A retrospective look at Mac OS X Snow Leopard - Addendum

February 22, 2021
by Riccardo Mori
Software

After reacquainting myself with Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard over the past two weeks and collecting a series of notes and observations about its user interface, I assembled everything in the article I published a few days ago. It was well-received and I want to thank everyone offering praise and feedback.

I’m glad it was clear from the start that it wasn’t my intention to write an exhaustive overview of Snow Leopard and the user interface degradation I’ve witnessed in subsequent Mac OS releases. I wanted to provide enough examples of user interface details to prove my point. And while I haven’t received many particular requests in the form of, You didn’t talk about [feature], you should add that example, when I returned to Snow Leopard on my 2009 MacBook Pro, I realised there were still a couple of things I had left out that were worth mentioning. Rather than adding them to that already long overview, I’ve decided to publish this addendum.

User interface

Menu transparency

In my previous piece, I talked about how Snow Leopard treated menu bar transparency (or rather translucency), and how I consider it a better, more user-friendly implementation than the one we now see in Mac OS Big Sur.

What I forgot to mention, however, is the way menu transparency is handled in both Mac OS versions. In both systems, when we pull down a menu from the menu bar, the menu background isn’t matte, but has a degree of transparency that lets you vaguely see what’s behind the menus (a portion of the desktop wallpaper, another window, etc.). On paper, you’d think that this effect may appear similar in Snow Leopard and Big Sur, but when you look at the implementation, things couldn’t be more different.

Here’s Snow Leopard:

The effect doesn’t really change from an image to another, but I wanted to show it both with a black & white and a colour desktop wallpaper as background.

Here’s Big Sur:

While the effect in Big Sur isn’t completely terrible, judging by the feedback I’ve received since I started publishing my Big Sur logbook, many people find the contrast between the menu text and the menu background to be rather poor, especially for inactive menu commands, so they usually enable either Increase contrast or Reduce transparency in System Preferences → Accessibility → Display as a workaround.

Snow Leopard doesn’t have a Reduce transparency option in the Seeing tab of System Preferences → Universal Access. There’s just an Enhance contrast slider you can move to increase the contrast of the whole interface and reduce the menu transparency in the process. But as you can see above, menus in Snow Leopard are already more contrasty than in Big Sur, even with their default transparency. If I had to use more descriptive terms to differentiate these two types of menu transparency, I’d say that in Snow Leopard the effect resembles flat, thin paper, while in Big Sur is more like frosted glass.

Personally, I find the effect in Big Sur unnecessarily tridimensional and I’m slightly bothered by the fact that the menu is not attached to the menu bar (there’s a 2‑pixel gap). But I’m really nitpicking here.

Exposé and Spaces

Snow Leopard is the last Mac OS version to feature the old approach to window management and virtual workspaces before it was rethought and its name changed in Mission Control. Exposé was originally introduced in 2003 with Mac OS X 10.3 Panther, while Spaces was introduced in 2007 with Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. I think Snow Leopard was perhaps the best version to integrate these functionalities.

From a UI standpoint, judging which is the better approach between Exposé & Spaces versus Mission Control is difficult. It’s mostly a matter of spatial arrangement, and things become quickly subjective here.

Let’s start by examining things in Snow Leopard; here’s the Exposé & Spaces preference pane:

And here’s the Mission Control preference pane in Big Sur:

There is a general overlapping of features. The main difference between the two models, conceptually, is that in Mission Control there is one shortcut to both show All [open] Windows and all the virtual workspaces (desktops); while in Exposé & Spaces, as the name itself suggests, the two things are accessed separately — one shortcut to show all Spaces (F8), one to show all open windows (F9). [In this section I’m going to refer to the default Fn-key shortcuts for practical reasons.]

Here’s what happens when you invoke Spaces in Snow Leopard:

 

And here’s what happens when you invoke Mission Control in Big Sur:

Details worth mentioning:

  • As you know, that is not exactly what happens when you enter Mission Control: at first you only see all the open windows of the applications in the desktop you’re currently in. To also show an overview of all the other desktops and all applications running in fullscreen mode — as in the above image — you’ll have to move the mouse towards the top of the screen.
  • Once you’re in this view in Mission Control, there’s not much you can do: you can access a specific window in the current desktop, switch to another desktop, move an app window to another desktop, or add/delete other desktops.
  • Note also that if an application has multiple windows, these will appear as a group. So, in a way, your bird’s eye view on the whole situation is a bit limited: you can’t see at a glance the contents of all windows because they’re grouped per app, and you also can’t see much of what’s happening in other desktops, because the thumbnails aren’t big enough.

Over on Snow Leopard, things are more fine-grained. Since Exposé and Spaces have separate controls, you can:

  • See all open windows in the current space.
  • Have a clearer view of apps and windows opened in other spaces (see above).
  • See all open windows in all spaces at a glance if you first invoke Spaces (F8) and then Exposé (F9). See the image below:

With the Spaces + Exposé view combined, you have the possibility of jumping directly to a specific window in any of the spaces. To achieve the same result in Mission Control you have to:

  • Invoke Mission Control (F9)
  • Move the mouse to show all desktops
  • Click on the desktop where the target window is located (or you think is located, since you can’t really see all open windows)
  • Once you’re in the other desktop, if you don’t see the window immediately, you have to invoke Mission Control again.

It’s clunkier, isn’t it? In Snow Leopard you hit two keys and you click once on the window you’re after, because you clearly see everything ‘from above’ in greater detail.

[Update — Eric on Twitter writes: “Quick tip about Mission Control — hold down Option when clicking on a space, you don’t zoom in to the space but still switch to it, so you can still pick a window without having to go back to MC (or pick a different space).” I admit I had forgotten about this shortcut. It certainly makes things easier in Mission Control, but the execution is still clunkier than Spaces on Snow Leopard.]

Oh, and another thing. In Snow Leopard’s Spaces preference pane, if you enable the option to Show Spaces in menu bar, you’ll always know which space you’re in thanks to this icon:

And by clicking on it, its menu will allow you to select any other space (though using Ctrl‑1, Ctrl‑2, Ctrl‑3, etc. is faster).

Personally, I have no problems navigating Mission Control: after years of muscle memory, and the fact that on my iMac 4K running Mac OS High Sierra Mission Control still shows all app windows without grouping them per app, I can move between app windows and workspaces rather quickly. Yet I have to point out that the Exposé & Spaces implementation in Snow Leopard is better designed and more versatile.

Labels vs Tags

Tags in the Finder were introduced with Mac OS X 10.9 Mavericks and replaced the previous Labels functionality. Or rather, they expanded the Labels functionality. Before Mavericks, Labels in Mac OS X used to work in a simple way, virtually unchanged since the classic Mac OS: you were given seven colour-coded labels (Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Purple, Grey), and you could use them as-is, i.e., by leaving Red, Orange, Yellow, etc. as label names; or change their names and call, for example, the Red label “Important”, the Blue label “Work”, and so on. This designation was simply to give each colour a name that was meaningful to you.

But you could only assign one label to an item, because the label’s colour was the predominant part, not the name. You could have a folder full of important documents, and if you used Red to indicate something “Important”, you could assign the Red label to that folder. But if you wanted to use labels to indicate that the contents of such folder were “Important” (Red) and from “Work” (Blue), you couldn’t assign both labels to it.

It’s safe to deduce that the reasoning that went into the execution of the Tags functionality in Mavericks was to overcome this hurdle and make things easier. With tags, you’re still limited to the same seven colours, but since these are tags and not just labels, the tag name is predominant, not the colour. In fact, with this approach, you can create all the tags you want and then assign a colour to them, if you want. But they can be colourless, or you can have different tags with the same colour. This, among other things, allows you to have an item with multiple colour-coded tags. Using the same example as above, you can indeed have a folder with the “Important” (Red) and “Work” (Blue) tags, along with many other tags of your choosing.

