Now, though, they've done the Windows 8 thing of overloading gestures and hiding behaviors. Want to see your notifications? Two-finger swipe to the left, starting from the edge of the touchpad. If the piece of text hasn't been there since OS X first came out, is it clickable or not? Because I damn well can't tell, nothing new looks like a button anymore.

I could also talk about how the gaussian blur effect is just about the most wasteful effect you can apply to anything, and is a far cry from pioneering the first fast rounded rectangle drawing algorithm, or anything in that vein, but I don't need to.

Because Apple's UI is just no longer good. I'd rather every button look like a shimmering stupid bubble than an unusable postmodern art piece.

Sent from my MacBook Pro

The trash icon was there in the Dock in 10.5, and still there in 10.11. The search function in help was there in 10.5, and still there in 10.11. To remove things from the Dock, right click the icon and the "Remove from dock" is still there in both versions. Any menu items that will open a dialog still indicates with three dots ("...") in both versions. Shortcut for opening dictionary is still not very discoverable in both versions (Cmd-Ctrl-D). I still don't know how to trigger Space/Expose without either using gesture (in 10.11) or look up the shortcut key (in 10.5).

I always see people saying Apple UI got worse in discoverability for the past few years and make it sounds like earlier releases were perfect, but I don't believe that is true. The bad part of the UI interaction was always there (e.g. drag icon from the dock to somewhere to remove it). The main difference I see is that 10.11 has a LOT more features than the 10.5, but the core interaction remain the same in regard to discoverability. In 10.11, we're exposed more to gestures, because it's quick, but there is always alternative way to trigger something without gesture.

[1] http://interface.free.fr/Archives/Apple_HIGuidelines.pdf [2] https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/Us...

Problem: You plug in an external monitor and for some reason it doesn't immediately display an images. What do you do?

In pre-el-Capitan, you open up the display settings pane and press the button marked "Detect Displays".

In El Capitan, you open up the display settings pane and note that the button is not there. Are you screwed? It appears so. So you run a google search and discover that if you hold down the option key, the button that had been there for maybe 16 years magically appears in an area of what previously appeared to be blank in the dialog.

I believe that's called the Indiana Jones UI pattern.[0]

So yes, the discoverability has gotten worse over the years. This is something that was visible and made invisible.

[0] http://youtu.be/xFntFdEGgws

I think Apple was good at keeping things consistent across apps, but the chosen metaphors were sometimes just as confusing (if worse) than the blessed windows one.

Not that it matters, everything is learned behaviour anyways. Consistency is already a great achievement.

This is the appendix of the Mac UI.

Gather round, kids, and listen to Grandpa tell you a story of the days when Macs had only one floppy disk drive. When you wanted to copy a file from one disk to another, you had to (physically) eject the first disk to insert the second one, but the first disk volume was still logically mounted so you could use it as a source or destination. So the volume's icon remained on the desktop, only dimmed so you knew the disk wasn't physically present.

So you physically eject a disk by selecting it and pressing Command-E (remember, only one mouse button), but how do you get rid of the ghost icon afterwards? Same way you get rid of anything -- you drag it to the trash.

From there it's an obvious shortcut to combining the two operations by dragging a "live" icon to the trash to both eject it and remove its icon in one step. (Well, obvious in 1985, anyway.)

Now that we can right-click the icon to eject the volume and have forgotten the origins of the drag-to-trash gesture, it may seem nonsensical, but those of us who were there at the beginning were grateful for the shortcut. (Also, get off my lawn.)

That was just something that was there forever, basically since 1984. It was part of the Macintosh vernacular. You could also right-click to eject.

Though someone's saying that dragging the ion turns it into the eject symbol, which I hadn't noticed until now but is more reasonable.

Control, which still works incidentally.

2. On a large screen, this action (the trash can transformation) can happen very far away from the place you're looking at, which means that you will miss it. This is a general gripe of mine with Mac OS: It will regularly place popup dialogs on seemingly random screens. I have three active screens, and when I'm looking at the left screen, the right screen is so far outside my FOV that I will literally not notice dialogs popping up there.

If your argument is that the dock is the wrong place for that feedback because it can be hidden, or that the disc/drive icons should always be closer to the dock, then we have a table laid for a good discussion.

Broadly, I object to the inconsistency and high astonishment factor more than any specific choice. For example:

- If a program has dialog boxes open (e.g. a 'find' box), they maintain relative position as you drag the main window across screens. Which, if you move to a smaller screen, puts them in offscreen no-man's-land where they can't actually be used or closed.

