Apple Doesn't Design For Yesterday 370
HughPickens.com writes Erik Karjaluoto writes that he recently installed OS X Yosemite and his initial reaction was "This got hit by the ugly stick." But Karjaluoto says that Apple's decision to make a wholesale shift from Lucida to Helvetica defies his expectations and wondered why Apple would make a change that impedes legibility, requires more screen space, and makes the GUI appear fuzzy? The Answer: Tomorrow.
Microsoft's approach with Windows, and backward compatibility in general, is commendable. "Users can install new versions of this OS on old machines, sometimes built on a mishmash of components, and still have it work well. This is a remarkable feat of engineering. It also comes with limitations — as it forces Microsoft to operate in the past." But Apple doesn't share this focus on interoperability or legacy. "They restrict hardware options, so they can build around a smaller number of specs. Old hardware is often left behind (turn on a first-generation iPad, and witness the sluggishness). Meanwhile, dying conventions are proactively euthanized," says Karjaluoto. "When Macs no longer shipped with floppy drives, many felt baffled. This same experience occurred when a disk (CD/DVD) reader no longer came standard." In spite of the grumblings of many, Karjaluoto doesn't recall many such changes that we didn't later look upon as the right choice.
Microsoft's approach with Windows, and backward compatibility in general, is commendable. "Users can install new versions of this OS on old machines, sometimes built on a mishmash of components, and still have it work well. This is a remarkable feat of engineering. It also comes with limitations — as it forces Microsoft to operate in the past." But Apple doesn't share this focus on interoperability or legacy. "They restrict hardware options, so they can build around a smaller number of specs. Old hardware is often left behind (turn on a first-generation iPad, and witness the sluggishness). Meanwhile, dying conventions are proactively euthanized," says Karjaluoto. "When Macs no longer shipped with floppy drives, many felt baffled. This same experience occurred when a disk (CD/DVD) reader no longer came standard." In spite of the grumblings of many, Karjaluoto doesn't recall many such changes that we didn't later look upon as the right choice.
I don't follow (Score:5, Insightful)
So what's so "tomorrow" about change from Lucida to Helvetica, which impedes legibility, requires more screen space, and makes the GUI appear fuzzy? Is that the definition of "tomorrow" now?
Re: I don't follow (Score:2, Interesting)
5K screens
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
5K screens
Thank god OS X never built-in support for user-selectable visual themes! Well ... except for that awesome-sauce "Dark Theme" that lets users be so tomorrow that they're into next week.
Absolute total BS is still absolute total BS and this shite should never have made it past the firehose.
Re: I don't follow (Score:4, Informative)
5K screens
... which are a ridiculous extravagance.
Apple's current 5k screens are way too small. A 27" display properly goes at the opposite side of your desk, but it only takes about half that distance for pixels at this density to be, practically speaking, invisible.
A 5k screen should be at least 32", and even that is pressing it. I'd say 36".
I'm currently running 2 WUXGA monitors, giving me 3840 x 1200, at the far side of my desk. This is about the ideal placement, and while the pixels aren't quite invisible, they are small enough (for me) as makes no difference.
A 5k screen at 27" is, in my opinion, a huge waste of money.
Re: (Score:3)
You haven't actually seen the screen yet have you.
I don't have to. I can do the math.
I don't dispute that they're beautiful displays. I was only questioning their practicality.
What's certainly true is it will be far better than the setup you describe as having at the moment. You just don't realise it.
No, it's not "certainly true" at all. I must have a certain amount of screen real-estate for my work, not extra pixel density, to get my work done. Beyond a certain reasonable limit, pixel density does nothing for me at all.
In fact, a 27" monitor, at ANY pixel density, would represent at least a 60% reduction in my usable screen space.
So don't be too quick to judge. It may b
Re: I don't follow (Score:5, Informative)
It's general knowledge in typography that Helvetica is the most legible typeface. Low-resolution devices present challenges that keep that from being true, so adaptations had to be made.
Of course, pretty soon if you want security updates you'll have to accept Helvetica, even on your low-resolution device. But you should stop being such a loser with a three-year-old computer and give Apple some more money.
Maybe they'll have "Mac Mode" ready for the iPhone by then.
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I could switch to whatever typeface in macos, at my own risk of course, but it seems strange this ability went away.
Re: I don't follow (Score:2, Informative)
It makes sense if you've ever designed an OS X app. The UI is defined in "nib" files on a pixel-by-pixel basis. (Nib stands for "NextStep Interface Builder" - this is something that comes from NextStep.)
So instead of saying "this label is here and a text field is to the right of it" you say "this label is at 10,10 pixels and is 100x30 pixels, this text field is at 120,10 pixels and is 400x30 pixels." If you were allowed to change the font, you'd completely screw up every UI.
"But wait! They just changed the
Re: (Score:2)
Ugh, that would have to make translations a pain in the ass. Not only do I have to supply alternate text for all the menus and dialogs, I also have to manually adjust the layout? Yeah, I've created some very nice manual layouts in my time, but never anything with multilingual support.
Re: (Score:3)
That's always a problem with translations. Equivalent words or phrases in different languages take up different amounts of space. You almost always have to provide a different layout for a different language, unless you start out with ginormous buttons that can accommodate all languages.
Re: I don't follow (Score:3)
Things like buttons and menus are automatically resized to fit the text (unlike Windows where about a decade or two ago you sometimes had to draw your own buttons).
These days for pretty much any OS: If you follow the design recommendations at least, your UI will be forward compatible. If you use your own or deity forbid use an entirely different API that does require fixed dimensions (eg the way Java does) you may get some weird looking apps.
Re: I don't follow (Score:5, Interesting)
Pro Litteris, the Swiss copyright society for literature does not agree. Helvetica doesn't even make the top twelve. Most returns on a search of "most legible typeface" that are by professionals boil down to 'whatever you're used to and like'.
