[HN Gopher] The New Apple Human Interface Guidelines
___________________________________________________________________
The New Apple Human Interface Guidelines
Author : soheilpro
Score : 59 points
Date : 2022-06-08 19:26 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (developer.apple.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (developer.apple.com)
| o_____________o wrote:
| What changed?
| _jal wrote:
| Apple blesses a converged Mac/iOS approach, which in practice
| means you basically throw away a lot of what made the Mac
| excellent.
|
| Not that Apple is even following their own guidelines...
|
| https://mjtsai.com/blog/2022/06/08/system-settings/
|
| The incoherent design, weirdly bipolar automation efforts,
| letting the command line rot, and a new-feature focus on lock-
| in are making the platform increasingly something I just don't
| care about anymore.
|
| Not to mention every time I get another Buy Apple Music! nudge
| or deal with their bratty "not now" dismissal of the fucking
| credit card offer makes me actively dislike Apple a bit more.
|
| I'm clearly not the customer Apple wants, and all good things
| come to an end. It just saddens me a bit - I've been using Macs
| for over 30 years now. Watching them become more annoying and
| arrogant than IBM sucks.
| gubby wrote:
| And the atrocious disregard for performance over the last few
| years. My 2014 OSX 10.14 home Mac Mini is _so_ much faster
| and more responsive than my 2021 OSX 12.4 work Mac mini (with
| no notable difference in features) it is difficult to
| conclude anything other than malice.
| daniel_iversen wrote:
| Are we moving towards a tablet-laptop hybrid Apple device in
| the next few years I wonder? (similar to MS Surface).. I know
| there's the issue of cannibalisation but I think such a
| device could be awesome (but hard to do right)
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| > letting the command line rot
|
| how so?
| seltzered_ wrote:
| Oddly, the settings panel in Ventura looks closer to what
| Gnome Settings looks like. Just without the "Buy Apple Music!
| nudge" or "credit card offer" elements.
| Macha wrote:
| The last redesign of Apple Mail made it look a lot more
| like Gnome too
| smoldesu wrote:
| Apparently, they revised a few recommendations to change the
| look of MacOS Ventura:
| https://old.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/v7o87z/apple_should_...
| sph wrote:
| That Ventura screenshot looks terrible. Is that real or has
| it been photoshopped?
| Gigachad wrote:
| I like the new one more. Looks kinda cluttered and
| unorganised with the checkbox version.
|
| But I think I'm general HN tends to hold a very
| conservative view on UI while the general public does not.
| The feeling I get is that most users here believe that
| windows XP was the peak of UI and everything after was
| worse. Which is not at all what the average person would
| say.
| SllX wrote:
| It's real. Not that System Preferences was blowing anyone
| away, but System "Settings" is Apple answering the question
| no one asked: what if we had iPhone Settings but on the
| Mac?
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| I like it better actually. Cleaner, less cluttered,
| everything related to an option is clearly grouped and
| visually associated.
| mafalda wrote:
| This makes sense if you came from touch ui. Mouse and
| keyboard UI favours the old design because the way you
| hit things with the mouse is different. It is also bad to
| compare the two screenshots because the sizes are not in
| the same scale.
|
| The new grouping is not a clear cut, like why is the
| position of the docked grouped with window behaviour? The
| older makes it trivial to discover that the dock moves
| unlike the newer one.
|
| My view is that the design is much less refined and have
| a lot of space to improve. It isn't bad, the potential is
| there if you consider a touch + mouse ui. So let's wait I
| guess.
| smoldesu wrote:
| Not sure how I feel about detaching controls from their
| label like that. I thought we learned our lesson with
| this when we switched to HiDPI displays, but oh well...
| cosmotic wrote:
| It was all clearly grouped before, but also had visual
| anchors. The new groups don't satisfy the WCAG contrast
| ratio guidelines. The new view is definitely 'cleaner',
| but in this case, that's worse. This isn't an artistic
| effort, this is a human interface. Did the 40 years of
| HCI research just turn up the wrong answers before? And
| the all-along more obvious approach is now the supposedly
| better approach? Unlikely.
| ushakov wrote:
| it's likely taken from that tweet
|
| https://twitter.com/siracusa/status/1534261202167152649
| hbn wrote:
| I hate this converging of touch interfaces and desktop
| interfaces. I get that it's easier than ever to share
| codebases between your desktop and mobile app, but all you
| get out of this trend is interfaces that are neither good for
| touch nor for desktop. They're just... passable and
| occasionally annoying for each.
