Riccardo Mori

While using the beta of Big Sur on my 13-inch retina MacBook Pro, I have occasionally encountered some dialog boxes, especially modal dialogs, whose redesign feels rather unpolished. It heavily borrows from iOS, and here’s the thing I don’t get…

…Why are they in portrait orientation?

I can understand such a design on an iPhone, since its display is in portrait orientation. On a Mac, this looks a bit strange. And those buttons, just piled on top of one another, with the same width and comparatively small space between them, don’t strike me as an elegant way of presenting choices.

Their layout is also inconsistent. This is the warning you get when you try opening an app coming from an ‘unverified developer’:

Buttons are side by side

And this is the similar warning you get when you tell Mac OS to open the application anyway by right-clicking on its icon and choosing Open from the contextual menu:

Buttons are one above the other

This second dialog box, as you can see, has an additional problem: the text block is longer than the space afforded. It looks truncated, but actually you can read it in its entirety by hovering over it with the mouse and scrolling down. Something that’s not at all apparent at first glance, by the way. A small scrollbar will appear next to the text on mouseover, but a clearer hint would be welcome. Sure, a verbose warning isn’t pretty no matter the dialog box design, and verbose warnings don’t happen that often, but this particular tall-and-narrow dialog box design makes the modal dialog look even busier.

Just for comparison’s sake, here are the same warnings on High Sierra. The dialog boxes are better designed and more balanced:

Another inconsistency is that sometimes — like in previous Mac OS versions — one of the buttons will be highlighted (see the first dialog above, from Mail), other times all buttons are grey. 

Historically, in the Mac OS user interface, most (if not all) modal dialogs have had an option highlighted, and its corresponding button preselected. Usually, the reason behind the highlighting was to provide a quick way to select either the most obvious choice, or the safest choice. And of course, for warnings where you don’t have a choice and you just acknowledge them, the OK button would always be preselected.

I presume the no-highlighted-choices in these dialog boxes in Big Sur are just temporary. By the way, I’m not arguing they’re wrong per se. Perhaps sometimes there isn’t an obvious choice or a suggested choice to highlight, therefore the user can’t just dismiss a dialog by pressing Enter — they have to actively read the dialog’s contents and respond accordingly by purposefully clicking on one of the buttons. Like maybe in this case:

Yet another inconsistency is that dialogs like this one essentially retain the old design:

So, what’s it going to be? An entirely new visual design, or a mash-up of old and new?

Sheets

As defined in Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines, a sheet is “a modal dialog that’s attached to a particular window — usually a document — and prevents further interaction with the window until the sheet is dismissed.”

It seems that in Big Sur, as far as I’ve noticed, sheets are getting visually detached from their corresponding window, and take the form of standalone dialog boxes, but further interaction with their corresponding window is nonetheless prevented by greying out that window which is now put in the background. I’m still undecided whether this is an improvement or not.

This is a confirmation sheet in High Sierra’s Mail app:

And this is the Big Sur equivalent:

This is a confirmation sheet in High Sierra’s TextEdit:

And this is the Big Sur equivalent:

What I like about the old design is that it emphasises the bond between the sheet and the application it belongs to. The animation, too, is unequivocal: the sheet comes out of the window like a sheet of paper comes out of a printer. In the new design, the sheet becomes a sort of dialog box linked to a window, and I guess that, with a Desktop crowded with application windows, that window behind the dialog box, so evidently darkened and in the background, may help make the whole interaction stand out more by attracting attention on itself. 

It has happened to me more than once: I’m bouncing between two or three open apps, I quickly press the keyboard shortcut to close a window or a tab, but instead I’m inadvertently telling TextEdit (or another writing app) to close the document. I keep switching between apps wondering why App 1 hasn’t registered my action, while TextEdit has produced that same confirmation sheet you see above, and it gets lost in the mess of white application windows on my Desktop. With Big Sur’s design change, I’d probably notice it sooner.

On the other hand, just from the two examples I posted above, you can see how this new sheet design still hasn’t been fully formalised. In Mail the dialog has this new, strange portrait-oriented look; it’s a slightly lighter grey than the background window, and it doesn’t really stand out as it should. While in the TextEdit example the dialog box is white, stands out more, and retains the older arrangement of all of its elements. Needless to say, I much prefer this latter look and feel.