Re: I don't follow (Score:5, Interesting)
What makes you think professionals are even qualified to make the call? Presumably you're talking typographers, graphic designers, etc - artist types who couldn't construct a proper double-blind study to save their souls.
Re: I don't follow (Score:5, Informative)
artist types who couldn't construct a proper double-blind study to save their souls.
Some studies have been done. However, I found none that even considered Helvetica as one of the options. So far I have seen no data to support the assertion that Helvetica is "most readable" or "most legible".
A Comparison of Popular Online Fonts [usabilitynews.org]
What Size and Type of Font Should I Use on My Website? [usabilitynews.org]
Another Comparison of Popular Online Fonts [usabilitynews.org]
Re: I don't follow (Score:5, Informative)
What makes you think professionals are even qualified to make the call? Presumably you're talking typographers, graphic designers, etc - artist types who couldn't construct a proper double-blind study to save their souls.
While that may be true, there have been a LOT of studies on typeface readability and legibility over the past 150 years or so, of varying quality.
After having spent some time reading these studies, I've basically come to the conclusion that we've learned basically nothing beyond three basic facts:
(1) readers don't do well with "weird" typefaces except in ornamental or occasional use -- use something that's close to what reader are used to encountering when they will read more than a few words in the font
(2) bigger fonts make reading easier
(3) unless the font has really unusual features (e.g., some characters that don't look like "standard" letterforms), overall design can usually fix most problems -- i.e., doing things like tweaking size, space between lines, space between words, etc.
The last point is really important. Most discussions of typeface legibility have to do with things like serifs, x-height, size of holes in characters like 'o' or 'p', etc. But as long as the letters actually still have standard shapes, you can usually tweak the size or spacing to make it just as legible.
Beyond that, it's basically personal preference and what people are used to. There are studies that seem to show small effects for everything -- serif fonts are better, except when they're not. Justified text is better than ragged right, or the reverse. (Hyphens are bad, or they aren't.) Double-spacing is necessary, or it's not. Larger spaces after periods or punctuation help readability to a small extent, or they don't make a difference.
Frankly, having read a lot in the literature of typography, I think the problem with most of these studies is that overall design matters most, and I'm not talking about the design of the study (though that's important), but rather the typographic design and use case.
Some typefaces will perform better when spacing is tight, others seem better if more space is available. Some typefaces are good for people with various disabilities or vision problems, but readability may be different for those with "normal" vision. Some typefaces look better than others when a smaller size is used, but people express a different preference when text is larger... or when resolution is varied... or....
Typeface is just one of many elements of proper design. And usually reactions like "Oooh, you simply CAN'T use that font on a screen!" or "No, no, no! That works well for newsprint and headlines, but no one would ever like long text blocks with that!" are just based on what people are used to, not what would actually be more legible or readable.
For example, there are situations where people have come to expect serif or sans serif fonts. Expect people to complain if you don't use the standard choice in those situations. That's not to say one or ALWAYS better than the other -- it's just a combination of what's expected and the other design choices.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
One quick clarification to my second point:
(2) bigger fonts make reading easier
Bigger fonts are more legible, but they generally make reading slower because it takes more time for our eyes to move across them. So, text that's too big can be annoying for reading, but it's easier to recognize and distinguish the characters.
Once again, even in this case, overall design and use is more important than simply choosing the font or the size.
Oh yeah. :) (Score:5, Insightful)
Those are hyperlinks. That's the generally accepted, even traditional, look for a hyperlink. You do know what a hyperlink [apple.com] is, do you not? When I click a hyperlink, I expect to arrive on a web page forthwith. That's what they mean. But that's not what these mean. These mean... random stuff. Normal words... are words. Underlined and/or blue-colored words are hyperlinks. Buttons, despite Ive's insane, drooling jihad against skeuomorphism, should look like you are expected to reach over and press them. This leverages the user's familiarity with the real world (something I admit I don't think I can assume you have) and creates a natural understanding of an implied action just by existing. An action, I might add, that is not hyperlinking. Because we use, you know, highlighted words for that. How would you react to a stereo that had no buttons, just words on its face? Is that intuitive? Of bloody course it isn't. You press a button, it depresses, it looks different, it clicks, you know to expect the action to occur. If it's a toggled state, the button stays in. Natural. Normal. Expected. But a word? Where's the premise for touching a word? Where indeed? Hyperlinks, you say? YES! BLOODY HYPERLINKS!
Ah. Ah ha. Ha. Ha Ha Ha. Oh, that is priceless. Just priceless. Ive's work is at best, a mixed bag, and he surely isn't the world's foremost designer. I can think of any number of designers that make him look like the pretentious hack he is. Starting with any number of supercar designers, wandering off into audio equipment and musical instrument design, heck, there are even refrigerators that are designed better than Ive's work product. Also, Scott Forstall's ideas were far better in terms of design than Ives. He just wasn't minimalist -- but minimalist is not a synonym for "good", and in fact, very seldom is that the case.
Also, look at the new Mac Pro. What a dysfunctional failure-storm. Can't install drives in it, doesn't fit in with other equipment well, requires desk warts to be even reasonably functional... expansion is a plug-addled nightmare... even the plugs themselves can be pulled right out, no security (physical or data) whatsoever. Oh yeah, Ives. I wouldn't let that guy "design" my kitchen. He'd probably take out all the plugs, knobs and buttons, color everything silver, and not allow silverware dividers in the drawers or pots on the stove. But you'd get a microwave with only one setting, and son, you'd be expected to like it. And you... well, you probably would. Lacking any kind of taste as you do. ;)
Yes, absolutely, that's why I praise Mavericks so highly after years of buggy OS's left unfixed. That's why I thought "awesome" when the fully expandable Mac Pro came out, and why I bought right in. That's why I changed from Windows to the Mac. That's why I generally have the latest in home theater gear. That's why I have a Tesla on order. That's why I cohabit instead of marry. That's why I'm atheist and not theist. That's why I just took in a severely injured kitten. That's why I get such a kick out of messing with a Raspberry Pi, cobbling up little RPi projects we can use around the house. That's why my favorite literary genre is hard science fiction. That's why I have moved to SDRs, away from conventional radios. In fact, that's why I write SDR software.