- Popups should consistently happen on either the active screen, or the active/furthest-forward window of the spawning program. As is, they unpredictably follow either rule, or borrow from the next bullet:

- Spotlight should appear somewhere sane and predictable. Either the same every time, or over my active window, or over my mouse cursor. Instead, it appears on the window which my Dock has most recently minimized to. My hidden Dock, which I have to use the mouse to locate/move. And then let re-minimize, because OS X doesn't update Spotlight's target when it appears but when it goes away. And which can automatically move itself to different screens without my help, based on where I open programs. Again, invisibly because it's hidden.

- And Spotlight's screen is also the screen where it will open new programs (a good decision). So I can't just look for it, I have to revert to the mouse to move either Dock or program to the screen I've been attempting to use this entire time.

So rambling aside, I think OS X actively causes time-consuming problems for multi-monitor users. I resent that because it's a pain even if I memorize the rules and how to solve the problems.

In particular, I object to tying large swathes of behavior to the Dock, since it's location/contents are both invisible and unpredictable for many users.

Or, y'know, you could just click the notifications icon in the menubar (the one that looks like a list of notifications)?

Sure the flat UI thing could be argued to have inspired some of Apple's later work... but I think the lack of discoverability started at Apple and was inherited by Microsoft, not the other way around.

You are definitely right that it has gotten worse in OS X overtime though...

[1] https://atap.google.com/soli/

The trash is still glued to the dock. The Help menu still has a search box.

I don't think anyone who uses osx would be unaware that the trash can is in the dock.

Both of Striking's examples are wrong though. The notification menu has an icon in the top-right corner of the screen (next to the spotlight one), click it to get the widgets/notifications; and OSX buttons still looks like buttons, they have changed look slightly (from aqua) and that's about it. Links have always been in OSX, usually for contextual linking.

They seem to know some iOS and assume OSX is the exact same, which it isn't.

Eject is a lot safer than format.

It sounds silly, but ejecting disks was about as common as deleting local content. Overlapping "delete" functionality with anything else still threatens to cause unintended deletes, even if this was better than the reverse.

(It's still fuzzy with Volumes in OS X, where you can click an 'eject' button that effectively deletes downloaded content if you haven't copied it out. Check out how many Volumes low-confidence users have running some time.)

You can also see notifications by just clicking on the omnipresent icon in the Finder Bar, or act on the notifications themselves by clicking them as they appear.

Like, I agree that the versatility of the trackpads is a blessing and a curse - beyond a few common ones, most gestures are unintuitive and it's probably why not too many applications take use of them on non-mobile devices. But the issue isn't with Apple having hidden behaviors here, it's that one method is less visible than others which are very accessible. The issue with the Windows 8 charms was that all means of accessing them were obfuscated. You had to move to a certain corner or swipe from a certain way on trackpads that often had poor sensitivity (or conversely, were overly sensitive) and the behavior was erratic and unpredictable.

It's fine to dislike aesthetics, but that doesn't make it unusable. In the case of the text buttons, I can't think of an instance off the top of my head where the text wasn't clearly marked as button with either a drop down arrow or ... or some other item.

some of these are not obvious, the little arrows pointing right are a bit confusing for instance - i only discovered they did anything when i clicked one in error.

b) Apple has not changed the behaviour of buttons on OSX. They still look like they always have.

c) Computing resources are not finite like oil. It's there to be used.

d) Which gestures are available has always been in the Trackpad system preference which has videos to show you how to use them.

I get that some things can't be made intuitive, and have to be learned. But "there's a video somewhere if you know to look" is a crappy justification for the current setup. As is, non-regional gestures compete with regional versions of the same motion and the enabled-by-default gestures aren't terribly well chosen.

I've watched a lot of non-power-users work their touchpad, accidentally fire off either the wrong gesture or an unintended gesture, and then sort of click aimlessly until they get back to something recognizable. That's a sign that OS X is failing users, no matter how elegant things look to Apple.

As a PC-only user since the days of DOS up till Windows 8, and having used Windows 10 after jumping ship to Macs a few hours ago, macOS has demonstrably more discoverability than Windows.

One example: Just click on the Help menu, in any app, and type something like "show" or "find" or any other operation, and it will show you all the menu items which have that word in their name.