I don’t know when Apple plans to ship the official release of Big Sur, but we’re already a week into September, and even if Big Sur is scheduled to be released in late October, time’s getting tight. I have the feeling the user interface polishing is going to still be a work in progress for at least a few minor releases.

Previous logbook entries

• Introduction
• (1) Installation, the menu bar, first impressions
• (2) Control Centre
• (3) New beta, Finder windows
• (4) Other UI odds and ends
• (5) First look at Mail
• (6) Brief look at Safari

Remember the disclaimer I wrote in the first entry of this logbook? Given that very little of Mail is shown in Apple’s Big Sur preview page, I’ll have to be careful about what I can share here. Also, keep in mind that I have practically never opened Mail in the brief time I used the 13-inch retina MacBook Pro under Catalina before installing the Big Sur betas, so I may make an observation about something that looks or feels new to me in Big Sur, while perhaps it was already present in Catalina. Sorry about that in advance.

Main interface

Here’s the default interface as it appears after setting up an account. I haven’t touched anything. At first glance, I don’t dislike the general look. At least the icons in the toolbar don’t seem to share the same excess of padding between them as we saw in the menu bar and Finder windows.

Still, see that [»] icon in the toolbar? It means that there are more buttons that aren’t currently visible. This, in turn, means that when you open Mail on a 13-inch MacBook Pro, the default toolbar is not even visible in its entirety. I may be wrong, but this didn’t happen in the past.

Now, I know it’s nothing major, but it’s still indicative of the fact that Big Sur’s UI seems conceived and optimised for bigger screens.

By the way, I’m not sure where I had read it or who had said it, but back in June rumour had it that this default layout in Mail would have also been the only layout. Meaning that if you, like me, had always loved Mail’s classic layout, you would have been in for a sad surprise.

Well, in case you had heard the same rumour, rejoice, because the classic layout isn’t going anywhere. If you select View → Use Column Layout, you get the familiar interface:

And in case you were wondering: yes, you can manually adjust column width again.

With the classic layout, there’s just enough space between the toolbar icons to reveal what was missing in the previous layout. Let’s focus on this part of the toolbar for a moment:

1. I find this icon misleading. At first, I’ll admit, I had no clue as to its function. When I hover over it with the mouse, the tooltip says Mute selected conversations or Unmute selected conversations according to the button’s state. Maybe it’s just me, maybe it’s YouTube’s influence, but I tend to associate the icon of a bell with the concept of ‘notification’ — oh wait, Apple does it too in Big Sur: in System Preferences, the icon for the Notification pane is a bell. Without that tooltip, I wouldn’t have surmised it had something to do with muting/unmuting conversations. It also makes no sense that this button is clickable even when you’re not viewing your emails organised by conversations.
2. This is an amazing UI trap: it looks like a text field. For a split second you may even think it’s the Search text field, since the Search icon is right nearby. But no, it’s a button. Why in Big Sur’s Mail this button has been given such an enlarged, prominent shape is beyond me. It’s the only toolbar button shaped like this. If you look at High Sierra, for example, you’ll see that Move is just a regular button with the same size as the others:

The whole layout of this button bugs me for some reason. The presence of that thin frame strongly suggests this is a clickable text field. The Move to… label beside the folder icon also suggests (based on other similar clickable text fields we’ve seen elsewhere) that the Move to… text will disappear and you’ll be able to type something in its place. You know, like a Search field. You’re led to believe so because, if you look at the toolbar again, even in “Icon Only” view, the text Move to… remains visible. Instead, it really behaves like an app’s menu command and looks like this when selected:

Also, note the terrible alignment of the drop-down menu with respect to the ‘Move to…’ button

Icon Only / Icon and Text views

Same behaviour as what we saw in Finder windows, and same mild annoyances: when you go from “Icon Only” to “Icon and Text” view, icons become really small; something that didn’t really happen before Big Sur. In Mail under High Sierra, when selecting “Icon and Text” view, the buttons maintain their height and actually get slightly wider, while in “Icon Only” view, they’re more compact overall. 

Also, since Big Sur features less chrome in the title area of application windows, when you switch to an “Icon and Text” view, both in Finder windows and in Mail’s main window, that area looks terribly busy and crowded. As I’ve previously pointed out, toolbars in Big Sur seem to be really decent-looking only in “Icon Only” view. That’s not great, usability-wise.

