I find OSX to be generally pretty logical and easy to understand, but certainly no more _intuitive_ than something like Windows. Another way of saying this: if I took someone who didn't know how to use a desktop OS, I wouldn't be any more confident sitting them down in front of a Mac.
They should be consistent, discoverable, and customizable.
I give macOS full marks for consistency, and a passing grade for customizable, but it's hardly discoverable! I read these kinds of HN posts because of all the little tips and tricks I find.
Operating systems used to come with a thick manual, and you could buy an even thicker "missing manual" book at the local bookstore. macOS could use one of those.
I think that's what 'intuitive' means, practically, in this context.
Of course, physical things are losing buttons. I guess kids will refer to things as 'tap the tappy spot' or some such.
But then there are core features like "a file icon on a document window can be dragged exactly like a file icon in the finder" that you can use macOS for years and never find. That's before they started hiding the file icons in Big Sur!
macOS is packed with little things like that.
I think it's fine that they hid it, since even before, the things you can do with it (dragging, cmd/ctrl-clicking) were already hidden.
The only old functionality that is lost with Big Sur is that you could glance at the icon to see if there are unsaved changes (if so, the icon would be dimmed). But you can still tell by looking for the dot in the red close button.
One thing that's killer for me in MacOS vs Windows, regarding consistency, is text fields. They always behave the same (except, of course, for weird apps, say ms office). CMD+Backspace will delete a whole word even in password fields or system settings, etc. This is always hit or miss in Windows. I know it doesn't work for passwords. In Windows explorer it works... sometimes. It works in the address bar, but not in the preferences or when renaming a file.
why ?
I find the "app-less desktop" of Windows and all the Linux DE's I've tried (i.e. the big ones) far more weird and infuriating. It's easy to lose context of what app is focused, since a slight dimming of buttons isn't quite as obvious as I'd like. Reading the word of the app in the menu bar, even if it's just through my peripheral vision, makes the focus behavior far more obvious.
And an "app-less desktop" more or less necessitates that you now dedicate an entire meta/super/Windows/whatever key to the window manager, which is just such a waste of keyboard real estate, as well as a driver for key command inconsistency. In macOS, Cmd+N will (nearly) always make a new window for the app that you're in; Cmd+W will close it; Cmd+Q will quit it. In Windows, Cmd+N works for everything, but to make my first file explorer window, I have to hit Windows+E. And to quit an app, it's...Alt+F4, for some reason?
The trickle-down effects of this design are endless -- I've just laid out the basics of the basics here.
I have used Windows setups with as many as 50 screens (command and control center). Having each application exist within its own window with all relevant menus in that window is, by far, a superior approach in these settings.
Even with three large monitors, using a mouse to fly across that screen space to reach a menu is just a pain. Imagine a system consisting of 25 x 4 screens. It would be a nightmare.
Shortcuts? Someone else said MacOS lacks discoverability. It’s true. Tooltips are almost nowhere to be found and lots of applications have no shortcuts. I have watched non-expert users in fear of clicking a button because they have no clue what it does.
The single menu and single mouse button idea worked well on an old Mac with a single 9 in screen. It works fine on laptops. The minute the display grows in size and multiple displays are used the approach breaks down very quickly.
If you own a multi-monitor Mac setup (we have several) and have enabled the menu bar on all screens, you already understand how broken that concept has become. If it was not you would only have one menu bar with your three large screens.
I typed in wrong window more times than I would like to admit because of this stupid singe menu bar design.
And we don't want "OS focus" to follow the mouse! That would pop windows to the front, change the menu bar, and other unfortunate consequences: if I were mousing up toward the menu and accidentally crossed another window, I'd get the wrong menu.
What we want is for keyboard focus to also follow the mouse, and there's not actually any inherent reason why this can't happen. It's just that they're tightly coupled by the implementation, to the point where an extension can't un-couple them.
The lack of (keyboard) focus-follows-mouse is the big fly in my macOS ointment, it annoys me whenever I'm on my widescreen, which is at least half of the time. I do think it would be possible to implement a usable f-f-m which still worked the way macOS does with respect to menus, which windows get priority, and so on.
It would require uncoupling some things under the hood, which would probably affect the API in an incompatible way, so I don't expect to ever see it happen unfortunately.
The only occasional pain point I encounter is when apps like Zoom automatically switch to "full screen mode".
There's also the option in Mission Control for "When switching to an application, switch to a Space with open windows for the application". If that feature is turned off, then you could, for example, have Chrome on _every_ desktop. Then it's just a matter of Cmd+tab to Chrome, and Cmd+n to open a new window on whichever display/desktop has the current focus.
For window management, I've found BetterSnapTool to be essential. It provides the typical window snapping from Windows. Better yet, you can setup keyboard shortcuts to quickly snap a window to the left side, right side, maximize, or move it to the next monitor. The shortcuts I use mimic Vim bindings, so it's easy to remember [1].
With caps locks remapped to Control in the Keyboard preferences, moving and re-sizing "windows" across multiple displays is fast & easy.
