2020 in review

January 10, 2021
by Riccardo Mori
Et Cetera

This is the time of the year when I typically get a bit more personal, and with a year like 2020 now in the rearview mirror, it’s hard not to get personal. So, what to make of it? As ideas for this little retrospective review started forming in my head, I thought that I would end up writing only negative things. We easily prioritise negative things because the kind of marks they leave inside us often make us forget about the good stuff, or make the good stuff seem small and inconsequential in comparison. But 2020 — while I’ll certainly remember it as a shitty, depressing year — also had its share of good things in store for me.

But let’s start with the negatives.

Well, Covid-19 of course

I was planning a trip to Italy to visit my mother in late February-early March 2020. I had started the year hoping I could also visit some close friends I hadn’t seen in a while. The virus and the consequent lockdowns obviously changed everything. And I don’t just superficially mean Gosh, Covid thwarted my plans, how inconvenient. I mean that the virus threw a heavy blanket of dread and worry over everything. 2020 was the year that for the first time in my life I really got scared to get terminally ill and pass away. I was worried (I still am) that for a simple, stupid oversight, I could get infected — or my wife, or my mother, or the people I care about the most. That’s why I self-isolated in my apartment even before the official lockdown here in Spain made that mandatory. That’s why I started wearing gloves and a mask since day one.

The weeks of ‘hard’ lockdown, when we were allowed to leave our home only to go grocery shopping, are indelible memories for me. The general atmosphere was surreal. No noises coming from outside. Empty streets. The dreadful uncertainty. But I must say I quickly started feeling safe in my home, and there was also a mild excitement bubbling underneath, because I (foolishly) thought that the forced isolation could also be an opportunity to advance my personal projects. Now I can finally sit down and finish my novel, and even write an entire new book of short stories for my Minigrooves series! — I said to myself.

So I don’t know if it was for these ‘creative plans’ or because I spent the quarantine with my wife and not alone, but I never suffered from cabin fever, or felt otherwise trapped. I felt scared, the virus scared and scares me, but I also approached the forced isolation with a pragmatic, let’s‑make-the-most-out-of-this, mindset. I’ll talk about how this eventually panned out in the Personal projects section below.

While no close friends or family members have died from Covid-19, I’ve still lost four acquaintances and one distant relative to the virus. 

I can’t stand people who have never really taken the virus seriously or who still refuse basic precautions like wearing a mask in public. Not wearing a mask is wrong, full stop. It’s not a matter of opinions. 

Personal projects

As I was writing above, I really thought I could take advantage of the quarantine to make considerable progress in all my creative endeavours. The plan was ‘simple’:

  • Finish the first novel in my science-fiction Low Fidelity series.
  • Expand, and maybe finalise, my series of short stories centred around the figure of Ian Charles Winterman, a consultant detective with a gift, a sort of heightened perceptiveness that allows him to have special insights and intuitions, and help the police force specifically in cases of abductions and missing persons.
  • Continue with Off the Grid, another series set in the same post-apocalyptic world of Low Fidelity — I wrote five episodes between 2016 and 2017, and the sixth episode was in the works when the first wave of serious creative block hit me back in 2018.
  • Start working on the third volume of Minigrooves, my series of short stories without a specific theme.

Do you know how much new stuff I ended up writing? A page of ‘tactical notes’ for Low Fidelity, and a whole paragraph of a short story. Nothing else, nothing more. This particular creative block hit me hard and unexpectedly. It felt like wanting to go for a run and feeling out of breath and sorely out of shape after 100 metres. Nothing clicked. Nothing worked. I don’t know if it was the constant attention I paid to the news, to always stay informed about the pandemic; I don’t know if it was the sudden increase of workload that left me without enough creative juices to proceed; I don’t know if the quarantine’s general atmosphere made me uninspired surreptitiously. But the end result was that I’ve never felt so useless as a writer or a creative. If I’ve written a bit more on this more tech-oriented space is also maybe because I wanted to prove to myself that I was still capable of writing something.

So, with regard to my creative projects, 2020 has felt like a huge, terrible waste of time and a missed opportunity.

