Comment by jorvi
4 years ago
I don't know if Apple deserves to be in that list, UI-wise at least.
Yes, they do break backwards compatibility in many many other ways, but you could put a technical layperson who is used to Mac OS 9 and put them on macOS 11.4 (for those unfamiliar, Apple's OS has been at 10.x for about 20 years) and they would still reasonably be able to find their way around.
One element especially (the global menu bar) is why I got my parents to switch to macOS. They had to learn where 'print' or 'edit' or 'save' was once, and now they can find it for any program, and it'll probably still be in that place in 20 years time.
Its also why I think it's sad that Gnome abandoned the global menu bar. It's an amazing concept that if stuck with makes computers so much easier to use for a large contingent of people.
Yes. There are so many things Mac got it right for parents or grand parent users. Global Menu Bar and Single Mouse Button.
But generally speaking for them it was still a hassle and hurt to use a computer. iPad with Home Button was so much easier. No support calls for years. It was the computing devices that works. But now they moved on to Smartphone meant iPad get way less usage.
Which also means some of those design decisions that make macOS easier to use might not be relevant as PC transfer to a more professional type usage rather than consumer / everyone computing devices. But even in that case I still think Global Menu Bar is a better design.
So true. Today I must explain to my mother that she needs to press a flat picture (not a button) of three horizontal bars in order to pull up a command list. The list won't be sorted by category, but by a designer or developer's perception of which commands are most used.
In the mid 90s, I could walk my 80-something-year-old grandfather through WordPerfect with ease: "File does basic file operations, like save or print. Edit is for editing, like copying and pasting."
Menu bars work because they're a great feature-discovery tool when done right--with verbs that describe the commands, and with functions grouped by category.
"Modern" UIs don't. Try to explain it: "So, the lines are called a hamburger menu, they're supposed to look like a list of commands. And you can press it, even though it's completely flat. Then you need read the list until you find the command you want."
The Mac GUI's great innovation was combining intuitive visual cues with an consistent, unintrusive, and always-on system for feature discovery (the menu bar).
I like the global bar and also its underrated, consistent command search function. I think it was probably abandoned by gnome because every application also has a top row of icons in each window now.
My perfect OS would have a global menu bar and enforce that all commands can be issued by searching and all ribbons/icon bars can be turned off.
I think global menubars are severely underrated. They act as a sort of index of any given program's functionality, complete with key shortcuts and because it's a facet of the OS itself and will be there regardless, there's no point in paring away menus for minimalism's sake.
The worst part about the new gnome not only we don't have the global menu bar, the default top bar is basically a waste of space with barely any useful content in it.
That’s why I just use Just Perfection extension & remove the top bar. Then you just run budgie-panel or xfce4-panel w/ vala appmenu for the global menu bar on Gnome. Use xfce4 if you need it on 2 or more monitors though - Budgie only supports 1.
Better than KDE imo - you keep sane defaults, simpler configs, & consistent themes.
The global menu bar is great for laptops and small screens. I'm less convinced it makes sense for big cinema displays or dual displays.
I argue that global menu bar is bad UI for big and multiple monitor era. It's fine for laptop but not for desktop. It's also not friendly to touch panel since it relies on what app is foreground.