OS X Yosemite: Do you Like the Look?

Daniel Beardsmore · 18 Oct 2014, 16:28

mr_a500 wrote: ↑That brings me to the point - why the fuck can't they let the user decide which fonts they use?? Why do they have to remove this customization?

Back when you could change the font, what happened when the character widths were too divergent from the default font?

My understanding is that Apple failed to provide a dynamic layout engine for Mac OS X, meaning that every localisation needs a custom layout to deal with different word and sentence lengths. Whether this is still true, or was ever true, I have no idea, but I've never seen any indication of (Mac) OS X being able to lay out a window dynamically.

Changing the DPI in Windows still breaks a huge amount of programs (in the latest Skype installer for example, the "please do install crap on my PC" checkboxes can only be accessed by shift-tabbing into invisible controls that are lost due to static layout problems) while typical X11 desktops (GTK+ for example) have been dynamic layout for very long time. Even Psion EPOC32 palmtops had dynamically laid-out dialogs — you only have to state the controls you need, and the window is built for you. (EIKON dialogs were single-column, but OPL32 didn't have the means to add tabs to the window to get more controls in than would fit on the screen; it would have been as easy as dTab "New tab name".)

Example:

PROC confirm%:(pTitle$, pPrompt$)
	dInit pTitle$
	dText "", pPrompt$, 0
	dButtons "No", -(%n or $100 or $200), "Yes", (%y or $100 or $200)
	return (dialog = %y)
ENDP

No need to create a window handle, window, lay out any controls, or anything. dInit begins a dialog box, and dialog executes it.

mr_a500 · 18 Oct 2014, 16:34

webwit wrote: ↑OS has kept trying to impress us with visual effects until the hardware and resolution could do anything. So we've seen gradients, shadows, transparency, wild transformation effects, things that look like metal or transparent glass, and you needed better and better hardware to get the newest updates to full effect. That is no longer relevant, so we're returning to the basis of design. Typography, colors, white space, etc. This is good. The rest is noise.

Yes, that is very sound reasoning. I like crisp fonts, good layout and minimal intrusion on content. But that doesn't mean that you have to remove all detail.

webwit wrote: ↑If you look at a toolbar and admire the beauty of its translucency effect, by that the toolbar just failed its primary function.

But if you look at a toolbar and think, "Well gosh, that's fucking ugly", it has equally failed.

webwit · 18 Oct 2014, 16:43

Next gen MS will settle on something less drastically flat and more usable, and it will look like this!

mr_a500 · 18 Oct 2014, 16:51

Daniel Beardsmore wrote: ↑My understanding is that Apple failed to provide a dynamic layout engine for Mac OS X, meaning that every localisation needs a custom layout to deal with different word and sentence lengths. Whether this is still true, or was ever true, I have no idea, but I've never seen any indication of (Mac) OS X being able to lay out a window dynamically.

Yes, that could be part of the reason. When changing the system font, I've seen some words cut off - usually in dialogues with radio buttons or check boxes. It didn't seem too big a problem to fix. I think Apple blocking customization is more of an Apple philosophy. They want don't want the user to have any control over the look of the OS - just the wallpaper.

webwit wrote: ↑Next gen MS will settle on something less drastically flat and more usable, and it will look like this!

Well gosh, that's fucking ugly.

Daniel Beardsmore · 18 Oct 2014, 17:04

mr_a500 wrote: ↑I think Apple blocking customization is more of an Apple philosophy. They want don't want the user to have any control over the look of the OS - just the wallpaper.

Well, it would mean they'd have to finally make the effort to write the quality of windowing toolkit that befits the level of standards they pretend to uphold.

Findecanor · 18 Oct 2014, 20:44

mr_a500 wrote: ↑Well gosh, that's fucking ugly.

I found the Windows 95 look to be quite elegant when it came. It was sure better-looking than Win 3.11 and had a more modern look than the contemporary System 7.5 on Macintosh. Remember also that it was designed to be drawn completely by a slow CPU in 256 colours and for small video resolutions.

