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Apple Doesn't Design For Yesterday
HughPickens.com writes Erik Karjaluoto writes that he recently installed OS X Yosemite and his initial reaction was "This got hit by the ugly stick." But Karjaluoto says that Apple's decision to make a wholesale shift from Lucida to Helvetica defies his expectations and wondered why Apple would make a change that impedes legibility, requires more screen space, and makes the GUI appear fuzzy? The Answer: Tomorrow.
Microsoft's approach with Windows, and backward compatibility in general, is commendable. "Users can install new versions of this OS on old machines, sometimes built on a mishmash of components, and still have it work well. This is a remarkable feat of engineering. It also comes with limitations — as it forces Microsoft to operate in the past." But Apple doesn't share this focus on interoperability or legacy. "They restrict hardware options, so they can build around a smaller number of specs. Old hardware is often left behind (turn on a first-generation iPad, and witness the sluggishness). Meanwhile, dying conventions are proactively euthanized," says Karjaluoto. "When Macs no longer shipped with floppy drives, many felt baffled. This same experience occurred when a disk (CD/DVD) reader no longer came standard." In spite of the grumblings of many, Karjaluoto doesn't recall many such changes that we didn't later look upon as the right choice.
Microsoft's approach with Windows, and backward compatibility in general, is commendable. "Users can install new versions of this OS on old machines, sometimes built on a mishmash of components, and still have it work well. This is a remarkable feat of engineering. It also comes with limitations — as it forces Microsoft to operate in the past." But Apple doesn't share this focus on interoperability or legacy. "They restrict hardware options, so they can build around a smaller number of specs. Old hardware is often left behind (turn on a first-generation iPad, and witness the sluggishness). Meanwhile, dying conventions are proactively euthanized," says Karjaluoto. "When Macs no longer shipped with floppy drives, many felt baffled. This same experience occurred when a disk (CD/DVD) reader no longer came standard." In spite of the grumblings of many, Karjaluoto doesn't recall many such changes that we didn't later look upon as the right choice.
5K screens
The distortion is strong in that one. And now he must excuse his earlier brief glimses of reality.
Btw. Helvetica is a classic font that is more narrow and easier to read than Lucida especially on print, on a screen it is best with good hinting, which Apple's fontsystem doesn't do.
Perhaps "tomorrow" means that Apple has done internal tests to show Helvetica as more legible than Lucida on its Retina brand displays. We've come a long way since 1984 when Apple made 72 dpi the standard, and the iMac ships with a Retina display now.
Whatever. Ubuntu Unity seems to be the only cool-looking UI left.
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Thank god OS X never built-in support for user-selectable visual themes! Well ... except for that awesome-sauce "Dark Theme" that lets users be so tomorrow that they're into next week.
Absolute total BS is still absolute total BS and this shite should never have made it past the firehose.
Pro Litteris, the Swiss copyright society for literature does not agree. Helvetica doesn't even make the top twelve. Most returns on a search of "most legible typeface" that are by professionals boil down to 'whatever you're used to and like'.
I don't often use OSX, but I'm a little mortified that the system font is dictated by the whims of Apple, instead of being selectable by the user. When I install Windows, one of the first things I do is to change the system fonts. In KDE I used to, but now I'm happy with the defaults. But it never occurred to me that there might be a modern OS that doesn't give you this option!
Legibility and usability is no longer of importance. Their focus group isn't working professional any longer, its fashion sensible teens and facebookers. When you throw away usability of an item to make it look "cooler" it's no longer good design, it fashion and fashion never lasts.
IOs has required to have many of the usability "helpers", meant for people with disabilitys, turned ON for average users for some time now... and many of them hardly makes any difference. Sandboxing from hell makes several developers abandon the app store. There is NO real Mac Pro (WTF is up with that?).
I used to have an iPhone, I used to have an iPad. I have replaced them for Androids... Why? Because my eye sight is too weak to use an Apple product. I still have a $3000USD Mac Book Pro but im not sure my new computer will be a mac. I'm not sure my eyes are good enough for me to be included in the Apple family.