|
| It's why I'm against the idea that so many have put forward
| of bringing macOS to the iPad. It just means that macOS will
| be forced into being a touch-first OS (since many people use
| iPads without keyboards, so every interaction now needs to be
| doable without one) and it'll just be a worse experience for
| a keyboard and mouse setup.
| anonymouse008 wrote:
| Don't be misled, it's not easy to transfer code bases, IF
| you are performing truly context based UIs. Meaning, you're
| appropriately designing for the keyboard and mouse or the
| finger context.
|
| That's why everything is starting to look the same (System
| Preferences in 13 is atrocious). This is the worst path I
| didn't see coming; I'm a huge advocate for MacCatalyst!!
| Not SwiftUI!
|
| The reason is once you get familiar with the architecture
| and UIKit/AppKit paradigms, things begin to flow in all
| contexts -- however, it does usually require working on
| lower levels than just UITextView for example. What SwiftUI
| has done has made it indescribably difficult to work on
| those levels -- that's why everything is so similar. You're
| only as good as your top level APIs. The new layout for
| SwiftUI will advance this somewhat - but it's more second
| order fall over than primary driver.
|
| I was so excited about a single language and general life
| mindset for Apps in all of Apple. They should have leaned
| into Storyboards and NSLayout helpers (it's just too
| verbose for what you want to do sometimes, but it's so
| powerful).
| alsetmusic wrote:
| And it's been shown that the new System Settings app breaks the
| HIG (end of the article as "Addendum").
|
| https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/SystemSettings.html
| ushakov wrote:
| > The HIG has merged its platform-specific guidance into a
| unified document, making it simpler to explore common design
| approaches while still preserving relevant details about each
| platform
|
| i'm very much against this approach of generalizing design
|
| instead of strict rule set they now offer some opaque suggestions
|
| this is how material design lost its meaning
|
| hopefully this decision won't result with everyone implementing
| their own design language rather than using the standard the
| platform dictates
|
| frankly, same design language across all apps is what makes me
| choose Apple software
|
| this looks like an attempt to keep their design language to
| themselves while asking others to implement their own
| nvrspyx wrote:
| That quoted bit seems more like, IMO, that they're just
| unifying their HIG since the design across macOS, iOS, watchOS,
| and tvOS are converging, partly due to the unified developer
| process for all of these platforms. It doesn't seem any more
| generalized than it has in the recent past. It's just that each
| platform previously had their own distinct design languages,
| which have been gradually reaching a shared state.
|
| One can certainly argue against the merits of said convergence
| though. However, I don't see how this is any indication of them
| hoarding their design language for themselves.
| ushakov wrote:
| fair point, but i still don't see what the benefit of shared
| design system is when you have 4 different screen-sizes
| (iPhone, iPad, Mac, Watch) with unique capabilities for each
| platform?
| nvrspyx wrote:
| Agreed, I'm not a huge fan either because something's gotta
| give and in my opinion, it's macOS in this case with how
| they've been iOS-ifying it year after year.
|
| With that said, I do see the benefit if you primarily
| develop for Apple platforms to take advantage of their push
| for the "universal app" development where you can share
| most of the same code base and have a consistent UI/UX
| across all of their devices.
| Tagbert wrote:
| Funny as I've seen iPad users complain that their iPads
| are getting too much like Mac OS. At it's core Mac OS is
| not getting iOSified. Some elements are borrowing ideas
| from the other platforms. Some things that have been in
| need of change for a while are getting addressed. I think
| it is a good thing that Mac OS is finally getting some
| TLC.
| trs8080 wrote:
| The benefit is consistent design and branding across
| platforms.
|
| They're not eliminating design that leverages the unique
| capabilities of each platform, they're standardizing
| inconsistent shared design. It says as much in the second
| part of the text you quoted:
|
| > making it simpler to explore common design approaches
| while still preserving relevant details about each platform
| toiletfuneral wrote:
| Can you elaborate more? Most of the 'specificity' I see missing
| just lives inside SwiftUI and IB now. The platform/OS manages
| so much layout automatically these days I think the 'design'
| work is moving up the abstracting ladder as well, or are you
| talking about something totally different?
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-06-08 23:00 UTC)