Except that the Dock icons are significantly more 3D in their appearance than iPadOS/iOS 14 are.
This is actually an interesting change of priority. Last time there was a major redesign, iOS got it first and Mac OS X got it later. This time, MacOS gets it first and iOS gets it next year in 2021.
I still remember the Snow Leopard 'No New Features' launch. Mac OS has been as buggy as ever lately, I'd welcome another 'no new features' release with open arms.
I was going to say something similar - I really wish they'd just slow.the.hell.down with the new releases, rather than continually changing things for what feels like the sake of it (and breaking more and more stuff along the way).
This is a side-effect of employment and raises being dependent on launching new features instead of improving existing features. Something certainly not exclusive to Apple.
Precisely - this is the perfect opportunity for Apple to do a "no new shiny things" release, given that they are going through quite fundamental changes in their Mac architecture.
I hate that they’re moving to a design where buttons don’t have borders and textures, don’t provide any visual guidances on what’s a button and what’s not.
But I absolutely despise them for making iOS apps installable on macOS. That’s... just terrible.
This WWDC just felt like that Apple decided that macOS should get merged with iOS and converged them. The Mac doesn’t have a future...
It looks like it's more tailored for lifestyle use. No big deal for a lot of people but Windows/WSL or Linux by itself feel like they will have more developer appeal if this direction continues.
Might not have a choice. When OS/2 added Windows app support it killed actual OS/2 apps. Why bother supporting the Mac when you could just make an iPad app and get both markets at once.
> Why bother supporting the Mac when you could just make an iPad app and get both markets at once.
Yea, this is what I'm afraid of. Instead of continued investing in their high quality Mac app, companies will just drop it on the ground and spend all their time working on their toy iPad/iPhone apps, expecting people to switch.
I think that's the real purpose of Apple introducing catalyst way before this announcement. To make it easier to enhance iPad apps to take full advantage of macOS.
>But I absolutely despise them for making iOS apps installable on macOS. That’s... just terrible.
Can't shake the feeling that a not-insignificant number of people inside Apple now see the future of the Mac just being a place that can run 6 iPhone apps at once and that's it's only strength.
On iOS the Universal Access setting "Button Shapes" and "Differentiate Without Color" seem like the sort of options designed to address these objections. It seems possible they'd end up in Big Sur, though I can't say for sure yet.
The Mac has always had kludgey ways to run software that seemed out of place on the platform (from Classic, to Java apps that never quite got UI right, to full-blown Windows-desktop-in-a-window, to other UI libraries that have quirks compared to AppKit). I do hate any iOS leaking into macOS but I am at least hopeful that they can smooth it out over time.
I really, really dislike the way macOS has looked since Yosemite, and compared to that, I think this one is an improvement overall. The icons have more depth, and there's far more use of color across the UI.
But, it also looks extremely mobile-inspired—I suspect Apple's primary goal was to make iOS ports and apps look less out of place. That's a fine objective, but it also means they weren't designing for desktop and laptops specifically, and it shows. For instance, most of the apps lack title bars, and I'm not sure where I'd click to drag windows as a result.
I think the lack of title bars is an issue now. I've found it annoys me most on my web browser, when I have lots of tabs open there is one small section between the 3 dots to minimize/close and the first tab that I can use to move the window.
My guess is that they expect most people to use the application full screen and not to be moving it around. I've got a large monitor and I don't keep my windows full screened so this annoys me.
If done well, then contrast will replace color for many things (e.g. menu bars) as a separating function.
If done poorly, then it will look horrible because they got the contrast wrong.
High contrast should be used where you want someone to pay attention (like an "exit only" market on a US freeway exit). Low contrast where you want something to fade into the background (like a mile marker).
The problem with "flat" designs is that it seems hard to get it done well. Just think how long it took the industry to get the "ok" & "cancel" buttons to highlight in a consistent way for users.