Yeah, I'm just terrified of change, you bet. You crack me up. Any other "insights" you might care to share while you're making things up out of the clear blue? I think Fox News is holding a place for you, better get right over there.
Let me at
Re:Oh yeah. :) (Score:4, Insightful)
What in the heck ever happened to having clearly identifiable buttons in favour of these mostly concealed soft-button things?
Warning: I am about to use some bad language. Stop now if that offends you.
Ah yes, I know what it was. Pardon my french: ****ing INTERFACE DESIGNERS.
I actually had a Skype proponent (who seemed to be speaking for the design team) argued for aesthetics over function when I pointed out that on my laptop, the contact list font (not changeable on the version I have and accessibility settings don't change font size) was on the order of 2 mm. When one of the other users pointed out he headed an Academic department that was finding recent releases unusable on many modern monitors with 40+ aged staff, he got the same scornful 'it's all about design and aesthetics'.
Well here's a notion for the UI designers: F*** AESTHETICS WITH A CHAINSAW.
Aesthetics are okay if usability is high and complete. If not, and they are the reason why not, they are not just failure but brain-addled failure.
If your user base is saying 'hey, we'd like your software to have readable font sizes for modern monitors' and those who seem to be fanbois or speaking for the product say 'our aesthetic is more important', then they will find their customers say 'have fun in the bankruptcy court, Fail Co.'
I stopped paying Skype monthly fees because of this crap. It used to be something I recommended and bought add on apps for. Now its on my 'hope to find a replacement' list.
I heard later someone indicating some of Skype may have come from a prior code base (an AIM product?) and that the original code which may have included UI code was an arcane mess and that the new engineers probably had no idea (or no budget) to fix the screwed up and unusable UI. I could understand that. It was the defense of the poor usability as intentional design that burnt my britches. I'd fire anyone that thought that on my development team.
Ultimately, MS has made a habit of retraining users every time they switch OS by shuffling around where you can find common administrative operations (at least common for power users). This has been a PITA for IT people and others since Win 3.1. Yes, once in a while part of the re-org made some logical sense of regrouping functions or or hierarchically arranging them. Mostly, none that I could observe.
Don't bother to retrain me unless there's a darn good reason. It's about one of the most off-putting part of software updates (including those on Android). The Ribbon Bar on latter day MS windows is an example. More efficient for the 10% hardcore users yes, a retraining time wasting PITA for the other 90%, HELL YES.
Try to get it right the first time. Try hard. If you make a mistake, make changes careful, limited, an gradual for UI items. Explain the logic of the new UI functional bits. And don't make any unnecessary changes or force senseless and time wasting retraining on your users.
Then again, I suppose UI designers are artists not engineers and always want to explore new things or see a way it can be done better. George Lucas had that when he made the newer versions of Eps 1-3 without the models, with awkward scenes formerly cut, and with Greedo shooting first. He thought we wanted to see the movies HE wanted to make. We actually wanted to see the movies WE HAD SEEN when we were younger which he ****ed up. (Not as bad as what came after with Ep 1 and product placement insanity....)
Re: I don't follow (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: I don't follow (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: I don't follow (Score:5, Funny)
No no, this could turn out to be an HaterGate. Please do not try to bring facts into it! Let people who don't even use OS X come in and rant about the poor choices Apple consistently makes.
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The reason is that MS tweaks the hinting in its screen fonts to ensure minimal problems with alti-aliasing. Cleartype carries forward a legacy of supporting low resolution displays by optimizing the position of strokes to align with the pixel grid.
Apple just throws whatever the designers get off on at Quartz and let it blur details into oblivion. Yeah, this will become a non-issue with high DPI displays but it is exemplary of Apples user hostility that they make adverse decisions for them and then claim it'
Re: I don't follow (Score:4, Interesting)
That is very much convention wisdom, yes. There are surprisingly few scientifically designed studies on typeface legibility, but the ones I have been able to find (particularly the FAA-sponsored study in the early days of CRTs in the cockpit) have indicated that serif - NOT sans serif - fonts are easier to read, even at low resolution.
sPh
Re: I don't follow (Score:4, Insightful)
It's general knowledge in typography that Helvetica is the most legible typeface.
That is very much convention wisdom, yes.
It really isn't. Helvetica is actually a relatively awkward typeface to work with, particularly for body text. Its default tracking/kerning are tight for extended reading, its glyphs have quite inconsistent width fittings, and it has various problems with similar-looking glyphs that are easily mistaken for one another, which also makes it a less than ideal choice for user interfaces. Don't mistake popularity or endurance for quality.
Re: I don't follow (Score:4, Informative)
That's only true at very large sizes—say 5% of your total field of view or larger—and it is IMO highly debatable even at those sizes.
At small sizes, particularly for people whose vision is less than perfect, Helvetica Neue makes Comic Sans look readable by comparison. It's not a question of the screen's resolution; no matter how precisely you render two letters that are separated by a distance that's less than your eye's circle of confusion, you still can't distinguish the strokes from one another.
For example, on my brand new MacBook Pro with retina display, I have no trouble whatsoever reading Courier New at 11 point. It is easily readable, and every letter is visually distinct. Same goes for any number of other fonts, including the venerable Lucida Grande. On that same hardware, my eyes struggle with Helvetica Neue even at 18 point, which means if I want it to be readable, I would get substantially less content on the screen even when comparing it with a fixed-width, serif font!
