Comment by kej
7 days ago
This feels suspiciously like the goals of Microsoft's "Metro" design from the Windows 8 era. It will be interesting to see if Apple can do a better job of keeping the same design without damaging the desktop experience than Microsoft did.
It’s terrible and an unsolvable “problem” that many have tried before and there’s no way of getting this right.
Transparent UI components always add noise by nature, especially glass that is intended to be realistic - see all the refractions shown in the keynote.
Aqua was also playful and suggested the same feel but never got in the way of clarity and was beautifully implemented almost feeling revolutionary at the time.
What is on point for VR use cases where this is taken from, unfortunately ruins a desktop or handheld experience.
A massive loss of precision, focus and a big step backwards.
> It’s terrible and an unsolvable “problem” that many have tried before and there’s no way of getting this right.
except apple dictates to its fans whats right. i feel apple has already begun a slow process of making them similar;
what im more curious about is how they will improve the settings app (it seems the desktop settings is the worst its been design and flow wise - ive never liked the ios settings design - i do hope they change both of these for the better)
edit: more newlines
They've already started ruining the desktop experience with the macOS 11 redesign and there's no sign of them stopping. For example, the recent settings app redesign that no one asked for broke the fundamental desktop UI design rule that controls never scroll, only content does.
one of my favorite examples of how bad the System Settings app is: find where the Default Browser setting is, without using search.
Oh wow. Took me several minutes of aimlessly poking around.
Actually, even without that, the grouping and the hierarchy don't make sense. Why are some things top-level items and other under "general"? Same for "privacy and security" (I assume that's what it's called in English), for some reason "passwords", "lock screen" and "touch ID and password" are separate top-level items even though they do very much belong to "privacy and security".
The more you look at it, the less sense it makes.
Your smoking gun is to not use the app in the most intuitive and obvious way?
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Metro on phones worked so well but MS failed to translate it to desktops.
As for the second part, Apple does a remarkable job at updating all of the OS to a new design language. Unlike Windows, which last time I used it, had three different settings panels and UI controls resembling archaeological layers going back to pre XP.
You can still get the Windows 3/NT 3.5 directory picker if you dig around enough.
The biggest problem with Metro is how little effort was put into properly adapting it to desktops. It tried to handle everything from smartphones to tablets to non-touch PCs with 27” monitors with the same UI. It’s an understatement to say that it was awkward to use with a keyboard and mouse, because it almost acted like those forms of input ceased to exist.
If Apple makes the right platform-specific affordances (which they have a much better chance of doing) I think it can work.
> It tried to handle everything from smartphones to tablets to non-touch PCs with 27” monitors with the same UI
That was a big part of the problem, but the issues with the UI/UX went far beyond that.
For exemple, if you used the search bar in the "start menu" to get something from the control pannel, it would ONLY show the new W8 Metro dialog box that barelly has 1/5th the features and would refuse to show you the real one. It also took multiple years before the metro apps inlcuded in the OS (eg. pdf viewer) could be used in windowed mode (they were fullscreen mode like a video game, without taskbar), even the ipad at the time had better multitasking than the W8 Metro apps.
And as I understand it, much of that sort of problem comes down to the “warring factions” model found at Microsoft internally where the whole company is never on the same page, a problem that Apple doesn’t suffer from as badly.
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Window's problem has always been their legacy systems. I believe to this day you can bring up windows 95 era dialogs somehow in Windows 11?
It’s also a much deeper and broader ui. In the past 20 years of using windows I don’t recall one time that I needed to bring up the command line to do something. Linux on the other hand is a constant battle with random commands with close to zero discoverability. macOS sits somewhere in between, but definitely a way more ui friendly system compared to the various Linux desktop distros
Guess you never needed to use ipconfig. Jokes aside, you're right. It never had a power system underneath which is why macOS started to dominate in the 2010s.
You seem out of touch with the current trends, as it is right now you have to open a command line window during the installation of windows and run some commands just so you have the privillege of being able to install the system without the requirement of an online account. (And it's now a mandatory procedure if you have no internet access! You are locked up from even proceeding with installation until supplying access to the internet, unless you do that CLI kung-fu) Also, make sure you have the correct incantation because Microsoft keeps changing it from time to time!
