> I'm listening to Music right now and just spent a few minutes trying to use the keyboard. I don't really feel unable to do so.
I'm not subscribed, but here's my experience.
When Music just starts, Tab is locked to a single pane.
Cmd+F to find something, how do I exit the search? Visually Esc does nothing.
While in Search Tab is locked to Search field. After Esc tabbing first does nothing, then cycles through top buttons, then goes somewhere?
There's no way to focus sidebar with keyboard. None of sublists there have a dedicated shortcut.
If you select something in the sidebar, Tab, And then Shift-Tab, the focus doesn't go back.
Once you've selected something (radio, or album, or artist, or...), how do you go back?
Focus is broken. Select an album, and tell me how exactly to get to the song list and navigate through it (hint: when you cannot see where it's gone, you can press Arro Down, and start going through the list).
That's 30 seconds of using this amazing first-party app. And that's before we start listsing all the ways it's badly designed, badly implemented, and breaks multiple Apple HIGs.
> The dialog that they're... expanding in Ventura? Where they acknowledged it should be bigger for certain cases?
Key word: "certain cases". So, they acknowledged nothing, but grudgingly reverted this inane behaviour for some random unknown length. As if desktop displays are have so little horizontal space.
> You're welcome to dislike change, I just think you're really stretching here.
Definitely not stretching. Changes to GUI have to justified. None of the changes since BigSur are. They are aggressively removing readabilty, affordances, plain humane contrast, etc. They introduce touch-only paradigms to a touchless OS. And so on.
To quote people much smarter than I [1][2][3]:
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...the work of people who put iOS first. People who by now think in iOS terms. People who view the venerable Mac OS user interface as an older person whose traits must be experimented upon, plastic surgery after plastic surgery, until this person looks younger. Unfortunately the effect is more like this person ends up looking… weird.
These people look at the Mac’s UI and (that’s the impression, at least) don’t really understand it. Its foundations come from a past that almost seems inscrutable to them. Usability cues and features are all wrinkles to them. iOS and iPadOS don’t have these strange wrinkles, they muse. We must hide them. We’ll make this spectacular facelift and we’ll hide them, one by one. Mac OS will look as young (and foolish, cough) as iOS!
---
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.
...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
...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.
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Apple’s approach when presenting the last few major Mac OS releases has always felt as if the most important thing to work on an operating system were its look & feel, rather than how this foundational tool can actually improve people’s work or tasks.
This insistence around the most superficial aspects of a graphical user interface — the look — often reminds me of the constant redesign iterations of some third-party apps in an attempt to make them more alluring to customers and to increase sales. The hyperfocus on always looking new and fresh
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[1] https://morrick.me/archives/9368
[2] http://morrick.me/archives/9150
[3] https://morrick.me/archives/9407