But I'm probably missing something with your particular use-case.
[0] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/bettersnaptool/id417375580?mt=... [1] https://imgur.com/a/YUufemN
What's interesting is that Apple explicitly chose to ignore what I will go-ahead and call the de-facto standard established across pretty much every desktop GUI by a range of vendors. I have worked on Solaris, Irix, IBM OS2, Amiga OS (owned an original machine signed by the development team), Linux, Windows and MacOS. The odd duck is anything Apple made.
No reason for it whatsoever. Proof? Billions of non-engineers around the world do not seem to have any issues whatsoever operating a Windows machine, which inherits from all of the standards I mentioned above.
The gist of the thread was to somehow characterize Macs as easier and intuitive to use. That simply isn't and has not been the case for a very long time. Expert users, engineers, coders cannot be the test subjects for this evaluation. You just said that a tool you use is easy to remember because the shortcuts mimic VIM bindings. That is beyond foreign to average or below-average users like my mother, father, uncle, the local doctor, teacher, restaurant employee, etc.
No issues with the average user running MacOS on a single small screen. The abstraction works well there. The problems start once you expand beyond that.
I was recently involved in a display characterization project where we had somewhere around eight 4K+ displays attached to a PC. We also evaluated Apple's Pro Display XDR connected as the second display on an Apple laptop (I forget which one).
Using the PC (running Windows) to address every display, run calibration tools on each one and run custom characterization code was an absolute breeze. Doing the same with the Apple XDR was an ordeal. And, to make things worse, using the touchpad to navigate across the entire canvas was just horrific.
I do like Macs. I just don't think they live up to the hype. Easy and cool to use for unsophisticated users on a single screen up to a point. The problem with not making users learn anything is that they will always remain naive users.
Imagine if everyone was forced to use a GUI text editor with simple controls and you did not have the option to use VIM. That's the difference. One assumes the user is an idiot. The other considers the idea that users can actually do more than point and click with a single button on a single menu bar.
Not trying to be nasty at all. I just think Apple takes things to an undesirable extreme at times. They carry this through to the iPhone, where you now have such overloading on controls that nobody knows what they do. I lost track, I think we got up to triple-clicking the home button? And no camera shutter button (no, the volume button isn't a good solution, as the many pictures of my left foot can attest).
Anyhow, good technology. I just don't agree with the choices they seem to make again and again.
The Mac had a functioning UI in the 1980s before the “defacto standards” appeared (I believe would be in the 1990s) would that explain some of the discrepancies?
No problem with that at all. Being opinionated is fine. No issues there.
One way to look at it is that Apple, as a computer company, was a failure. They were on the edge of becoming insolvent. In fact, most Apple users don't know that Microsoft/Bill Gates rescued Apple from meeting an unsightly end by investing $150 million (maybe more, I don't remember) into the company. This would be equivalent to a billion dollar+ investment today.
What saved Apple was the iPhone. Plain and simple. The computer portion of their business was crashing and burning. Note that I am not ascribing this impending doom to the choices made for the GUI at all. Just reviewing some history.
Sometimes being very different is cool, and sometimes it isn't.
Let's look at it from a very different frame of reference. All browsers today work and feel about the same to a casual user --the general public. If someone insisted on delivering one that behaved and looked very different from the standards developed over time, they would not find a great deal of adoption. Microsoft did the right thing in dropping their failed browser and adopting Chromium. That is an example of a good decision made based on how standards evolved outside of their own efforts. Late, sure, but they were opinionated about browsers and eventually understood they were wrong.
That's what Macs felt like to the rest of the world. Weird. Perhaps unnecessarily weird. As the world was getting used to having a capable computer on every desk, Apple, in my opinion, continued to shoot itself in the foot by not listening to a user base 10x to 100x the size of their at all.
You can do that, of course, but when your company ends-up at the edge of failure and you have to be rescued by your competitor...maybe it's time to rethink your approach.
Apple insisted on silly things, like having a single mouse button and, yes, a single menu bar. As I said before, the single menu bar makes sense for some single small screen use-cases, but it quickly falls apart once you go big and multiple screens. There's also the effect of having multiple windows belonging to multiple applications strewn about your screen or screens with no clear association to a single application. I remember the early days of this. It was a mess. The difference between running something like Photoshop on Windows vs. a Mac, was night and day. One was clean and organized. The other was a mess of windows everywhere. What I am using for this use-case evaluation was the reaction of my daughter who had been learning tools such as GIMP and Photoshop on a PC and then saw how Photoshop ran on a Mac. She wanted nothing to do with it.