Now, the positive stuff.

People

Firstly, I feel that, while the pandemic and the related quarantine have prevented people from connecting in person, they also enabled people to connect online in a sort of we’re in this together fashion. With my closest friends from Italy, people I have been seeing so very rarely since I relocated to Spain almost 16 years ago, we organised a weekly videochat meeting, a sort of hanging out at a virtual pub, and thanks to this we paradoxically ended up seeing one another much more frequently than in the past 10 years or so.

Secondly, people I only know via the Internet, and sometimes even people I’ve simply exchanged a few words over Twitter, or strangers who simply like what I write on my blog, have all surprised me repeatedly with their generosity. 

Thanks to a concerted effort from two marvellous fellows, one from the US, one from the UK, I was able to acquire a 2015 13-inch retina MacBook Pro to use as a test machine for the Big Sur betas. The machine wasn’t exactly donated to me, but it was made available at a ridiculously low price.

Another example: one day I was talking on Twitter about how amazed I was at the photos I took with a Fujifilm FinePix F30, a 6.3‑megapixel compact camera from 2006; when I kept sharing my snaps, I was contacted out of the blue from people who were following me on Twitter, and/or readers of my blog, telling me they had other compact cameras they didn’t use and asked me if I wanted them. They were clearly affected by my enthusiasm and perhaps thought that — just like I put vintage computers and devices to good use — I could do the same with older digital cameras.

This triggered a snowball effect. I was excited by the ‘new’ cameras I received, shared my photo tests and results, and this in turn drove other people to offer me more cameras. Again, not everything was given me at zero cost, but often it was a matter of just paying shipping fees. In a short amount of time, I got an Olympus E‑P2, a Nikon 1 J2, an Olympus E‑PL3, and a Samsung NX1000, all very capable mirrorless cameras (I was especially blown away by the little Nikon J2), all cameras that cost a small fortune when new, and that I had the chance to own for very, very little money. All this thanks mostly to the kindness of strangers.

Photography

All those generous offers left me with a few new toys to try out. As soon as the ‘hard’ lockdown was lifted here and people were allowed to go out, I resumed an old habit from the time I used to shoot exclusively on film: taking photowalks across the city and just shoot — mostly architecture shots and street photos. Eventually, with so many cameras to shoot with, 2020 turned out to be a very prolific year for my photography. I probably haven’t taken this many photos since 2011 or thereabouts. Last year has been terrible, inspiration-wise, but at least it was not a complete disaster on every creative front.

Final stray observations

  • For many people I know, 2020 and the pandemic have been rather disruptive, work-wise. Many who never worked from home found this new arrangement to be a bit of a shock, and had trouble adjusting. I was lucky, in a way, because as a freelance who has worked from home for the past 20+ years, the ‘quarantine life’ wasn’t very different from my usual routine — overworking included. I remember feeling somewhat vindicated when an acquaintance, who was also a client back in 2004–2005, wrote me and, in passing, said something like: I used to belittle your work, I know; I admit I didn’t take someone sitting all day at his computer very seriously; I didn’t understand how fucking exhausting that can be. Now my company requires I do the same, and I’m losing it, I’m telling you. So yes, this is kind of an apology. Fifteen years later, I know, but take it anyway.
  • Speaking of work, my daily job got pretty intense in 2020. There was a surge of translation/localisation assignments that kept me extremely and stupidly busy for months with little to no respite. I’m not complaining, mind you, Having a somewhat steady job in this day and age is a blessing, and I’m fully aware of that. Still, there were extremely stressful times that left me drained and almost burnt out.
  • Despite all the silver lining I’ve found, 2020 still remains a mostly-negative year for me. The general ‘feel’ of it has been weird, wrong, dreadful, disheartening. Despite my little exposure to social media — I’m basically just on Twitter and a couple other low-traffic networks — there have been several periods where I just couldn’t stand staying up-to-date with what happened around me and in the world. I’ve tried to filter out as much toxicity as possible, but sometimes it got so overwhelming that I had to quit checking Twitter for a while. And when you seek refuge in your daily job to avoid what should be a social, casual, leisurely platform, then you realise just how fucked up things are nowadays.
  • I also hate 2020 for the untimely passing of Adam Banks. We weren’t personal friends, I only knew him via Twitter and through some sporadic private correspondence, but he was certainly more than just an acquaintance. When I was experiencing some hard times work-wise back in 2014, he was one of the few who did something to try and help me out, and I’ll never forget it. Rest in peace, Adam.
  • I have no specific plans or resolutions for 2021. These are uncertain times, and one can only plan so far. I’m trying, again, to be more organised and to further limit my focus to what really matters most. Creatively, I’ve sort of given myself an ultimatum — either I advance or finish my main writing projects, or I’ll scrap them and begin afresh with something entirely new. As for my tech writing and this blog, everything will proceed as per usual — updating when I can, writing only when I feel I have something to say.
  • And finally, a big heartfelt thank you to everyone. You all made 2020 a much more tolerable year.