I’d say at least several times per month I either accidentally nuke a background window tab when a close button "X" materialized at the last second where it looked like I could just move the thing, and the rest of the time I simply catch myself a fraction of a second before doing it.
Just-in-time UI combined with a complete lack of borders and affordances is the stupidest trend and it needs to end.
I’ve had that mental block the whole time I’ve used Macs (10yrs+). The “answer” is easier to work with than you’d think: most of the toolbar drags the window around, not just the title bar.
Yes—but the title-bar/toolbar combination used to look visually unified—a deeper gray distinct from the content for the window. That seems to be gone in Big Sur.
I'm pretty sure the goal isn't to make iOS apps look less out of place, rather it's to pave the way for a macOS/iPadOS merge after the 2 year ARM transition is done. Most of the UI changes across the OSes looked to be in service of stitching up the UI inconsistencies.
To add to that, the interactions they showed during the demo appear to be by finger, not mouse. They are treating it as iPad first, bubbling into laptops/desktops.
Apple took off with the .com boom and became a staple of every startup. But since the iPhone they've shifted to being a consumer focused company, and I don't see any reason why they would dedicate too much resources to improving their products for developers/designers.
It's pretty sad because they are still the best option. But people are not happy with them, and it's been getting worse over time. I really think Microsoft has an opportunity to cater to power users and release a really beautiful OS. But not Windows - would have to be something new
That was dropping the X from the name, not changing the major version number from 10 to 11. It's had a major version number of 10 ever since the first release of OS X. Most people assumed the actual version number would stay at 10.x.x forever, regardless of any changes to the marketing name of the OS itself.
Catalina's Mail is terrible too. No more column view with clickable headers, plus data loss issues. I don't care much for Thunderbird but it seems like the only halfway-decent IMAP client for MacOS any more.
sort of... the fact it doesnt use the native notification system is super annoying because outlook brings itself (and all its windows) front and center whenever a reminder happens, disturbing my work...
IMHO Apple's design jumped the shark a long time ago. Even apart from the aesthetics of the "flat" look, which I like about as much as fingernails on a chalkboard, Apple has completely abandoned the principles that made the original Mac great: ease of use and discoverability. Once upon a time it was easy to tell where the affordances were, what you could click on, editable vs non-editable text. Nowadays everything looks the same. The only way to tell whether something is clickable is to try to click on it. The only way you can tell whether something is editable is to try to edit it. And the UI is lousy with hidden features that only show up when you hover over them, with absolutely no indication of where they are until you happen to get lucky and move the mouse over one of them. Easter eggs lose their charm when you have to find one in order to accomplish an actual task.
To be fair to Apple, the JIRA app is the single worst Mac app I've ever used, by quite a long shot. And their web app also has atrocious performance (so much so that it was the deciding factor in a recent decision to move away from JIRA at $DAYJOB).
The Mac App Store is probably a fairer comparison.
I still laugh about how it takes over 10 seconds to render a dropdown box so I can move a ticket from 'in progress' to 'done'. It's often one of the last things to become functional on the page.
Yeah, and they had the audacity to highlight this in the overview today like it’s a good thing: how controls will now get out of your way when not using them (that was a problem that needed solving??). Now we can look forward to things on macOS looking even less clickable because Apple has spent valuable engineering hours “helpfully” keeping controls “out of our way”.
Good point. It’s like post-Jobs Apple has forgotten that design is not how it looks, but how it works.
“Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. People think it’s this veneer – that the designers are handed this box and told, “Make it look good!” That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” - Steve Jobs
I know it's just the look-and-feel, but to me it appears dumbed down in every single way. The uniform app shape, top bar icons, Control Center??? This does not look like a serious OS at all.
Scrolling this site with a mouse is comically bad, this is clearly designed to be used only with a trackpad. I cant read most of the content without very carefully scrolling unnaturally. You also have to pause for the animations to play, but if you scroll one pixel too far they don't play, so its a guessing game of whether you're in the right place or whether you missed some content.