I was really happy when the retina displays came out because it gave me more legible fonts and and a sharper display, now the high res displays has turned OS design into a pissing contest to see who can draw the thinnest lines and use the least contrast... On my stationary machine I use Linux and Awesome (since there is no real Mac pro)... Its a tool, plain and simple, not something designed to use to impress others by looking "cool".
Apple doesnt design for the past or the future, or even the present. Apple products are designed using focus groups and industrial engineering teams. once the nuts and bolts are completed, apple checks current fashion and design trends as set by the industry (Pantone for example sets your "favourite" color or scheme for the year) and conforms as necessary. Then, the largest marketing firms in the world polls their focus groups and create a multi million dollar campaign rivalling anything seen at even the american political level. The product is advertised on television, internet, billboards, and subtly through product placement in your favourite television shows until it becomes an icon or status symbol. Finally, a handheld computer that costs around $50 to make is sold to the general public for upwards of $300 as dictated by the finance team, with futher successors of the product priced more competitively as deemed necessary.
arguably consumer driven development or manufacturing as its told in the fairytale of the free market has been dead for 50 years or more. Its eulogy was trumpeted by Jimmy carter in his malaise speech as he committed political suicide by telling americans that buying endless amounts of more goods and services was simply contributing to misery. Frankly, you buy what you're told to buy due to a combination of manipuative social psychology and indoctrinative marketing. No one really needs a lexus or the latest iphone.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Much like with Windows 10 and 8 (which run in Windows 7's footprint), Apple is actually supporting every single machine that ran Mavericks.
A couple of machines got dropped at Mavericks (the rather silly initial Macbook Air and the last white plastic MacBook).
But in this release Apple is officially supporting hardware that dates back to the mid-2007 iMac. People who bought a machine more than seven years ago are going to get at least another year of full support.
I'd imagine that machine, and my late 2008 unibody MacBook, will finally fall out of OS support with whatever replaces Yosemite. But more than 8 years of support for an all-in-one machine strikes me as pretty good.
Microsoft tossed out Tahoma and forced Segoe UI on everyone back in 2007. I don't recall it being that big of a deal.
That is very much convention wisdom, yes. There are surprisingly few scientifically designed studies on typeface legibility, but the ones I have been able to find (particularly the FAA-sponsored study in the early days of CRTs in the cockpit) have indicated that serif - NOT sans serif - fonts are easier to read, even at low resolution.
sPh
What makes you think professionals are even qualified to make the call? Presumably you're talking typographers, graphic designers, etc - artist types who couldn't construct a proper double-blind study to save their souls.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
>Does anyone even use full-screen apps?
Yes... on laptops. This is something I've observed watching my own customers work with software -- on desktop machines, few things are truly maximized. On laptops, nearly everything is maximized. I think it has to do with screen real estate. The more you have, the less likely you are to want to fill the whole thing with one window.
Making the green button work to maximize is probably the right choice for the smaller devices. If they want a consistent UI across all devices, that's the right call given the prevalence of smaller devices.
It makes the behavior match MS Windows... I doubt Apple considered this a plus, but I work back and forth across both OSes regularly, and that's one of the few kinks that has caught me.
> At least Apple should put a toggle in system preferences so the user can revert the behavior.
Yes, that would be nice. I agree. But that is explicitly what Apple does not do and what they generally consider to be A Bad Idea. Such toggles lead to low-use code paths in the OS, which means they don't get nearly the same amount of testing and they increase the complexity of the underlying software, increasing the risk of bugs in both settings. I've encountered that philosophy in many companies with large scale software -- better to leave out the option and give people something that you know works rather than put in the option and increase your bug risk.
Question: Does anyone know of actual studies done to demonstrate validity of such philosophy? I've heard it described many times, but I don't think I've ever heard any research into it.
The opinion of whether or not it was the right choice is severely clouded by the fact that in the Apple environment, there is No Choice. The user Has To go along with what Apple decides is The Future.
Precisely. Even when Apple's decisions are good, they generally end up inconveniencing a bunch of users for quite some time. I built my current desktop last year, and it's the first machine I built with no floppy drive. But I darn well still have a CD/DVD reader/writer, which is useful periodically. Do I use it everyday? No. Could I get along without it? Yeah. But once every few months I have a task where it's still a useful thing to have around.