What about the M1 Macs?

December 28, 2020
by Riccardo Mori
Briefly / Tech Life

Whenever I end up updating my blog less frequently, or seem to avoid talking about the tech subject du jour, I’m sure to find some message or email asking me or teasing me about exactly that. According to recent feedback, people were surprised by my silence regarding the new M1 Macs with the first Apple Silicon chip.

There’s nothing sinister about my silence. As I’ve said repeatedly over Twitter, I’ve simply been very busy with my daily job in the past three months or so, and I haven’t had the time to sit down and write about this subject. I started to read and watch reviews from people who actually had review units of the new M1 MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, and Mac mini, and therefore had something concrete to say. And in so doing, I realised that, at the end of the day, there’s not much to add to what has already been said — the blessing and the curse when you finally have time to talk about a subject that isn’t really du jour anymore.

Pretty much all reviewers have reported the amazing mixture of stunning sheer performance and greatly-improved power efficiency, making the new MacBooks largely silent, never getting hot under pressure, and with absurdly long battery life. Performance has also been notable software-wise, as many Intel apps translated by Rosetta 2 apparently run faster on an Apple Silicon Mac than on Intel Macs. These facts alone have filled me with enough excitement to consider purchasing an M1 Mac sooner rather than later.

More interestingly, I think it’s also time to look back at what I expected, mused, and feared about the current Mac transition a year or two ago, when everyone was engaged in speculation roughly before the release of Mac OS Catalina. Searching previous entries on this subject in my blog, some key words appear to be dread, apprehension, anxiety, then a mix of quiet optimism and worry.

In my numerous observations back in 2018, 2019, and earlier this year, the apprehension regarding the Intel-to-ARM transition was never really about the hardware. I anticipated (like many other pundits) that the new ARM-based Macs would display an incredible combination of sheer performance and power efficiency. What made me nervous was primarily how Apple would manage the transition; the time they would grant users and developers to adapt; how quickly they would burn bridges with their Intel past, so to speak; if and how much they would provide backward compatibility software-wise, and so forth.

But the WWDC 2020 made me quietly optimistic, and the November ‘M1’ event reinforced that optimism. Apple still seems to care about the Mac, after all, and seems to be handling the architecture transition just as smoothly as the PowerPC-to-Intel one.

I still have some concerns, though. Two, mainly.

One — Many commentators, talking about Apple Silicon, appear to be relieved by the fact that Apple has finally been able to get rid of Intel CPUs and that Apple isn’t constrained anymore by Intel’s chip development roadmap. Finally Apple has complete control over their hardware. Like what’s been happening for years on the iPhone and iPad’s fronts, Apple is able at last to design everything at the hardware level, inside and out. And I agree with this sentiment, to some extent. Apple’s innovation in SoC design is undeniable, and these first entry-level M1 Macs are just the beginning of what Apple can do.