That feature is a part of the Cocoa subsystem and comes for free with every app, and very handy when you know an app has a certain feature but you're not sure which menu it's buried in (like standard operations and filters in different image editing apps.)

Also, all the shortcuts and standard menus are the same in every macOS app, and can be discovered/modified from System Preferences -> Keyboard, again for any app.

Take "Preferences", which in Windows is sometimes under Edit, Tools, or the app name menu (which imitates macOS.)

I could go on and on, but "zero discoverability" is an undeserved hyperbole.

Discoverability is when you can see what/how to do something by just looking or clicking around a bit.

maybe i am overstating it a bit - maybe unforgivable sounds really bad, but what i find it hard to believe that most people couldn't trivially improve on the more confusing or poorly implemented UI elements.

Actually, it's a deserved hyperbole.

It's not like Apple haven't realized their mistakes... They wrote a book in the late 80s about UI and it's still one of the best works. But they've abandoned many of their most-important guidelines, and almost always for the worse.

They threw out the discoverability baby with the skeuomorphic bathwater.

For example, I have a 2TB AirPort Time Capsule, but it looks impossible to backup my iPod or MacBook directly to it (which is nonsense, why do I need 2TB then?). So I have to create backups with iTunes, then go to `~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup/` and copy everything manually to the capsule.

Searching for a song in iTunes is always confusing. Why don't they have global search field that searches in both Library and connected device?

Photos app is another nightmare (and photos management overall)! Again, I just want to connect my iPhone or my camera and transfer photos to AirPort Time Capsule. Impossible.

Or in macOS, you can't just make some apps fullscreen: they always have that 5px gap between app window and dock bar (http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/141800/gap-at-the-b...).

Or the fact they don't have proper window management and themes. One have to use third-party apps full of hacks to have, say, dark window theme or some parody of tiling WM.

b) Almost every app bar a few older ones can be made full screen. Unless I am confused there will be no black bar at the bottom. I definitely can't see it.

c) You can do basic side/side tiling if your apps are full screen. Most people aren't clamoring for advanced window management and there are dozens of tools available that aren't hacks by any measure.

I find myself wondering daily, how the hell have Apple dropped the ball so badly, and how on earth have they not been steamrolled by Microsoft.

>I find myself wondering daily, how the hell have Apple dropped the ball so badly, and how on earth have they not been steamrolled by Microsoft.

Because there's legions of gullible suckers who'll line up to buy the latest iDevice and then believe everything Apple tells them, whether it's "you're holding it wrong" or "you don't need to copy music files to your phone, just buy them again on iTunes" or "you don't need a headphone jack, just buy a new pair of Bluetooth headphones from Beats for $$$".

It's getting harder and harder to answer the questions they ask.

I know what I'd tell them: "Easy, transfer your old photos onto your computer to free up some space." Now if they ask how to do that, I'll tell them "I don't know, I don't use Apple devices. Try asking Siri." Unless maybe it's some hot girl I'm trying to bed, then I'll work a little harder, but I'll still try to convince her to dump Apple and switch to Android so I don't have to deal with this stuff in the future.

Do you know how I transferred my photos to the capsule last time?

I had to:

1) Connect iPhone to Macbook (via USB cable, not wifi)

2) Run shitty Photos app

3) Copy all pictures to the capsule...well, NO! Select 50% of pictures (because I don't have enough space on Macbook), press Import all selected pictures (don't forget to check Delete after import!)

4) Wait, wait, wait

5) Then drag all imported pictures to the capsule

6) Wait, wait, wait

7) Then Google where Photos stores all photos

8) Delete them

9) Repeat for the rest pictures

It is even more difficult if you want to transfer YOUR music from iPod to the capsule. I had to make a backup, then google backup location, then copy everything manually (bad thing is that all files have cryptic names).

Apple loves to say that all their devices are integrated with each other. What I want is, for example, to press 'Transfer all pictures/music/whatever to Time Capsule' and just wait until it is done (via WiFi).

It's not an Apple product, but "Plex" can transfer your photos to your own harddrive/library if you buy the pro version. You can for example run the Plex server on your Mac or on a Raspberry Pie, and then let Plex synchronize your photos to your Capsule over wifi or 3G.

Edit: it also allows to delete them directly after import

Betteridge's Law of iTunes Features

Dug around, couldn't find it. Googled it, found a few forum threads where everybody concluded it couldn't be done. Went into an Apple store, gave an employee a few minutes to figure it out, and he gave up.