Another toolbar — the Preferences pane

Here’s another detail I do hope it’s just temporary and that it will be fixed in a future beta. When you invoke Mail’s Preferences you get this pane:

Have you noticed, there in the top right corner? That’s right, there’s the [»] icon again, meaning that there are more options available, and that they’re currently hidden because the window is not wide enough. Clicking on it, you have the missing tab — Rules:

Well, that’s a bit unsightly, I thought, Let me resize the pane so that all tabs are visible.

But you can’t. The Preference pane’s dimensions are fixed. I hope someone at Apple notices, otherwise the Rules tab will definitely end up feeling lonely.

Anything good?

Yes. This is just a first look, and I’ve only set up a Gmail account, so I still don’t know how Mail in Big Sur behaves under heavy load, but so far the application’s performance is satisfactory. Mail feels very responsive and stable. After verifying my Gmail credentials, Mail started downloading all 15,000+ messages in the account, and it did so rather quickly, all things considered. 

I don’t know if this behaviour is new in Big Sur, or if it’s something that was already introduced in Mojave or Catalina, but I noticed that, after downloading several hundred messages, Mail put the download on hold, detecting that the MacBook Pro was on battery power. I noticed this in the status bar in the bottom left:

It’s still too early to talk about reliability or possible data loss bugs (as many experienced under Catalina). I’ve been running Mail with this sole Gmail account for only 36 hours. So far, everything is working well. I’ll certainly update the logbook further down the road in case something happens with Mail and to add any further UI-related observations. I’m still exploring the application.

Previous logbook entries

• Introduction
• (1) Installation, the menu bar, first impressions
• (2) Control Centre
• (3) New beta, Finder windows
• (4) Other UI odds and ends

‘Sticky’ locations

This is something I forgot to add in my previous entry. Let’s look at this figure once more:

Previously, I wrote:

Another change I’ve noticed is that, if you look at the sidebar, you can’t see other Macs with file sharing turned on that are present on the same network. In previous Mac OS versions they would usually appear in the area marked as (4). If you click on Network in the Locations section, then you can see them and connect to them; and once you’re connected to one or more of them and you mount one or more volumes, then you’ll be able to see the Mac’s name in Locations (3).

What happens next is something you may find handy or annoying — it depends on how you use your Mac. After disconnecting from a Mac on your network, that Mac’s name remains listed in the Locations section, and (at least for now) there doesn’t seem to be a way to remove it from the sidebar. In the figure, you see that I’m currently connected to Richard-XV. When I eject it, Richard-XV stays there. 

For how I navigate windows on my Macs, this is rather annoying. I’ve already selected Richard-XV by mistake on two separate occasions, when I actually wanted to select the MacBook Pro’s main volume XIII. And every time I selected Richard-XV, the MacBook Pro reopened the connection to the other Mac. It’s a small annoyance, which I suspect can worsen as one connects and then disconnects from multiple Macs/network volumes.

At least, in previous Mac OS versions, computers on the same network with file sharing turned on would appear in a separate Shared section, much easier to locate (or avoid) when needed.

Folder icons

In these logbook notes on the beta of Big Sur, I’ve generally refrained from remarking on specific icon designs because I’m assuming that nothing is definitive at this stage, and things may change over time. In the figure above, thanks to Dropbox, you can see both the old and the newer folder icon design. There was nothing wrong with the old, but I was always left wanting a bit more contrast. Folder icons in Big Sur have that contrast, maybe even too much of it. Still, I kind of like them.

Speaking of contrast…

Here’s a screenshot of the Finder’s File menu:

Visually, the biggest change compared with previous Mac OS versions is that now the command shortcuts are grey instead of black. I get why Apple made this change — to give prominence to the menu command, to the text — but to my eyes this also has the side-effect of tricking me into thinking that the command shortcut isn’t active. 

Perhaps it’s because it is the same colour as other inactive menu commands, or the fact that the background colour of the menu pane is now a light grey, further reducing the contrast, but the first impression I get when I invoke this menu is, Lots of these menu items have corresponding shortcuts, but they’re currently disabled. I reckon it’s quite subjective. Still, worth mentioning.

In general, as I’ve already pointed out since the WWDC 2020, Big Sur’s UI could use more contrast, and another area that seems to have regressed in this regard is how menu names are highlighted in the menu bar. This is with the default transparency setting:

The Finder menu name has an excessively subtle highlight, in my opinion. (Note that when you hover over the various menu commands, they’re normally highlighted, just like before Big Sur.)