This implementation also allows for more fine-grained Spotlight searches. While with labels you could search all items marked with a specific label colour, with tags you can search for any tag by name.

In practical terms, if the Labels approach was perhaps too simple, the Tags approach is certainly more complicated. From a merely visual standpoint, labels are more effective. Yes, you can only assign one colour to an item, but when you do, the whole item’s name is highlighted, and it definitely stands out:

With Tags, since an item can have more than one colour-coded tag, its name won’t be highlighted — a coloured dot will appear by its side:

And it doesn’t stand out in the same way. You can find a few more examples in my brief piece Labels vs Tags, written in October 2013.

In a nutshell: Tags are more versatile than Labels; Labels are more effective than Tags in how they behave visually.

Pedantic interpolation on Tags’ behaviour in a multilingual setup

There’s an irritating side-effect of how tags and colours work, as opposed to the old Labels model, but you’ll only see it if you, like me, need to occasionally switch from one system language to another. Since with Tags, names are more important than colours, when you change system language the seven default coloured tags (Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Purple, Grey) will be localised in the other language. But when you revert to your preferred language, you’ll see that those localised tags have remained along with the original seven. That’s because the system thinks that they’re two distinct sets of tags, not the same set with names changing according to the language.

So, if you switch from English to Italian as system language, the green tag with the name “Green” will become a green tag with the name “Verde” (Italian for ‘green’); but when you revert back to English you’ll find yourself with two green tags, one named “Green”, the other “Verde”. Same for all the other six colours:

This creates unnecessary confusion, and not just because you now have seven additional tags you didn’t want. Suppose you typically use tags as you once used labels, and you don’t assign a specific name to a tag but you just leave its colour’s name as-is (e.g. “Green” for the green tag). If you have English as the default system language, and assign the green “Green” tag to a bunch of folders, when you switch to Italian, all those folders will still have a green tag with the “Green” name, but if you find another item you want to tag as “Green”, after selecting the green dot from the Finder’s File menu as a quick way to assign the green tag, you’ll find yourself with an item that has a green dot but the name “Verde”, because now the system language is Italian and the default green tag is called “Verde”. So you’ll end up with items which indeed have the same tag colour, but different tag names.

Yes, it is as confusing as it sounds.

Conversely in Snow Leopard, with the simpler Labels model, if you don’t alter the default label names (Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Purple, Grey) and use them as-is, when you switch to another language their names will be translated into that language, but when you revert to English, they’ll revert to English as well:

 

Left: System language is Italian. Right: System language is English. The “Screenshots” folder retains its green label and the colour name is automatically localised.

My apologies for this pedantic excursion. I’m aware that the confusion generated by using Tags in a multi-language setup is something that may be annoying for only a subset of users, but it is nonetheless yet another example of something that is implemented without taking into account other scenarios that may differ from the default. And of course this has nothing to do with Big Sur, as the change from Labels to Tags happened way before.

Applications

iTunes

Some people wrote me asking why there was no mention of iTunes in my previous article. On the one hand, speaking about the user interface of iTunes is probably enough material to write a small book, especially considering how, over its long history, it has often eschewed system-wide UI conventions in a few places of its interface. On the other hand, the last iTunes version supported by Snow Leopard is 11.4, and by that version its user interface was already deteriorating. So while I still think that iTunes, in general, is a better application than the current Music + Podcasts + TV apps, I didn’t feel that version 11.4 under Snow Leopard was a particularly good example of iTunes user interface.

iTunes 11.4 under Snow Leopard. Nothing to write home about, UI-wise. In a previous version of this article, I wrote that the Column Browser (shown here) was a feature “sorely missing from the current Music app”, but Mike kindly corrected me over Twitter — the feature is actually present and accounted for in the Music app. Terrible oversight on my part. 

While many long-time Mac users tend to prefer iTunes when it was just a music player, I consider both iTunes 9.2.1 and 10.6.3 to be two solid versions of the more jack-of-all-trades iTunes that came later.

 

‌iTunes 10.6.3 on my iMac G4 running Mac OS X 10.5.8 Leopard. Buttons that look like buttons; quick access to view options right in the upper area; clean, thoughtful organisation of controls, especially in the status bar at the bottom.

Other odds and ends

Reader Simon H. contacted me via email and, among other things, he writes:

I know it’s not a UI question, but I seem to remember that Snow Leopard had great network stability. What’s been your experience in this regard? Can you confirm?

Quite satisfactory. In more recent versions of Mac OS, all my Macs will sometimes (not frequently, mind you) disconnect from the wireless network or fail to reconnect automatically after exiting sleep. The old 2009 MacBook Pro has been running Mac OS X 10.6.8 for the past two weeks and its connection to the home wireless network has been very stable and reliable.

Another place where I’ve noticed more reliability compared to more recent Mac OS versions is when connected to other Macs for file sharing. Sending or retrieving sizeable files from my two Macs running High Sierra can sometimes fail with what can only be described as a network timeout: the copy process hangs for no apparent reason and never resumes, and I have to abort by relaunching the Finder. With the MacBook Pro running Snow Leopard this has never happened so far, and I’ve shared several large files in the past two weeks between it and my iMac running High Sierra.

In my previous article, I mentioned two very usable browsers you can try to surf the Web under Snow Leopard, as Safari 5.1.10 is too old and unsupported. Jeremy reminded me of TenFourFox, which is more up-to-date. Since TenFourFox is a PowerPC-based browser, at first I thought Jeremy was suggesting running it under Snow Leopard via Rosetta, but it doesn’t work anyway. When I reread his tweet, I realised he said TenFourFox for Snow Leopard. I hadn’t realised there was a separate project for Intel Macs. Anyway, after some Web searching, I found TenFourFox Intel (a.k.a. “TenSixFox”), and also another project, called Arctic-Fox, which seems fairly recent as well. I haven’t had the time to properly test either, unfortunately.

Another thing I wrote in my previous article was about the little-to-no iCloud functionality under Snow Leopard:

Predictably, iCloud (still called MobileMe in Snow Leopard) doesn’t work either. Login fails in the System Preference MobileMe pane and when setting up an iCloud account in Mail. The only way to access iCloud is therefore via the Web.

In the same tweet, Jeremy mentioned that he has been able to set up iCloud email accounts by using the direct incoming/outcoming mail server addresses and configuration. So I went back to Mail and tried again, but even creating a new account and manually entering all the settings found at this Apple Support page, I still was unable to set up an iCloud account. Mail kept telling me that “the icloud.com IMAP server rejected the password” for my account.

And with this, I think it’s all for now. I still welcome feedback via Twitter or email, and may write further updates on this subject in the future.

A retrospective look at Mac OS X Snow Leopard

February 17, 2021
by Riccardo Mori
Software

Introduction

My recent article, The reshaped Mac experience, received a lot of attention judging from the response on Twitter and the WordPress analytics — apparently, among other places, it reached Hacker News and Reddit. Unlike my four-part series ‌Mac OS Catalina: more trouble than it’s worth, however, it didn’t attract any hate mail at all. The sheer majority of feedback I received was very positive, with many many people agreeing with me and my observations. A few — some provocatively, some genuinely curious — asked me something along the lines of, Well, if you dislike the current Big Sur UI and Mac experience, what’s an example of Mac OS UI and experience you DO like?

It’s a more than fair question, and this piece serves as an answer. When I wrote back to those who asked me, I replied Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. It was sort of a gut-reply based largely on fond memories of using that Mac OS version quite extensively.