And yet, it's possible.

Rather than just tell you, I'm going to leave this as a challenge. See how long it takes you to figure this out.

It's a convention followed for literal matches in tons of environments (including Google Search IIRC).

Those devs are master-level trolls.

Perhaps actually doing the text search is the barrier you mean? Were you looking for an item labeled "Essentials" in the Quick Links section? I agree that would be preferable, but it's not like doing a search is the Riddle of the Sphinx.

In this case, there is no good place to put tag search because tags aren't first-class citizens.

Add a route between A and B, then slightly scroll on the map. The context information disappears and once you get the bloody thing up again, how do you go back to results? It is infuriating.

And, yet, the maps themselves are worse: they changed the algorithm for which labels are displayed, making it impossible to cause some street names to appear.

But with the labelling change, it's impossible to coax out the needed information. Combine that with Google's exotic definitions of "sharp" and "small" turns and it's surprisingly inconvenient.

1. In the most recent version, there is some action (I don't know which at the moment) which makes all UI elements disappear, and I don't know how to bring them back except by restarting the app.

2. My most common use-case is to search for some amenity within a certain area. So I pan and zoom to the area that I want to search, type in my query... and it zooms out to the city level to show me absurdly distant results. I can zoom back in afterwards and do "Search in this area", but it's still annoying every time.

2. That one is the most annoying thing for me. It usually happens if you search for something that it can't find in visible area, but it looks random. Google Search taught me that you can write a bit sloppy and it still is able to find it. Than in Google Maps it can lead to showing you some cryptic place in another country.

Another annoying thing for me is a language problem. I am living now in Germany, but I am from Poland. You can't do category search in Polish, because it will show you results in Poland. But at the same time if you look on details for the German place you will see category in Polish. So you may not know what Google expects.

Also when you click on category icon from search list (those red icons) it will search in language of the country you're in, but you have to click on a name in your language.

But multiple language support suck mostly everywhere... Chrome offers site translation (some of the time). I prefer translations to English, because they are better than translations to Polish. I also don't want to translate it always, because it is not always needed (and flicker is annoying) or not good enough.

To translate a site to English I have to do this every time (my UI is in Polish, but I will write all in English, but translation is mine):

1. Tap on underlined "Polish" in sentence "Translate to Polish"

2. Tap "Polish" in "Translation language" menu

3. Scroll to the top to find "English"

4. Tap "English"

5. Tap "Ready"

6. Tap "Translate"

7. Ignore annoying confirmation by scrolling or tapping "Ready"

At least translation from context menu is sensible now. You can select text by long tapping and tap translate and it remembers what language you selected earlier and has the most recent used languages at the top of the language list.

It is doable, but how is it supposed to be done?

(For context: IIRC there used to be a shortcut to navigation for that feature. And yes I think ux designers mindlessly copying each others or Apple are at least partially to blame.(

This was on Android. Is your UX any different?

But usually if I want to search for directions not to or from current location I just search for destination and later just change current location to different thing.

What is missing for me is the ability to select time of arrival/departure for car navigation. It is useful to see how traffic is predicted to look like in advance. But you can get something a bit like this (with just enough advance) by creating event in calendar and using Google Now. It will notify you when you must go with taking traffic in consideration.

(For some reason it seems I only tried the search field and looked in the menu.)

2. Ask for directions

3. Replace your location with y (or x).

4. Reverse start and end if necessary.

Personally I think is flow is better than directly entering start and end for two reasons:

- The common case (go from where I am to somewhere else) is faster.

- I don't have to think about how to enter "my location", which isn't obvious (over the years I've seen - typing "my location", searching with the start box empty, pressing a special button for the purpose, and others).

> - I don't have to think about how to enter "my location"

IIRC at some point this where solved rather nicely by offering you start location pre-filled with your current address.

They rolled out a feature to limit search results to locations within your current zoom. Great! Problem is, they reloaded the entire page (not just the results partial) on every change.

The constant flickering made it very difficult to orient yourself around the map. Was infuriating to use and I'm very glad that they've now fixed it.

Take keyboard shortcuts - they're EXTREMELY undiscoverable, but they're not required for most operations, it's more of a power-user feature.

Not every feature does. But every function does. If there is no visual indication of how to zoom at all, there are users who will never even discover that they can zoom.