Basically all of macOS is comically bad with a mouse and clearly designed for trackpads. You need to install a third-party tool to even disable mouse acceleration.
I use SteerMouse. It lets you customize mouse speed/acceleration, remap all your buttons, and set up mouse chords.
It's admittedly paid and it's stupid that you should need to pay for functionality like this, but it's useful enough for other stuff (e.g. setting up buttons/chords to manage spaces to replace the trackpad gestures) that I live with it.
Came here to say this. I don't get this kind of web page design. It absolutely sucks if you actually want content. I have to scroll a specific amount on my mouse in order to get content for that particular scroll distance. Just comically bad.
I usually end up turning off the motion and turning on increased contrast, reduced transparency etc. These things demo nicely but I didn't like windows with transparency effects when Windows Vista did it and I feel the same way today. I care about what's in the window not under it.
I do think the Safari updates look great, though. Webkit may have its governance issues and so forth, but Safari is really a wonderful app to use imo.
Lots of extra padding everywhere which makes me think a touchscreen Mac is coming out soon. The extra padding is out of character for Apple designs unless they need the space for your fingers to not mash more than one item at a time.
touchscreen mac already exists, it's just still called an iPad and still runs beefed-up phone software. The merge is coming in the next couple years. Tim Cook said the ARM transition would be 2 years, so I'm guessing that means 2022 or '23 has an apple tablet device running the same OS as apple laptop/desktop devices.
I'm pretty excited to see how well the new spatial audio feature works on Airpods Pro. It sounds like it will come in a firmware and/or iOS update, but they didn't seem to give an ETA on it. Could certainly be a great new feature if implemented well (they claimed support for 5.1, 7.1 & Atmos), added to hardware that's already out there.
Probably. WebGL is only a small subset of OpenGL, so I think it wouldn't be that hard to create a Metal translation layer for it. MoltenGL was already doing this (https://moltengl.com/moltengl/)
It's been known for a while that Safari/WebKit are integrating the same ANGLE abstraction layer that Chrome uses. That will bring WebGL 2.0 support also. But the progress on that getting anywhere near shipping has been extremely slow. Several years have passed.
It does not appear to have a Metal backend - just OpenGL and Vulkan.
From what I can tell, commercial game devs treat Mac gaming as an edge case and mostly only the large engine devs care about Metal support (with exceptions, of course).
It looks like Minecraft is already using Metal. LWJGL makes use of other low level APIs by means of BGFX, since version 3.1.0 (per release notes) and Metal is one of the current targets.
Looking at a running 1.15 Minecraft instance I see it is using lwjgl 3.2.1 and there a link to "net.java.openjdk.cmd/com.apple.metal", when I do an lsof.
OpenGL drivers still basically have to be there because of WebGL on Safari. And if it's a derivative of the GPU on iOS devices, then the GL driver is mostly already written.
The move away from a standard window bar/window chrome is a usability disaster in the making. I haven’t time to unpack what was shown yet but it did not leave me with a good impression.
Because they know their chickens - or rather their frogs.
Mac users are their loudest and most conservative customer sector, and have feared for years that OSX was going to be effectively taken over by iOS. Any big move would have had to face a wave of negative comments and would risk going down in flames. So instead they take things one step at a time - tweak here, tweak there, common icons, common services, Catalyst, we drop an X this year and major rev next year...
The jump you mention will inevitably happen, because in practice it has already happened internally with the yearly matched-release cycle. I predict sometime in the next few years you will have iOS NN + ipadOS NN + macOS NN released at the same time. It makes sense. It just couldn't be done right now because the priority is to keep existing Mac users on board. Frogs must be boiled slowly.
The UI and UX seem to be getting worse on macOS with the “iOSification” of the OS. I thought Jony Ive’s exit would stop that trend. It’ll be interesting to read perspectives from John Gruber, M J Tsai, Marco Arment, etc.