But the flipside of total hardware control is, well, that Apple is even more free to shape the Mac platform to their taste, needs, and whims. Which means that if they want to release Macs that are user-inaccessible black boxes inside, they can. And many people won’t even protest because oooh, these Macs are powerful, they last hours and hours on a single charge, and they’re very secure! I know that in late 2020 wanting a personal computer with user-upgradable and user-replaceable parts sounds quaint and very old-school. But if an internal SSD fails, or if I want bigger internal storage down the road, it ought to be possible for me to replace the SSD or to swap it with a bigger one, instead of having to bring the Mac to have its entire motherboard changed by Apple at a cost that, out of warranty, would certainly be prohibitive.

Two — Hardware/software integration. It should be a no-brainer at this point. With Apple Silicon Macs and Apple designing and coding their own operating system, we should be in integration heaven, back to the good old PowerPC days and even better. And yet, when I look at the advances of Apple’s hardware division and the products of Apple’s software division, the results seem to come from two different companies. In After WWDC 2020: bittersweet Mac, I wrote:

I’d hate to see a progressive oversimplification of the Mac’s UI that could potentially introduce the same discoverability issues that are still present in iPadOS.

I’ve always considered the look of an operating system to be a by-product of how it works, rather than a goal to achieve, if you know what I mean. If something is well-designed in the sense that it works well, provides little to no friction during use, and makes you work better, it’s very rare that it also ends up being something ugly or inelegant from a visual standpoint. How it works shapes how it looks. If you put the look before the how-it-works, you may end up with a gorgeous-looking interface that doesn’t work as well as it looks.

After spending five months using beta after beta after official releases of Big Sur on a 13-inch retina MacBook Pro, Big Sur’s interface feels exactly like that — easy on the eyes, but punctuated by arbitrary design decisions that make it clunkier, less usable and less friendly in different areas. It shows that the system has been rethought with the how-it-looks before the how-it-works. The Mac today feels powerful like never before. Mac OS feels at its most dumbed-down.

So, what about the M1 Macs? 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, software quality, and so forth. Who cares that a pill tastes bitter, if it makes you feel good, right?

The narcissism network

December 27, 2020
by Riccardo Mori
Briefly

Every now and then I get a message from one of my contacts asking me if I’m ever ‘fully’ returning to Instagram. You see, my Instagram account, while still active, is in a sort of passive mode. Back when Facebook acquired Instagram (2012), I decided to stop uploading photos, not wanting to put anything creative on something that was now owned by Facebook, the tech company I despise the most. My first reaction at the time was to just shut down my account, but what about the network of contacts and acquaintances I had built there when Instagram was good and fun? So I decided to still hang around and check their photos, and sometimes like and leave comments. There are also a few people I know I can only contact through Instagram, so that’s the way we exchange messages. 

Back to the question I was mentioning at the beginning — the answer is probably When Instagram will be removed from Facebook and returned to its former glory, i.e., it’s pretty unlikely, unless someone in power really decides to break down tech giants like Facebook.

But apart from my personal preferences and my hate for Facebook, it is undeniable how profoundly and for the worse Facebook has changed Instagram over the years. Of course, people who have become ‘important’ thanks to Instagram will not agree, but everything Facebook has brought to Instagram has contributed to transform a fun network for casual photo sharing into a machine for self promotion and ego-boosting.

When I open Instagram today, what I see is a destroyed timeline that is so riddled with advertisements, promoted accounts, suggested accounts and similar extraneous content, that I actually struggle to scroll and find photos from people I actually follow. What is important to me — this content, submitted by friends and acquaintances and people I’m interested in — is presented by the app as if it were an afterthought.

But it’s not just a matter of a distorted shape or form of the product, it’s also a matter of how the content itself, even from people I like and follow, has shifted. Very few people still use Instagram in the way that it was back in 2010, and those who do are all early adopters. Now Instagram is an opportunity for self promotion, both in the sense of Here’s something I made (a product, a design idea, a typeface, etc.), and in the sense of a narcissistic cult of personality, and that’s where you’ll find accounts made entirely of selfies and announcements of upcoming live videos. I appreciate the former type of self promotion; the latter, er, insta-grows old. 