BTW. I made and released a "MS Sans Serif"-lookalike interface font for X11 back in '99, as part of a theme package for GTK (Gnome). The default for GTK programs back then was Helvetica, if I am not mistaken ...

Muirium · 18 Oct 2014, 21:14

Windows 95 borrowed its look pretty wholesale from NeXT. As such, it looked a hell of a lot better than XP!

Daniel Beardsmore · 18 Oct 2014, 21:21

I used Church Windows briefly, and one of the themes it came with made my System 7.1 Mac resemble Windows 95.

Personally I like the Windows 95 appearance, but with the enhancements made by XP (in particular the native 32-bit icons). The classic Windows interface also has the advantage that you can completely customise the colours. You can even remove the 3D effects if you tweak the precalculated accent colours that are cached in the Registry:

That's Windows 2000 though, so there's no ClearType and the icons are fugly.

Also, before Windows 8 you could set the scrollbar track to your choice of colour, though the OS had long stopped obeying that setting; XUL on the other hand still obeyed it in its simulated scrollbars. In Firefox I've set up a Stylish theme to give me blue scrollbar thumbs because, on dark pages, I can't actually see the thumb.

Apple's fancy interface designs on the other hand are too clever to be properly restyled, just as with Windows Vista and 7.

bazh · 18 Oct 2014, 21:30

their (Microsoft) latest attempt in flat design, they made the windows completely flat and no border or shadow effects, like it could be more stupid

Daniel Beardsmore · 18 Oct 2014, 22:13

Windows 8 windows have borders and shadows, they're just subtle.

bazh · 18 Oct 2014, 23:12

try 10 beta then

)

jacobolus · 18 Oct 2014, 23:23

Muirium wrote: ↑Windows 95 borrowed its look pretty wholesale from NeXT. As such, it looked a hell of a lot better than XP!

Absolutely agree. Windows 95/NT/2000/etc. style was very corporate and bland, but it was a dramatically better UI style from a usability perspective than any later windows theme. XP, Vista, & al. are really quite terrible. Back when I had a Windows machine, I always reverted to that theme.

Some Linux variants have pretty solid appearance styles; they mostly look like they were designed by engineers, not artists, but they get the job done.

BeOS was decent, as was NeXT.

Windows 1.0–3.1 were truly awful.

I still think the original Mac Finder (circa 1985–1990) was a masterpiece given the constraints it was under (black/white display), but later Mac default styles were also pretty solid.

I didn’t like the OS X theme at all until 10.2, and it improved through 10.4/10.5 (whichever version it was when they mostly ditched the brushed metal look) which was a high point, then it’s been slowly downhill since, with the latest style marking another sharp-ish break.

I hope within another version or two, assuming they find something better than Helvetica for the type, Apple will be able to make the new UI direction work pretty well. Currently it’s in a transition phase and hasn’t seen the kind of refinement I’d hope for. But we’ll have to see. Fingers crossed.

Laser · 18 Oct 2014, 23:43

I'm not a Mac user. Are you paying for that transition?

Muirium · 18 Oct 2014, 23:54

You mean paying for OS updates? Nope. Free, so long as your Mac's new enough. Apple hasn't ditched a single model in the last two releases, actually. Although they killed a couple of mine back with 10.8

Findecanor · 19 Oct 2014, 00:07

Muirium wrote: ↑Windows 95 borrowed its look pretty wholesale from NeXT. As such, it looked a hell of a lot better than XP!

I used to say that, but I am not so sure any more.

Sure, the look of the button frames and the close-button with an X symbol in the top right corner.
The scrollbars were still on the right, with an arrow at each end. Funny how NeXTStep's iconify Symbol became Windows' Maximize symbol... I find Windows 95's Task Bar to be an improvement on NextStep's row of active apps' icons.
Otherwise, I would say that they were just as inspired by Macintosh and Motif.

webwit · 19 Oct 2014, 00:19

NeXT? Motif, Open Look, OpenWindows!