Anyhow, I am not here to downgrade Apple computers. They are fine. Very usable. Lots of people love them and, in my opinion, pay ridiculous amounts of money for them. All I am saying is that Apple could have made an effort to still be opinionated while giving users the choices they were already making elsewhere. That's an important point. The PC world has been an amazing experiment from day one. For the most part choices were made by users. There have been massive failures in that universe. Users voted with their purchases every step of the way. And that's how we got where we are. Were it not for Microsoft/Bill Gates and, later, the iPhone, it is quite possible the Mac would have died long ago. This was a technology imposed on users from above. I think I can say it is very rare to see that kind of thing survive in the long term. I still remember when Apple decided to move away from the PowerPC platform and killed off every customer's investment in software. In the PC world, like it or not, the issue of compatibility across transitions was incredibly important, hence the slow-but-steady evolution rather than having radical step changes in technology.
To some degree I equate some of what Tesla is doing to this effect. Today, if you analyze their financials, Tesla would be out of business if they had to rely on car sales. A harsher way to put it is that their electric car business is a failure. Had it not been for carbon credits they would have imploded, or, at the very least, would have had to raise tons of capital to burn for a few more years. The truth is simple: As much as I like electrics, nobody wants them. Not at scale. And the reasons are somewhat similar to the Apple issues (if we contort thing around). If the GUI, other platform choices and cost are relabeled as "infrastructure", the electric car isn't desirable to the vast majority of the population due to infrastructure issues. There are approximately 1.4 billion conventional cars in the world vs. about 10 million electrics. If you look at the energy required to replace the fleet of IC cars (to manufacture the cars, batteries, charging stations, etc.) and the massive step-change in electric power generation, it is very easy to conclude the idea is far closer to ridiculous on any time horizon shorter than 50 to 100 years.
Anyhow, it's a fun bit of computing history.
The core difference is that macOS is (originally) document-oriented. You could care less if an app is opened or not, window == document, whereas on Windows, window == program.
Each progressively grew into the direction of the other (e.g Finder progressively losing spatial features and Explorer gaining them, MDI interfaces on macOS vs the win7 taskbar being actually more of a Dock...)
If I have some document editor open, and I close all the documents, what should happen?
Should it quit? Well if I wanted to quit, I would have done so.
Should it display some blank pane? Why? To let me know it's still running? The menu bar does that!
I say it should close that last window, and then I can open up another one and keep working.
In other words, I want to have a "menubar-only" app every time I'm done with all the windows I had open, and intend to open more. This happens frequently enough that I'm glad macOS works the way it does.
Should whether an application is running or not be a concern to you? Why would you ever want to actually quit an application?
Granted, I understand that in reality the app might be misbehaving, hogging resources and whatnot and that the underlying OS isn't perfect and we should absolutely have control over how our hardware is utilized, but from a UX PoV I think the notion of a running process isn't of interest to me unless I am developing software.
If I close a window, I just want to get it out of my way. I only leave things running as a workaround to the possible slow cold start the program may present.
same reason why I want the parts of my house that I rarely go to to be tidy ?
If you close all the tabs in a browser window, should it close the window or display a new tab page? Or just do nothing but show an empty tab bar and a blank window pane? That seems like the worst possible solution, because it always requires more clicks to do whatever you were intending to do. At least closing the window or opening a new tab will save you some clicks 50% of the time.
If I close all the tabs in a browser window, the window should disappear, yes. If I close all the windows, the browser should stay open, so I can start another window if I want to.
That's the whole point of this user affordance, there's a difference between closing the last window and closing the browser! If I want to close a whole window at once, that's Shift-Cmd-W, Cmd-W closes just one tab, and this works for any tabbed window on any native Mac app.
No amount of Cmd-W will quit the application, and Cmd-Q will always quit the application, maybe prompting and maybe not. They're unrelated commands, especially since most applications will save your windows and that's most often what I want to have happen.
This is, particularly for a novice or intermediate user IMO quite intimidating. It means there is some learnt behavior + keyboard command required to "see anything" and work with the program. If I'm using my trackpad/mouse trying to work out after I start a program why I can't see anything like I've seen new Mac users do for some time it isn't great. Because there is no window its easy to click anywhere else in my search for my "missing program" and immediately lose the "menu bar" that allows you to (Cmd-N) or discover the ability to do that. It's almost like the app never booted up.
Sure you can learn behavior and work around it as I and you have had to do, but if the menu bar behavior changes per window focus anyway I don't see the difference than Windows with menu bar on the window other than "its the Mac way".
(I don't think it's a good thing to keep applications running when the last window is closed, but that's a different argument)
This would be an example of the 10% of the UI which isn't identical.
One of the fundamental differences between macOS and Windows is the menu bar. There's only one at a time, and it belongs to the program which has the focus. A corollary of this is that you don't need a window to have a program.
It's not just Finder, most macOS programs are perfectly happy having no window open.
I've been on OS X since 2003, and it took me a second to figure out what you were talking about here, because if I don't see the window I expect to see, my eyes immediately flick to the upper-left corner. If I see what I expect to see, I've probably already typed Cmd-N or Cmd-O, depending.
There's a lot to complain about with Finder; my personal peeve is that I want two-finger-swipe-right to go back one directory, like the back button in browsers. But this particular behavior is just macOS working the way that it does. If you close all open windows in Preview and quit, then start it again, it will do the same thing.