Remember the good old days? The good old days when people cried loads of foul over the inconsistency in the Windows user interface? You know, applications deviating from the norm – with even Microsoft seemingly doing whatever pleased them? This was considered a huge problem, especially by those from the Macintosh and Apple camp. Oh, how the times have changed.
Yesterday, Apple unleashed the Mac App Store upon us as part of the Mac OS X 10.6.6 update. When I updated my cute MacBook Air 11.6″ and launched the App Store after the mandatory reboot, and laid my eyes to rest on the interface, my eyes exploded. It felt like they hired Neville Page to design the darn thing.
I originally planned to verbally slap the UI to Neverland and back, but luckily, Tim Morgan beat me to it. The most glaring act of professional UI murder is the placement of the titlebar widgets, which have been centred vertically with what I would reluctantly call the toolbar. Instead of the perfectly fine and universally used ‘4pix from the top’, Apple decided to move them down considerably, giving the window a severe case of obesity.
As if the act of merely brutally murdering the UI wasn’t enough, Apple also felt the need to desecrate the corpse some more. The back and forward buttons are non-standard, using the same colour as the frame – whereas everywhere else in Mac OS X they use a slightly different colour to make them easier to spot.
In addition, the ‘search’ field is also non-standard; it has a different shape, and lacks the blue halo effect of other search fields. Heck, any text input field in Mac OS X gets that same blue halo when active. This is done to properly highlight the field currently active. It’s one of the things I miss in Windows 7. They cherry on top is the weird toolbar buttons, which look completely out of place in Mac OS X, as they sport this weird neon-blue highlight when selected.
The reason as to why this UI feels so horrendously out of place is simple: it seems as if Apple was too lazy to code a proper Mac OS X UI, instead opting to simply drag and drop the code from the iPad version of the App Store, make some minor changes to the UI, and leave it at that.
It’s nothing new, of course. Mas OS X has been a consistency nightmare for years now, with boatloads of different themes, and functionally identical UI elements that look entirely different from one another. Where Apple once stood at the forefront of consistent, sensible UI design (Platinum, I salute you!), the company took a left turn to bananas a few years ago.
Coincidentally, the amount of inconsistency in Mac OS X’s user interface seems directly correlated to the amount of success of the iOS. It’s no secret that Steve Jobs likes to focus on the latest and greatest, and it seems that the traditional operating system has fallen from his grace. The result has been a glacially slow development pace in Mac OS X and a user interface that gets increasingly messy. This is further illustrated by the fact that just about everything unveiled about Mac OS X 10.7 Lion are things taken straight from iOS.
Apple taught us not to try and cram a traditional desktop interface onto a mobile device, yet now, it seems as if they are trying to cram a mobile interface onto a desktop. How delightfully ironic.
So, this leaves us with the crazy situation where Microsoft has really been cleaning up its act when it comes to user interfaces; the amount of clean-up between Vista and Windows 7 is astounding, and it seems that they’re going to take it further in Windows 8 (they appear to be working on centred titlebar text, bringing it in line with Office where this is already the case). At the same time, however, Apple seems to be making a mess out of Mac OS X’s user interface.
What really made my day was Jon Gruber’s response to all this. When Apple still stood for consistency, Gruber was a proud member of the ‘konsistenz muss sein’-team. Now that Apple seems to have abandoned this mantra, Gruber follows, using increasingly silly reasons to justify this shift.
Once, concistency was an integral part of good UI design – now that Apple has decided to intercourse the pooch on this, Gruber tries to justify this by surgically removing consistency from good UI design, claiming it is somehow “conservative” – a word with a decidedly negative connotation. This allows him to label consistency in UI design as, and I quote, “boring, old-fashioned, stodgy”.
In other words, if you are an advocate of consistency – what Apple and Gruber once were – you are now a curmudgeon, a whiner, not hip. And yes, I take offence to this. While I believe there is some merit in allowing developers and UI designers to experiment with the contents of an application, some elements ought to be consistent, with the titlebar being on top of the list of things not to mess with.
I dislike the inconsistent mess that is my iPhone, and I’m sad that Mac OS X is starting to look just as inconsistent as the iOS. It’s disturbing to see a company that developed one of the best interfaces in history (Platinum, I salute you!) – in my opinion – go down this path.
Yeah, the App Store is a joke. It seems rushed and plain ugly. Apple hypocrisy at its finest.
Money talks. A million+ downloads on day one. UI consistency can go stick it, as far as Apple’s concerned.
So confusing why millions downloaded stuff from it. I took a look yesterday. My goodness its full of crap. The only worthwile apps are Apple developed ones ( ilife,iWork, …), the rest are unworthy of my desktop at any price.
Yeah, the interface is a little odd too. The whole thing just makes osx look cheap.
I dunno, maybe it’s cheaper (Pixelmator was 59 or 69 and now it’s 29 for example) or maybe it’s easier to discover stuff or maybe the hype (OMG it’s teh ApPz).
Good point. I didn’t see Pixelmator there.
It looked like there were less than a couple hundred apps, and I didn’t notice Pixelmator. Probably because it was surrounded by a bunch of worthless (from my perspective) apps ported from IOS.
I think they really need to work on the organization and presentation of the app store. It looks too thrown together. Like the value bin at Compusa, its difficult to find the worthwhile apps from the worthless ones.
Or maybe it’s millions of mac users trying it out.
Apple’s asking price for a Mac suggests otherwise, right from the start…
I had the impression that Thom’s article was about the design of the App Store rather than its success/relevance/whatever. Or?
RT.
Probably because Apple don’t care for a good web front end, it’s all about locking people into an application like iTunes anyway, since that’s what you have to use.
Apple should get with 2010 and make their software web friendly, since this vendor lock-in like design is a thing of the 90s.
Upon reading the Apple site, it seems that the App Store for OSX does not use iTunes. It is a separate app included with the latest OSX update.