When I purchased my 15-inch MacBook Pro in July 2009, it came with Mac OS X 10.5.7 (Leopard), but I immediately upgraded to Snow Leopard when it was released a month or so afterwards. As you know (and if you don’t, here’s a refresher), together with Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, Snow Leopard was one of the Mac OS versions with the longest lifespan — almost two years, from August 2009 to July 2011, when the final 10.6.8 v1.1 minor release came out. On my 2009 MacBook Pro, I kept using it until mid-2012, as Mac OS X 10.7 Lion (released in July 2011) didn’t fully convince me at first, so I waited until at least version 10.7.3 before upgrading.

So, I used Snow Leopard on my 2009 MacBook Pro for about three years, and then again on a 2010 Mac mini that a friend gave me to maintain, as a sort of offsite backup. That Mac mini was kept on Mac OS X 10.6.8 for the whole four years it was in my custody (2011–2015) and it was switched off only twice during that period and maybe restarted four or five times in total. It enjoyed an insane uptime and it was a testament to Snow Leopard’s stability.

But back to my ‘gut-reply’, I wanted to be certain that my fond memories of Snow Leopard weren’t just nostalgia. While I am confident when I say that Snow Leopard is the most stable version of Mac OS, I wanted to make sure its user interface was really the good user interface and experience I was remembering. So, after a few frustrating attempts at creating a virtual machine on my current iMac with Mac OS High Sierra, I decided to install Snow Leopard on a USB flash drive, and boot my 2009 MacBook Pro (yes, it’s still alive & kicking) in Snow Leopard from that flash drive.

Installation


Ah, When Mac OS welcomed you after the installation process was complete…

Since the MacBook Pro doesn’t have an optical drive anymore, I had to create a bootable USB flash drive from my original Snow Leopard DVD Installer. The fastest method is to use Disk Utility — rather, an older version of Disk Utility, from a time when this application was really a utility, and you could use the Restore feature reliably to clone the bootable DVD to (in this case) an external volume.

From a bootable USB flash drive to another USB flash drive, installation was relatively fast, about 20–25 minutes. Although I would have preferred an external SSD for the speed, I must say that using Snow Leopard from the flash drive is a breeze nonetheless. The system is responsive and I haven’t noticed any particular lags.

User interface

Now let’s examine just a few aspects of Snow Leopard’s user interface — just like I did for Big Sur in my logbook — and draw comparisons with Big Sur’s interface.

The menu bar

Back in August 2020 when I started testing the first Big Sur beta versions, I wrote in my Big Sur logbook:

In Big Sur, the menu bar by default isn’t solid white, but has a noticeable degree of transparency: it takes the colour of the desktop wallpaper behind it, in an attempt to blend in with the rest of the desktop environment. Some may consider this sleek, but it’s just gimmicky and usability-hostile.

What happens when the desktop wallpaper has darker colours? Well, menu items and menu bar icons become white, of course. The problem is that the wallpaper doesn’t have to be too dark.

In other words, when Big Sur decides that the desktop background image is dark enough, text and icons on the menu bar become white. The problem is that there are cases where the background colour simply isn’t dark enough to warrant a change from black text and icons to white text and icons. Consequently, the contrast is too poor. The only option for better usability is to select Reduce transparency in System Preferences → Accessibility. This brings the menu bar back to a useful state, solid white with black elements.

In Snow Leopard, the menu bar has transparency set to on by default, but it’s definitely more subtle, even with darker desktop backgrounds:

In the top image, menu bar transparency is off; in the bottom image, transparency is on. The difference is almost negligible.

Only with certain background images that contain dark and light areas starkly juxtaposed can menu bar transparency become a bit of an issue under Snow Leopard, but that is partly mitigated by the visible drop shadow beneath the menu bar itself, which helps to make the menu bar stand out more:

Contrast, even in these conditions, tends to be more tolerable than in Big Sur, at least for my eyes. And in any case, in Snow Leopard you can quickly turn off transparency right in System Preferences → Desktop & Screen Saver:

I’ve been talking about ‘transparency’, whereas it’s actually ‘translucency’ — at least in Snow Leopard.

Finder windows

In Snow Leopard, Finder windows are essentially perfect from a user interface standpoint.

When I shared this over Twitter, Mario Guzmán observed that Things are nicely compartmentalized by color. You can distinctly tell each section of the window (even the damn scroll bars)… it’s not just one blob of white with grey symbols.

Exactly this. The window has clearly distinguishable areas: the Title bar (with the semaphore controls at the top left of the window, and the sidebar+toolbar show/hide toggle button at the top right), the Toolbar, the Sidebar (with colourful icons helping you quickly and easily locate items at a glance), the Path bar, the Status bar, and finally the scroll bars which are always visible.

Persistent up/down arrows and scroll bars are the right thing to do, usability-wise, and it is such a user-friendly design. The length of the ‘aqua blue’ bar immediately gives you an idea of how populated that folder you just opened is going to be. Further, if you need to rapidly scroll down, you just grab the bar with the mouse pointer and scroll.

In later Mac OS versions, scroll bars are set by default to appear only based on mouse/trackpad movement, which is a pity; many users probably don’t realise they can have scroll bars appear permanently, so they don’t have to time the mouseover action for the scroll bar to appear and then hope they’ll manage to grab it when they want to quickly scroll down a long list of elements.

I am once again reminded of that infamous quote by Alan Dye (Apple’s VP of Human Interface) from WWDC 2020, speaking of Big Sur’s UI redesign: ‌We’ve reduced visual complexity to keep the focus on users’ content. Buttons and controls appear when you need them, and they recede when you don’t. I still believe this is not a good approach in general, and especially for essential elements like scroll bars, which should always be visible by default, because they are UI elements whose usefulness isn’t limited to when you use them or interact with them — they signal something even when not strictly needed. In the case of the scroll bars it’s a visual estimate of how many elements a folder contains, how long a list of items is, and more importantly your current position when scrolling.

Back to Finder windows, here’s an “Apple’s attention to detail” detail: notice that icon in the bottom left of the window? It is a subtle visual cue that tells you if Finder icons (items) are sorted, unsorted, or simply snapped to a grid. When opening windows from read-only volumes, the icon of a crossed-out pencil appears here, meaning that you can’t modify the enclosed items or write to that volume.


Items are unsorted (Arranged by: None) — No icon in the bottom left corner


Items are sorted (by name, size, kind, etc.)


Items are snapped to grid


Window from a read-only volume

While I don’t find this UI detail to be crucial, it is certainly nice to have, and an example of those little things that contributed to make the Mac’s interface great. As I said above, it reflected a certain attention to detail and overall thoughtfulness I’ve seen progressively fade away in later Mac OS releases.

A look back at a few system apps, with occasional UI comparisons between Snow Leopard and Big Sur

Safari

5.1.10 was the last version of Safari running on Mac OS X 10.6.8. Here are a few things I still prefer over the current Safari:


The blue progress bar


The RSS button (you could read RSS feeds with Safari)

Another detail I very much prefer in the older Safari over more recent versions of Safari is how the plus [+] button near the address bar works. Its placement makes its function rather unequivocal: Add the current page to something. As usual, tooltips are helpful:

But what if I want to add this page to my Reading List? No worries, when you actually press the [+], a thoughtfully-designed sheet comes down, and you can put the current page exactly where you want: in your Reading List, in the Top Sites, or in your Bookmarks.

The other plus button, to open a new browser tab, is placed in such an obvious spot that you know what it does without even waiting for the tooltip to appear:

Now, let’s take a quick look at the UI in Big Sur’s Safari:

At first glance, there’s only one plus button in the app’s chrome. Try to look at this UI with fresh eyes and guess what the [+] button does. Despite its prominence, it just opens a new tab. If you want to add the current page to your Reading List, you have to move the mouse pointer inside the address bar, and at that point a tiny (+) will appear on the left side of the address bar.

