MacOS interface used to be joyful 7/25/16

By Chris Johnson

Great blog post by Nicholas Howard on how Apple drained a lot of the joy from the Mac OS UI starting with Yosemite.

OS X, while not quite as committed as Windows 8+ to purging all meaningful metaphors from the operating system, has chased the trend. The ideological roots of the redesigns are flimsy: thickly coated with bloated art theory language, so that no common person can detect their flimsiness, they throw aside genuinely good ideas such as ease-of-use, personality, and beauty in their obsessive quest to remove all references to the physical world from computer software.

It is a laudable goal to have more timeless designs in the UI, but I wish it hadn’t come at the expense of usability. Notice how Apple removed all the color cues from the Finder sidebar:

Mac OS Finder sidebar color drain

Now you have to carefully read and consider each sidebar item before you click. Before it was easy to recognize general colors like purple for the desktop or yellow & red for Applications.

If you’re at all concerned about the evolution of the Mac UI, I definitely recommend reading Howard’s entire post.