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.
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...
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.
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