I still haven’t upgraded from Mojave to Catalina because of serious bugs reported by other people (including data loss issues in Mail). I’ll see if Big Sur shows improvements (reported by others) and decide when to upgrade. I don’t even run beta versions of macOS point updates, which is in stark contrast to iOS betas, which have been of better quality (comparatively).
Edit: Apple seems to be ignoring long term Mac users (even the vocal ones) for quite sometime. It was poorer hardware quality and lack of hardware updates for several years. Now it’s software, where it’s been going about removing what makes native macOS experiences great. The Catalyst apps are not “native Mac apps” by any stretch of imagination.
You shouldn’t have to wipe everything from a computer to have it usable, ever.
Thanks, I laughed a little at that.
People have been saying exactly that for as long as operating systems have been on disk. I was thinking just a few days ago that I must have installed OS/2 50 or 60 times in its day.
I can't calculate the number of weeks of my life I've wasted babysitting clean operating system installs.
You're right, it shouldn't happen. But we're decades away from that being the reality.
I've recently switched jobs. At my previous role, the 15 inch retina 2016 MBP I was using never had issues on Catalina.
At this new role, the 2019 13inch retina MBP I was given seems to have one or two kernel panics a week on Catalina.
Also, I haven't noticed this other issue lately, but for a couple of months my laptop screen would flicker/distort and times for a moment or two; have not noticed that issue since setting up a home office with external monitor for obvious, current reasons.
It’s a little too early to see the effects of Jony Ive’s departure. He left less than a year ago. He probably had a decent role in designing Big Sur. Plus all the remaining designers were probably hired by Jony. I doubt we’ll see big change until a few years out.
Yeah. Lack of keyboard support in some apps. Not being able to drag/drop certain icons.
I’d have to see the interface to see if it’s good for fast discoverability of features, but I doubt it. It’s starting to look more like windows, but in a bad way.
Hopefully they'll have an option to reduce the corner radius of windows & views... it looks a bit too bubbly for my taste. Brings back memories of the "candy" widgets of the first OSX release.
I kinda agree with you on the "bubbly" look. However, I'm pretty excited about the Widgets stuff. I really like(d) the Widgets in OS X and even built one to show weather radar. Even though it's kinda silly and not super useful it was nice to be able to hit one button and get an image of any storms in my area. I was really bummed when they removed that functionality in Catalina and it's been one of the reasons I haven't updated yet.
However, it looks like this functionality is back, albeit in a different form. You have to do a bit more work to build it in Swift vs Javascript but I don't think that's too bad. Plus it might actually work on iOS as well.
Catalina is the one and only macOS upgrade I regret doing. It has mostly been bug-free, but I was surprised how much software no longer works due to the 64-bit change.
What is not working for you? I did the analysis a while back and (I stopped doing kexts back when SIP hit) - I have like no 32bit apps worth keeping (I don't have to use legacy Photoshop).
The accounting software my accountant requires me to use for my business is 32-bit. Luckily I have an old iMac in the closet I use as a media server and for the accounting software.
Catalina was the primary motivator to move back to Linux for myself, and I don't regret it. If you care about things like this, you can configure Plasma Desktop with macOS features and shortcuts and end up feeling right at home.
I've been umm-ing and ahh-ing about making the switch to a linux laptop full time.
Currently have my work desktop (linux + windows for gaming :D) at home for lockdown and a file share/media server (linux) hooked up to the tele. All seems to work. Even my firewire audio interface is more stable on my linux work desktop (it's not supported on Windows 10 > 1903 / OSX > 10.13).
The one thing that is keeping me switching is Apple Music w/ the iCloud Music Library syncing. Legit the only reason I haven't ditched my 10 year old macbook pro yet.
I was stuck with Google Music for a while until I ran a Jellyfin instance along with some Subsonic fork. I just VPN in and use the Android client or DSub when I want to listen to music, or use the web interface from my computer. This was another choice that I don't regret.
