors that shape Apple's products and designs,. They keep on pretending that the primary factor here is some inscrutable forward-thinking vision of these titans of design, and that the reason why Apple's stuff has gotten progressively worse over the last fifteen years or so is that the men in the high towers have lost their way -- Ive strayed from the True Path of Familiarity as set out by Steve Jobs himself, and then Dye followed in his heretical footsteps because he lacked the design knowledge to understand how wrong it was and so on.
Frankly, I think the remaining decision makers were very much aligned with Dye on the fundamental mechanics. They may have disagreed on things like how rounded the corners had to be and on the relative importance of icon consistency but there's no way they didn't agree on the fundamentals: facillitate the integration of applications with reduced design budgets, enable service integration to support a pivot to services, reduce personalisation opportunities, facillitate attention-grabbing and moving consumers away from macOS and towards iOS, improve customer base segmentation by financial resources, integrate more of it in planned (though generous) obsolescence schedules. This has been the Apple party line for ten or fifteen years now, and organisations the size of Apple are very good at purging people who don't toe it.
These are also some of the factors that have contributed to the steady erosion of Apple's desktop UIs. Whoever's in charge of UI is there to execute this policy, not turn it back into make bicycles for the mind.
I have worked at Apple, and this is right on. There are a lot of folks who have a parasocial relationship with some imagined Steve Jobs Apple, and it drives a lot of the Discourse. That said, speaking normatively, it is Bad that Apple is chasing rents via services; it's bad for customers, it's bad for ISVs, and it's bad, I would argue, for Apple.
Back at Microsoft we had to have at least 24px targets, at least for the web work I was doing. Microsoft rightfully takes heat for a lot of things but I was always glad how much they focused on accessibility when I was there https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG22/Understanding/target-size-minimum.html
Once you are a big enough fish and the ADA sees your company as worthy of a lawsuit, that’s when accessibility starts mattering (unfortunately). I’ve seen this “not right now” attitude at every place I’ve ever worked. At this point I’d be surprised if Microsoft wasn’t obsessed with getting a passing grade though.
As someone being forced to use OSX at work right now, I expect somebody will rant (or give a good explaination) on why Mission Control does not work with a keyboard.
More related to the post, the default Terminal breaks (as in restores or un-maximizes) the window size every time I change the font size.
Thank heavens today is Sunday and I can write this on Linux
Thank heavens today is Sunday and I can write this on Linux
But Linux is ugly and designed by developers!
Which I've come to understand means it will be functional, and actual work like everybody expects...
I know you are joking on the first sentance, but I seriously think that Gnome has been improving its OSX ripoff over OSX itself. Why doesn't Mission Control allows me to right click on icons on the dock? Why the traybar has more icons than my number of Firefox extensions? Why can't I alt-tab only in the current workspace? Why can't I easily find my mouse pointer in the screen?
And the biggest offense, and a cry for help: How on this F earth do I open a file explorer and browse my files? I focus Finder in the dock but nothing happens. I have managed to open windows for specific folders but I can't navigate elsewhere! I have to rely on the terminal to browse my files! I know Google does have an answer but I'm so pissed with this machine I expect someday the OS itself will show me how to do it.
I'm not seeing this issue on my Macbook. Perhaps they've fixed it in an update? I'm on 26.1 apparently. I see the resize cursor anywhere in the visible window area near the corner and I can drag the corner from anywhere that cursor appears, plus the 'missing' bit that would make it rectangular.
You're probably used to thinking of the window resizing area as the edge of the window. I am too, so I haven't had issues with Tahoe.
Long-time Mac users, on the other hand, may still think about resizing as something you do by grabbing a part of the window, not its edge, stemming from how there used to be a rectangular grab handle in the bottom right part of the window. When your mental model is "grab the window to resize it", it becomes an issue that the actual window is such a small part of the grabbable area.
I use the open source easy-move-resize app to get Gnome style <modifier-key>+drag window move and resize.
I also struggled to see the selection in the application switcher (I had to install AltTab instead). Recently there was an article about the mess made of menu icons in Tahoe. A lot of issues have been raised about Liquid Glass of course.
A number of core parts of the macOS UI are no longer truly functional; it's a complete disaster from the point of view of UX/a11y. What sort of organisational dysfunction produces this kind of release, I wonder?
Or the struggle of identifying active tabs - honestly they at times active tabs seem easier to distinguish without the accessibility options.
There is as far as I can make out nothing in the “let’s make everything transparent” UI that is an improvement, and making everything transparent has the exact impact on readability and legibility you would expect.
I thought this was about grabbing the bottom or right or left straight edge of a window, getting the arrow cursor and then it does nothing when you drag.
Or it was about moving a window to another screen and then it resizes itself and still has 20% on the old screen.
I have not had problems with this one.