And the reason for the readability problems are a decided lack of legibility in Helvetica Neue. With Helvetica Neue 12 point, when I look at the word "pill", the "p" touches the "i" until I'm six inches from the screen. And depending on where the letter happens to fall, it may or may not be possible to tell the difference between "pom" (the juice) and "porn" (naughty stuff on the Internet) without getting ridiculously close to the screen. Sometimes the gap is visible, sometimes it isn't. In other words, the tracking is simply way, way, way too tight to qualify as legible. Remember that when designers use Helvetica, they painstakingly tweak the kerning to ensure readability at the target output size. As a general display font without that level of hand-tweaking, Helvetica and Helvetica Neue are crap.
But Helvetica Neue's problem goes way beyond over-tight tracking. The most critical requirement for a font to qualify as "legible" is that you must be able to distinguish letters from one another. Helvetica Neue fails miserably at this, though not quite as badly as Helvetica or Arial.
For example, look at a lowercase "L" and a lowercase "i" in almost any font, and you'll see that they are decidedly different heights. This is deliberate; it makes it possible to tell the difference between a pillow and a plllow, (which I believe is Ancient Egyption for an unreadable typeface, but I could be wrong).
Not in Helvetica Neue. They're the exact same height. This makes it excessively hard to read text that combines those two letters, particularly at small point sizes where the gap in the lowercase "I" is often hard to see.
And speaking of "I", is that a capital "i" or a lowercase "L"? If you're reading this in Slashdot's default font (Arial) or in Helvetica or Helvetica Neue, you probably can't be certain, because the two letters are nearly indistinguishable. So when I say I'm "Ill", do I mean that I'm sick, or that I'm three years old in Roman numerals? At 13 point, even on a Retina display, a capital "i" and a lowercase "L" can look literally identical, depending on where the letters happen to fall and how font smoothing interacts with them. And that's even with getting my corrected-to-20/20-vision eyes as close as a couple of inches from the screen.
Legible, my ass.
Re: I don't follow (Score:5, Informative)
Re: I don't follow (Score:5, Insightful)
Not to disagree in principle, but don't confuse "readable" (ability to read for hours without strain) and "legible" (ability to make out each letter at all).
Serif fonts are readable: great for reducing strain from hours of reading under good conditions. That's why they're used for books (except some crazy tech books that get it wrong), newspaper text, magazine text, and so on. Serif fonts are perhaps over-used in blogs, from a desire to look more like a newspaper, I suspect, for text too small for the screen resolution to really make it work, but for eReaders and such that devote all possible space to the text, allowing for larger fonts, it's the obvious choice.
Sans-serif fonts are good for remaining legible under highly difficult conditions. That's why they're often the choice for billboards, for headlines (designed to attract you close enough to read the text), for advertising text (to make the big text easier to read from across the room, and the small print unappealing to read) unless the advertiser's style trumps other font choice concerns. Sans-serif was the only practical choice in the early days of computing, and so some people still see them as "technology fonts" - ooh, it's high tech, it should be sans-serif. Sigh.
Helvetica is a particularly demanding san-serif font. It's sort of the worst of both worlds for screens - it demands high DPI, but it's still less readable than a proper serif font. In a totally Apple move, choosing style over practicality, they pick the font that's famous for being the most stylish (at least among hipsters) over practical concerns (e.g., one-button mice, you're holding it wrong, bendy-phone - all style over practicality).
Re: I don't follow (Score:5, Interesting)
Serif fonts are readable: great for reducing strain from hours of reading under good conditions. That's why they're used for books (except some crazy tech books that get it wrong), newspaper text, magazine text, and so on.
[snip]
Sans-serif fonts are good for remaining legible under highly difficult conditions. That's why they're often the choice for billboards, for headlines (designed to attract you close enough to read the text), for advertising text
Nope, nope, and nope.
Basically, serif fonts are used where serif fonts are used because they're more familiar where serif fonts are used.
Sans serif are used where they are used because they tend to be used in those cases. Readers are used to seeing them there.
Numerous studies have come up with inconsistent results (for a good summary of what dozens of them on the subject say, see here [alexpoole.info]).
The takeaway message is readers find familiar design choices to be easier to deal with. Most books and long texts tend to be set with serifs, so we've come to expect that -- but well-designed studies have shown little difference (or inconsistent results). Web fonts tend to be sans serif, so we expect that. And I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about when you say that sans serif will remain legible under difficult conditions -- if anything, studies tend to show that serif fonts have a small advantage (probably not significant) there. After all, serifs were inherited from Roman techniques for carving letters into giant stones, not in writing: I doubt Roman sculptors would have added things that seemed to decrease legibility to monuments. (The one "difficult condition" where sans serifs have a claimed advantage is in low resolution electronic situations, but recent studies have shown this advantage to be small or non-existent.)
Re: (Score:3)
(By the way, I know it's "common knowledge" that sans serif fonts must be used on things like road signs, because they are so ubiquitous. But most of the studies on such fonts only tend to take into account point size or capital height as the standard for comparison. Factor in X-height, which in many serif fonts tends to be smaller and use at least a semibold or medium weight, and serif fonts can do just as well as sans on signs. Mostly, I think sans serif was adopted for things like signs because such th
Re: I don't follow (Score:5, Informative)
Sure, sure, 300 years of technology have it all wrong and a few "recent studies"
Did you even look at the link? The guy looked at something like **50 studies** from the past century or so. And there have been at least a dozen more I've seen dealing with readability in a variety of fonts since that article was published in 2008.
show one more way for hipsters to be "smarter" than everyone else.
What do "hipsters" have to do with this?
And by the way, frankly, I prefer serif fonts too for reading -- I think sans serif fonts looks stupid. (Actually I kinda dislike them in general and have been known to change my browser defaults to remedy this situation -- but my personal preference is different from what actual studies show about legibility/readability.)
