The problem with Microsoft is that they “simply have no taste.”

Windows has always had their Windowish / Microsoftish smell to its design. Much like Linux, You could spot a linux desktop from 100 miles away. And everyone thought these were simple you could just copy it. Turns out there are trillions of small details that make it all coherent and beautiful.

Windows and all the Linux desktop environments that copied Windows have so much more functionality than the brain-dead macOS that can't even get basic features like window management right.

Imagine thinking an OS that won't let you easily maximize or snap application windows is any good?

It might seem like an issue if you are coming from a tiling window management environment, but over time it becomes quite familiar and intuitive to use because of all the parallels with the physical world and how we interact with physical objects. I have tried the tiling window manager route, and it's more clumsy than anything imo.

You could design a VR environment that lets you walk around your virtual house, open your virtual front door, walk down your virtual driveway to your virtual mailbox, pull out virtual envelopes and open your virtual mail, but you'd just be replicating all the old real world cruft that doesn't matter to achieve your goal. What you really want is just to read some text in an email.

I had an older professor in college who still read and replied to all of his email via terminal, and he was multiples faster than those of use that used Gmail, but I remember thinking I'd never devote the time to learn to do things this way when the way I'm used to works just fine.

Apple has done a tremendous amount to make technology more approachable, and in doing so has brought millions into the digital age, but I do think the pendulum has swung a bit too far - a monitor isn't a desk, it's a monitor. Too much value is placed on "intuitiveness" these days, and while those real-world parallels might feel nice to interact with, there's a time to disavow ourselves of them to take full-advantage of what the technology can be.

The window management on macos is light years ahead of anything on Windows. Ever try to deal with full screen windows on either platform? The macos approach is a breeze where fullscreen windows get their own virtual desktop and window chorme, titlebar, dock, etc are managed by the OS consistently. Switching between fullscreen windows and regular windows is sane.

Meanwhile, the Windows approach to fullscreen windows is to just draw a borderless window on top of everything. A stupid approach that some linux desktops decided to copy for some reason.

> Imagine thinking an OS that won't let you easily maximize or snap application windows is any good?

Macos lets you maximize windows easily. Double Click on the titlebar works in most applications. Clicking on the maximize button makes any window a seamless fullscreen window in ways I wish a linux desktop could.

Yeah, snapping might not be baked into the OS. But there are 3rd party apps available for this so it is not that big of an issue.

The reason the macOS pushes full screen by default is because their idiotic UI design takes up way too much vertical space with the useless Dock that isn't even half as useful as the Taskbar, and the awful, ever-present global top menu bar.

Honestly, I don't full screen anything on Windows or Linux unless it's a movie that I'm watching, because I don't need to.

Three-finger swipe up. Click on the desktop most to the right.

Another advantage of the menu bar is, that you can always see which shortcut belongs to which action, because most items have a shortcut displayed next to them. On Linux and windows it is trial and error, or looking them up online.

Also it makes the windows look a lot less cluttered.

Shortcuts for menu items are normally shown in menus on Windows and Linux, right-aligned next to the label. For Windows, it's part of the platform UI design guidelines, and if you're using standard APIs to define your UI, any item with a shortcut assigned will render appropriately.

So it's true. Mac users really are delusional.

Using macOS and its ecosystem was the most dictatorial and opinionated experience I've ever had.

Or after making it a three-key shortcut to take a fucking screenshot.

What's so difficult about clicking the green button (maximizing) or holding it (snapping)?

Still, that's a common reaction from people who use Windows. I've used both Mac and Windows on a near-daily basis for the past ~30 years. Both have spent roughly equal amounts of time as my dominant platform. My observation is that maximising is such a default behaviour on Windows that most apps seem to be developed with that mode of operation in mind. Whereas Mac apps tend to be developed without that assumption. This in turn influences how people use apps on these respective platforms.

I have a smaller vertical monitor next to my main monitor which I full-screen my code editor. It looked weird at first but nothing beats having oodles of vertical space, enough to convey entire blocks of code at a time. And even though it's a verticalised widescreen monitor and a comfortably large font, I still have enough width for almost 150 columns of monospaced text—plenty for my personal coding style.

Full-screening code editors on a large horizontal widescreen monitor tends to have no tangible benefit other than to conceal clutter behind a bunch of useless whitespace.

Annoyingly, even at 1440p, the code window gets crowded, if I'm using both the file browser and builtin database client. Luckily you can double-click the tab for the file you're on and everything tucks away nicely.

Though I did grow up obsessing over Windows, so you're right about that.

And for the record, having to hold option to maximize is bullshit. I rarely use fullscreen mode.