But wait, if you want to add that page to your Bookmarks instead? Well, you’ll have to click the Share button in the toolbar, and here you’ll find the option to add the page to your Bookmarks…

Oh look, from here you can also add it to your Reading List. Why exactly can these actions be found under a ‘Share’ menu? Am I sharing this with someone else? It makes no sense, but it’s done this way because that’s how Share sheets work in iOS and iPadOS.

And if you want to add that page to your Top Sites Start Page? Unless I’ve missed something, you can’t do that directly. You can add the page to your Favourites, and then it’ll show in your Start Page.

I think this is enough of an example to show you how clunky and haphazard certain parts of Safari’s UI are under Big Sur.

Mail


Remember when Mail integrated support for RSS feeds? I used to find that useful. I never used Mail as my sole RSS client, of course, but it was great for following selected feeds and keeping an offline archive of all their articles. Even better: a searchable archive of all the articles. Back when Snow Leopard was the newest Mac OS release, I used to have Mac OS X Hints’s RSS feeds in Mail, and searching for specific articles or tips was sometimes quicker than using the website’s Search tool. And when Mac OS X Hints was shut down and maintained only in a read-only form online, having a few years of archived RSS feeds in Mail was certainly handy for searching past hints and tips.

iCal

Let’s draw a brief comparison between iCal in Snow Leopard and Calendar in Big Sur.

The old iCal is yet another example of how the user interface in Snow Leopard was consistent system-wide and throughout the various built-in apps. You have a main app window with clearly distinguishable colour-coded areas, well-placed controls and generally unambiguous icons. Everything you can click on is plainly visible, no discoverability issues. Here are iCal’s Day view and Week view:

If you look at the bottom left corner, when you click the ‘Mini calendar’ icon, only the mini-calendar will show/hide within the sidebar; the sidebar won’t go away.

Now let’s look at the same Day and Week views in Big Sur’s Calendar app:

Calendar looks minimalistic in comparison; maybe some will say it looks prettier, and I may agree in part. But apps should be more than just pretty to look at — they should be functional as well. In Calendar’s Day view, the UI is terse, and the elements appear placed without structure or consistency.

For instance, why does the mini-calendar appear on the right in Day view, but on the left in Week view? It’s as if Calendar isn’t sure whether to have a right sidebar or a left sidebar. And when, in Week view, you click on the ‘Mini calendar’ icon on the top left, the whole sidebar goes away:

Also, every button in iCal has a tooltip (usability wins here), while Calendar’s buttons don’t. And the placement of those icons near the semaphore controls in the top left corner still makes me cringe. Of course, now that in Big Sur the line between Title bar and Toolbar has been blurred, we have cases like Calendar where those controls in the top left of the app window — whose place should be in some sort of toolbar — find themselves in a sort of UI-No-Man’s‑Land. And why does the [+] button get separated when the sidebar appears? For logistic reasons, but not for logic reasons.

And why doesn’t the upper part of the app window have a fixed colour or appearance? In Day view without the sidebar, the top of the window is in a light grey colour, and it’s separated from the rest of the elements much like the Title bar/Toolbar in Big Sur’s Finder windows. But in Week view without the sidebar, the top of the window becomes white and blends with the rest of the app window. When the sidebar is visible, of course, the top of the window changes again, because in Big Sur the sidebar covers the whole left side of a window, including the top left area with the semaphore controls.

System Preferences

From a user interface standpoint, I’ve always liked how the older System Preferences’ main window had the preference panes neatly organised in categories, and while Big Sur’s ‘Show All’ button is not particularly cryptic, I always prefer the clarity of using text in buttons, especially when there’s enough space. I’m annoyed by the current tendency to iconise everything in an app’s interface, especially when the icon that replaces a text label is really not as self-explanatory as the designer thinks.

I also like that in Snow Leopard, the ‘Show All’ button is clearly a button, while in Big Sur, like in many other places of its UI, you realise it’s a button (and not just a decorative icon) only when you hover over it.

This may be more of a personal preference (pardon the pun), but I find the icon design to be more consistent under Snow Leopard than under Big Sur. If you look at the icons of the various preference panes in Big Sur, they appear to have been drawn by different people who never communicated among them during the design phase. They don’t seem to adhere to a unified æsthetic or icon language you find elsewhere in the system. Instead, the icons in Snow Leopard are similar to icons you would find in other application’s toolbars or Preferences windows.

When it comes to individual preference panes, comparisons between Snow Leopard and Big Sur become hard, because over time their features and functionality have changed and expanded. The one pane which has been extremely simplified, however, is the Bluetooth pane. Here’s the main view of such pane in Snow Leopard:

Details worth noticing:

  • Under Snow Leopard you had the option of toggling discoverability without turning off Bluetooth entirely. I suppose this was useful to keep using the Mac with your paired devices without exposing the machine to other Bluetooth devices.
  • For each device, added to the list on the left, you get a detailed view indicating what kind of device it is, which Bluetooth services it provides, and if the device is paired and connected.

This is the main view of the Bluetooth preference pane in Big Sur:

  • The left side of the pane is pretty much a waste of space.
  • In the Devices list, the only information you get is that the devices appearing on top are paired devices, and their current status, which can be Connected or Not connected. That’s it. Granted, for most people that’s probably all they have to know, but a more detailed view (maybe with a Show/Hide toggle) wouldn’t hurt.

As for the Advanced Bluetooth options, I’ll let the images speak for themselves:

Preview

Preview is a strange app for me. In the past I really didn’t use it that much, finding it pretty basic both as an image viewer/editor and a PDF reader. In later iterations, I’ve come to appreciate the added features, especially the Markup Toolbar and the well-designed Signature functionality. It’s very easy to create a signature and manage different signatures in Preview, a reminder that Apple still does something right, UI-wise.

But when we compare how the user interface was organised in Snow Leopard’s Preview, and its treatment in Big Sur, Snow Leopard wins another round. See for example how the sidebar used to work under Snow Leopard:

When the sidebar is visible, first you notice it has the same background colour as all the other sidebars present in the system and applications. Then you find some handy buttons at the bottom: you use them to quickly change the sidebar’s view — you can switch between Contact Sheet view, Thumbnails, Table of Contents, and Annotations.

Here’s Preview in Big Sur:

When the sidebar is visible, there are no visible controls at the bottom. Peculiarly, when you choose View → Show Markup Toolbar, a small toolbar also appears at the bottom of the sidebar, with a fairly cryptic (+) button you really have to click to understand what it does; it shows a menu with two entries: Insert Page from File… and Insert Blank Page:

Okay. Now here’s a usability detail that drives me nuts about the sidebar. There isn’t a simple button to toggle the sidebar on and off. The button is a menu and it shows Hide Sidebar as an option but not as a command or toggle. Same with the application’s View menu. At first I kept clicking on Hide Sidebar in order to make the checkmark go away and therefore show the sidebar. After a few attempts I finally understood that in order to make the sidebar appear, I have to select any other option from that section of the View menu (e.g. Thumbnails, Table of Contents, etc.).

 

Now, I might be slow, or tired, or stressed, and blame the user interface for something I should have realised sooner, something that is more intuitive than I think. But let’s have a look at the same menu in Snow Leopard’s Preview:

First of all, the menu’s hierarchy — while a level deeper than in Big Sur — is also clearer: you want to hide the sidebar? Select View → Sidebar → Hide Sidebar. If you want to change what’s displayed inside the sidebar, you can do so from the same submenu.

But when the sidebar is hidden and you want to show it, here’s how that menu changes:

A‑ha. Now the menu becomes: View → Sidebar → Show Sidebar, and of course the other sidebar view options are greyed out because currently the sidebar is hidden.

Yes, when you get the hang of the View menu in Big Sur’s Preview, it’s fractionally quicker than in Snow Leopard, but how that same menu is organised in Snow Leopard is more logical and user-friendly.