Hak Foo · 19 Oct 2014, 06:54

webwit wrote: ↑Typography, colors, white space, etc. This is good. The rest is noise. If you look at a toolbar and admire the beauty of its translucency effect, by that the toolbar just failed its primary function.

Except, there's a matter of how far you can go before it compromises usability.

I liked the "beveled edge" language that were standard on every major 90's GUI from OS/2 3.0 to Mac System 8 to PC/GEOS to Windows 95 to Motif.

It uses nothing but a handful of flat grey scales (making it excellent even on devices where screen quality may be poor, such as e-ink displays), yet is sufficiently expressive for almost every GUI interaction you can imagine. At the same time, it's very consistent.

I'm not a fan of the "text that looks like text but is actually a button". Works okay only if you have the ability to do mouse-over to indicate "we've got some interactivity", or the use of a very consistent design language (like the 1993 web browser mentality of "All new links are blue, all visited ones are purple) to allow people to identify it.

It feels like we've retreated from "flashy effects that do nothing" but we went all the way past "the simple usability of 1990s GUIs" back to "1980s, we only have 1-bit colour depths and have to figure out how to make basic widgets work that way.

I use a Windows Phone device, and although this would seem like it's a pretty big offender (with that whole "metro" design stuff)-- there are a lot of conventions which tend to make it less blatantly messy. Most programs stick all their interaction buttons in a consistent location, manyt buttons still at least have a border around them. It's also designed for a much more restricted environment-- small screen, fumbly fingers, one program at a time-- where you can get away with a lot more than if you're trying to juggle a few million pixels worth of high-value data.

From what I've heard, the Windows 95 taskbar was most strongly inspired by similar features on RISC OS, but it should be noted that some of the earliest releases of Windows-- before overlapping windows were a feature-- had a list of running programs' icons running across the bottom of the screen

Daniel Beardsmore · 19 Oct 2014, 13:49

I always felt that there was something "tight" about the Windows 95 design. A lot of the old GUIs from the 80s looked very sloppy to me, like people were trying too hard to be "cool" or "art deco" or something and ended up with self-inconsistent and botched designs. To me, Microsoft got it right twice in a row, with CTL3DV2.DLL and then Windows 95 (Windows XP and Vista brought back some of the nice curves from CTL3DV2). When I used Sun machines at university, for example (mostly CDE I think) they never looked quite as good. There were so many knock-off GUIs that all looked just plain terrible; see http://guidebookgallery.org/

That's what was so funny about Windows XP — Microsoft joined the "try too hard brigade" and came up with something overblown. The Luna control set was rather nice (except the scrollbar buttons) but the title bars were hideous.

Apple made the same mistake with Mac OS X when it first came out: they couldn't help themselves and overdid the design terribly, with their corrugated cardboard textures everywhere (originally they wanted backgrounds on Dock icons, which was just absurd). As fast as they could clean that up, they started mixing in metal and then skeuomorphic designs. Apple also couldn't help themselves from adding all sorts of random (and, private) interface elements to their own software, that undermined the consistency that they'd brought to the platform with OS X. First and foremost it's important to be consistent with an interface and make sure that third-party developers get full access to every single interface element and every single usage of every single element. That also goes for the MS Office team: the ribbon should have been created as a separate project from day one, and kept fully independent from Office.

sth · 20 Oct 2014, 08:32

I missed this thread cause i was moving.
i've been a mac user for close to 15 years and was pretty much an evangelist for 10 of those.
i hated the yosemite beta so much I wiped my macbook air and installed linux.

matt3o · 20 Oct 2014, 08:33

sth wrote: ↑I missed this thread cause i was moving.
i've been a mac user for close to 15 years and was pretty much an evangelist for 10 of those.
i hated the yosemite beta so much I wiped my macbook air and installed linux.

that's my boy

andrewjoy · 20 Oct 2014, 09:51

I approve of the flat dock, you know like the 2d one they got rid of after lion i think, if i could change it back to black like it was in lion when you tuned that on we are onto a winner.