The ‘Instagram story’ format, while open to many different purposes, is again very often used for self promotion, self-affirmation, and navel-gazing. And don’t get me started on Instagram Reels. I don’t know about you, but in my case all Reels suggested by the algorithm involve young women who are either dancing, working out, showing off their new clothes, or engaging in suggesting activities. (I really can’t explain this. It’s certainly not based on my Instagram browsing activity, which is generally very limited and always focused on people I follow — a completely different demographic.)

There are days when I think Flickr should double down on social photo sharing for its mobile experience and try to recapture the fun and immediacy of both Instagram and Flickr’s heyday, but I understand this is easier said than done. I’m also wondering if Instagram’s transformation at the hands of Facebook has perhaps poisoned the well for good, so that it’s now more difficult to create a social network where people just share stuff for the fun of it, without thinking about other purposes, without egocentrism and the “what’s in it for me?” mentality.

Finally upgrading my iPad

December 12, 2020
by Riccardo Mori
Tech Life

Rather unexpectedly, my wife got me an eighth-generation iPad as birthday gift. The Space grey, 128 GB, Wi-Fi model. She told me she couldn’t stand my growing frustration as I kept using my old third-generation iPad I bought in 2012. And she knew that, for my needs and personal preferences, an eighth-generation iPad (“iPad 8” from now on) would have been more than enough.

And she was right. Granted, the new iPad Air is cool, and is for now the only iPad featuring two things I really like: the new, more angular design and reduced bezels of the iPad Pro, and the presence of a TouchID sensor. But really, I’m just happy to have a more modern iPad; I’m not overly concerned with looks and specs.

Of course, coming from an 8‑year-old iPad 3, the performance boost and also the experience boost are remarkably noticeable. Upgrading my iPad was never one of my top priorities because I don’t use it for work, I barely do creative things on it, and it certainly is not my primary device. While I’m a tech-savvy person and you could even call me a ‘power user’, when it comes to the iPad I use it just like most regular folks — mainly as a consumption device. I read the news and RSS feeds, write the occasional email, browse the Web, listen to music, watch videos, do some photo editing, take notes, and plonk around on GarageBand. 

For a long time, my trusty iPad 3 was powerful enough to let me do all that, and since upgrading my main Mac and iPhone became a more urgent matter, also upgrading the iPad felt like an unnecessary expense.

However, the overall performance and responsiveness of my iPad 3 have been worsening over time, more and more noticeably, and the user experience so marred by lags, freezes, and unpredictable (though fortunately sporadic) self-reboots, that for certain tasks I actually enjoyed my first-generation iPad more. Yes, as I’ve previously stated when reviewing the iPad 1, despite it being a less powerful machine than the iPad 3 when you compare their tech specs, it still feels quick and responsive under your fingers. iOS 5.1.1 on the iPad 1 feels much more ‘tuned’ and optimised than iOS 9.3.5 on the iPad 3.

When the iPad 3 was new, I remember some pundits criticising it for essentially being a slow dog that used to get too hot when in use. But it wasn’t my experience. The iPad 3 originally came with iOS 5.1, and while iOS 5 and iOS 6 were certainly the two releases where that iPad really shone, I didn’t really notice any slowdowns under iOS 7 and iOS 8 either. But iOS 9, that was a mistake. Sure, it extended the iPad 3’s useful life, but the cost was a performance hit that became more severe as time went by. iOS 9 came out in 2015; maybe Apple didn’t think there would be people using this 2012 iPad for so long, so they didn’t bother optimising it too much (the same can be said for iOS 9 on the iPhone 4S — which I downgraded to iOS 8.4.1 the day after acquiring the phone a couple of years ago).

Anyway, even with all that said, this ‘slow dog’ has remained useful for many years, its performance truly degrading only over the past year or so (To which point, you may ask — well, to the point that simply scrolling down a moderately complex webpage would make the iPad hang). 

What keeps amazing me about this old device, however, is its battery life. After eight years and a half, it still lasts a couple of days on a single charge, with light-medium usage.