If we enable Reduce transparency in System Preferences → Accessibility → Display, the highlighting is back, almost starkly so.

Notification Centre and widgets

I find it odd that you now invoke Notification Centre by clicking on the clock, instead of a dedicated menu extra like before. I also think that, on Mac OS, merging Today view and Notifications while having these bigger, redesigned widgets taking up considerable space in Notification Centre isn’t an improvement over the previous design. Here’s a screenshot of the entirety of the Desktop on my retina 13-inch MacBook Pro with Notification Centre showing one notification and four widgets. Yeah, the available visible space before having to scroll is almost over.

And three of the widgets are set to Small size. In the older design, widgets were more compact, and even if you couldn’t have two of them side by side, their use of the limited space of Notification Centre’s pane was more efficient and more information-rich.

What I’m seeing with these bigger widgets is something like, Let’s cram the old Dashboard concept into Notification Centre and it feels a bit silly, to be honest. This kind of widget design is certainly better employed on iOS and iPadOS — it makes more sense and it blends better with those operating systems’ respective user interfaces.

Previous logbook entries

• Introduction
• (1) Installation, the menu bar, first impressions
• (2) Control Centre
• (3) New beta, Finder windows

A couple of days ago, after a bit of a delay due to work, I was prepared to continue with my Big Sur logbook entries, but meanwhile Apple released a new beta, so that further delayed me. Before installing it, I took screenshots of all the System Preferences panes — it seemed an important place to focus my attention on, a place where changes and updates are very likely to happen. I forgot to take screenshots of Finder windows, though; but, going from memory, there doesn’t seem to be any noticeable change in their UI between the first and the second public beta. 

Or should I say between Beta 4 and Beta 5, since apparently the latest beta version I’ve downloaded is Beta 5:

It was another chunky update, at 7.15 GB, and the first time I downloaded it, the download aborted and I got an error. Since I was trying to download it as soon as I learnt there was an update available, I figured that maybe Apple servers were busy and slow, so I postponed the operation. The day after, the download was very fast and completed successfully. The installation, on the other hand, took longer than the previous beta — around 50–55 minutes. The stage that took very long to complete was the Preparing Mac OS Big Sur Beta 5… just after download and before restarting the Mac. The progress bar appeared stuck for a while. But in these cases I usually let the Mac be, and sure enough things went smoothly, eventually.

Finder windows

This was the entry I meant to write before updating to Beta 5. My initial observations remain unchanged.

Let’s take a standard Finder window. I’ve set my viewing preferences just like on my production Macs running High Sierra (Sidebar, Path bar, and Status bar are visible; Toolbar is in “Icon Only” view; and the only customisation to the standard Toolbar is the addition of the Path and Dropbox buttons).

Finder window in Big Sur

As a general observation, I’d say that, now that I’m seeing this new UI in person, it bothers me less than when I saw it revealed at the WWDC 2020. I’m not entirely okay with it either, but now that I’m looking at it more attentively on a Mac I have before me, there are also little details I can appreciate.

For starters, I like the use of this unified symbol library Apple is developing. The new sidebar icons appear slightly smaller than their counterparts in previous Mac OS versions, but they’re nonetheless recognisable. I also like the colour differentiation between the icons in the ‘drives and devices’ section (Locations) and the icons in the Favourites section. The former remain dark grey, while the latter take the colour you specified in System Preferences → General → Accent colour.

The new design of the upper part of the Finder window — with the loss of a proper title area, the semaphore buttons that now are visually part of the sidebar (1), and the title that is now part of the toolbar (2) — is a mixed bag. Like other parts of the redesigned Big Sur user interface, it’s not that bad if you just look at it or interact with it superficially. But the more you stare at it and ponder, the more you find annoyances.

The new toolbar (2), for example, suffers from the same spacing problems as the menu bar. There is simply too much padding between icons. If you look at the screenshot above, you’ll see that I chose a somewhat typical window width, at least for a 13-inch display. But the toolbar is not entirely visible. If I want to make all the buttons visible, and avoid too much title truncation, I have to stretch the window to a size that (again, on a 13-inch display) takes up 95% of the screen’s width, leaving just enough Desktop space on the right side to see the drive icons.

