We were supposed to get a "total rewrite" of Finder years ago. What happened? And Spotlight is a clinic on shitty UI: WTF is the use of a search facility that doesn't show you WHERE it found things? How degenerated is design acumen (or even just basic sense) there that allows a design like this to not only make it out the door, but persist for a decade or more? Then again, Apple offered up a windowing GUI in which you couldn't resize windows from their edges... or even 3/4 of their corners... for 30 years.
But Windows is far, far worse today. At least Apple is stepping back from the idiotic "flat" design fad and reintroducing a bit of proper GUI. Microsoft is just lost and flailing in the weeds.
Just had to teach a relative how to save images attached to an email into Photos with macOS Mail: move around the mouse cursor somewhere above the email body and below the headers towards the middle, and a magic menu will appear with a paper clip on the right that reveals "Export to Photos".
Why?
Looking at the screenshots of Big Sur (my mac is too old to install it), I have mixed feelings. On the one hand, they're doing more skeuomorphism in some places, especially icons. But in some other places, buttons are losing borders for this godforsaken "clean" look. But I do hope that the departure of Johny Ive is going to help with them going back to a good design.
And it's very unfortunate that Apple doesn't have a visionary CEO any more. Tim Cook feels more concerned with investors than anything else.
I bought a 2009 iMac with Snow Leopard on it and used it for the first time today, and found the process of finding, recognizing and clicking on buttons to be faster than in both Big Sur and even Catalina, despite me using Catalina daily. I don't have any data to substantiate this, but I think there's a good chance that interfaces with contrast, depth and well defined separation between elements are generally better suited to our eyes and brains.
Obviously. IRL everything has depth and many things have well-defined boundaries. Shadows are also a natural phenomenon that our brains have learned to interpret as a signal for depth.
In my own UIs, I still always use shadows and/or borders.
Holding the Command key shows you the location
I've been turning off most notifications, because since the controls were hidden, they're basically useless noise that just hides useful controls.
I know many designer-types want to get rid of the URL bar, but either butch up and fucking do it, or leave it as a useful tool. Quit shrinking it, overloading use, making it jump around another otherwise trying to make people not want to use it.
Iphone screens waste a ton of real estate, and (at least to my eye), it isn't even pretty, it frequently just looks unfinished, like the designer gave up on the job.
And so on.