Currently contemplating the switch as well. Any recommendations about making the keyboard shortcuts as similar to macOS as possible? I'll be using my MBP, and after years of muscle memory, it'd be nice if I could continue using CMD as the primary modifier key for all things: clipboard, navigation, etc. I know you can configure everything, but maybe there's some easy patch or pre-configured plugin for KDE?
Take a look at my response[1] from a couple of weeks ago to a similar question on HN.
The tl;dr is to use Plasma Desktop, take advantage of its ability to create keyboard shortcuts for everything, and use Plasmoids to create a global menu and dock.
I didn't mention it in the post, but KDE Connect[2] works on most desktop environments and integrates with tablets, phones and other computers, and it's great.
There's sandbox info in the parent post[3], if you need a sandboxd replacement, too.
2. (more seriously) its pretty obvious they are making it look like ios so that catalyst and pure ios/ipad apps dont look too out of place
personaliy, i think its a bit sad, because it makes the desktop feel less professional and notice the larger fonts, spacing etc... seems like the ui could be used for touchscreens almost, instead of optimized for mouse/keyboard....
One of my favorite small things about OS X has been the dock icons and their variety in shapes. Like how TextEdit has the pencil sticking out or Logic looks like a DJ turntable. It feels like that’s gone now.
They address that in the new macOS 11 HIG [1], indicating that protrusions from the square look "to combine depictions of the physical objects that best convey the app’s core purpose" are acceptable. TextEdit, Preview and Xcode all have elements sticking out a bit.
That said, I still think overall it's a loss in terms of usability. (I find that without shape to distinguish icons on iOS, I often confuse icons that are broadly similar in color when I'm not paying attention, even though the images inside the roundrects are different. I can't be the only one.)
Yeah, Mac icon design felt like it was hanging on by a thread, and now feels like it's being killed.
A significant piece of character that's just... gone. I think this is what bothers me more than any iOS-ification of the OS, on a UI/UX level at least.
Edit 2: since https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23606052 posted that and is now on the front page, maybe it's better to just let the discussion pick up there. This thread is pretty generic. Perhaps an article with more detailed information will lead to a more interesting discussion.
390 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 301 ms ] threadThis is actually an interesting change of priority. Last time there was a major redesign, iOS got it first and Mac OS X got it later. This time, MacOS gets it first and iOS gets it next year in 2021.
But I absolutely despise them for making iOS apps installable on macOS. That’s... just terrible.
This WWDC just felt like that Apple decided that macOS should get merged with iOS and converged them. The Mac doesn’t have a future...
Don't use them then? Seems like a useful feature to me for certain utility apps that don't require a proper Mac app/can't afford to develop one.
It's strength and beauty was in the apps tailored entirely to the platform, not cheap tacky ports because the developer couldn't be bothered.
Yea, this is what I'm afraid of. Instead of continued investing in their high quality Mac app, companies will just drop it on the ground and spend all their time working on their toy iPad/iPhone apps, expecting people to switch.
Can't shake the feeling that a not-insignificant number of people inside Apple now see the future of the Mac just being a place that can run 6 iPhone apps at once and that's it's only strength.
Just from some of the wording in today's keynote.
Does that mean I can ditch my phone and install whatsapp as a standalone desktop app?
https://www.apple.com/macos/big-sur-preview/features/
I really, really dislike the way macOS has looked since Yosemite, and compared to that, I think this one is an improvement overall. The icons have more depth, and there's far more use of color across the UI.
But, it also looks extremely mobile-inspired—I suspect Apple's primary goal was to make iOS ports and apps look less out of place. That's a fine objective, but it also means they weren't designing for desktop and laptops specifically, and it shows. For instance, most of the apps lack title bars, and I'm not sure where I'd click to drag windows as a result.
My guess is that they expect most people to use the application full screen and not to be moving it around. I've got a large monitor and I don't keep my windows full screened so this annoys me.
If done poorly, then it will look horrible because they got the contrast wrong.