I've looked at the OnePlus 3, and it seems like a worthy successor. LinusTechTips on YouTube did a review on it. I'd recommend checking it out.

It's annoying as hell when you're holding a coffee and want to zoom.

In what way? If you mean one handed usage, it's pretty common here when people are standing on public transport, you need to hold on with one hand. If you mean the infrequency I need it, take a look through you're list of installed apps and tell me how many require zooming? Almost all are designed specifically to avoid it.

http://www.carlsednaoui.com/post/46803524724/google-maps-one...

Even if you restrict yourself to one supplier, they have dozens of variants and arcane naming schemes that makes working out what's current something that takes hours of research. Compare this to apple which only has a couple of SKU's at a time in each category and it makes purchasing a lot simpler.

My thinking is that apple == easy is something that just sticks in your mind from the outset.

But I agree. It's even worse with phones - have you seen the number of phones Samsung have? I have a nack for remembering model numbers and specs and even I find it absurdly difficult.

All you need to know about Apple UI is this:

Sometimes you click the green (maximize) button and the window gets smaller.

At least, that's what it used to be. They changed the default behavior to 'fullscreen' because all the people coming from Windows thought that's what the button should do...

Which is just so, so wrong. Imagine how much mouse-mouse-mousing around (and time wasted) that kind of organization produces.

Things I wish Steve Jobs had said:

"If you're using the mouse, you're doing it wrong"

(I have to use a Mac for work. I'd kill for a touch pad with physical buttons, or even better, the Lenovo clitmouse.)

but the UX for some apple things is trash. I've had years of IT working with crap interfaces and itunes is still one of the most confusing and willfully annoying programs i've used.

They don't. Apple is the only tech company that markets their products like fashion accessories.

That's not a bad thing: in 2016 we're living squarely in the age of 'wearable computers'.

The "good UI" stuff is just rationalization, however.

"The # symbol is replaced by the £ symbol (as on PC keyboards); the # is available by pressing ⌥ Option+3

More recent Apple British keyboards move the backquote/~ key to the left of the Z key and replace it with a section sign (§) and a plus-minus sign (±) respectively.

The Enter key spans two rows and is shaped similarly to the Enter key of many ISO PC keyboards."

Whenever I had to use a Windows PC during the Windows XP - Windows 7 days, I'd wonder how Windows users ever got anything done.

Windows would almost constantly interrupt any sort of flow with notifications about updated virus definitions, really really urgent updates that need a reboot right now, the highly relevant information that I got a new DHCP IP etc. etc.

It's gotten better now I believe, and OS X usability has indeed suffered a bit while expanding in features.

E.g. with the podcasts sync feature, you can only decide how many episodes you want stored for every podcast at a global level, not per podcast. So e.g. you can either store the most recent ten episodes of each podcast, or every episode of each podcast. So even though for most podcasts ten is probably enough, you end up needing to store every episode of every podcast on your phone even if there is only one podcast where you want every episode.

Similarly, once you purchase an app the only option is to download all the new updates, even if you don't use the app anymore. There is no option to archive the app, so it's either let iTunes keep installing the updates each week or else delete it the app you paid for from your computer. Again, this just needlessly churns through backup disks so that Apple can sell people more external hard drives.

These are just a couple examples, but it seems like pretty much every features of iTunes is designed to force you to buy more stuff from Apple that you don't actually need.

I actually highly doubt this. Apple has done a lot of work (starting in iOS 4 IIRC) to actually remove the need for iTunes.

From my personal experience, and that of working at the Genius Bar, most people don't use iTunes at all. With regular backups and sync happening over iCloud, with Apple Music/iTunes-over-the-cloud/Spotify, the use case for iTunes - ESPECIALLY for managing an iOS device - is incredibly small.

In fact, more and more iTunes features are added to lessen the space it takes up - the default behaviour of iTunes (as a music listening app) is for it to stream songs and download as much as possible on-demand. My 45GB iTunes library only takes up 15GB on my Mac.

I say this as someone who uses iTunes daily to listen to music, but never actually touches iOS devices through it.

I still think there should be some kind of iOS device management on Mac (for backups and old-fashion-sync), but I'm not the first person to call for it to be overhauled and split out into a seperate app (iSync anyone?)

Archiving is redundant. You can have manual update and update the app as needed, you can have auto update and update all installed apps, or you can just remove the app from your device and install it again later when you need it. If you don't use an app, just remove it. You can redownload it later. Why keep things you admit you don't use?