Thread

1. fedeb95 · 1790088079 · focus · HN ↗

   I have been a long time Android fan because of the tinkering you could do more easily than Apple. Then I started appreciating some of the design decisions behind especially iPhone, and it's been almost 7 years of iPhone usage.

   Recently I am starting to question some of the design decisions. Most native apps are bloated with functionalities, most of the time useless. Ads pop up everywhere, even before persistence; iCloud and backups are clearly designed to make you pay, the free space is useless.

   I am not that sure my next phone will be an iPhone.

   I have tried a recent Mac, and the system isn't intuitive at all. The first time I used GNOME, it was a breeze. Not the same with the MacBook system.

   1. boxed · 1790088227 · focus · HN ↗

      > I have tried a recent Mac, and the system isn't intuitive at all.

      You mean it's not the same as Windows. I personally find Windows infuriating after having been a mac user for decades even though I started out on windows way back in the win3.1->win2k era. It's just different.

      1. sholladay · 1790089805 · focus · HN ↗

         I like macOS but we should be honest about some of its basic functionality being unintuitive. The “traffic lights” were pretty confusing to me for a while. Green button made the window grow but not fully maximize - I never understood the point of that (though, nowadays it goes fullscreen, which is great). Yellow minimizes, fine, whatever. Red appears to quit, but actually doesn’t, it merely closes the window, which is confusing for the simple case of only having one window. And the analogy of traffic lights doesn’t really work.

         The classic one that everyone talks about is the weird way apps are installed by dragging an app into a folder, signified only by an arrow, with no explanation of what it’s doing or why. Also, that UI wouldn’t always show up, I believe because the app itself has to be coded to trigger it. So sometimes I would end up with an app running without having been installed. Therefor some of my apps wouldn’t show up in Launchpad, etc. Now that I understand the process, it’s pretty cool. And it’s simple, in a sense. But it fails any definition of intuitive.

         The scroll direction of a mousewheel cannot be controlled independently from a trackpad. So one or the other is bound to feel wrong to most people.

         There are simple things Apple could change to fix most of these, but I think it’s overlooked just because “that’s how it’s always been”.

         1. bee_rider · 1790091232 · focus · HN ↗

            I wonder why they decided to go with traffic lights. It doesn’t really map at all to the things you want to express on a desktop OS. Yellow=hide car but leave it running, and red=… destroy car?

            The funny thing is, it could almost work on something like iOS, where (if I understand correctly) focusing away from an app suspends it typically. So that could be the red button. I’m not sure what yellow should be. Maybe put the app into a sort of non-interactive mode where it stays on the screen but doesn’t do any processing, just queues up notifications.

            1. someguyiguess · 1790093923 · focus · HN ↗

               Red = stop (close)

               Yellow = yield (minimize)

               Green = go (grow)

               Makes sense to me.

               1. bee_rider · 1790097978 · focus · HN ↗

                  It makes sense to me as well, but mostly because I’m familiar with the UI in-and-of-itself. This is a website for computer programmers mostly, we’re exactly the wrong people to ask if a UI is intuitive.

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