Pixelmator is a real good price on the app Store. I’d expect the makers to sell a lot more this way. If the cost to the end user is lower and the dev sells more isn’t that a win-win?
Also, The Apple supplied apps (eg pages) are not at the top of the listing.(as seen with my web browser). If that continues then I really have a hard time understanding the problems people have with it. You don’t have to use it do you?
I would not expect Adobe to start selling CS5 via the app store.
No, the price to volume sales inversely made is not a good deal for anyone but the middle man. The manufacture has more infrastructure to maintain (support, releases, so forth), the user has a diluted experience with the company and also lower quality of releases (fewer, more bugs, so forth), and the middle man (apple) gets to a high percentage of the cut along with demand due to being the outlet for a ‘better’ sales record.
The bottomline is apple is adding nothing to the software landscape, they are simply taking as much from the ground swell of idiots. Maybe the bozo consumer deserves to be raped by apple.
I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for that one. Get with 2010? Hell, hey haven’t even managed to get with 2001 and put web interfaces on their “Airport” gateways.
I see the changing philosophy with consistency as a result of what the web is teaching us. Websites evolved without the toolkits resulting in a lot more experimentation in their designs. The next generation of designers are growing up with the web as the biggest platform resulting in a different way of thinking about design.
The old way of thinking was that a good UI was a set of rules to follow religiously. While the web generation of design sees a good UI as something that:
* Is on message marketing wise (style and copy)
* Is consistent workflow wise, but not necessarily in the details
* Tests well. I think this is a big one. User testing is now the stamp of approval for web designs. Having a design that users find easy to use and elicits the emotional response they are looking for is seen as far more important than following platform style guides.
Is this a good thing? Well that remains to be seen. It seems to be working well so far as web and mobile interfaces take this philosophy and are seeing great adoption rates, especially among people who found computers too hard to use in the 90s.
Bingo. Me personally, I’ve never really cared if my apps looked like they were fully integrated into the environment. I put vastly more value on self consistent behavior within the app itself and doing the job the app is intended to do without getting in my way.
Hmm… perhaps that is why I (and a vocal group of others) find webpage functional inconsistencies to be so annoying. To me, webpages are documents, and an interactive one is like a shared document. The viewer (i.e. web browser) renders them consistently despite their quite varied appearance.
For example, hyperlinks have a variety of ways you can interact with them (e.g. middle click, tab to select, drag to toolbar, etc.), so when some moron uses flash or javascript to replicate only a single aspect of their functionality, it’s infuriating. OTOH, perhaps I’m a dinosaur fearing the meteor that is the gradual unification of the viewer and the document, the application and the webpage.
Oh I agree. Reinventing the wheel without a damn good reason is just silly. I *hate* web designers who insist on using the latest whiz-bang tech the W3C or Adobe/MS can churn out for no better reason than making perfectly fine older content more pretty (and about 20 times more resource heavy).
100% of the creators of java-script functionality before AJAX should had been shoot.
Now it’s just 90%.
My prediction is that we are seeing the beginning of the end for OSX. Apple’s App Store is a huge success for Apple in that they have complete control over what can be sold (and just as importantly what cannot be sold). They also get 30% of each and every sale.
By moving to iOS on the Macintosh line, Apple extends that control to all Apple devices, and expands their revenue base to cover applications that they historically have not received any revenue from. Take Adobe, Microsoft, and other ISVs that sell mid and high priced applications. Having control over those applications (to whatever degree Apple wishes to control them, including not approving them) gives Apple huge leverage. The icing on the cake for Apple is the 30% commission on each sale – practically free revenue for Apple.
Yikes! While I *hope* your prediction doesn’t bear fruit, it certain seems to be consistent with overall trends.
I don’t like the idea of any device, especially a desktop computer, being dependent on a centralized “store” for software, along with legal penalties for the user breaking or working around that dependency.
Call me a neanderthal, but I value computers as freely-reprogrammable universal machines. While Apple scores supremely high marks in my books for using BSD code for much of their OS underbelly, I cringe at the “Apple-approved” world they are creating, in which any sort of hacking must be vetted by Jobs & Company. How soon before Micro$oft follows suit?
I’m surprised Microsoft didn’t do it before Apple.
Take Microsoft Update.
Make .msi the official Windows package format rather than setup.exe.
Allow competing products in the listing along side Microsoft’s own products.
Done.
The centralized updates across all installs software alone would significantly improve things.
Wouldn’t be surprised if that’s going to be one of the major new things in Windows 8.
And then you create a multi-platform software repository and charge 10 cents for storage space and service / download.
== profit?
30% is robbery, regardless of whatever the creator sell more and generate more income or not.
Microsoft has to compete with Windows 7. It really seems that the biggest rival for any version of Windows now, is a previous version of Windows. If the new version is not good enough, then it wont sell.
just wait till you have to jailbreak your mac to install “outside” software.
-I’m revising this significantly because I ended up mischaracterizing/forgetting your original point-
I think people misunderstand the nature of Apple’s power and influence. A future where Apple has left workstations entirely to concentrate on an area they dominate, portable Web and media, makes more sense than one where they’ve simply corrupted the definition of a workstation.
Consider the driving force behind the App Store model on the consumer end of things. I think I want a modern Mac – which is to say a mouse-keyboard-chair workstation that’s pleasant to use recreationally – into the foreseeable future, but I’m honestly not convinced it’s going to matter anymore. If Apple provides my music, Web, and IM smoothly on a “just works” portable device, and I need to glue myself to a chair in front of Linux or Windows only for the time it takes to design, configure, or convert something, what have I lost?
I am a geek and a hobbyist. I will always enjoy playing with what a system can do, I appreciate technical diversity for its own sake, and I love the open source + commodity hardware option that offers infinite flexibility, but if Apple’s workstation alternative only provides advantages redundant to their portable products, and everything else about them is a burden, what power would they retain over anything? Why would anyone buy them?