But what about the iPad 8? To be honest, I still haven’t had the time to put the new iPad through its paces, since I’ve been swamped with work these past weeks. But I wanted to start with a clean slate, so I didn’t perform a restore from a backup. I just configured it as a new device, and started downloading the apps I’ve been using the most on the iPad 3. And as I said above, the jump in performance is extreme when you’re accustomed to an iPad whose CPU is seven generations older.

The iPad 8 came with iPadOS 14 preinstalled, of course, and I was afraid of feeling a bit lost with regard to gestures and features. Thankfully, the basic, surface-level gesture language is essentially the same as it was on the iPad 3 with iOS 9. But I still maintain that — unless someone tells you, or you gather information by perusing the iPad Guide on Apple’s site or by searching on the Web — many deeper gestures and features remain essentially undiscoverable. I remember staring at the iPad 8’s screen, trying to recall multitasking-related gestures, and I drew a blank. Trying to trigger things by tentatively swiping here and there only brought frustration and frankly made me feel a bit of a newbie. While typing and editing text, I also tried to recall those fancy gestures for Cut, Copy and Paste. Do you remember them, without looking them up in the Guide? I didn’t. Here’s a refresher:

  • Cut: Pinch closed with three fingers two times.
  • Copy: Pinch closed with three fingers.
  • Paste: Pinch open with three fingers.

Intuitive, right? Right? Yeah, didn’t think so.

But anyway, I could make this article very long by listing all the little things that, together, create a bad mix of undiscoverability and friction, but that would just be a waste of everyone’s time, mine included. Because those people who already know my criticisms regarding the increasing complexity of iPadOS, and agree with me, will still agree with me. Those who don’t will just tell me that once I’ve got accustomed to the new layers of complexity in iPadOS, all those gestures that still lie undiscovered will become second nature. 

And to this second group of people I’ll say that maybe they’re right, but before getting accustomed to such gestures I still have to discover them. Now, I am a techie who keeps himself reasonably up-to-date with this stuff, so I know there are gestures and features on my iPad 8 I need to look for and learn — and I’m going to do just that, because I know where to look. A regular person, not so much. And retorting that a regular person probably doesn’t need to learn more sophisticated gestures because they’re likely to use the iPad in an unsophisticated manner is such a bullshit excuse, if you pardon my French. 

iPadOS still needs work to increase discoverability, usability, and reduce friction in many basic-to-intermediate workflows. It’s still an operating system that cannot properly handle its increasing complexity. When you stay on the surface and keep using the iPad as a consumption device, iPadOS is a breeze and is really enjoyable. Once you start digging deeper, once you want to multitask and carry out more complex tasks for longer sessions… that’s when the struggle begins, as you keep wondering why the path to complete certain tasks has to be so convoluted when on the Mac is literally one click and one keyboard shortcut away.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m enjoying my new iPad more than it seems at first glance. I can finally browse the Web and read RSS feeds without hiccups or freezes or the iPad spontaneously rebooting because it didn’t like the Javascript pill a website forced down its throat. I can finally edit photos on the fly, and so on. Whatever app I’m using, everything feels instantaneous. Battery life is outrageously good (I mean, I was given the iPad on 3 November as a very early birthday gift, and since then I only recharged it twice!). And while being only 162 grams lighter than my old iPad 3, it feels much lighter when I handle it. The essence of the iPad experience I felt when getting to know my iPad 3 back in 2012 is still mostly intact. And I’ve decided I’m happy with that.

Mac OS Big Sur logbook (10) - Out of Beta: assorted notes

November 21, 2020
by Riccardo Mori
Software

As you can see by the lack of updates on this blog — almost one month, goodness gracious — my day job has kept me incredibly busy. In this day and age, tech commentary generally tries to keep up with the speed of tech news, and it’s frustrating when you finally have the time to collect some thoughts on a certain subject, and you’re more than a week late. 

Also, when I started this logbook, the format idea was to post short, frequent entries as I kept exploring each Big Sur beta version, and try to document differences and any progression or regression of what I’m most interested in when it comes to operating systems — the user interface. I ended up being busy a lot of the time, and only managed to get to 10 entries so far, but I hope I’ve been in part successful in showing what has been going on with Big Sur over the past months.