Disk Utility

The difference between the user interface of Disk Utility in Snow Leopard and Disk Utility in Big Sur can be summarised like this: one is functional, the other is pretty.

This is the main Disk Utility window in Snow Leopard:

And this is the main Disk Utility window in Big Sur:

Let’s forget about the quality and reliability of these two iterations (spoiler alert: Snow Leopard wins here, too), and let’s just focus on the user interface.

Like the iCal example seen above, Disk Utility in Snow Leopard is a clearly well-structured and organised application. We have general commands in the main toolbar, and five main sections in the bigger pane, related to the most important operations users may need to perform when managing disks: First Aid, Erase, Partition, RAID, Restore.

When you enter each of these sections, the pane clearly explains what to do and clearly shows what the options are. It’s a sophisticated UI, but well thought-out.

Big Sur’s interface feels like Disk Utility for Dummies: the main toolbar is gone, and those five sections are essentially gone as well. Now we have a unified, simplified toolbar with these buttons: Volume, First Aid, Partition, Erase, Restore, Mount/Unmount, Info. When you click on those entries that took an entire, detailed section in Snow Leopard, you now have a simple modal dialog or panel. Look at the difference between selecting First Aid in Snow Leopard and in Big Sur:


Detailed explanations, clear overview of the available options.


Just a Yes/No prompt. With terrible visual contrast on top of that.

One thing that always bugged me in more recent versions of Disk Utility is that View menu — specifically the option, in that menu, to show/hide the sidebar. Why, why would you want to hide the sidebar in an app like Disk Utility? Its purpose is to show you an overview of all disks detected by the system. You need to see them at all times. Yes, even if it’s just the internal volume — especially in Big Sur where the internal volume is not a monolithic item.

AirPort Utility

As I said on Twitter, I don’t think the current version of AirPort Utility is particularly bad, and I like its graphical view of how the wireless network is organised. But overall the older UI required fewer clicks to access the various options.

Other odds and ends

Browsing the Web

If you want to use Snow Leopard on an older Mac, or you manage to create a Snow Leopard virtual machine on a more recent Mac, you will need a more modern browser if you want to surf the Web with a modicum of security. Safari 5.1.10 is obsolete and incompatible with many popular websites and services like Twitter and YouTube.

Two usable browsers in Snow Leopard are:

You can still do content blocking in Firefox by installing the legacy Ublock Origin extension from here. To install an unsigned extension, you’ll have to access the Configuration file by typing about:config in the address bar, search the xpinstall.signatures.required preference, and change the associated value to false.

Messaging and chat

It’s very limited, at least with first-party apps. Snow Leopard came with iChat, and you should be able to download FaceTime from the Purchased tab of the App Store app if you purchased it back in February 2011 when Apple made it available for $0.99. (FaceTime was included for free with Mac OS X 10.7 Lion and later releases).

Both iChat and FaceTime don’t recognise your login with Apple ID, complaining of server errors, and so forth. You can still use iChat with a Google account, either by adding a ‘Jabber’ or ‘Google Talk’ account in the iChat account wizard. But since FaceTime only works with Apple accounts, in Snow Leopard it’s basically useless.

iCloud

Predictably, iCloud (still called MobileMe in Snow Leopard) doesn’t work either. Login fails in the System Preference MobileMe pane and when setting up an iCloud account in Mail. The only way to access iCloud is therefore via the Web.

The Mac App Store

I want to take this opportunity to complain about a specific aspect of dealing with an older version of Mac OS: installing older versions of third-party apps. Via the Mac App Store it’s not possible unless you find (either in the current catalogue or among your Purchased apps) an application that still has Snow Leopard as minimum requirement, which generally means an application that is still available on the Mac App Store, but no longer updated.

Otherwise, you’re out of luck. Now, if you have an older iOS device — even obsolete devices like the first-generation iPad or the first generations of iPod touch models — when you try to install an app you previously purchased (or, in some cases, even apps that are still currently available), you’re often given the option to download the last compatible version for the (older) iOS release installed on your device. That doesn’t happen on the Mac. You either can install an app, or you can’t, and a dialog box will inform you that the app can’t be installed because a certain newer version of Mac OS is required.

This is especially annoying, considering that a lot of Mac apps still work fine in Snow Leopard when you manage to install an older version. Why not offer a “Download the last compatible version” option on Mac OS too? Kudos to those Mac developers who have always offered their apps both via the App Store and their own websites, and even more kudos to those developers who still make older versions of their Mac apps available for download on their website.

Conclusion

This has been a fun ride, and while my reexamination of certain parts of Snow Leopard’s UI has been far from exhaustive, I hope I’ve offered a decent overview of what I consider the peak of the Mac user interface, and why. I wasn’t misremembering: Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard was truly a solid release, both in terms of user interface design, software quality, and system stability. Three staples of the Mac experience that have all been declining, in various degrees, over the last decade.

One more thing…

People and resources added to my reading list in 2020

February 7, 2021
by Riccardo Mori
Tech Life

Every January for the past seven years I’ve published a summary of all the worthwhile discoveries I made during the previous year, and then added to my daily reading and consumption. Over time, I’ve taken the opportunity to expand this summary and add commentary on my approach to reading, RSS feeds management, and personal trends about my consumption habits. (I hate the term consumption, and I’ve already used it three times, but it’s a convenient shortcut).

I’m a bit late this year, but January has been a truly busy month, work-wise, and I haven’t had the time to stop for a day and collect my thoughts. Here we are, finally.

Last year, I opened with this general assessment:

Since 2017, there has been a noticeable decline in what and whom I have discovered and found interesting enough to add to my RSS feeds, especially in the blog category. Concurrently, as I wrote in the past two summary articles of this kind, another depressing trend in my feeds has been the removal of people/resources failing to maintain my interest (or their quality). Between 2017 and 2019, the number of resources I removed from my feeds has been comparatively higher than what I added. 

The first part of this assessment still holds true this time around. As for removing more sources than what I’ve added, fortunately this didn’t really happen in 2020. I think I’ve removed just one blog from my daily reads. All in all, as I look at my RSS feed subscriptions, I’d say 2020 was pretty stationary. That’s not bad news, but it isn’t particularly good news either.

Tech blogs

Over time, the tech blog category that has grown tiresome for me is the ‘tech news portal’. I still follow a few such sources, but I’ve been increasingly using their feeds to just skim headlines, check the occasional interesting piece, and marking dozens of articles as read at a time. I really prefer one-person outlets with tech commentary pieces, rather than a barrage of news, information, trivia.

Don’t get me wrong, I like to stay up-to-date with what happens in the tech world, but I’m not necessarily interested in every single thing happening on a daily basis.

Anyway, when it comes to tech blogs, every new addition to my reading list in 2020 comes from installing NetNewsWire 5 on the retina MacBook Pro I’ve used to test the Big Sur betas since August 2020. 

NetNewsWire comes with a selection of tech-oriented feeds, and while many are the same sources I have been following for years (Brent Simmons and I have similar tastes, it seems), there were other people I didn’t know, such as:

  • Julia Evans — What’s not to like? From her About page:

    • This blog is about

  • Becky Hansmeyer — I find Becky to be a constantly refreshing read. She may be a “beginning iOS developer and fan of all things Apple”, as she describes herself in her About Me page, but her critical approach, genuineness, and open-mindedness are qualities a lot of other people in this sphere should aspire to.
  • The Shape of Everything – Gus Mueller’s blog. Gus Mueller is the developer of Acorn, and if you’ve been a Mac user for a while, this app should definitely ring a bell. Acorn and GraphicConverter have been my favourite image editors pretty much since their first versions. Since version 5, Acorn has essentially become my main, almost only tool for editing images. Gus isn’t a frequent updater on his blog, but that’s a plus in my book, as every post is interesting and to-the-point.