What they’ve been doing is working because there are tangible advantages. My cell phone and iPod have taught me how ridiculous it was during the ’90s to actually sit down in front of a box of whirring fans for hours just to enjoy an MP3 collection or anticipate some kind of text-based communication. But the reality distortion field is a myth, and if a locked-down workstation doesn’t offer huge tangible benefits over the old model, it won’t sell and Apple won’t be able to pull it off.
Edited 2011-01-08 08:56 UTC
My god, you’re acting like the AppStore is now the ONLY way to install applications on your Mac, when this is obviously not true. Nothing has changed; you can still to go any website, discover a piece of software you like, purchase, download and install it from there, in fact a lot of the software available on the AppStore is also available by this method. Or you can go to your local Best Buy, buy a box with a disc in it, take it home and install from that, OR you can use the AppStore to browse, find, download, and install from it. Good lord, Apple has NOT said a word about removing the ability to install software by ANY other means than the AppStore, so spreading FUD in this manner is just silly and completely irresponsible.
As to the interface, I don’t mind it at all. Sure it’s a little out of the norm, but it’s still completely functional once you take 10 seconds to learn it. I did draw the line with the placement of the Close, Minimize, etc buttons on iTunes and put them back with the hack I found on the internet, but to get ones panties all up in a wad in a huge rant over the interface of the AppStore is a bit much. Maybe I’m too flexible and too able to learn new things. Hey that’s a good thing for someone of 60 years of age!
True, but only to some extent. Some applications have become App Store exclusives. Namely:
– Pixelmator
– Twitter (know as Tweetie before)
– Coversutra
– Courier
Probably there are more, with more to come I’d expect.
No big deal, but what irritates me is that previous purchases (i.e., before the App Store) do not count and cannot be upgraded through the store. The usual “Check for Updates…” still works, but it remains to be seen how long it will be before the developers will stop supporting non-store applications altogether.
Reece
Edited 2011-01-08 13:33 UTC
The words “just wait” implies that this is something that will happen in the future.
Why do Apple People always sit, coiled to strike?
Perhaps they’re like their leader, feigning friendliness, exuding haughtiness, but with rage and vitriol sitting just beneath the surface.
I’ll wish for Steve Jobs’ good health once he stops being an evil, vindictive, software-patenting bastard.
Hahaha, too true. “Real Soon Now” should be the official motto of Apple advocates.
Remember how PPC was going to allow Apple to oust “wintel” and take the computing world by storm? Then it was the G3… then it was the G4… then it was OS X.
Please go back and re-read my post. It is my prediction, and I never said that the App Store is the only way to install software on a Mac today. Now, however, suppose that Apple does decide to make the App Store the only approved and permissible method of installing software on the Mac?
I suggested some reasons why they might want to do that. Apple (and really, Steve Jobs) are all about control. Everything they do and their rational behind it is about exercising control over their hardware and software, and over their customers. So, eventually extending that control over the Mac line only makes sense.
There is no use correcting some people – I saw what you wrote and I can’t work out why some people to the conclusions that they do. The only way they could come to such conclusions is if they don’t actually read the post but instead scan it, look for keywords and make assumptions about what you’re saying without actually reading what you said in the post.
Regarding iOS and Apple’s relationship with carriers – I think there is a lot more going on behind the scenes than simple Apple deciding not to allow people to install ‘custom applications’ on the devices. One can observe how much other devices are locked down by carriers and come to the conclusion that there were demands placed on Apple and Apple decided to keep the store in house. Remember when the iPhone was launched Apple was in NO position to negotiate and even today they’re still very much at the mercy of the carrier. People may like to think that Apple is the ‘renegade’ who ‘sets the standard’ but they’re always going to be at the mercy of the carriers that are out there. For Apple it is choosing the carrier that sucks the least and so far AT&T at the time were the ones who sucked the least.
I don’t see anytime in the future it becoming bound to Mac’s because it is a completely different kettle of fish when compared to devices such as the iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch. Little is gained locking it down but you’ll probably see Apple move away from shipping physical software in the future, market as a ‘Apple becoming Green’, and the operating system will be the only thing shipped on physical media but even then you might have a downloadable version of Mac OS X in the future that can be loaded onto a thumb drive once the optical drive is removed then used to upgrade the operating system. Apple might have a secretive control freakish persona but I don’t think they’re so stupid as to shoot themselves in the foot.
Edited 2011-01-10 01:17 UTC
Except for the fact that iOS _is_ OSX. So……no, it won’t replace OS X.
Try splitting a curly one next time.
They use the same basic toolkit, and have similar codebases for their kernels.
OOoOOo.
I finally found the perfect description of Apple’s design sense:
Star Trek: TNG meets Fisher Price.
No, thank you.
Fisher Price has the UI market cornered when it comes to the “6yrs and under” category.
Apple has a lot to learn from them including, design cues for preventing users from chewing on their laptops, or swallowing mag-safe connectors; not to mention more exotic tricks like drool resistant touch interfaces…
Edited 2011-01-07 18:54 UTC
Fisher Price is the ONLY brand of toy that a determined 2-year old can’t break within five minutes. Believe me, a lot of thought goes into those things.
I got my first cassette player at the age of 2. It’s a Philips. Still works. I beg to differ.
Also my dad was a carpenter so he brought lots of wood bricks to the day care for people to build whatever off, and I assume bricks of wood is rather hard to break to.
Also I got enough information to look at and avoid toys labeled made in Taiwan and such
Not all small metal cars and such hold well, especially if you step on them, but I assume lots of plastic things work. And I had things like metal tractor and such which although the wheel axle was a little dented or they got sand in their wheels and such they still worked to play with in the sand box. So I don’t see the problem.
Funnily enough i mentioned something similar in another topic on OSNews
http://www.osnews.com/permalink?456317
The App store App is absolutely terrible. I love the idea and i have found so good apps in there like things, pixelmator etc.. (which i already own). I think this is a good way to expose applications to mac users and helps developers who don’t want to setup a payment system + website hosting.