Dude, you're missing out. I love using a four-finger swipe on the magic trackpad to quickly jump my side monitor between various spaces: my full screen code editor, a space with two web browser windows (typically showing monitoring tools), and a black screen.

> even at 1440p, the code window gets crowded

I loathe customisation, preferring everything to be as generic and standard as possible, but one thing I have done for my own sanity is assign F16–F19 to hiding and showing sidebars in all the various apps which have them. Typically F16 for left bars, F18 for bottom bars, F19 for right bars.

I know the shortcuts on mac and I don't even use them. alt+tab on Windows and Command-Up on mac are the habits I've been able to remember

Think of it like Cmd-Tab for your side monitor.

I run VSCode maximized on a 27" monitor, and the editor field is just about wide enough for 150 columns, with all this other stuff.

(Sadly my code editor of choice doesn't offer that feature.)

1. Open two apps, at least one of which supporting fullscreen.

2. Open three windows in the app that supports fullscreen.

3. Fullscreen one window.

4. Cmd-tab to the other app.

5. Cmd-tab back to the previous app.

If your window from step 3 was maximized (filling the screen in the same desktop space), you would return to that window, but instead you are now looking at some completely random other window that you were not interacting with at all.

For people who cmd-tab (and cmd-`) frequently to switch between apps, this is super jarring and not at all what we intended to do.

And I'm reminded by other posters that they changed it to full screening (which is also not maximizing), complete with a disorienting animation, ugh. Pretty happy being Mac free again.

It's supposed to be "smart", in a sense that it gives you the largest window size that it considers usable. But that's too subjective an assessment to enable it by default, and even more so to not make it configurable at all.

You can say that about Apple today too. After all, in iOS7 they copied the Flat UI from Microsoft, including thin fonts, and buttons that don't look like buttons and so on. Although more recently they have removed thin fonts in their designs.

I know it feels a little harsh, but Jony without Steve is a Designer without Product Manager. Steve Jobs is great being an Editor and Product Executive.

I cant help but think Jony knew he was getting burn out without Steve. And he wanted to get those last design to be perfect before he left.

It used to be that we could change the colors and themes of our UIs, in this case all of the way down to the OS level. Nowadays it's a major feature for a bit of software to introduce "dark" mode.

This "look-and-feel-as-branding" philosophy has now entered parts of the Linux community, as evidenced in this public letter to the GNOME community titled "Please don't theme our apps" asking Linux distributions to not apply custom themes to GNOME applications (https://stopthemingmy.app).

Personally I'm a major proponent of native GUI applications conforming to their platform's UI standards, and I'm also a proponent of users being able to theme their environments. In my opinion the purpose of personal computing is to empower the user. Users should be able to control their work environments and their workflows as they see fit. Unfortunately I feel that this philosophy of user empowerment has been slowly challenged, where the user experience is being controlled.

Often people don't want to maintain an old code path. Sometimes people get into that line of thinking without clear understanding of just how many people like what the old code path is doing for them and why. Sometimes they also over-estimate the maintenance cost of the old thing.

In the case of win8, there was a strong drive for "we're doing a tablet now", very little intuition about how their thing was going to be received in the market, and the company culture and talent pool was already markedly different from the one that produced their 1990s greatest hits, so it's not like they were automatically going to reproduce prior success.

Also notable that in vista and win7, turning on the classic look disables dwm.exe, the compositing engine, and some GPU-based optimizations.

> "nah.. that looks terrible and we aren't going to be cohesive, so lets do our own thing over here."

I wish this were the case. Instead all Microsoft products have switched to the ugly Flat UI, including Word, PowerPoint, Excel, etc.

It's just that some idiot manager came up with the "unified experience" idea and shoved that shit onto desktop Windows without any time for polish.

Ironically I think pretty much anyone's first experience with metro was Windows 8 on PC, which was such a disaster that people wouldn't even give Windows phone a try because it had the same UI that they learned to hate. Not to say this is the reason Windows Phone failed, but probably one of the many factors.

has there been research done on whether these difficulties occur in all age groups? Because I can easily see this being an artifact of tradition.

People who don't use a lot of analog devices may be confused by a skeuomorphic interface, and may appreciate the simplicity of a flat design.

Here's what tobiasandtobias had to say about that in their blog:

Even 'digital natives' live in the physical world. We start learning how it works before we ever touch a computer, and even the most dedicated nerd spends more time interacting with physical objects than with digital interfaces. It doesn't take additional learning to know that an object casting a shadow on another is in front of that other, for example. Failing to leverage that existing knowledge is tantamount to shutting down whole swathes of users' brains.

(The blog is no longer online unfortunately.)