To mock your most absurd claim further (your last one): you can make sans-serif letterforms distinguishable, barely, with 5x3 pixels to work with.
Yes, to mock you back: this is of course the most common usage case these days with high-res screens. :)
Look, the question is about LEGIBILITY, not ability to render. At small enough sizes, serifs can't even be placed on fonts -- you're correct. But this has nothing to with whether people prefer to read 8-point or 10-point text in serifs versus sans. And basically there some studies I've seen recently which show people to prefer serif fonts for reading at smaller font sizes and sans only at larger sizes.
But it's a small effect, and I don't know if it's actually significant -- point is, if you're dealing with enough pixels to actually display serifs, there doesn't seem to be a strong preference one way or the other. And if you have fewer pixels, serif fonts will essentially look like sans anyway, so again they're about equivalent.
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You gotta watch those sans guys. Sometimes you can't tell the difference between l, I, and 1. It's a bit of an issue sometimes in computing, where sans is more frequent that serif. Makes sense. Yep.
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Yeah, it's an euphemism for "change for change's sake".
Apple thinks ~100 dpi is the past (Score:5, Interesting)
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Most Macs don't have Retina displays (Score:2)
Re:Most Macs don't have Retina displays (Score:5, Informative)
Creatives will naturally gravitate to the best available displays, which means either the retina-class iMac or MBP, or the Mac Pro and whatever their display of choice happens to be, and Apple definitely has them covered. Helvetica looks just fine on retina displays (honestly, I think it looks just fine @ 1200p on a 17" display, too), so these users won't be likely to complain.
They sell the most expensive hardware to the group least likely to buy a lot of apps and media from Apple, and I agree, that's the way to go. Users of iOS devices have voiced that they want the look and feel of their iPhone, iPod, and iPad everywhere they can possibly get it. Well, those use Helvetica, they also use flat neutrals, transparency, and blur. Apple catered to those users, who are likely to buy the cheaper computer and spend more on apps and media, without a second thought.
If you're not in those two categories or, at least, don't follow either of those spending patterns, I won't say Apple doesn't care about you at all; they certainly care about anyone who wants to give them money, just just don't care enough to give a shit what you want.
Again, I fully agree with this from a business perspective. Unfortunately, I have my own business, which comes with its own perspective, and if that's the view Apple wants to take, it's sadly incompatible with reality for a lot of professional users. It really saddens me, as they were making strides toward developing a huge presence in professional fields before Jobs passed; that has not only slowed, but reversed, since then. It doesn't seem to be hurting their sales, yet, but I imagine it will when they start making more obviously negative changes to OSX's UI. They'll still sell to iOS users and creatives, and they'll probably remain the college student's PC of choice; but, by crapifying the interface (observation of others in this thread, which I've already stated I don't necessarily agree with -- but, me vs them, they're the majority, so I'm using their opinion for my point) on lower-end-but-still-current hardware, which the mass market is more likely to be able to afford when they choose to buy Apple, they're removing much of the allure of their platform. This can't be a good thing.
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If you'd used Helvetica you'd have spotted it in time.
Re:I don't follow (Score:4, Informative)
So what's so "tomorrow" about change from Lucida to Helvetica, which impedes legibility, requires more screen space, and makes the GUI appear fuzzy? Is that the definition of "tomorrow" now?
More to the point how does changing from Lucida to Helvetica impede legibility, require more screen space, and make the GUI appear fuzzy? I can't say that I have noticed any of these world ending problems in decades of using the Helvetica font.
Re:I don't follow (Score:5, Informative)
Helvetica is print font, not a screen font. It isn't optimized for pixel displays, and even on fairly high DPI displays does not look a nice as fonts optimized for them. Screen fonts take account of the pixel grid and get hand optimized to look good on them.
Apple is clearly hoping that they have a high end DPI that can overcome these problems, but it doesn't appear they have. The 5k display is only around 200 DPI, and Helvetica tends to look a bit naff below about 600 DPI at small sizes. Of course it's a little more complicated because they have sub pixel rendering, but it only affects horizontal resolution and not vertical resolution. To counter this they have made the fonts a little larger, but of course that means everything takes up more space on screen.
Everyone else uses screen fonts. Bitstream derived fonts for Linux and Android. Microsoft has Segoe and Meiryo, designed specially for them. Some phones have reached the point where Helvetica will look good, around 450-500 DPI, although the iPhone 6 Plus is only around 400 DPI.
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I have a mac with retina. To me, the font change was like 'ohh, the font looks different'. Its not worse, or better - just different. I can still program fine. And I prefer the new font now.
Seems like adults are so much like children now, they complain about everything. We don't have real problems anymore so so have to invent them.
Yoesemite Helvetica Neu is tuned for small size (Score:3)
Although it can be, also note that the Helvetica Nueu that Apple uses in Yosemite is heavily edited to look OK on LCD displays - just like other screen tuned fonts.
They also were trying to get the average size of sentences between the old and new fonts closers so programmers didn't have as much work to adjust for text changing sizes.
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You get to have a crappy experience today and a better experience "tomorrow". Welcome to the bleeding^Wblurry edge of technology.
Re:I don't follow (Score:5, Insightful)
It is a standard "apologist" tactic. Sort of like an appeal to authority, but one that assumes the authority knows more than you do.
In the future, impeding legibility, requiring more screen space, and making the GUI look fuzzy are just as bad as they are today. However, this author is indicating that eventually such things will become less needed, and we'll learn to live without them, and they fit the same pattern as Apple's abandoment of hardware that was really showing its age.
Except that this is not hardware. Fonts are just as functional as they were two hundred years ago. They haven't outlived their usefulness.
Perhaps high density pixel screens will fix the fuzziness, but it won't fix the footprint (unless Apple's font management is totally pixel based, which would be stupid, and I don't think Apple is stupid). But even then, if Apple released a poorly legible desktop on a high res display, it still would be poorly legible.