YouTube channels

In 2020, with the pandemic, the lockdowns, the self-isolation, it was bound to happen. An increase of YouTube consumption on my part, I mean. Still, while I have indeed watched a lot of stuff on YouTube, I’ve tried to keep my subscriptions under control and subscribe to only those channels whose content managed to keep me constantly interested. For others, the YouTube algorithm is sufficient to provide me the occasional reminder or suggestion.

Photography/videography channels

  • Mark Holtze – From the channel description: Hi, my name is Mark Holtze and I’m a professional editor & videographer in both film and network television. I absolutely love the craft and want to share my experience in the industry with you all. Tutorials, Vlogs, short stories and pretty much everything in between. Mark keeps his videos short and interesting. I love his humour, I share his love of vintage manual focus lenses, and his videos are very well edited (duh) and informative.
  • Zenography – Thoughts and reviews of cameras and lenses both old and new. If you, like me, are starting to hate that shouting, hyperactive delivery style of many YouTube hosts, you’ll love Zenography’s quiet, low-key approach. The host is a good photographer and enthusiast, often providing very useful advice if you’re looking to make the most out of vintage film/digital cameras and lenses.
  • Steven Heise – In the channel description Steven writes: Hi, I’m Steve. I review camera gear. I film vlogs. I like cats. Terse, but accurate. Steven’s videos and reviews are typically short and sweet (I’d say they average six minutes in length), and I really like his relaxed style. If you’re looking for not-so-current digital cameras that are still a good bang for the buck from a photography/videography standpoint, check out his channel. I think he deserves many more subscribers and that his channel is way underrated.
  • Jake Felzien – Speaking of underrated channels deserving of more subscribers, Exhibit B is Jake Felzien. He has a cool, confident presence, making even ‘talking head’ videos interesting to watch. He is great at what he does and that is reflected in how well-edited and polished his videos are. I found him by chance as I was looking for videos on Micro Four Thirds cameras, and I instantly subscribed. He also routinely upload shorts that he calls “films” (in quotes), which I particularly love because of his ability to present mundane tasks and activities with an epic, cinematic style.

Gaming-related / Let’s Play

These are the only people I follow, and they all have great, relatable personalities that make every upload a fun and entertaining experience to watch (here I’m mixing old and new discoveries, by the way):

The rest

  • Behind the Bar with Cara Devine – Cocktails and mixology? Why not. It’s not a hobby of mine or anything, but I like trying something out every now and then. YouTube is chock-full of channels of this type but I really like how Cara presents her videos. She’s a knowledgeable, professional bartender and achieves that sweet balance of being professional, funny, and entertaining. This way, her videos aren’t either too dry/boring, or too silly.
  • James Hoffmann – This is a channel for serious coffee geeks. I’m not one, but James is such a knowledgeable host and his videos are so well-made, that watching him is a pleasure and an opportunity to learn new things in an area I feel I should know more. He’s a gentleman, and while his reviews are generally opinionated, he’s never unfair. His professional approach, honesty, and code of conduct are things sorely lacking in many other pundits — especially in tech.
  • Julie Schiro – I discovered her by chance while searching for videos with tips on how to start a YouTube channel. When I stumbled on her video Which Mic Type is Best for Zoom, Class, Recording 2020 | Headsets, Lavaliers, & Podcasting Mics, because of her confidence and editing skills I initially thought she was a long-time YouTuber with a big following. Shortly after, I realised that that was her first video and that she had like 1,500 subscribers, and I couldn’t believe it. At the time of writing, she has only uploaded four videos but her subscribers count is at around 10,500. It’s well deserved. She makes video reviews and comparisons of tech gear that are as entertaining as they are informative, and I really like her style. Check her out.

Podcasts

I nuked them all in 2019. I explained my reasons in last year’s summary.

Still, there are two people I know via Twitter whom you should follow, as they make podcasts that are worth checking out: 

Useful/fun Web tools

A new section. As the title suggests, these are websites/web applications I’ve bookmarked and use when the need arises. You have to keep in mind that single-purpose sites like these may stop working or being maintained without warning. At the time of writing, they all work.

  • HTML5 Halftone Maker
  • Time and Date – This is my go-to site whenever I need to convert timezones, or make time calculations, etc.
  • city roads – This is just something cool to look at. You enter a city, and the site downloads roads from OpenStreetMap and renders them with WebGL, creating beautiful monochromatic maps.
  • SVG Creator – Free online SVG converter (supported input formats: JPG, PNG, GIF).
  • UTF‑8 string length & byte counter – Sometimes you just need to know how long a text is, especially if you’re translating something and the output is constrained by a character limit.
  • Paste to Markdown – This is so useful. Suppose you have a block of text with a lot of URLs. You want to copy the text into your Markdown editor without losing all those URLs, and it would be so tedious to first copy the raw text, then copy/paste all the URLs afterwards in Markdown syntax. With this Web tool, you copy the rich text and you paste it in the Paste to Markdown window, and voilà, everything correctly formatted in Markdown, styles and URLs included.

My RSS management

This is the part that hasn’t never really changed these past years. Here’s a brief rundown of the apps I’m using on my devices.

  • On my Intel Macs running Mac OS 10.13 High Sierra: Reeder and ReadKit.
  • On my 13-inch retina MacBook Pro running Mac OS 11 Big Sur: NetNewsWire 5.
  • On my PowerPC Macs: older versions of NetNewsWire.
  • On my iPad 8: Unread, Reeder, NetNewsWire for iOS, and ReadKit. Speaking of ReadKit, I really like the recently released version for iOS. While it shares many similarities with NetNewsWire, I find it useful especially for its Pinboard integration. Also, I know that four apps are overkill and for RSS reading one is probably enough, but I like reading stuff in different apps and I like supporting developers.
  • On my iPhone 8, iPhone 5, iPad 3: Unread.
  • On older iOS devices: Older versions of Reeder, and an older version of Byline.
  • On my first-generation iPad: an older version of Newsify, Slow Feeds (which is now called Web Subscriber), and the Feedly app itself.
  • On my ThinkPad T400 and ThinkPad X240 (with Windows 8.1 Pro and Windows 10 respectively): Nextgen Reader.
  • On my ThinkPad X61T with Windows 7, and my ThinkPad 240X running Windows 2000: FeedDemon 4.5. Discontinued in 2013, it still works well.
  • On my Windows Phone 8.1/Windows 10 Mobile smartphones: Nextgen Reader and FeedLab.
  • On my webOS devices (Palm Prē 2, HP TouchPad): FeedSpider. A really great app.
  • On my Android phone (Xiaomi Mi A2): the official Feedly app. It’s good enough, but if you have a better candidate to suggest, I’m all ears.

Past articles

In reverse chronological order:

I hope this series and my observations can be useful to you. Also, keep in mind that some links in these past articles may now be broken. And as always, if you think I’m missing out on some good tech writing or other kind of resource you believe might be of interest to me, let me know via email or Twitter. Thanks for reading!

The Developer Transition Shit Sandwich

February 5, 2021
by Riccardo Mori
Handpicked

From Apple Asks Developers to Return DTK Mac Minis in Exchange for $200 Credit Toward M1 Mac — MacRumors, written by Juli Clover:

Ahead of the release of the M1 Macs, Apple provided developers with a Developer Transition Kit that included a Mac mini equipped with an A12Z Bionic chip first used in the iPad Pro, 16GB RAM, a 512GB SSD, two USB‑C ports, two USB‑A ports, and an HDMI 2.0 port.

These DTKs were offered up on a temporary basis to developers who paid $500 for access, and were aimed at giving developers a way to create Universal apps to prepare for the transition from Intel processors to Apple silicon chips.

Apple is now asking developers to return their Developer Transition Kits in exchange for a one-time use code that will provide a $200 discount on an M1 Mac.