However the actual app is really bad, it really looks like someone opened xcode and just dragged and dropped whilst drunk in the space of 15 seconds. I don’t understand how apple could have let this leave the gates, it’s really unrefined for an apple app. Normally visual inconsistencies don’t bother me, but this is the first app where i actually noticed the traffic lights are not positioned correctly which in turn means the back and forward buttons could not be position correctly (under the traffic lights e.g. finder, safari etc..)
The spacing along the top equally looks awful and i must admit i missed the category buttons on the first load up as they blend in with nothing separating them from the title bar, but everything just looks strangely spaced out again as if a 5 year old was let loose on the UI.
I hope they correct the app store soon as to me it looks rushed and unprofessional.
I think you are quite right about xcode etc. – iTunes for instance is by far the worst app I (have to) use on Windows.
About 3 years ago or so an Apple guy gave a presentation about a music app to my team. Not a great app (I can’t even remember its name now), but …
… the noteworthy bit of the presentation was him cheekily admitting in a moment of truth: “Well actually Apple doesn’t care which software you use as long as you buy our hardware”
Take this as Apple’s prime goal and many decisions make perfect sense – and to be honest I think it’s a valid path, every company has limited resources to an extent and has to set priorities and make the best of it.
Edited 2011-01-07 22:32 UTC
“I don’t understand how apple could have let this leave the gates, it’s really unrefined for an apple app.”
Apple does not care about the desktop anymore, simple as that.
iBooks was the first warning sign. Wooden buttons! The interface resembles an Windows 3.11 encyclopedia app for kids.
Not to mention how OSX used to have Aqua and Brushed Metal visual styles, which behaved slightly differently. Even Apple was confused and some apps (e.g. Finder) switched from one style to another.
My guess is that Apple has more designers than it actually needs and these awful interfaces are accepted to keep designers busy or as a result of internal political battles. Think different.
there was a band named “Simply Red”, and they had a song “Money’s too tight to mention” which i used to love. What does this have to do with the article, you might ask, and rightfully so. Well, I tend to think that Apple has limited resources (mostly due to their closed nature) and has a tendency to focus them on the most profitable product. On top of that, they (Apple) do not care if they leave their customers hanging. In short, in order to keep profit margins healthy and secrets secretive, Apple will not invest in increasing their resources and will focus on what brings the most money in. Currently that is not Mac OS X.
Consistency is good to have, but some proyects are just to obsessed with it, at the end they look boring.
Edited 2011-01-07 19:12 UTC
Then again some projects just end-up looking like they chose random myspace pages for their UI.
Consistency is important to me, and I think it can be maintained without making things boring. If consistency were the primary goal, every app would look the same, regardless (think how hideous Windows apps would be if they were consistent!). We do, however, need things to have similar visual cues, and an overall consistent behavior of buttons that look, or look like they should look, the same. Things like the placement of window management buttons, titles and so forth should be kept consistent, not to say “forever unchanging”, but if Apple wants to change it, their underlying UI tools should be able to uniformly change every app at once, assuming they used Apple’s tools to do it. Buttons, also, are premade in UI toolkits for a reason. Morgan points out that some buttons darken, as expected, while others lighten, which I find to be wierd. The pointless eye candy stacking animation is misleading too. If you’ve seen the dodge effect in Compiz, that would probably be a better way of doing it; slide the tab out and over the top, so you can see it’s the one coming forward. I think, for novices, Compiz’s dodge is the simplest and best thing ever. Teaching people how to use computers on Windows often gets stupid questions like “where did my window go?” when they focus on another, dodge clearly shows that one comes forward, and the others go back.
I actually think the Tweetie screenshot in Gruber’s post, despite being the same but a little bit uglier, is a better design overall. I feel like the twitter app needs a great big “under construction” sign on it. I’m all for making things differently so they make more sense, and relaxing HIG, but not throwing HIG out the window. If you want to make apps like that, then they should behave fundamentally differently, maybe like widgets.
On OSX, you really have to go to lengths to make an such an inconsistent UI.
Normally, you just open up Interface Builder, create a window, some controls, and a few views. The view are like the editor windows in a word processor, in that they draw custom content.
All of the title bars, widgets, controls, etc… are normally standard Cocoa widgets.
To hack the title bar, like in app store, you really have to do some series overriding of standard behavior. This is a lot of effort. I don’t know why they went to such trouble when the app store could have be such a simple and consistent UI, if they would have just left the standard widgets alone.
At least app store is not as bad as office on windows. Not sure if I’m in the minority, but the UI on MS office Mac 2011 is actually pretty nice, and dare I say consistent.
Office on Windows is an interesting case. The ribbon in and of itself is absolute bliss – however, they also felt the need to fcuk up the titlebar, which totally wasn’t necessary.
I concur to an extent.
I certainly would not go so far as ribbon is bliss, its not bad though. I can’t stand the menus / titlebars, just bizarre.
With the little msoffice use I’ve done, I have to say ribbon makes it much easier to use than, say, openoffice. How hard can it be to overhaul OOo interface to use ribbon anyway? It should be a trivial rearrangement…
Err…With the apparent horrible code base and custom toolkit in OO it probably isn’t trivial to do anything…
Edited 2011-01-07 22:01 UTC
The ribbon is a nightmare: completely ad hoc, almost deliberately misaligned packing of widgets and huge vertical space wastage in the age of widescreen monitors. The humble toolbar certainly wasn’t cutting it since… 1997 but they really went about solving that problem in an arse-backwards and anachronistic manner.
KOffice, on the other hand – for once, the over-engineered mess that is KDE paid off. If it weren’t for stability issues and feature incompleteness, it’d be the perfect office suite. Docking toolbars-come-plasmids to the side of the window works like a dream.