Little change

And here comes the first point I want to make (or probably reiterate): in general, from a visual and UI standpoint, the Big Sur we have today, officially released nine days ago at the time of writing, hasn’t changed much from what was previewed last June at the WWDC. And that’s… not good, in my opinion. Every time I’ve made this point in the past weeks, the kind of response I’ve received was something like, This is a major visual redesign for Mac OS. It’s likely that Apple has started with a lot of drastic choices that will be smoothened out over the next major, not minor, Mac OS releases.

It’s a sensible response, and very possibly describes what will happen, but it’s extremely unsatisfying for a user interface enthusiast like me. Because it feels like the work on the user interface isn’t getting the priority it deserves. And let me tell you: looking at the current visual state of Big Sur, the work on the UI ought to be Priority Number One on Apple’s list.

And random changes leading to friction

You can browse past entries in this Big Sur logbook for a more detailed look at certain UI changes. The overall feeling is that in an attempt to make Mac OS look more like iOS/iPadOS, Apple has introduced new elements and interactions that on the one hand feel alien to experienced Mac users, and on the other disrupt decades of Human Interface Guidelines with arbitrary and purely-æsthetic changes.

You have app icons that are now losing their uniqueness by going through the Big Levelling Machine and coming out all squares with rounded corners. This sameness in shape that originated in iOS had a reason: in a touch interface, apps are like buttons you press with your finger. This metaphor, on a regular computer with a more precise mouse+keyboard input method, weakens at the functional level, and can also become actively impractical when you have a crowded Dock and you start hunting for the app you want to launch because now all icons have the same shape and they’re harder to make out.

You have dialog boxes and alerts that have been imported as-is from iOS whose design on Mac OS — even within the new Big Sur æsthetic — looks weird and ultimately feels just like what it is, a simple copy-and-paste from another OS that was designed for a completely different category of devices.

You have other ‘imported’ solutions that, while bringing that sense of familiarity and homogeneousness across OSes Craig Federighi seems to care so much about, also introduce friction for no real reason. Take the Control Centre, for example. It’s one of my favourite features on iOS. Its essence is to be a control panel you quickly access to quickly perform certain routine operations, and over time it has become a bit more customisable so that you can have shortcuts to even more actions.

But almost everything about the Control Centre in Big Sur makes it somehow a slower solution and involves more clicks to perform the same operations you can perform in a much faster way on older Mac OS versions. And this added friction is not only limited to Control Centre. Managing notifications has become more fiddly and frustrating, again because of some arbitrary design decision. I fully agree with Marco Arment here. He tweets:

The important actions are now invisible, hidden behind a hover state that requires an extra click (“Options”).

Why?

I know the cost — it’s slower to use and less discoverable.

What are the benefits that make that cost worthwhile?

Whose job is it at Apple to fight for usability over visual appeal when a conflict arises between these factors? 

Firstly, that hover state doesn’t even appear consistently. Especially the little ‘×’ in the upper left corner of a notification pane that has the important role of letting you dismiss the notification. Sometimes it appears as soon as you hover your mouse, other times it takes repeated attempts until it finally graces us with its presence. On top of that, it’s an awfully tiny target to hit. I often miss it, and I’m using Big Sur on a 13-inch retina display… Imagine using a 27-inch retina iMac, or the 32-inch Retina 6K Pro Display XDR.

Usability versus visual appeal

Secondly, Arment — in his typically lucid and succinct way to put things — completely nails the crux of the matter when it comes to Big Sur’s UI design: usability versus visual appeal. It’s the recurring theme whenever I encounter some user interface change or user interaction hiccup, and usability seems to always lose the fight. 

Think about how less immediate a lot of little things have become. Replying to a message from the notification you’ve received, for example (see this tweet by Wojtek Pietrusiewicz). Or take the Bluetooth indicator in the menu bar. Previously, the icon had a few very recognisable states, such as:

  • Greyed out icon: Bluetooth is off.
  • Black icon: Bluetooth is on, and there are no devices connected.
  • Grey icon with three horizontal black dots across it: Bluetooth is on, and there is at least one device connected.
  • Black icon with a little battery icon at its side: at least one connected Bluetooth device has a low battery.

