I've never understood the claim that Apple's UIs are better than others'. That wasn't true while Jobs was around, and it isn't true now. Apple Photos, for example, loses keystrokes every time I create a new album. That's been true for years. And Time Machine randomly drops files from backups. Linux isn't perfect, but my daily experience using it has been far superior for years.
Time Machine's "Floating Time Tunnel" user interface for browsing backups and restoring files is such a useless pretentious piece of shit. I DO NOT CARE for it taking over the entire screen with its idiotic animation, that prevents me from browsing current Finder folders at the same time or DOING ANYTHING ELSE like looking at a list of files I want to retrieve on the same screen.
It even sadistically blacks out every other connected display, and disables Alt-Tab, as if it was so fucking important that it had to lock you out of the rest of your system while you use it.
You can't just quickly Alt-Tab to flip back to another app to check something before deciding which file to restore and then Alt-Tab back to where you were. No, that would be too easy, and you'd miss out on all that great full screen animation. It not only takes a long time to start up and play its opening animations, but when you cancel it, it SLOWLY animates and cross fades back to the starting place, so you LOSE the time and location context that you laboriously browsed to, and then you have to take even more time and effort to get back to where you just were.
It was designed by a bunch of newly graduated Trump University graphics designers on cocaine, with absolutely NO knowledge or care in the world about usability or ergonomics or usefulness, who only wanted to have something flashy and shiny to buff up their portfolios and blog about, and now we're all STUCK with it, at our peril.
Crucial system utilities should not be designed to look and operate like video games, and turn a powerful mutitasking Unix operating system interface into a single tasking Playstation game interface. ESPECIALLY not backup utilities. There is absolutely no reason it needs to take over the entire screen and lock out all other programs, and have such a ridiculously gimmicky and useless user interface.
Whatever the fuck is wrong with Apple has been very very wrong since the inception of Time Machine and is STILL very wrong. How can you "Think Different" if you're not bothering to think at all?
>Core Animation will allow programmers to give their applications flashy, animated interfaces. Some developers think Core Animation is so important, it will usher in the biggest changes to computer interfaces since the original Mac shipped three decades ago.
>"The revolution coming with Core Animation is akin to the one that came from the original Mac in 1984," says Wil Shipley, developer of the personal media-cataloging application Delicious Library. "We're going to see a whole new world of user-interface metaphors with Core Animation."
>Shipley predicts that Core Animation will kick-start a new era of interface experimentation, and may lead to an entirely new visual language for designing desktop interfaces. The traditional desktop may become a multilayered three-dimensional environment where windows flip around or zoom in and out. Double-clicks and keystrokes could give way to mouse gestures and other forms of complex user input.
>The Core Animation "revolution" is already starting to happen. Apple's iPhone at the end of the month will see people using their fingers to flip through media libraries, and pinching their fingers together to resize photos.
>The "Delicious generation" is a breed of young developers who embrace interface experimentation and brash marketing. The term "Delicious generation" was meant as an insult, but they wear it as a badge of honor.
>Image: Adam BettsShipley's initial release of Delicious Library, with its glossy, highly refined interface, gave birth to a new breed of developers dubbed the "Delicious generation." For these Mac developers, interface experimentation is one of the big appeals of programming.
[...]
>Apple has been ignoring its own HIG for some time in applications like QuickTime, and is abandoning them completely in upcoming Leopard applications like Time Machine.
>Functionality-wise, Time Machine is a banal program -- a content-version-control system that makes periodic, automated backups of a computer's hard drive.
>But Apple's take on the age-old task of incremental backups features a 3-D visual browser that allows users to move forward and backward through time using a virtual "time tunnel" reminiscent of a Doctor Who title sequence. It's completely unlike any interface currently used in Mac OS X.
[...]
>While it seems logical to speculate that interfaces like those of Time Machine and Spaces will lead to the end of the familiar "window" framework for desktop applications altogether, many Mac developers predict that the most basic elements of the current user interface forms won't disappear entirely.
Hard disagree over here. Apple's not always been good but my experience has usually been better than the competition (at least OSX 10.4+). They've been on a downward trajectory, certainly I've whined a lot about how bad MacOS 14 is, but their main competition (Microsoft) has also been working to lower the bar. Linux on the desktop's largely been a non-starter for me due to Apple's ARM stuff and disinterest in spending the effort to find compatible hardware.
I've not used Apple for photo stuff past monkeying around with Aperture. However I recently tried digikam, darktable, and rawtherapee. Darktable in particular was atrocious, and if that's how Gtk apps are on Linux I'd consider that another strike against desktop Linux. All three crashed or hanged repeatedly. You could rather easily dismiss some things like keyboard shortcuts not being aligned (rawtherapee) or partially aligned (darktable) with MacOS norms. Even the lack of app signing (darktable, digikam) and mix of cocoa and gtk widgets could be attributed to big bad Apple.
But once you dig into them it's a rogues gallery. Darktable has two different modules for setting the white balance (ugh). Countless issues have been opened (and then closed) over this on github. The docs explain when each one comes into play. With the default settings if you believe the docs and change the module that's supposed to be active, you'll get an error. Widgets respond to mouse events even if you think the cursor isn't over the widget. Rawtherapee, for some reason, renders the metadata widget as blurry mess to the point of the text being illegible.
To me it feels like open source projects sneer at ease of use (especially after looking at how bug reports are dealt with) vs commercial software companies willingness to fund a UX team.