Wrong. Wrong, and wrong:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jensenh/archive/2008/03/12/the-story-of-the…
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jensenh/archive/2006/04/17/577485.aspx
Edumacate yourself. The ribbon is a statistical based improvement that take no extra screen estate.
What a coincidence, I’m a fusion-powered, mathematically sound, science-based commenting machine, forged from pie charts!
I never said otherwise; I said they wasted huge amounts of vertical space, which they have. You haven’t contradicted me. How they’ve managed to rationalise it internally isn’t relevant when you’re trying to edit a portrait document on a netbook, lower-end notebook, 720p HDTV, etc and you either have to scroll, or continually collapse and expand the ribbon, just to see an entire paragraph of text, or review an entire page, at a reasonable size. It’s broken and while the Office devs were busy engaging in self-congratulatory fellatio over their novel UI and pissing off the Windows devs, the KOffice guys bested them on the UI front.
Compared to the menu-driven interface, it uses the exact same amount of space.
We’ve been over this:
But since you’re here:
Really? Have you used Win7 recently?
http://ompldr.org/vNnduZA/consistency.jpg
And that’s just the stuff that comes with the OS (that I haven’t removed). Imagine if I had Defender, WMP, WLM and Office – all MS products – sitting there as well. They haven’t clean up their act at all; they’re still as lazy and flippant as they’ve always been.
Edited 2011-01-09 03:56 UTC
Compared to the menu-driven interface, it uses the exact same amount of space.
Try checking the link Kroc provided, but look at the screenshots instead of the misleading text. Ribbons do beyond any doubt, and easily proven use more space (you can argue wether this is good trade-off or not, but not argue the facts). The misleading point in Kroc’s link is made by the fact that Office 2007 has slightly more space available for content after removing additional unrelated widgets such as the horizontal scrollbar and the lineal/tab bar.
Edited 2011-01-09 23:12 UTC
Edit: Double comment, collapsing with other.
Edited 2011-01-09 23:09 UTC
Also, at least app store, nor just about anything else (except perhaps matlab from as UI perspective) is as bad as QT applications on OSX. Now there is an absolute and total disaster. QT apps are so freaking bad on OSX that the only way I uses them is either on one of my LInux boxes, or Linux running inside Parallels.
Yeh, QT apps on OSX are pretty freaking bad. QT’s OK on Linux (I still prefer Gnome), but yeh, you think Java (swing) or TkInter apps are bad, you havn’t seen anything till you’ve tried a QT app on OSX.
“Apple taught us not to try and cram a traditional desktop interface onto a mobile device, yet now, it seems as if they are trying to cram a mobile interface onto a desktop. How delightfully ironic.”
A Big Ball will never fit in a small hole, but other way around will work! it’s called “lowest common denominator”
I can teach a Seer braille, but you can’t teach a Blind the normal Type!
so in my opinion your statement is not ironic!
I really dislike the UI of android. All the random widgets people slap all over their home screens that don’t match at all.. ugh. Most android devices I see look like myspace user pages.
It’s funny but I didn’t notice any of these little nitpicks about the App store app. But now that you mentioned it, I find that it is indeed a mess.
But comparing it to Microsoft cleaning up Vista and refining the UI with Windows 7 is just plain wrong, at least in my book.
Microsofts major thing for Windows 7 was to remove all the farging toolbar icons and replace it with plain text labels. UGLY. They then did the same thing with the Windows Live tools like Live mail, etc to remove all the pretty icons and replace it with plain text. UGLY! Well apparently MS has changed their minds because the new 2011 Live tools all have icons back on the toolbar.
So even MS can’t figure out what it wants to do either. And yes I much prefer the icons and toolbar of Vista over Windows 7.
Agreed.
Facepalm. That’s called a usability improvement. You know, so you don’t have to memorise what all those obscure icons represent, or mouse over them and hope that tooltips feel like working today (something MS and GTK+ devs never seem to be able to fix).
Again, facepalm. The problem wit apps like Live Messenger is not that they removed all the icons; it’s that they removed all the widget borders and to add torture to torment, went about deliberately misaligning every widget, causing users’ brains to segfault by destroying the visual relationship hints between widgets and actively obfuscating them.
Beyond mind-boggling inconsistency, aesthetics is the least of MS’ design woes.
Do you think these UI changes seen in the app store are changes that are being implemented into the upcoming Lion? I’m not sure what Lion screenshots I’ve seen around are mock-ups or are legit, but I wonder if some of the elements are a preview of what is to come. But I wouldn’t be surprised either if it’s just inconsistency.
Yes, you are now officially old. How’s your shoulder feeling – a little tight, you say? That’s okay, a little Aspercreme will loosen that up.
By the way, Dvorak says hello, welcome to the club.
not to explode on monday when i’ll be listening how apple invented downloading applications from single source. same thing was about mobile store. this time i’ll be prepared so i don’t kill my foolish friend who is avid fanboy and always spews non-sense. i’m just waiting to hear how apple invented warn water and sliced bread. osnews might have just saved his life. one of these days impulse might just take over my pacifism. someone so foolish and sheep like should be put down out of pitty
the fact it uses different interface is old news. every release made some minor/major changes in new apps but leaving some old ones as they were. apple ate the consistency when they launched second release of OSX.
Edited 2011-01-07 21:18 UTC
Speaking of design, why all of a sudden OSnews front page layout looks completely broken?
We’re facing a bug. No idea what it is – I don’t do the webdesign. We’re looking into it, and sorry for the inconvenience :/.
Oh, someone else saw that too?
its a firefox rendering bug, best as I can make out. Doens’t happen in other browsers. If you view source, you can see the problem pretty quickly.
Sorry don’t know how to do html on osnews, but that is supposed to be an ending of an a tag above.
When viewing the source, you notice that the html comments are highlighted green. The highlighting seems to end at the end of my quote up above. Somehow it notices the — from the “Sorry — YAAWWNNN” part and the closing bracket from the a tag and thinks thats the end of the comment.
Doesn’t happen in other browsers like chrome.