The main reason I refuse to buy Apple computers is because of lack of choice. I understand that by locking their users into a smaller set of choices, they make it easier to support. But I often want better options for my particular uses. So even if Apple offered a machine that is exactly what I want (probably at a price premium), I still wouldn't buy it -- because I don't want to support that kind of fascist approach to hardware, software, apps, etc. (And yeah, that's a strong word, but I truly believe it's a potentially dangerous development for free use of computers if everyone were to adopt it.)
Apple has built the walls so high around its empire, that few dare leave. Therefore, they must rationalize that whatever Apple decides for the future is The Right Choice.
Yes, all this justifying of "they ultimately saw what was best for the future" sounds like so many big companies' rhetoric. Google is notorious for this too in recent years, breaking their search for power users so it's only useful to people who can't spell or don't actually know the right word for what they're looking for. (Yes, Google -- I did actually ONLY want results with those particular obscure words in them.)
That's not so much about "the future," I suppose, but the infamous Gmail redesigns are. I don't know and don't really care whether Google employees only use emails as equivalents to IM chats or whatever. I need to send emails every day that require me to do things like alter recipients, change subject lines, cc or bcc people, etc. -- and now I'm forced to do 2-4 extra clicks just to get what was there before. As someone who joined the Gmail beta via invitation very early, I almost abandoned Gmail completely last year -- until the unauthorized browser plugins came that basically allowed a reversion.
Maybe email will become obsolete or turn into text messages in a decade or so. But that isn't true in most places now, and I don't appreciate the current giant corporation attitude of "we're going to make random changes to 'simplify' our user experience. But if it makes your life a lot harder, too bad." It's not just an Apple thing.
All of that said, I don't really get what the big deal about a TYPEFACE change is. Resolutions are good enough now that legibility will be fine for just about any decent typeface. There's nothing "futuristic" about Helvetica or any other. Frankly, it's just some random change to UI that makes something look "new and improved" to differentiate from old, even if the actual changes "under the hood" are less pronounced.
Perhaps "tomorrow" means that Apple has done internal tests to show Helvetica as more legible than Lucida on its Retina brand displays. We've come a long way since
As a former employee of Apple's (i still go back and forth as a contracter, so posting anonymously) the days of Apple doing internal UI and usability testing are a long ways away... it simply isn't how their product development began to work under Steve.
Under Steve, instead of paper prototypes and usability testing/science, it became much more "this is what I like and feels right, do that" and consumers agreed with him more often than not. Unless by internal testing you meant Ive liked how it looked when he squinted sideways to mandated it, then yes, I guess you could be correct.
Serif fonts are readable: great for reducing strain from hours of reading under good conditions. That's why they're used for books (except some crazy tech books that get it wrong), newspaper text, magazine text, and so on.
[snip]
Sans-serif fonts are good for remaining legible under highly difficult conditions. That's why they're often the choice for billboards, for headlines (designed to attract you close enough to read the text), for advertising text
Nope, nope, and nope.
Basically, serif fonts are used where serif fonts are used because they're more familiar where serif fonts are used.
Sans serif are used where they are used because they tend to be used in those cases. Readers are used to seeing them there.
Numerous studies have come up with inconsistent results (for a good summary of what dozens of them on the subject say, see here).
The takeaway message is readers find familiar design choices to be easier to deal with. Most books and long texts tend to be set with serifs, so we've come to expect that -- but well-designed studies have shown little difference (or inconsistent results). Web fonts tend to be sans serif, so we expect that. And I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about when you say that sans serif will remain legible under difficult conditions -- if anything, studies tend to show that serif fonts have a small advantage (probably not significant) there. After all, serifs were inherited from Roman techniques for carving letters into giant stones, not in writing: I doubt Roman sculptors would have added things that seemed to decrease legibility to monuments. (The one "difficult condition" where sans serifs have a claimed advantage is in low resolution electronic situations, but recent studies have shown this advantage to be small or non-existent.)