High contrast should be used where you want someone to pay attention (like an "exit only" market on a US freeway exit). Low contrast where you want something to fade into the background (like a mile marker).
The problem with "flat" designs is that it seems hard to get it done well. Just think how long it took the industry to get the "ok" & "cancel" buttons to highlight in a consistent way for users.
Just-in-time UI combined with a complete lack of borders and affordances is the stupidest trend and it needs to end.
Apple took off with the .com boom and became a staple of every startup. But since the iPhone they've shifted to being a consumer focused company, and I don't see any reason why they would dedicate too much resources to improving their products for developers/designers.
It's pretty sad because they are still the best option. But people are not happy with them, and it's been getting worse over time. I really think Microsoft has an opportunity to cater to power users and release a really beautiful OS. But not Windows - would have to be something new
The Mac App Store is probably a fairer comparison.
I wonder how much of the world's coal and gas has been consumed by browsers struggling under the load of Jira.
No one makes a computer that Just Works any more. It's a real problem.
Good point. It’s like post-Jobs Apple has forgotten that design is not how it looks, but how it works.
“Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. People think it’s this veneer – that the designers are handed this box and told, “Make it look good!” That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” - Steve Jobs
https://quotesondesign.com/steve-jobs/
It's admittedly paid and it's stupid that you should need to pay for functionality like this, but it's useful enough for other stuff (e.g. setting up buttons/chords to manage spaces to replace the trackpad gestures) that I live with it.
I do think the Safari updates look great, though. Webkit may have its governance issues and so forth, but Safari is really a wonderful app to use imo.
I don't like the new dock design. Maybe they'll change it back to the old dock if the feedback is vocal?
Presumably Apple didn't want to write OpenGL drivers (full, not ES) for their in-house GPUs.
From what I can tell, commercial game devs treat Mac gaming as an edge case and mostly only the large engine devs care about Metal support (with exceptions, of course).
Looking at a running 1.15 Minecraft instance I see it is using lwjgl 3.2.1 and there a link to "net.java.openjdk.cmd/com.apple.metal", when I do an lsof.
Any further insight would be appreciated.
The other question I would have is how this behaves with shaders, such as BSL?
Links:
OpenGL drivers still basically have to be there because of WebGL on Safari. And if it's a derivative of the GPU on iOS devices, then the GL driver is mostly already written.
OSX has been through two transition. The NeXT team must be very proud of their foundation they built 2x years ago.
[1] https://www.macrumors.com/2020/06/22/macos-big-sur-is-versio...
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/06/apple-announces-maco...
It's cleaner.
https://fortune.com/2016/06/13/apple-mac-os-sierra/
Because they know their chickens - or rather their frogs.
Mac users are their loudest and most conservative customer sector, and have feared for years that OSX was going to be effectively taken over by iOS. Any big move would have had to face a wave of negative comments and would risk going down in flames. So instead they take things one step at a time - tweak here, tweak there, common icons, common services, Catalyst, we drop an X this year and major rev next year...
The jump you mention will inevitably happen, because in practice it has already happened internally with the yearly matched-release cycle. I predict sometime in the next few years you will have iOS NN + ipadOS NN + macOS NN released at the same time. It makes sense. It just couldn't be done right now because the priority is to keep existing Mac users on board. Frogs must be boiled slowly.
I still haven’t upgraded from Mojave to Catalina because of serious bugs reported by other people (including data loss issues in Mail). I’ll see if Big Sur shows improvements (reported by others) and decide when to upgrade. I don’t even run beta versions of macOS point updates, which is in stark contrast to iOS betas, which have been of better quality (comparatively).
Edit: Apple seems to be ignoring long term Mac users (even the vocal ones) for quite sometime. It was poorer hardware quality and lack of hardware updates for several years. Now it’s software, where it’s been going about removing what makes native macOS experiences great. The Catalyst apps are not “native Mac apps” by any stretch of imagination.
Thanks, I laughed a little at that.