With the ‘old style’ (pre-Big Sur) of Finder windows UI, this kind of spacing issue is absent, of course. On my 11-inch MacBook Air, I can have a Finder window that is less than half the whole screen’s width, and still see all the toolbar buttons, including Search, which on previous Mac OS versions is a whole text field instead of an expandable control.

Finder window in High Sierra

Another peculiar thing worth mentioning is what happens when you choose to view the toolbar as “Icon and Text” (Finder → View → Customise Toolbar → Show: Icon and Text). In previous Mac OS versions (High Sierra in the picture below), since the toolbar extends across the whole window, when you choose to show icons and text for the toolbar buttons, the size of the buttons remains the same, and labels are placed beneath them. Finder windows become a little taller, but not wider, and you don’t lose anything usability-wise: no button disappears or gets reduced to accommodate the text beneath:

Toolbar: Icon Only view (High Sierra)

Toolbar: Icon and Text view (High Sierra)

In Big Sur, something interesting happens: to accommodate the labels beneath the buttons, the buttons become noticeably smaller, and one peculiar side-effect of this change is that you get to see more controls. In the picture below you can see that, after switching to Icon and Text view, the Action control becomes visible. While we’re here, also please note how unpleasantly crowded the left side becomes with the appearance of the “Back/Forward” text beneath the [<] and [>] buttons.

Toolbar: Icon Only view (Big Sur)

Toolbar: Icon and Text view (Big Sur)

I’m sure that, as you’re reading these notes, you may think I like splitting hairs and that I’m being unnecessarily fastidious. But making me aware of the finer details is something Apple itself has done over the years. This Finder window design, while superficially pretty, doesn’t feel completely thought out or optimised for different cases. It’s the same thing as the menu bar: there is a lot of wasted space between controls, and it seems designed to look good only in the best case scenario: relatively big retina screens (16-inch and above).

Look again at how smaller the toolbar controls become once we choose to display the labels beneath them. The targets become smaller too, and on a 13-inch retina screen you already have to pay attention whenever you want to click to select them. Imagine doing that on a 13-inch or an 11-inch non-retina screen. Add to this the poor contrast of the controls themselves, and you end up with quite a blurry and unpleasant interface. Finder window toolbars in Big Sur seems to be really optimised for an “Icon Only” setting.

And again, the new design of Finder windows in Big Sur seems to favour bigger screens with retina resolution even with regard to window management. To be able to see all your toolbar controls you have to widen each window to a considerable degree. On smaller screens windows end up taking more space than before, thus cluttering the Desktop unnecessarily and making simple drag & drop of files between windows more awkward.

Other minor details

Let’s get back to this figure:

Another change I’ve noticed is that, if you look at the sidebar, you can’t see other Macs with file sharing turned on that are present on the same network. In previous Mac OS versions they would usually appear in the area marked as (4). If you click on Network in the Locations section, then you can see them and connect to them; and once you’re connected to one or more of them and you mount one or more volumes, then you’ll be able to see the Mac’s name in Locations (3). I hope this is just temporary and that the old behaviour is restored, as it’s more efficient and practical (you see which Macs are available on the Network and you can connect to them with fewer clicks).

Another UI element I hope is just temporary is the big, dark handle to adjust icon size in Finder windows, located at the bottom right corner (5). It looks a bit cartoonish and I feel it attracts more attention than it should. Compare it with the more understated counterpart in previous Mac OS versions (see the High Sierra Finder windows screenshots above).

As a final note, I’d like to point out how small the difference between active and inactive windows has become under Big Sur. In contrast with previous Mac OS versions, now a window in active state (i.e. in focus) has a lighter appearance than an inactive window in the background. Overall, though, I think there’s enough differentiation to avoid confusion: the title bars/toolbars of inactive windows are very grey and low-contrast; the semaphore buttons in the top left corner lose their colour; and even the accented icons in the sidebar turn into a less vibrant hue compared with the active window’s sidebar icons.

Wrapping up

As I said above, the overall impression I’m having about Big Sur’s user interface is that it’s a mixed bag. From what I’ve seen so far, there are nice touches here and there, interspersed by oversights and even regressions (the largely inefficient use of space between controls and menus, both in the Mac’s menu bar and in the toolbar design within Finder windows). It seems that now how it looks (to stubbornly achieve a unified Mac OS/iPadOS interface) is more important than how it works.

Previous logbook entries

• Introduction
• (1) Installation, the menu bar, first impressions
• (2) Control Centre