For historical record keeping purposes, it “works” now because the comment that triggered the bug is no longer a “top Comment”, So its not in the page and not triggering the odd firefox bug. So if Osnews “web editors” can’t find the problem anymore, that’s why.
In the future you can do one of two things to prevent this issue:
1) Remove double hyphens from comments displayed in the top comment section.
2) Remove the output of the top comments. Why are they there, but commented out? Tis Ghetto.
I wasn’t quite that offended with the app store UI, but I was somewhat taken aback by the tabs that don’t look like tabs. Didn’t notice the rest.
However, this is where you go off the rails:
The iPhone UI is actually quite amazingly consistent. Yes, some app developers are idiots and try to make their app stand out with bizarre behaviour, but for the most part the standard widgets are used everywhere and they always work the same way. The only thing most apps do is customize the colours, which isn’t the end of the world. As a developer on iOS, it is dead simple to make consistent user interfaces and add consistent, helpful animations for transitions. You can’t complain that some of the 400,000 apps out there spend a bunch of time to break that consistency.
Work the same way yes. But they almost never look the same way when they are used – font and icon sizing, spacing, layout arrangements, everything is all over the map. And that is just when the built in UI elements are actually used, more often than not they are not used at all and developers roll their own controls. And honestly the “idiots” that do “bizarre” behavior are for the most part the ones that get boatloads of sales (when their bizarre design is actually good).
I’m not at all saying this is bad – I like that so much freedom is being taken in design. I just can’t at all see how you view this as consistent relative to say Gnome, where virtually every application lays out things in an almost identical manner. I think Gnome is boring frankly – but it’s applications are certainly consistent. iOS, not so much…
Well no. It isn’t. If you use the standard components, which most apps do, then everything is the same. Of course, app developers can change fonts and colours and if they work really hard, they can move things around. But being an app developer, I know that it is a hell of a lot more work to be inconsistent. You can fault the app developers for not sticking to the standards, but the standards exist and are very clear about how things should look and go into great detail about things like alignment and spacing of elements.
Well most of the top apps are games. Of course those aren’t consistent. Games have never been, and I don’t see a reason for them to be since their UI is usually minimal around the game itself.
The other top apps are pretty consistent (aside from colour, I don’t think that’s really important to use). Navigation bar on top, possibly a toolbar at the bottom, and most of the time a table view in the middle. Standard widgets are widely used, I’ve never seen anyone reimplement them completely custom.
Well the colours are certainly more consistent in Gnome or most other desktop OSes. However, I think it is less important in a mobile context because you only have one window open at a time. On the desktop with many windows, having each be a different colour would be a horrible clashing mess. As for consistent behaviour, I think it’s about the same, with the edge going to Gnome because they police that far more.
I think Gnome is boring frankly – but it’s applications are certainly consistent. iOS, not so much… [/q]
I was not trying to imply that iOS as a platform was bad in any way when it comes to giving you the tools to do “consistent” UIs. I agree the tools are there, and if you do things the “normal” way you get very consistent look and feel.
My point is unlike many other platforms, it is incredibly easy to override the default drawing behavior of virtually everthing – including the standard UI widgets – and devlopers do routinely modifying how they are drawn, to the point where I honestly rarely see a major application with a “generic” style for built in widgets.
The table view element for example: developers routinely adjust height, size, spacing, icon layout (left, right, top), colors, group headers (some have icons, some don’t, different colors), etc.
I’m not saying this is bad – but it is certainly not consistent in the same sense as in say Gnome, where developers rarely if ever deviate from the default styles for any built in widgets.
I don’t think it is *so* important to have extreme visual consistency. As long as the controls are easily discernible and with clear functionality, their color or style is ininfluent. Well, maybe it would be nice to maintain consistency across the whole application 🙂
That said, the App Store app and the Twitter client are obvious examples of how things should *not* be done.
Consistency within the UI of the OS is one thing: Apple and Microsoft both seem to do some dunder-headed things in this area that they often deserve to be called out on.
But for apps, there is an argument to be made for design freedom. From a developers point of view, “consistency” means “take your styling cues from the OS and try to look and work the same way”.
There were always some developers that just did things their own way, often with terrible results. These were often held up as examples of what not to do. But honestly, their problem in reality was that they were just bad designs. It isn’t always a bad thing to deviate from the OS style guide – if you do something unique, elegant, and easy for users to adapt to it often ends up being an overall win. It is something that separates you from the flock.
iOS apps are a particularly fertile playground for this sort of experimentation, since the built in UI elements are very limited and very boring. With the exception of the springboard, iOS is absolutely bland – most developers do everything they can think of not to look like cookie cutter iOS app. That and being touch based there are a lot of directions you can go, there really isn’t a particular “style” involved in a good design.
My point is simply that I think developers are tired of having to take their queues from Microsoft and Apple for everything, that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Delicious Library is a good example (although I have never used it). Sure, it had some unique features that had nothing to do with the UI, but the primary reason it garnered so much attention was the bookshelf UI paradigm. Granted that is an isolated UI element, and for the most part the application melds nicely with OSX, but it is certainly not “taking queues from the OS”…
Wow, it would be hard to take a quote more out of context then that. The full sentence from the article is is: “Liberals see an app built using nothing other than standard system UI elements as boring, old-fashioned, stodgy.” Using your same technique we could quote him as saying “non-standard custom UI elements as wrong.”
However in the process of his analysis he clearly nailed one thing, which your out-of-context quoting is a perfect example of:
“The problem is that once you see that a certain piece of UI criticism is coming from someone at a distant position from yours on the conservative/liberal design spectrum, there’s a natural tendency to close your mind and discount everything they say.”
So what is consistency? Are we talking about the granular “this is not 4px from the top” stuff, or the more important (from my perspective) “is this in the same general place and does it look fairly similar” stuff?
