Riccardo Mori writes about Apple's Mac OS X and macOS design, user interface changes, browsers, and software habits.
HN links it for comparisons of Snow Leopard with modern macOS and the Safari 15 critique; one commenter agrees with his dislike of later macOS versions.
> I'm listening to Music right now and just spent a few minutes trying to use the keyboard. I don't really feel unable to do so.
I'm not subscribed, but here's my experience.
When Music just starts, Tab is locked to a single pane.
Cmd+F to find something, how do I exit the search? Visually Esc does nothing.
While in Search Tab is locked to Search field. After Esc tabbing first does nothing, then cycles through top buttons, then goes somewhere?
There's no way to focus sidebar with keyboard. None of sublists there have a dedicated shortcut.
If you select something in the sidebar, Tab, And then Shift-Tab, the focus doesn't go back.
Once you've selected something (radio, or album, or artist, or...), how do you go back?
Focus is broken. Select an album, and tell me how exactly to get to the song list and navigate through it (hint: when you cannot see where it's gone, you can press Arro Down, and start going through the list).
That's 30 seconds of using this amazing first-party app. And that's before we start listsing all the ways it's badly designed, badly implemented, and breaks multiple Apple HIGs.
> The dialog that they're... expanding in Ventura? Where they acknowledged it should be bigger for certain cases?
Key word: "certain cases". So, they acknowledged nothing, but grudgingly reverted this inane behaviour for some random unknown length. As if desktop displays are have so little horizontal space.
> You're welcome to dislike change, I just think you're really…
No. That's not comparable at all.
What he's saying is that he's tried later versions of the same OS and he doesn't like them.
I've tried the later versions, too. I don't like them either. As such, I think his assessment is sound.
Additionally, this piece does not stand alone. He has written about this extensively before, in January 2021:
https://morrick.me/archives/9150
And then revisiting it a month later after it received a lot of comment and attention:
https://morrick.me/archives/9220
He went into great depth in those posts. He knows this subject area exceptionally well. The first one of them, particularly, went viral and TBH I'd expect you to have known that, and to have read those earlier posts, before you start passing judgement. Otherwise you look ill-informed and ignorant, and to be judging on that basis of a lack of understanding.
In addition I'd add that I started using Mac OS X with 10.0, and on unsupported old Macs because new ones were too expensive for me to afford back then, so I hung out in various fora for people running unsupported kit.
(P.S. Don't "lad" me. I've been doing this stuff for more than a third of a century, and that's professionally, after nearly a decade as a hobbyist.)
I'm still in those fora and their modern continuations.
When Riccardo said that he felt that the experience had degraded since "Snow Leopard", he is merely expressing a widely-held view. Many old OS X hands feel that from 10.0 to 10.6 it got better and better, and…
> but I could see how they might be alien and uncomfortable to someone that has only ever experienced mobile interfaces.
From a review at an attempt to butcher Safari interface several years back, by Riccardo Morri https://morrick.me/archives/9368
--- start quote ---
The utter user-interface butchery happening to Safari on the Mac is once again the work of people who put iOS first. People who by now think in iOS terms. People who view the venerable Mac OS user interface as an older person whose traits must be experimented upon, plastic surgery after plastic surgery, until this person looks younger. Unfortunately the effect is more like this person ends up looking… weird.
These people look at the Mac’s UI and (that’s the impression, at least) don’t really understand it. Its foundations come from a past that almost seems inscrutable to them. Usability cues and features are all wrinkles to them. iOS and iPadOS don’t have these strange wrinkles, they muse. We must hide them. We’ll make this spectacular facelift and we’ll hide them, one by one. Mac OS will look as young (and foolish, cough) as iOS!
--- end quote ---
(power users don't use mobile devices for their work, and yet...)
I wouldn't know. Even Snow Leopard had more thorough options in a lot of areas, see http://morrick.me/archives/9220 .
In today's era people don't dare to change from the default configuration if they don't have to. We all know that if some settings feel like Apple doesn't want it, it will be hell (incompatibility with other settings, subtle hints that things won't work because of that, the option will get back to default magically in some occasions, and so on). Heck lots of people don't even change their Desktop picture anymore.
I just tried to firewall out Apple's app notarization, using Apple's provided IP addresses, macOS's included firewall (pf), configured from macOS's System Settings plus a configuration file in /etc.
Not only my configuration file will be burned down at each update (and rapid security response will probably make it even more deceptive), not only I cannot receive even the courtesy of having my conf file in some "Relocated Items" directory as macOS used to do, but also I notice clearly that app notarization still works in apparently random moments
Separate keys have challenges: in addition to the extra cost, you need to find physical space and train people to look for and use them. The original designers wanted to make it efficient for people who were already typing and as you might have noticed those keys are all close together and convenient for one-handed use:
> Why the Z X C V keys? — They were close on the keyboard. We did X because it was a cross out (CUT). We did V because it pointed down like this [he makes a ‘V’ shape with his hands], and you were inserting; it was like an upside-down caret (PASTE). And Z was the closest one, because we figured you’d UNDO a lot. And C for COPY — that was easy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OW-atKrg0T4 via http://morrick.me/archives/8432
"Windows 10 Mobile was a significant upgrade from WP8 in nearly every way" EXCEPT the UI — unfortunately the interface was the main reason Windows Phone fans took up the platform.
Riccardo Mori provides my go-to reference for illustrating the difference between 8 and 10: http://morrick.me/archives/8094
WP8 took on Apple-Android with a beautiful interface; its glance-ability is still unsurpassed. webOS took on Apple-Android with a powerful multitasking interface; its task fluidity is still unsurpassed. I willing used both until the phone hardware was abandoned and still prefer them to Apple-Android today.
KaiOS is a feature-phone OS and does NOT take on the Apple-Android mobile duopoly.