Apple first sent out Developer Transition Kits at the end of June, so developers have had them on hand for the last seven months. Developers were meant to have a year with the DTK for app development purposes, but other benefits that include a private discussion forum and technical support will continue to be available for the full 12 month period.

Some developers are unhappy with Apple’s compensation given the initial $500 price of the DTK program and the bugs that were experienced that made using the DTK difficult. The last time Apple had a similar program for the transition from PowerPC to Intel chips, Apple provided developers with the first Intel-based Mac for free.

Sorry for essentially quoting the entirety of the article, but it’s a good summary of the whole situation.

Dave Mark, at The Loop, writes:

One wrinkle: The $200 expires at the end of May. Presumably, WWDC will be virtual again and will occur in June. And if new Macs are announced at WWDC, this means the $200 will not be usable for those Macs. Some developers are notably unhappy.

All in all, I think Apple could have avoided this PR bruise if they would have clearly laid out the specifics when they released the DTK in the first place. You pay us $500, we’ll give you a $200 credit that expires at the end of May when you return the box. As is, I got the sense that people were expecting Apple to send everyone an M1 Mac. An unfair expectation, true, but Apple could have controlled this from the beginning.

“An unfair expectation”? I don’t think so. I think if there’s a miser here, it’s Apple.

As I wrote on Twitter, here’s what I would have done:

  • Every developer who purchased (rather, rented) a DTK would receive an M1 Mac mini upon returning the development machine.
  • Those developers wanting to purchase a different Apple Silicon Mac would receive a $699 store credit instead (the equivalent of an entry-level M1 Mac mini).

Or, to streamline the process, just offer a $699 discount instead of that stingy $200. It’s a matter of respecting your developers, who are the people helping all of your platforms thrive. Considering that Apple reported an all-time record revenue of $111.4 billion for last quarter, and considering that Apple’s relationship with their developers hasn’t been exactly great in the past several months, keeping developers happy by being a bit more understanding and gentlemanly is the least Apple can do in this situation.

If you think I’m exaggerating or demanding too much from Apple, here’s what Apple did in 2005–2006 during the previous transition from PowerPC to Intel:

  • Contrary to what MacRumors reported, the Apple Transition Kit Pentium machine Apple offered to developers in June 2005 wasn’t free, it cost $999.
  • But developers could keep it until the end of 2006 (18 months), and when they returned it Apple provided them with a 17-inch Intel iMac, which at the time retailed for $1,299.

And this was 2005 Apple; which, while already very wealthy, certainly didn’t have the amount of money they have today. Their avarice and tone-deafness on this matter is staggering to me.

The condition that developers have to use the $200 discount code before the end of May is another sour ingredient of this shit sandwich. I was trying to put myself in a developer’s shoes, and think about the implications, but Michael Tsai has already provided such scenario:

The main issues for me are:

  • I want to apply the $200 credit towards [an Apple Silicon] 16-inch MacBook Pro or iMac, neither of which has been announced yet. And Apple, surprisingly, requires that the credit be spent by the end of May, i.e. before any WWDC product announcements.
  • The May expiration also means that, unless I want to buy two Macs, there will probably be several weeks when I have no ARM Mac for testing. I don’t get the credit until Apple receives and processes the DTK, and then I have to wait for the M1 Mac to ship. Currently, it takes about 2 weeks for a new M1 MacBook Air to be delivered.

I had been hoping to keep my DTK for the full year, until I could replace it with the actual M1 Mac that I plan to use. But it looks as though I’ll need to buy a temporary M1 Mac just to maintain the ability to test Apple Silicon apps. Others have already bought an M1 Mac and won’t be able to use the credit unless they buy another.

I’m frankly appalled by those who side with Apple on this matter, saying that developers are essentially being cheapskates or demanding too much here. User ‘Rhino Rebellion’ on Twitter told me: Many, if not all, of the DTKs started acting-up after 3/4 months use. Random reboots meant it was unusable for the intended purpose. Apple Support refused to replace mine with a working unit. For me it was a waste of money, during exceptionally difficult times. Is this person demanding too much or having unfair expectations? I don’t think so.

My understanding of economics is extremely basic, but really, by being more magnanimous, Apple would have virtually nothing to lose in this particular transaction:

  • If Apple chose to give developers a $500 discount, for instance, Apple would literally lose nothing, because developers gave that amount of money as a deposit in the first place. (*)
  • If Apple chose to give developers a discount equal to the value of a Mac mini, whatever Apple would ‘lose’ from a financial standpoint, the company would gain in image and public relations.

Instead, by offering a meagre discount — with conditions, too — what Apple’s communicating here is that every opportunity is good to make money. Even with people who are indirectly already helping you make money. It feels very Uncle Scrooge, it feels gross. There, I said it.

(*) Update — It seems Apple changed their decision and opted to do just that: Apple Ups DTK Mac Mini Return Credit to $500 After Developer Complaints. It’s always kind of amusing to witness the same story over and over: Apple does something shitty, there’s backlash, Apple course-corrects. All major App Store fiascos have followed this pattern, for example. Anyway, I’m not really going to praise Apple for this, because frankly it’s the least they can do. Just before learning about this news update, I was talking with a friend who’s not really into tech, and his reaction was: “You’re telling me Apple asked $500 as a deposit for these units, and now they’re not even returning the full sum as developers return the hardware!? I’d never want Apple as my landlord!” Indeed.

 

The reshaped Mac experience

January 31, 2021
by Riccardo Mori
Tech Life

Yesterday, a short Twitter thread by the excellent Jeff Johnson caught my eye. Since he often deletes past tweets, I’ll quote the relevant ones here (emphasis mine):

The selling point of the Macintosh was never the hardware, it was the user interface. So if the selling point now is the hardware, that’s a damning indictment of the current user interface.

 

I cannot emphasize enough how everyone seems to have lowered their standards with regard to the user interface. The “Overton window” has moved. The Overton window now has rounded rects.

 

We’ve gone from “insanely great” and “It just works” to “Catalyst is good enough for most people.”

That’s fucking BS, and I won’t tolerate it.

 

Windows is “good enough for most people”. That’s why Windows has a 90% market share. Why should we aspire to that level, shouldn’t we have much higher aspirations? Mac is a niche. “Most people” are not even using Macs, so the majority is not even relevant. Mac is a premium brand.

 

The way I see it, the Mac now is merely milking the brand reputation and loyalty it previously built. That Jobs previously built. But neither Cook nor the current Mac deserves that reputation or loyalty.

 

Steve Jobs wasn’t an engineer. Not a hardware engineer, not a software engineer. At Apple, his role was as “proxy” for the users.

Apple no longer has a proxy for the users. Tim Cook is a proxy for the shareholders, nothing more.

Jeff himself says that this criticism is hardly new, that these are things he already pointed out “a thousand times, to no effect”. While I am in no position to affect Apple or Mac development, this short Twitter rant had the effect of reminding me of something I, too, believe in; something I myself should emphasise more frequently. It’s those first two tweets I’ve quoted above.

As someone who still puts vintage Macs and older computers and devices to good use, the Mac’s user interface and user experience are in large part what still makes using 15–20-year-old machines enjoyable. This, by the way, also applies to other products of course. It’s thanks to well-designed user interfaces that we enjoy driving a classic car, or shooting with a 50-year-old film camera, or listening to vinyl records on a 40-year-old record-player and hi-fi stereo.

A couple of weeks ago I was on a group videochat with some friends and when I said that, frankly, using my 12-inch PowerBook G4 (2003) with Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard was more enjoyable than using my 13-inch retina MacBook Pro (2015) with Mac OS 11 Big Sur, the common reaction was that I was just being ‘nostalgic’; that surely my MacBook Pro was the better choice because it is orders of magnitude faster, with a ‘more modern’ OS, and that the sum of those parts was a better Mac experience. That I should ‘be rational’ and accept that.