So lets consider those who are the App Store’s target audience. IMHO it’s aimed squarely at the switchers and those who’ve never really owned a computer – many people on this forum would be totally amazed at just how many people, even young people, don’t own and have never owned a computer! Many of the App Store’s target audience, I dare say most in fact, have arrived at the Mac via an iDevice. So they’re familiar with the iOS UI and if they were a switcher they’d be familiar with iTunes.
So lets look at the layout of the App store compared to what that target audience is going to be familiar with. Window control widgets top left – check. Search box top right – check. Back and forward buttons, arrows that point left and right somewhere in the top left – check. Some form of category menu along the top – check. Quick links top of the right menu – check. Big ugly scroller advertising new junk at the top – check. Section headings with a clickable “See all” link – check. Top paid, top grossing, top free sections in right menu – check. The list goes on.
Are there some low level inconsistencies in the design. A site impaired individual on a hurtling equine can see there are, even between this and the iOS App store. One that pisses me more than anything is the lack of breadcrumbs on the product detail page – but then that’s a concept that comes from web sites and this isn’t a web site is it?
But does that impact the target audience for this product, who would see this as being almost identical to use to the iOS App Store? Not in the slightest.
And as has been pointed out here by numerous others both of the major commercial OS players have significant issues performing well in the micro detail department when it comes to UI consistency – hell I could whack Windows 7 up BOTH sides of the head with a baseball bat over some of the crap in there – and supposedly they spent a lot of time “fixing” it.
The reality is that no matter what Apple did with this App Store there are certain people who were going to absolutely hate it, for all sorts of reasons. For those of us who use our computers as a tool of the trade, for a bit of entertainment and to stay in touch with family and friends it really doesn’t matter. I opened it, looked through what was one there, thought it was neat the it recognised that I already had some of the apps installed, swore about there being no breadcrumbs, decided there was nothing I wanted or needed, then went back to doing what I do with my computer for most of the day, working. Maybe some people just have too much free time on their hands…
Thom you old man, how a nice tall glass of hatorade!
No, but in all seriousness, stuff like this is the reason I ditched Mac’s about a year ago. It just feels like they are shifting way too much towards their i* line of stuff and away from Macs.
Doesn’t it seem funny how Apple is getting messier and moving a mobile OS onto x86 while MS is getting much more organized and now moving their desktop-class OS onto embedded hardware
What wonderfully bizarre times we live in
Edited 2011-01-08 01:00 UTC
I find this article a bit ridiculous. Apple made good on their promise to have the app store open in three months and that they did.
They will eventually improve the UI over time, obviously anything new will have a few problems to work out. Especially since there was a time factor involved.
With over 1 million downloads in the first 24 hours tells me it did not bother most people, as well as my self.
When I first used their app store I never thought to myself, gee, this UI sucks. I thought it simplistic, easy to use and did what it needed to do.
“They will eventually improve the UI over time, obviously anything new will have a few problems to work out. Especially since there was a time factor involved.”
Seriously?
Well, I happen to know that doing anything outside the normal toolkit on a Mac is rather difficult and time consuming so I don’t think that’s what’s going on here. the put a good amount of work into making this app different than the norm. Now we just need to figure out why and if this is a sign of UI design to come from Apple.
Edited 2011-01-08 01:05 UTC
Ah, the old Apple Person “they made the thing! So what if it’s awful? They’ll make it better!”
When Leopard came out, it wiped out the system of one person I knew, and borked a fair amount of data on another’s.
The consensus was that Leopard was beta-at-best on release, but they were still happy with the purchase.
The jist of the conversation, paraphrased, obviously.
“It broke your system, forcing you to re-install”
“yeah, but Time Machine is really good back-up software”
“no, I’m not talking about the data itself. You payed for a product. the product should work properly, or you should get a refund”
“well, I’d have to return it”
“I’m asking you why you’re not angry”
“it’s still got alot of cool features, though I hate <insert 1/2 of said features>”
*thegzeus gives up*
Similar thing when the first iPhone came out.
“It doesn’t _do_ anything, and you can’t install outside applications…”
“The UI is great, and I can browse the web and get my email anywhere!”
“You can do those things on other similar devices”
“but the UI sucks”
“*sigh* ok, so you payed 600usd for something that makes phone calls, browses the web, and lets you manually check your email… because it’s pretty?”
“It’s also an iPod!”
*thegzeus gives up*
Edited 2011-01-08 15:48 UTC
Well, what did you think they should do? Return the computer and use paper & pen? Or did you have a better option for them? Do you consider Windows XP (which was the version available at the time) to be a better, more stable and bug free OS compared to Leopard?
Every major (and minor) piece of software has bugs. If you depend on your computer for your livelihood you learn not to be an early adopter. Wait a few months after a software is released, read reviews etc. and wait until you are confident that you need it and it will serve your purpose.
If not, and you are a computer enthusiast, you live on the bleeding-edge and learn to live with the risks.
They release utterly broken and/or useless products, and Apple People rave about them.
What I’d have them do is figure out what that itchy thing over their eyes is, and remove it.
I’d have them acknowledge that there are problems, and react accordingly.
I’d have them be rational.
The thing is, people join cults because they want something to believe in unconditionally, and they react viciously when they feel those beliefs are threatened.
Will there always be early adopters? Yes.
Do these early adopters have to adopt the very earliest if it’s utterly broken? No.
Apple has no incentive to improve their practices if their core base doesn’t want them to do so.
Thus, Apple will never will never truly improve their practices.
So apparently it is Apple’s fault that your friend is a knuckle dragging moron? amazing how all these came down to fuckwitts installing third party hackware that ended up borking the operating system that was installed on top of it. Were there issues when Leopard came out? sure, just as there was with Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7 but unlike those operating systems I wasn’t forced to pay upwards of NZ$500 for a retail version of Windows nor was I told I had to wait up to 12 months for a service pack to correct some bugs where Apple releases updates to their operating system within months of it being released. Bash Apple all you want but it says more about yourself than contributing anything worthwhile to the discussion.
