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How Apple Is Giving Design a Bad Name (theverge.com)
ColdWetDog writes: Co.Design has an article by two early Apple designers on how the company has lost its way, and quite frankly, lost its marbles when it comes to user interface design. In the search for a minimalist, clean design, it has forgotten time honored UI principles and made it harder for people to use Apple products. As someone who has followed computer UI evolution since the command line and who has used various Apple products for a number of years, the designers' concerns really hit home for me.
Of course, Apple isn't the only company out there who makes UI mistakes. And it is notable that the article has totally annoying, unstoppable GIFs that do nothing to improve understanding. User Interfaces are hard, but it would be nice to have everybody take a few steps back from the precipice.
Of course, Apple isn't the only company out there who makes UI mistakes. And it is notable that the article has totally annoying, unstoppable GIFs that do nothing to improve understanding. User Interfaces are hard, but it would be nice to have everybody take a few steps back from the precipice.
A lot of the functionality of the iTunes UI has fallen to the wayside.
I dread every iTunes update as I know I will have to change things back around to the way I like them from the way that Apple thinks I should like them.
And in a sort of related issue, the recent revelation that Siri won't answer music related questions unless you have a current subscription to Apple's music service is both worrisome and telling about the direction that Apple is taking.
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Here's a tip: if ever you are unsure about whether to use "who" or "whom", use "who".
> graciously supply multiple samples of your voice, to be analyzed with millions of others,
It doesn't work. Vlingo lost patent wars, and eventually got bought, pretending that gazillions of speech samples would ever solve the problems with indeterminate text searches, local accents, and the rotten quality of small microphones in noisy environments with speech analysis techniques that haven't fundamentally changed since before any of its founders were in diapers. They and their colleagues just wrap more and more computers around the underlying problems. All the modern speech comprehension systems have the same problems: they mistake gain control for something of any use whatsoever, and smear out sharp sounds by trying to measure frequency band based power levels. It throws away all the timing information, so "c"onsonants aren't, and the difference between "p", "b" and "v" are completely lost, even though they're acoustically quite distinct. One may as well transmit it in ancient Hebrew and throw out all the vowels, send the signal cross country, and roll dice to replace the vowels to play it back.
Look again, please. systemd breaks stable network configurations by unnecessarily replacing dhcp, it breaks daemon-startup debugging, it breaks decades of log analysis tools designed to work with text based rather than proprietezed binary logging format, it's repeatedly broken kernel startups, it's broken the stable model of attached storage being mounted under /media, and the attempts to replace all of "/etc" with a "stateless Linux" model is breaking tools that never volunteered to have anything to do with systemd. It's also breaking cross-platform compatibility of daemon initialization configurations.
A "light Linux user" may not see these issues becuase you wouldn't necessarily be debugging failed daemons, writing cross-platform tools, or trying to integrate stable business software with this latest fad for configurations.
This is just a logical progression from what they did many years ago. Windows 7 introduced the progress bar inside the progress bar. You have no idea how angry I was the first time I saw the progress bar get to 100% only to start again at 0% without warning nor reason.
If there are multiple progresses to track then the old school setup from the floppy disc days which showed an overall progress followed by a sectional progress was the way to go, but really the stupid spiny rings, flashing dots, or that progress bar which just moves a small line inside a box over and over again are worthless. They don't even serve as an indication that your computer hasn't locked up since typically the only thing that will stop those dead in their tracks is a bluescreen.
Give us 90s UI designs back!