Here, bringing up nostalgia is missing the point. And the point is that an admittedly faster hardware plus a purportedly ‘more modern’ operating system do not necessarily equal a better Mac experience. It’s interesting that my friends’ reaction was not to ask me why I was finding using an 18-year-old machine more enjoyable than an up-to-date Mac, but to promptly want to readjust my enjoyment, implying that there was something ‘wrong’ with it.

I’m finding that many people not only have lowered their standards with regard to the user interface, but more and more often when I bring up the subject, they seem to consider it a somewhat secondary aspect, something that’s only good for ‘geek talk’. The same kind of amused reaction laymen have to wine or coffee connoisseurs when they describe flavours and characteristics using specific lingo. Something that makes sense only to wine or coffee geeks but has little to no meaning or impact for the regular person.

The problem is that if an increasing number of people start viewing user interface design as an afterthought, or something that isn’t fundamental to the design of a product or experience — it’s all just ‘geek talk’ — then there is a reduced incentive to care about it on the part of the maker of the product. It’s more like a vicious circle, really; if Apple software’s quality declines but only a bunch of professional users and enthusiasts point that out, then Apple isn’t particularly incentivised to do a better job at it — the “good enough for most people” is really a dangerous, self-indulgent excuse. And in turn most people are fine with it, and in turn Apple think they’re on a ‘good’ path, and so forth.

At the very end of my piece What about the M1 Macs?, I wrote:

They’re unbelievably good machines, and everything that is genuinely good about them and future Apple Silicon-based Macs — sheer performance, astounding power-efficiency, and great backward compatibility with Intel software thanks to Rosetta 2 — will also allow Apple to get away with a lot of things with regard to platform control, design decisions, and so forth.

If you take a look at Jason Snell’s Apple in 2020: The Six Colors report card, the Mac scored very good points overall, 4.7 out of 5, with a year-over-year increment of 1.1 points. The main reason has been of course the M1 Macs and Apple Silicon. Don’t get me wrong, Apple Silicon is groundbreaking, and Rosetta 2 is really an incredible performer on the software side. But what I contend is that a leap in hardware architecture and performance doesn’t necessarily mean that suddenly all is fine with the Mac as a platform or as an experience.

The Mac’s user interface is undergoing plastic surgery by the hand of surgeons who have studied on iOS books. The result is pretty much the same as when you see a favourite celebrity after a procedure. They look ‘younger’ but there’s also something weird about their appearance. Their traits have changed a bit. In certain cases you almost fail to recognise the person at first glance.

Similarly, the Mac experience today feels disjointed. The hardware has unquestionably improved with the introduction of Apple Silicon, and yes, it’s something worth celebrating and it’s something worth praising. On the other hand, the software that drives this hardware is a bit of a paradox: Big Sur and Apple Silicon Macs fit and work together well from a technical, architectural standpoint. From a user interface standpoint, however, Big Sur embodies what I’ve been fearing in recent years — a progressive iOS-ification of Mac OS. Big Sur provides a general user experience that is the least Mac-like in the history of the Mac. Going through Big Sur’s user interface with a fine-tooth comb reveals arbitrary design decisions that prioritise looks over function, and therefore reflect an un-learning of tried-and-true user interface and usability mechanics that used to make for a seamless, thoughtful, enjoyable Mac experience.

iOS was born as a ‘spinoff’ of Mac OS X, a sort of Lite version aimed at mobile devices like the iPhone and the iPod touch. The two platforms have maintained their separate paths and trajectories for years, and for a while using a Mac and an iPhone (or iPad) felt like having the best experience of each world. Then Apple became obsessed with thoughts of convergence, and features, UI ideas, paradigms, started bleeding through both platforms and in turn the respective experiences have become less clear-cut over time, with the software not fully capable of bringing out all that hardware power and potential.

This convergence will continue, of course, with Macs becoming more and more like ‘senior iOS devices’ from a UI and user experience standpoint. It seems clear to me that Apple is prioritising ecosystem experience because, let’s be honest, having a unified ‘operating system core’ underlying all platforms means having fewer framework-specific headaches and probably a faster, streamlined process when deploying new features. But this loss of differentiation is especially detrimental to Mac OS, which is being reduced to the lowest common denominator and loses an increasing amount of user interface ideas and conventions that were central to its superior user experience and ease of use.

I’m not annoyed because I see pieces of UI history fading away. I’m annoyed because I see pieces of good UI design fading away and being replaced by decisions that are puzzling and arbitrary, or the product of a trial-and-error process, rather than a meaningful, purposeful design.

You want an example that I find particularly glaring? Big Sur’s UI features a general increase of space between elements — icons, menus, labels, toolbars, sidebars, pretty much everywhere. On the surface it doesn’t seem like a bad decision. If you zoom in on certain parts of the user interface, you could say that more space between elements means that things looks cleaner, airier, sleeker.

But you’re looking at it on a 27-inch retina display. What about a display half that size? What about an 11-inch, non-retina display, like the one of the older 2013–2015 MacBook Airs that can be updated to Big Sur? It’s less pretty.

I usually work with a lot of app windows and Finder windows, but when I’m using my 13-inch retina MacBook Pro with Big Sur, the workspace constantly feels cramped, while on the other hand I have no problems using High Sierra on my 11-inch MacBook Air. Sometimes it feels like looking at a zoomed-in interface. That increased space between elements becomes less of a good idea because it doesn’t scale gracefully when the overall screen real estate is reduced. It becomes an interference. Before installing Big Sur, the amount of icons on the right of the menu bar had never really been a concern. Now, the simple addition of a couple of third-party apps like Dropbox and iStat Menus — both essential for me — is enough to make that menu bar look crowded. (And thankfully Apple has been reducing the space between menu icons, because in the first Big Sur betas icon padding was so bad I had to remove a few icons and use Control Centre to check on their status).

This, like other UI design decisions in Big Sur, feels like watching a chess player who only thinks about a move without considering the next one — or the next several ones, like good chess players do. As I tested beta after beta of Big Sur, I often asked myself the reasons behind a certain change in the UI. When the answer clearly wasn’t To make it look more like iOS, I tried to replicate the thought process behind it but I was often left with the feeling that another possible answer could be, It seemed like a good idea at the time. But an interface designer — who really should think like a chess player in these circumstances — can’t simply say It seemed like a good idea at the time to justify a UI change. There has to be a plan, a design. “Let’s try this, let’s try that” is not a strategy. It’s the way I played chess against my dad when I was 8 years old. I didn’t plan my moves ahead. I just reacted to what was before me. And I never won a game, of course.

These are all notes from an external observer, mind you. I don’t have inside information. I don’t know anything about how the Design team works at Apple. I’m just trying to make deductions based on what I’m seeing when I’m using Big Sur compared to all Mac OS versions I used previously and still use along with Big Sur. As I tweeted yesterday in response to Jeff Johnson, every time I point out some terrible or questionable UI design decision in Big Sur, there’s always, always someone who tells me “You’re just resisting change! You’re not willing to adapt!” without even entertaining the thought that, hey, maybe it is terrible UI design.

I am, in fact, willing to adapt — I will certainly purchase an Apple Silicon Mac in the future, and for all Big Sur’s user interface shortcomings, at least it’s not an unstable, unpredictable mess like Catalina. But again, great hardware performance plus software efficiency are not enough (for me) to create an enjoyable user experience if user interface design is neglected in the process. For years, decades, there has been a deep-seated user interface culture at Apple, and I feel it’s withering away. Unless it regains importance on the priority list, and depth in terms of knowledge (know your past) and thoughtfulness (apply all the best lessons learnt, and build on them), I guess I’ll keep using Macs, enjoying their performance and efficiency without a doubt, but merely putting up with them when it comes to user experience.