So you come back to the main point of this article. "Apple knew better back then"; ahem.... actually everyone knew better back then, floppies were used by about 8% of all the computer users when Apple finally ditched them. "and so Apple will know better now"; ahem... if only we were sure that past performance was a reliable indicator of future performance. "And we should trust Apple because they know more than us"; ahem... ok, so we've gotten to the real argument here.
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So what's so "tomorrow" about change from Lucida to Helvetica, which impedes legibility, requires more screen space, and makes the GUI appear fuzzy? Is that the definition of "tomorrow" now?
Yes. By this logic, we're but one illogical decision away from Comic Sans being default.
(Yeah, I know, I just threw up in my mouth a little too.)
On top of the fact that Steve Jobs is likely rolling in his grave. The man had a flair for aesthetics that seem to be dying in the face of "futurethink".
Bauhaus (Score:5, Insightful)
Highly accomplished designers tend to fall in love with and become obsessed by Bauhaus style in its various cyclical incarnations. The remaining 99.999% of the human race finds Bauhaus objects and systems very pretty to look and impossible to use for more than a few days, as documented by Jane Jacobs, William White, Tom Wolf, and many others. The designers believe the rest of the critics are blind and the human race is just using their wonderful Bauhaus stuff wrong.
sPh
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As noted, Jane Jacob's famous _Death and Life of Great American Cities_ addressed the affect of Bauhaus and other modernist schools of architecture and urban planning on everyday human beings. William Whyte's _City_ touches on many of the same issues. Wolfe's _From Bauhaus to Our House_ was written for more of a general audience and shows clear signs of the Wolfe-ian obnoxiousness to follow but is nonetheless a biting critique of those design schools.
But there's a large amount of Bauhaus (and/or Chicago S
Re: I don't follow (Score:2)
I'm sure that Apple knows what is best for our future and I intend to make these changes at work as soon as possible.
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So what's so "tomorrow" about change from Lucida to Helvetica, which impedes legibility, requires more screen space, and makes the GUI appear fuzzy? Is that the definition of "tomorrow" now?
Tomorrow, you will be one day older than today. Enough tomorrows and your eyesight will probably fade to the point where text on a computer monitor appears fuzzy. By making the font fuzzy today, Apple is providing their users with a taste of tomorrow. Next, Apple will probably shrink the keyboard to the point that accuracy suffers, as it inevitably does with old age.
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Tomorrow can mean many things. In a couple billion years, Earth will be a lifeless planet. So your worry about obamacare, etc.. is really moot.
Nonsense (Score:5, Interesting)
The distortion is strong in that one. And now he must excuse his earlier brief glimses of reality.
Btw. Helvetica is a classic font that is more narrow and easier to read than Lucida especially on print, on a screen it is best with good hinting, which Apple's fontsystem doesn't do.
Re:Nonsense (Score:5, Funny)
This. Just the case of a fan trying to justify a questionable decision. UI has become a fashion show. Helvetica is this year's hem length. Flat, primary colors are in, and they're simply FABulous! None of the changes have anything to do with usability. It's all change for the sake of change, nothing more. It's the same reason dresses and cars change their outward appearance from year to year, regardless of any substantive changes. It's done to make you think, wow, this is new, I MUST HAVE.
(Full disclaimer: I'm a sucker for upgrades. I always need to have the latest version of any software, regardless of whether or not it's actually better. Call it an OCD-ish mental disorder. I installed Yosemite yesterday, but unlike the author of the post I don't feel the need to justify Apple's fashion sense.)
Apple's take on Windows 8 (Score:5, Insightful)
Ugh... when Microsoft throws out the old to make with the new, however stupid and ill-advised it really is, they justifiably get lambasted for it.
When Apple does it, they are "designing for tomorrow"
Um, ok, sure. Whatever. Ignoring good user interface design is still bad.
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Stone cottages and lamps? Pfft, kids. In my day we only had lean-tos built with sticks and leaves. And we liked it that way.
Oh yeah, get off my lawn.
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If hyperbole is your argument, you have no argument.
Hyperbole ? We didn't have hyperbole, we were lucky to get kilobole let alone megabole.
Oh yeah, get off my lawn.
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least you had rocks. You have no idea how hard it was to get the women back to the cave when all you had to hit em over the head with was grass...
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At least you had grass. Do you know how hard it is to get anything done when all you have to work with is a primordial subatomic particle soup?
Primoridal soup?
Luxury.
I still have coalesce these hydrogen and helium atoms into a star...
I call BS on this article. (Score:3)
Because Mac chose a bad font
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They are all going down the toilet (Score:5, Interesting)
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Troll score: 0/10.
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Ubuntu Unity seems to be the only cool-looking UI left.
I can't say it's not cool looking. As long as all you have to do is look at it, you're set.
My 2c on the topic. Apple knows what to do, the objective is not to make the best looking hi res desktop, it is to make the lower res desktop look like sh1t. Marketing 101.
I think it's lovely (Score:2)
"The Right Choice"? (Score:5, Insightful)
... Karjaluoto doesn't recall many such changes that we didn't later look upon as the right choice....
The opinion of whether or not it was the right choice is severely clouded by the fact that in the Apple environment, there is No Choice. The user Has To go along with what Apple decides is The Future.
.
Apple has built the walls so high around its empire, that few dare leave. Therefore, they must rationalize that whatever Apple decides for the future is The Right Choice.
Re:"The Right Choice"? (Score:5, Interesting)
The opinion of whether or not it was the right choice is severely clouded by the fact that in the Apple environment, there is No Choice. The user Has To go along with what Apple decides is The Future.