Talking about UI without any screenshots at all? And Is this an article or just a rant or a troll? And having read through comments I felt like being in a Windows forum. Nothing can be perfect nor can be great from the beginning. period. And I had absolutely no problem at all using App Store. Consistency? Do you mean a pixel-by-pixel consistency? That isn’t good. Only over all consistency which does not interfere with workflow is enough. This article is really depressing and these kind of articles make the site over all quality lower and make me not to come to the site as often as I have used to..
Is every Apple article here have to be negative?
That depends on Apple
The 2+ decade long GUI recommendations documents that evolved slowly on real CHI studies that Apple (granted at times slowly) used to form its GUI guideline documents was at times conservative and served many well. Stanards, things that matter to folks, with meaning and didn’t stall or evolve too fast were expected. Apple years ago with the consumerism model of iPlop/Pod/Crap changed this and forgot where it came from, got greedy, became complacent and didn’t really care a crap about the user experience any more. That is where Apple is today, and where Micro$haft was and maybe is (by playing catchup) today as well.
These and other conditions in the markets (linux sucks plain and simple, I don’t care how hard you try to make a very old and ugly core/OS usable) demand that I don’t recommend computer tech devices (phone, tablets, PCs, otherwise) to anyone. These devices don’t liberate, they enslave folks via the GUI and feature-dumb-downness.
“Now that Apple seems to have abandoned this mantra, Gruber follows, using increasingly silly reasons to justify this shift.”
Is the last ‘f’ meaningful ?
Kochise
I am telling you the emperor’s new clothes may have existed in the birdhouse Macs, but less gullible people have know the emperor has been a nudist for over a decade.
In my subjective opinion KDE is the current king of usability. Not perfect, but consistent, clear and easily customisable, so you are never stuck with some artsy moron’s form-over-function UI component appearance.
Otherwise all we would have are paltry, horrid apps like Lotus Notes.
Yeah, why not. Let’s talk about the weather when there’s an elephant in the room.
I don’t give much about the interface (in fact: it is consistent with the other Apple ‘Store’ experiences, just ten times as fast).
I ask: Where are we heading? Do we really want one big american corporation to know, and to control, the purchases and downloads we do? Do we have enough reasons to trust Apple?
Interface design at Apple is obviously no longer driven by designers, instead it’s controlled by “artists”; AKA the people who know how to make pretty pictures but are utterly clueless when it comes to design, usability, etc.
Really, why is anyone surprised? Apple elevates “form over function” almost to the level of corporate philosophy; this is a company that his repeatedly prioritized aesthetics ahead of adequate cooling and that actually pays people to create 512px version of icons that will never be viewed at even a 4th of that size.
I get that feeling with Mac OS X that there has been a tug of war between two factions in the Mac OS X development team with an attempt to compromise being a system that looks pretty but lacks the consistency that Mac OS X has been known for – when it comes to ‘look and feel’.
Microsoft is no better in those regards where you have ever control panel item when loaded doing their ‘own thing’ – each bundled application with Windows using a different widget kit, look and feel. Completely disjointed and as though developers threw shit against the wall with what stuck being used as their muse for UI development.
What I think is laughable is when Windows advocates bash Linux on the desktop claiming it is an ‘inconsistent mess’ and yet casual use of GNOME or KDE shows a greater care to a consistent user experience and integration than what one observes with Windows.
‘Form over function” – what examples do you have beside a few ‘dim bulbs’ putting their computer in a poorly ventilated room that is incredibly hot and wondering why things go haywire or them whining about the ‘fans starting up’ then installing a widget to slow the fans down but then whining that their computer over heats and shuts down? I’ve had this iMac for almost 2 and a bit years and never saw an example of ‘form over function’, I’ve had my MacBook Pro for almost a year and again I’ve never seen an example of ‘form over function’.
Yes, I don’t beat the living crap out of my computers, throw them around the room, bash them up when they’re in a laptop bag but I would have thought such ‘common sense’ behaviour would be normal amongst those who actually want their property to last a long time.
Edited 2011-01-10 00:21 UTC
And laff and laff. Most of the time I use it from the shell, The Linux interface on KDE and Gnome is frequently inconsistent, and often ugly or weird, To me the app store is honestly ugly to the point of invisible. I have to look away from the interface. I am not even gonna open it unless I need to, and this is simplistic. I am certain that was not the goal. I do not think that Apple was shooting for an ‘uncanny valley’ of GUI control. I have a lot of software on my Mac that is from ISVs. Their GUIs are also freq. strange I dont see the consistency that I was subtle(and enforced back in the day). – I remember the skinning phase in the mac from let’s say system 7.5 on up. I used to Love Kaleidoscope and Resedit and others. These days I see too much customization as too much time to waste on my hands.
Now it is easy to talk about the toolbar in XCode/Interface builder but if that is the case then why not open that App Bundle up and see what the UI element is and what some KVO-pairs in the default.plist are. This is generally gonna reliable. There is a plist editor a command line tool. I know that I wont, because I don’t care. I am not planning on opening the app and staring down my bellybutton. And making a functioning toolbar in an app is difficult, compounded by the certainty that Apple designers are using much newer versions of XCode and MacOS X
I was insulted that Thom or who ever wrote this never mentioned Linux in brief glance that I had on this article. I mean Linux has been ahead for years in this, showing how Awesome it is. Most Linux software has had inconsistenced UI for years, that’s the Awesome Power of Open Source! I think this surely shows what copycats Microsoft and Apple truly are, all innovation has always came from Fabolous Open Source community.
Actually, the only thing that ‘Linux’ has is a console and third-party applications.
It’s up to distributions or the individual to choose what UI style they want.
KDE is pretty good at consistency, especially as KDE4 moves forward.
GNOME _tries_ for it, but seems to be under the impression that anything that isn’t the same as something else is to be removed, rather than changed…
As a side-note, your diction and spelling are atrocious.