People have been saying exactly that for as long as operating systems have been on disk. I was thinking just a few days ago that I must have installed OS/2 50 or 60 times in its day.
I can't calculate the number of weeks of my life I've wasted babysitting clean operating system installs.
You're right, it shouldn't happen. But we're decades away from that being the reality.
The Catalina beta was a sh!tshow on my MacBook Pro, as was the first (upgraded) release. A fresh install made most of the issues go away.
https://talk.tidbits.com/t/psa-catalina-spotlight-is-broken-...
It's one of the most recent reasons I have yet to update to Catalina.
[0] https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/constant-kernel-panics-...
[1] https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/strange-chrome-browser-...
At this new role, the 2019 13inch retina MBP I was given seems to have one or two kernel panics a week on Catalina.
Also, I haven't noticed this other issue lately, but for a couple of months my laptop screen would flicker/distort and times for a moment or two; have not noticed that issue since setting up a home office with external monitor for obvious, current reasons.
Trying to delete (instead of backspace) brings up the emoji palette, even using Apple's own keyboards.
Performance was horrible in Firefox on a MacBook Air (mid-2012), which has been dropped from support for this latest macOS.
Otherwise, it actually looks okay to me.
However, it looks like this functionality is back, albeit in a different form. You have to do a bit more work to build it in Swift vs Javascript but I don't think that's too bad. Plus it might actually work on iOS as well.
That sounds like a right pain in the arse. I’d have replaced them if they’re not using updated software personally.
Anyway yeah it's not my business so it's not by business, nose un-poked-in
Apple could do virtualization and run all the way back to macwrite or macdraw. Apple just doesn't get virtualization.
Currently have my work desktop (linux + windows for gaming :D) at home for lockdown and a file share/media server (linux) hooked up to the tele. All seems to work. Even my firewire audio interface is more stable on my linux work desktop (it's not supported on Windows 10 > 1903 / OSX > 10.13).
The one thing that is keeping me switching is Apple Music w/ the iCloud Music Library syncing. Legit the only reason I haven't ditched my 10 year old macbook pro yet.
The tl;dr is to use Plasma Desktop, take advantage of its ability to create keyboard shortcuts for everything, and use Plasmoids to create a global menu and dock.
I didn't mention it in the post, but KDE Connect[2] works on most desktop environments and integrates with tablets, phones and other computers, and it's great.
There's sandbox info in the parent post[3], if you need a sandboxd replacement, too.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23473207
[2] https://kdeconnect.kde.org/
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23471667
1. playdoh os
2. (more seriously) its pretty obvious they are making it look like ios so that catalyst and pure ios/ipad apps dont look too out of place
personaliy, i think its a bit sad, because it makes the desktop feel less professional and notice the larger fonts, spacing etc... seems like the ui could be used for touchscreens almost, instead of optimized for mouse/keyboard....
Those square icons really got on my nerve for some strange reason. The previous design at least I know I am using a Mac.
Now I felt like I am using a glorified iOS. It feels more like iPadOS being ported to Mac.
[1]: https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...
That said, I still think overall it's a loss in terms of usability. (I find that without shape to distinguish icons on iOS, I often confuse icons that are broadly similar in color when I'm not paying attention, even though the images inside the roundrects are different. I can't be the only one.)
A significant piece of character that's just... gone. I think this is what bothers me more than any iOS-ification of the OS, on a UI/UX level at least.
Sigh, here comes a trove of white-background icons to macOS. Relevant: https://medium.com/swlh/let-s-talk-about-white-app-icons-ce2...
If there's a better URL for discussing this, we can change it again.
Edit: it looks like https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline... is probably a better URL for discussing this, so we'll change to that from https://www.apple.com/macos/big-sur-preview/.
Edit 2: since https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23606052 posted that and is now on the front page, maybe it's better to just let the discussion pick up there. This thread is pretty generic. Perhaps an article with more detailed information will lead to a more interesting discussion.