I've also noticed a lot of solutions to issues in windows now adopting the usage of power shell one liners as an easy way to fix it, and some times even the only way to change a setting or disable something in the system.
Meanwhile in Linux land with the more recent distros running Gnome I've noticed less and less need to use the command line. Can still be annoying though, but I guess it's the price to pay when you roll the OS of your choice on a system that wasn't really validated for it. (it's amazing it works as well as it does honestly)
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Everything is deep down beneath all this W11 acrylic translucency. MS did a good work around W7 when they patched majority of old icons and resources and then made widgets flatter in W8 and W10 so they would fit better. That gray 9x legacy is here and will stay - for compatibility reasons
That would be a surprise, since Windows XP and newer are based on Windows NT, not the Windows 9x family (Windows 95, 98, and Me).
He did say era. It actually NT3/4 UI.
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Do you mean Aero Glass from Windows 7? Metro is a flat design that looks nothing like this.
I assume they might be talking more to the "universal design" aspect.
Though Apple has long had a universal design across platforms. Not always in lockstep, but visual traits and behaviours and traits and appearances end up in all of their platforms, which even if it wasn't logical from a design perspective, there is loads of shared code so it's inevitable.
But really a lot of what they showed today reminded me most of Aqua from 25 years ago.
As a followup on this, it's notable that Apple has changed the title of the linked post to "Apple introduces a delightful and elegant new software design", making the subtitle "A universal design across platforms brings more focus to content and a new level of vitality while maintaining the familiarity of Apple’s software"
Everyone was keying on the universal design thing, and the seeming importance of "introduces" as if this is a first, and it was such an odd thing for Apple to denote given that they have been using a universal design for a long, long time.
Do you mean Aero Glass from Windows Vista?
Windows Mojave strikes again. Vista really got the short end of the stick
I was referring to the idea of having a universal design across mobile and desktop, which was one of the goals of Metro, rather than the specific visual style.
Definitely in the minority here but I liked Metro, I always felt it was just a decade ahead of it's time (as was Windows 8 generally)
The esthetic wasn't bad, the problem is that it was a massive reduction in functionality. For example, the fact that Metro apps included on windows could only be use in fullscreen mode and only one copy of it could be used at the same time. The new Metro settings they included to replace the ones from the control panel had only like 10% of the functionality of the old one and they actively tried to prevent you from finding the old one. The content density was significantly lower and dialogbox/dropdownmenus couldn't be resized to display more items (eg. list of keyboard layouts that can only display 3 items at the same time)
The issue with Metro, imo, is that it was dizzying to use as you were swept away into new interfaces and for many tasks we lost a lot of usability.
Yes especially given that XP was the most useable version of Windows ever. They just threw it all away and expected people to relearn the basics of interacting with their PC.
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I really liked metro on windows phone but I did not understand it on desktop. It didn’t help that they took away the usual UI
Right but go a decade ahead when many more people use their phones as their primary computer, much less of a problem
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Metro was terrific on mobile - especially for older people who had no issues reading information from tiles or navigating sharp interface. Once my mother's HTC 8S broke and she had to temporarily switch to iPhone she complained how the interface was small and barely readable. It's the desktop where it failed - you can't just force users into a mobile interface, at the same time remove the most recognisable element of your product (start button and menu) and believe people will adapt.
What I find wild is that there were internal W8 releases with a proper start menu but they abandon it at some point to fully embrace Metro.
A Win8 tablet on Snapdragon X Elite would be a wonderful thing. Also, Metro on phones was amazing.
Metro was, and is, my favorite UI ever.
Metro never had this much transparency ingrained in the UX - and where it had, it was tastefully done with no/minimal accessibility concerns - doesn't seem like a valid comparison. Windows 8, especially 8.1 was a very pretty piece of software, the whole gesture- and card-based interface fiasco ruined its good name.
I didn't mean the visual style so much as the "let's use the same design on phones and on giant desktop monitors" philosophy.
Not Metro, which was flat, but their newer Fluent UI, shown in their design videos [0].
[0] https://www.youtube.com/@microsoftdesign/videos
It doesn’t look like Apple changed how the desktop fundamentally works. Microsoft put a touch-first UI on the server, and replaced the start button with a hot corner. Using that with RDP was a horrible experience.
If anything, we saw the iPad make serious roads towards functioning like macOS.