I have only seen screenshots but it looks ok to me, it looks a little light so i would like to make it a bit darker but on the whole it looks ok.

Flatness is ok for me unnecessary 3dness of a UI is pointless to me.

I still dont understand the need for the fancy colors tho.

jacobolus · 20 Oct 2014, 12:40

andrewjoy wrote: ↑I approve of the flat dock, you know like the 2d one they got rid of after lion i think, if i could change it back to black like it was in lion when you tuned that on we are onto a winner.

The dock has always been and always will be a terrible user interface element: inefficient, inelegant, inflexible, a triumph of style over substance, something that demos well in the store and then sucks forever after. Especially distressing is how hacky Apple’s implementation has always been: the Dock process also controls all sorts of other window-management functions (like the command-tab app switcher, Expose, etc.), so it’s impossible to take the Dock out back and put its out of its misery and replace it with something actually useful.

Without thinking too hard (or I might come up with something else), I think the Dock might just be the single worst thing about OS X.

I agree though that its new visual style is better than the previous 3d bullshit.

andrewjoy · 20 Oct 2014, 12:46

thats why i always liked the 2d dock as you could make it very small and have it out of the way , i also change all folder and application folders in the dock to lists

that makes it usable

in this instance i prefer the start menu from windows 7 you can just press start and start to type what you want

Muirium · 20 Oct 2014, 12:47

Press Command + Option + D. That's µ mode right there.

jacobolus · 20 Oct 2014, 12:58

Even with the dock tiny (at some point ~8 years ago I had it set up so the icons were 1 pixel high, IIRC), in a corner, hidden, the Dock still sucks, because it blocks one whole edge of the screen from being used for something more productive, and because a bunch of stuff inevitably pops in and out of the dock. Because the Dock is undestroyable, there has never been any kind of real market for Dock competitors, especially recently (in the early days there were several neat tools ported over from OS 9; DragThing is still on life support but the others are long dead, and I don’t even remember their names).

andrewjoy · 20 Oct 2014, 13:06

Muirium wrote: ↑Press Command + Option + D. That's µ mode right there.

COOL!

keep them tips coming, i am moving into the mac world in work so anything like that will be useful.

i am soy happy i will only have to deal with windows bullshit when playing games on steam and not all day in work

EDIT
is there a way to disable all the flashy annimations ? i hate that ! I like OSX in genreal but there are a few things that i find distasteful and that is one of them, will be on 10.9 for now but i want to start migrating people to 10.10 where possible. Some of them are still on 10.6 i will have to see how mutch of my budget is left to get them new macbook pros or minis ( i miss the macbook and the none unibody pros)

Hypersphere · 20 Oct 2014, 17:26

Regarding the Dock, you can customize it to some extent using cDock:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/cdock/

I am using it now, and I have a black dock with 50% transparency, slightly rounded corners, and white indicators. This also gives me the option of restoring color to the Finder sidebar. I have kept the menu bar as a light color and removed the transparency (System Prefs > Accessibility > Display > Reduce transparency.

I have also changed the system font back to Lucida Grande:

https://github.com/schreiberstein/lucidagrandeyosemite

andrewjoy · 20 Oct 2014, 17:41

To click the button or not click the button.

I am so tempted but i don't want to be the IT admin who broke his own macbook on the first day, and considering i am the only member of IT staff. Well i think its best to test it on something else first

.

Hypersphere · 20 Oct 2014, 18:27

If you slip and fall while climbing Yosemite, be sure you are wearing some Federation-issue rocket boots.

matt3o · 20 Oct 2014, 18:35

just noticed... is it me or yosemite redefines the meaning of BLUE! Those blue fonder icons burn my eyes!