Precisely. Even when Apple's decisions are good, they generally end up inconveniencing a bunch of users for quite some time. I built my current desktop last year, and it's the first machine I built with no floppy drive. But I darn well still have a CD/DVD reader/writer, which is useful periodically. Do I use it everyday? No. Could I get along without it? Yeah. But once every few months I have a task where it's still a useful thing to have around.
The main reason I refuse to buy Apple computers is because of lack of choice. I understand that by locking their users into a smaller set of choices, they make it easier to support. But I often want better options for my particular uses. So even if Apple offered a machine that is exactly what I want (probably at a price premium), I still wouldn't buy it -- because I don't want to support that kind of fascist approach to hardware, software, apps, etc. (And yeah, that's a strong word, but I truly believe it's a potentially dangerous development for free use of computers if everyone were to adopt it.)
Apple has built the walls so high around its empire, that few dare leave. Therefore, they must rationalize that whatever Apple decides for the future is The Right Choice.
Yes, all this justifying of "they ultimately saw what was best for the future" sounds like so many big companies' rhetoric. Google is notorious for this too in recent years, breaking their search for power users so it's only useful to people who can't spell or don't actually know the right word for what they're looking for. (Yes, Google -- I did actually ONLY want results with those particular obscure words in them.)
That's not so much about "the future," I suppose, but the infamous Gmail redesigns are. I don't know and don't really care whether Google employees only use emails as equivalents to IM chats or whatever. I need to send emails every day that require me to do things like alter recipients, change subject lines, cc or bcc people, etc. -- and now I'm forced to do 2-4 extra clicks just to get what was there before. As someone who joined the Gmail beta via invitation very early, I almost abandoned Gmail completely last year -- until the unauthorized browser plugins came that basically allowed a reversion.
Maybe email will become obsolete or turn into text messages in a decade or so. But that isn't true in most places now, and I don't appreciate the current giant corporation attitude of "we're going to make random changes to 'simplify' our user experience. But if it makes your life a lot harder, too bad." It's not just an Apple thing.
All of that said, I don't really get what the big deal about a TYPEFACE change is. Resolutions are good enough now that legibility will be fine for just about any decent typeface. There's nothing "futuristic" about Helvetica or any other. Frankly, it's just some random change to UI that makes something look "new and improved" to differentiate from old, even if the actual changes "under the hood" are less pronounced.
wtf (Score:2, Insightful)
So on OSX you can't choose the system font? (Score:5, Interesting)
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The system font option will be with a quick utility that programmers have no doubt already put together for users that will want it.
Personally, I don't care as I don't work & live in the system font.
Apple nolonger cares for minority users. (Score:2, Interesting)
Legibility and usability is no longer of importance. Their focus group isn't working professional any longer, its fashion sensible teens and facebookers. When you throw away usability of an item to make it look "cooler" it's no longer good design, it fashion and fashion never lasts.
IOs has required to have many of the usability "helpers", meant for people with disabilitys, turned ON for average users for some time now... and many of them hardly makes any difference. Sandboxing from hell makes several develo
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
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It does seem like corporations tell consumers what they want, how else do you explain the SUV.
Uh, the SUV came about when the US GOVERNMENT demanded than cars meet some--for the time--crazy fuel consumption requirements, but trucks didn't. Americans wanted big cars, but couldn't buy them because the US GOVERNMENT had pretty much made them impossible to build, so EVIL CORPORATIONS invented the SUV by sticking a stationwagon body on a truck frame.
But, yeah, blame the EVIL CORPORATIONS if it gives you a stiffy.
Apple dumbs down "tomorrow" software (Score:2)
I'm not a Mac user so I don't know if it's possible, but it would be good if Apple made it easy for users to select an OS font best suited to their needs. If one has an older 21 inch iMac and maybe poor eyesight, then maybe some other font, neither Lucida nor Helvetica, wo
Helvetica pre-dates the space program (Score:5, Informative)
All this announcement means is that Apple has finally decided to pay whomever has the copyright on Helvetica for the rights to use it as their default system font. The bit about "tomorrow" is just marketing spin to make it sound like some awesome new thing, when the font itself was made in 1957.
And yes Apple abandons old tech and adopts new tech sooner than the rest of the industry meaning they're often at the forefront of tech which later becomes commonplace among PCs. You can cherry pick some of their successes (e.g. 3.5" floppy, abandoning optical drives) to make them seem brilliant. Or you could list some of their failures (e.g. firewire, lightning thus far, SCSI on the desktop, PowerPC which they abandoned for Intel) to make them seem like bumbling idiots. Apple isn't a prognosticator. They're making guesses about the future just like everyone else. For some reason people are less likely to remember their failures than with other companies.
Hockey puck mouse (Score:5, Insightful)
Karjaluoto doesn't recall many such changes that we didn't later look upon as the right choice.
He must have never tried to use the hockey puck USB mouse. Truly a case of form over function....
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People always mention that mouse... but fail to mention that the original iMac's keyboard was also utter shit. I mean $5 Chinese no-brand awful. Particularly sad when you remember how good their old Extended II was.
Reality distortion field (Score:2)
Or rather, the famous reality distortion field later convinced Apple customer's that Apple must have been right all along. Because otherwise they'd have to admit that they'd been had, and no one wants to do that.
People who have paid a high price to enter a group tend to value that group [psychwiki.com], and people who are part of a group tend to conform to that group's judgments [spring.org.uk]. It's terri
Apple Don't Design for Yestserday, but for Fanboys (Score:4, Insightful)
But in this case, well, Apple does something wrong (not even remotely comparable to the trainwreck that Microsoft did with Metro, I'll concede) that devalues the largest part of its already expensive product line, with the exception of the most expensive products, and without adding any value to those either, but Apple fan are happy nonetheless because... it's good to be shown how Apple does not care about who doesn't spend the most?
What is this, an exercise of asceticism in the path of the true Apple worship?