When you only connect one device to the Mac via Bluetooth, seeing the grey icon with the dots gives you a visual confirmation that the connection has been established. You don’t even need to check by clicking the icon and pulling down the menu.

In Big Sur, when one or more devices are connected, the Bluetooth icon simply stays black. The only thing this tells you is that the Mac has Bluetooth on. But even if you only connect one device, you have to invoke the menu to be certain that it’s paired and connected. This is a minuscule detail, I agree, but it’s a step back for no apparent reason all the same. An intelligent improvement would be what my friend Donovan Bond suggested: A visual indication of how many devices are currently connected would be great.

Mind you, such annoyances aren’t huge if you examine them one by one. An early impression of Big Sur’s UI I had around the time I started testing the betas (first half of August) was that the visual redesign was ‘kinda nice’ if looked from afar, but frustrating up close the more attention you paid to the various little details. In this sense, it truly reminds me of iOS — an operating system whose interface I’m overall okay with, but which becomes progressively tiring to use the longer the session. It’s like talking to a quick-witted person whose jokes and sarcastic remarks are enjoyable during relatively brief interactions, but get a bit too overwhelming over the course of much longer conversations.

And the problem is that I don’t typically use my Macs in short bursts of activity or for short sessions or to carry out brief and spur-of-the-moment tasks. I have my iPhone and iPad for that. Ever since I started testing Big Sur on my 13-inch retina MacBook Pro I’ve realised I don’t really like to engage in long sessions with it. Especially at first, it started to feel like I was using some kind of third-party iOS-inspired skin installed over Mac OS, and after a while I was sort of thinking of a way to ‘reset it to default Mac OS’, so to speak. Now this feeling has waned a bit, but hasn’t gone away completely.

Cognitive load, my ass

In a now oft-quoted interview for the Independent, Craig Federighi remarks:

We’re living with iPads, we’re living with phones, our own sense of the aesthetic – the sort of openness and airiness of the interface – the fact that these devices have large retina displays now. All of these things led us to the design for the Mac, that felt to us most comfortable, actually in no way related to touch.

I’ve never felt more comfortable moving across our family of devices as a user, which I do hundreds of times a day than I do now, moving between iOS 14, iPadOS 14, and macOS Big Sur. They all just feel of a family – there’s just less cognitive load to the switching process. 

I’ve used iOS since it was still called iPhone OS, and of course I’ve used Mac OS for more than 30 years now, and I’ve never felt that ‘cognitive load’ Federighi talks about when switching from one OS to the other. I also never had a problem recognising that the two systems were from the same company. And neither did any of my friends or acquaintances, whether they’re Mac or Windows or Linux users, whether they’re tech-savvy people in general or not. And here we have someone who, I believe, has used Mac OS for as long as I have, and is also the VP of Software Engineering at Apple, talking about this ‘cognitive load’ when switching from one platform to another… And, well, I have a really hard time believing him, you know?

At the same time I’m in full agreement with Michael Tsai when he says:

The cognitive load that Federighi mentions just isn’t something I’ve (consciously) experienced. And one could make the argument that it’s confusing to make systems that work differently look the same. But I take him at his word because it certainly explains decisions like the awful iOS-style alerts. That design provides no benefits for touch; it just makes macOS look more like iOS, which he considers to be a plus. 

What I do believe is that it’s the software engineers at Apple who have been progressively experiencing a cognitive load in trying to bring forward different operating systems with different ages, histories, and design such as Mac OS and iOS. It’s been a while, I’m sure, that they were aching to simplify software development across all platforms, and the best way to do that was to unify all of them. And if you look at all of them, which was the outlier until now? Mac OS, of course. Who cares if it was the oldest, more robust, more consistent UI-wise. It was the odd one out, and now that Apple has regained complete control of the platform at the hardware level with Apple Silicon, the software has to play along. 

 

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