I thought windows had bad UX until I tried macOS. Maybe my taste is different than others but I found macOS UX to be really confusing. I particularly disliked the iconset. Interestingly this is not true for iOS and iPadOS, those are magnificent.

I'd say macOS actually is a lot more polished than Windows, but I agree with you that it is damn confusing. Try "closing" an app for example and you'll find that half the time it will not have closed properly, or maybe it did, who knows? It depends on the app. If it's vanilla you can bet it will have to be closed with CMD+Q

That’s because “proper” macOS apps close windows not apps when you click the little red dot in the upper left. See some of the answers here https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/4618/why-mac-applic...

And I agree it’s different from all the other operating systems, once I understood why it made sense.

For example, I can copy an image to my clipboard, and open Preview. No window opens, but the top menu bar shows that Preview is open. From there I can choose the “new from clipboard” entry. It’s just a different model of interaction.

It makes sense if the initial startup of an app is expensive, memory is cheap, and creating new windows is fast.

I think the convention is for apps where you can open multiple instances of it (document editors, web browsers, etc), closing window won't quit the app.

Exactly. In the scenario of closing all open documents and then creating a new one, it prevents the awkwardness of having to keep that last document open to keep the menubar available so you can select File > New and then close the last document. It also means you don’t have to invoke your app launcher again after closing all documents since the app is still open.

Conventions being different than what one is used to (in this case, Win9X) isn’t necessarily bad. Additionally, this particular convention has been on macOS for most of its existence, which means there’s longtime Mac users who find the Win9X way just as awkward.

This is actually more confusing then windows.

The visual UI element to close does not close. Instead you must click File->Quit or CMD+q.

These are not intuitive and must be learned.

Agree with it being weird but intuitive != commonly known. Just because windows does it a certain way doesn't mean it is intuitive. It's just widely known and assumed. If GNU developed to be the worldwide market leader then we'd all find the CDE drag and drop applet system 'intuitive'

And yet, with modern browsers - since firefox - cmd + W closes a tab, cmd + Q closes the browser. So even Windows users don't find it that strange.

Did you ever try macOS (OS X) circa 2006–2014? It was really, really good and then they ruined it for the sake of having a (kind of) unified design language with iOS.

I'm typing this on OS X 10.9 Mavericks.

Old Mac OS X was great. I hated the mouse and the iMacs were a little too 'cute' for a work tool, but wow they could run the doors off a Math Blaster CD.

I can never find the back button on iOS.

Is there a back button? Honest question. I thought iPhones didn't have one. When I pick up my wife's iPhone I always feel a little lost.

As someone who mostly uses iOS and occasionally Android, I’ve had difficulty integrating the Android back button into my usage. Because its behavior within apps is defined by devs, I feel like I never have a grip on what to expect when using it (sometimes it’ll close a sheet, sometimes it won’t, etc) and adding inter-app navigation muddles that further. Every time I try I end up enabling the iOS style gesture bar at the bottom.

Convention is to keep it in the top left. All the stock apps will use more or less the same navigation dock up top for back and other functions. Often apps will be rejected for not providing this kind of functionality predictability. This was the hardest thing for me to learn moving from Android to ios as well, but the smoothness of ios trumps all the hardship in my opinion.

Except in Safari, where it is now in the bottom left corner, after the move of url bar to the bottom of the screen.

Though there you can also swipe whole screen left to go back.

> But it sure does look minimal and slick, until you have to actually use the thing.

Modern UI """design""" in a nutshell. So-called designers (1) optimise for "looking good on a screenshot / promo screen", rather than for usability and aesthetics for the user, and (2) do so according to their own subjective tastes, instead of evidence-based approaches. These are to me the two major sources of the atrocious design of much of modern software.

Given the way UWP and now WinUI 3.0 teams have managed the product, with many not even having an understanding of the capabilities and VS tooling from the frameworks they are supposed to replace, I am starting to think the internal code name for the team is something like Team Titanic.

Recently scrolling through a list of countries to choose 'United Kingdom' I eventually found it under 'G'. The nearest I can figure, it was previously for 'Great Britain' and was never re-sorted? (Never mind that nobody in the UK has called it Great Britain since maybe mid 20th century!)

People still say Great Britain all the time (it refers to something slightly different than the UK though [1]). It's what the Olympic team is called, for example.

[1] https://www.cgpgrey.com/blog/the-difference-between-the-unit...

That's true, I forgot about Team GB!

Ahhhhhh I hate this, it happens so many time when you're using a translated software: they proper translate the label, but do not order stuff again. In German, Germany is Deutschland but still comes after France

The ISO 3166 code is GB (the uk. TLD being a grandfathered exception), they might have sorted by that. There would be more cases of “wrong” order in the list, though most of them would be more subtle than that.

That’s probably due to the ISO country code being “GB”.

Scrollbars are actually a real pain to implement.

- you first need to lay out the scrollable content normally, without a scrollbar

- then you need to detect whether it spills over, and whether a scrollbar is needed

- if so, you need to lay out all the content again, in a slightly smaller area

- if the content ever shrinks, you need to detect this too

- and if the content only _just_ fits, then it is possible that without a scrollbar, it doesn't need a scrollbar, but if there is a scrollbar, it needs to be scrollable. Chicken and egg.

This is actually pretty nasty to get right. Now factor in layout models like flex box, which also require part of the content to have a "pre layout" pass done in order to estimate "natural size", and it can get quite gnarly. And if you want to mix vertical and horizontal layouts... oof.

I got an equivalent of HTML/CSS box+flex working in Use.GPU but it took plenty of iteration.

I think the lesson here is that UI is always more complicated than you think. There are countless little tricks and mechanisms that you would only ever notice it if they didn't work. When they do, it is so "obviously" right you literally can't tell.

(As an aside, whoda thunk that a generation raised on participation trophies would be easily triggered???)

(Yes this is an alt)

Yes, scrollbars are not completely trivial, but what you describe used to be a solved problem on desktop UIs, and the reason for making scrollbars invisible were purely aesthetic.