For examples of how Apple's new UI is less usable than their old UI see: http://uxcritique.tumblr.com
I often tap things that are just rectangles and fail to realize that other rectangles are buttons.
I can't wait for "everything is flat, two-tone, and rectangular" to be replaced by whatever the next trend is. Hopefully something more useful.
Ironic note: the flat trend was really made mainstream by Microsoft when it released Windows Phone 7.
I think we went way overboard with it and the pendulum swung to far to the side of flat design. Hopefully we start moving away from super trendy flat design, much like we moved away from those crazy web 2.0 design styles.
It's easier to be the former than the latter both in terms of skill and the politics of the client relationship, and that's why there are so many "designers" and so few designers.
Most designers don't get it right because they don't have these skills, they are only artists. And because of that they don't understand why a particular design is better than another or even what their own design expresses.
To do a real design, it asks you to do a ton of research and going back and forth between art and UX. Doing brain storming to implement old and new logic elements in a fashion way.
It's like the iOS 6 it was a big step forward because it was a design: simple, expressive, and functional. The guys who created it understood all of that. Then again, Apple followed the fashion trend more than the logic and did the iOS 7 design criticized even before it was out. The problem, among its specific fashion, was that the design was so flat it was destroying UI information. Plus visual problems: sometimes the color seems to mean something but you find one red button that isn't one, sometimes the shape, sometimes the animation...
Here is an example of what a designer should do to design a UI. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudio/archive/2013/06/27/desi...
Other uses are gratuitous and often the blurring and blending of colors creates weird sensations where what is underneath a window seems more important. I can see something is there, but can't make out the details, make me anxious that I'm missing something happening in the window.
My impression (I'm not expert) is that the trend is rooted in the opposite - the crappy displays of cheap phones. The old fancy graphics of say Windows 7 could not render quickly or at all on cheap phones so with the advent of responsive design companies used flat design so the same graphics could be used on all devices including cheap phones.
I get the technical issue but I still find it a bit ugly.
Probably not wise to abandon those because of the new shiny thing.
Apple has started to move away from it tags and "All my Files."
I struggle to think of a better way to solve organizing and collecting items than into nested groups.
One idea would be, that in addition it should be possible to execute computations on the current view of the filesystem and the possible computational primitives are selected by the "type" of the files (essentially find a way to lift a typed version of the unix shell with pipes to the GUI level).
Another idea would be to emphasise versioning and time based information more. For example with the current storage capability it makes little sense for the default save operation when working on a document to be "destructively replace the old one". Obviously as a programming one is aware of that and uses version control systems, but so far I had multiple occasions when working on a collaborative project not involving code, where the versioning was done by appending suffixes to folder names.
What does work quite well for me is the default approach of Gmail where your emails are in basically one folder with a good and fast search facility (and tagging)
Who are 'we'? What do you do? Why should I care?
Your post contains no useful information, and thus contributes nothing to the discussion. Ergo, downvotes. The only way to work out what you're talking about is to go through your comments (which I did) and synthesise based on founder bios and a job posting. Even then there is little to no concrete information about empiric.al that I could find in the few minutes I spared for this.
Here's a post that might have worked better, and maybe even could have got you some marketing/interest. I didn't downvote you the first time, but I would be far less likely to downvote this:
--- I agree completely. File management is still an unsolved problem and existing solutions are not optimal by any stretch of the imagination. It's really only getting worse as more and more user data moves to various independent and unconnected online services. Even if you manage your local files in a satisfactory manner you can't use the same system everywhere.
I'm actually actually working on a product that should help alleviate that problem. It does $ACTUAL_DETAILS and works by $IMPLEMENTATION. Our site is barebones for now (empiric.al if you want to read more about founders or sign up for information), but we're really excited about what we've built so far and aim to launch next month. Hit me up on $EMAIL if you'd like to discuss it!
I'm happy you're excited about your launch, but, unless you're linking a technical, or at least informative, blog post or similar that describes ways you're solving the problem the person you replied talked about, Hacker News isn't the right place to brag.
Great.
Dropbox has:
- Access to everyone's data.
- Control over everyone's data.
- Control over the clients used to access that data.
What is actually private? Nothing.
What do users "own"? None of their tools.
SaaS makes the world a worse place, one rent-seeking product at a time.
The large variety in print design demonstrates that this is not an unreasonable restriction. In my eyes the translucency of windows in Yosemite is a much nicer choice than "brushed aluminium" or "black with fake highlights", it does not pretend to be something it is not. Eventually I would prefer if the "Desktop" metaphor, including "Folders", was given up and replaced with something different. The faster the design language becomes more abstract to facilitate that change, the better. We are stuck with an overall UI design initially conceived in the 70s, alternative versions of personal computing like the Lisp Machine died unfortunately.