Yosemite (Score:3)
the removal of the ipfw firewall. I had just gotten around to learning that and setting up a Launchctl plist.
The fact that the green button now fullscreens an application is another change I don't like.
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The fact that the green button now fullscreens an application is another change I don't like.
Recent versions of BetterTouchTools can reverse this 'new and improved' behavior.
Here's my rant:
That change really pisses me off. I know I can hold the option-key down and it will still zoom, but the green-button zoomed since at least Snow Leopard so why change it now? More importantly, why make it default without any way to change it back.
Does anyone even use full-screen apps? Will reclaiming a few dozen pixels
Re:Yosemite (Score:4, Interesting)
>Does anyone even use full-screen apps?
Yes... on laptops. This is something I've observed watching my own customers work with software -- on desktop machines, few things are truly maximized. On laptops, nearly everything is maximized. I think it has to do with screen real estate. The more you have, the less likely you are to want to fill the whole thing with one window.
Making the green button work to maximize is probably the right choice for the smaller devices. If they want a consistent UI across all devices, that's the right call given the prevalence of smaller devices.
It makes the behavior match MS Windows... I doubt Apple considered this a plus, but I work back and forth across both OSes regularly, and that's one of the few kinks that has caught me.
> At least Apple should put a toggle in system preferences so the user can revert the behavior.
Yes, that would be nice. I agree. But that is explicitly what Apple does not do and what they generally consider to be A Bad Idea. Such toggles lead to low-use code paths in the OS, which means they don't get nearly the same amount of testing and they increase the complexity of the underlying software, increasing the risk of bugs in both settings. I've encountered that philosophy in many companies with large scale software -- better to leave out the option and give people something that you know works rather than put in the option and increase your bug risk.
Question: Does anyone know of actual studies done to demonstrate validity of such philosophy? I've heard it described many times, but I don't think I've ever heard any research into it.
MacOS X == not sysadmin friendly (Score:2)
ipfw's been gone for a while ... but they've made a lot of other stupid choices that might be good for general users, but make things a pain when you're administering lots of machines.
For instance, pushing all updates via the iTunes store; we have a centralized account that we put everything under ... so an iWorks update comes along, and sysadmins have to go and enter the password on each machine.
The 'server' package under the App store to get the server OS ... WTF? For apache, the config files are absolut
View Different (Score:2)
why Apple would make a change that impedes legibility, requires more screen space, and makes the GUI appear fuzzy?
You're viewing it wrong.
Headline Tweak (Score:5, Insightful)
There, fixed that wonky headline for you. I suspect you were posting with the new OS X Yosemite and just couldn't read what you were typing?
Never mind the new font, the new font looks fine (Score:5, Insightful)
What really causes my eyes to bleed is the new "flat" buttons that don't really look like buttons; they look like text labels. The top of every window now looks like someone gave a junior high student a screenshot of a Mavericks window and told him to reproduce it using construction paper, scissors and glue.
And the frosted-glass semi-transparency effects are just a pointless and unnecessary in Yosemite as they were in Windows. I get the feeling that the Apple UI team has run out of useful work to do, and now they are just changing things because they're bored. The next OS/X release will no doubt change them back, and then add in some other dubious changes that be reverted in the release after that.
Courier FTW! (Score:2)
vi is my shepherd. I shall not font.
Re:Courier FTW! (Score:4, Funny)
vi is my shepherd. I shall not font.
It soothes my tired eyes
On screens of green; It speaks to me
In the quiet of the night
My code it doth record again
And me to type doth make
Within the paths of recursive loops
E’en for the program’s sake
Yea, though I work in a cubicle
Yet will I not use emacs
For vi is with me, and its colon
Efficiency it does not lack
My console it empowers me
In the presence of my foes
PHBs and HR drones
The source of all my woes
With Mountain Dew and salty snack :wq
I can code, and sigh
How happy can one programmer be
As long as he uses vi
The very near future (Score:3)
Exactly. Apple designs for the very near future, as in, when you download their new OMFG FREE operating system, you're going to need to upgrade your hardware in the very near future.
Apple designs for yesterday (Score:3)
Example: a few releases ago they made scrollbars thinner (making them harder to click), and also made them disappear by default. All this to "free up the space" that was being "wasted" by scrollbars. Now in Yosemite they're getting rid of window title bars in many apps, making it harder to move windows around. This is for the same reason: to free up space being used by title bars.
My computer has a 24" screen. The space taken up by scrollbars and window titles is completely insignificant. The inconvenience caused by not having them is very significant. This is a design decision that might have been justifiable 15 years ago when a 17" monitor was considered large, but today is completely absurd.
Future *purchases* (Score:5, Insightful)
Apple does not design "for the future". They design for future purchases.
They drop support for older hardware to force you to upgrade, not because there is a technical problem mandating it.
I'm running Debian on a 12 year old box. It's had a CPU upgrade (to a whopping 3.8 GHz single core) and some extra RAM installed (4G total.) It's perfectly usable, and fully patched.
Had I bought a Mac, I'd have an unsupported paperweight years ago.
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I bought an LS120 drive after reading about all the problems people were having with Zip (Click of Death) at the time when hard drives were still £120/GB and I felt I needed cheap archival storage. Still use it, though for floppies. Never actually bought a LS120 disk in the end, because the day after I bought the drive I was given two DC300 decks and a crate of tapes...
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The one that drives me crazy is removing the ethernet port on MacBooks. Which wouldn't be too bad if Apple's USB or Thunderbird ethernet adapters lasted more than 6 months before breaking, but I'm on my 5th in slightly over 2 years now... finally bought a third party one in the hopes that it will be less frail.
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For me, it isn't the Ethernet port, but the Kensington lock slot. It would be nice to be able to tie down a laptop when not in use, so it doesn't have to be in a rental car in a seedy area of town. Bonus points for a mechanism that deters opening if the lock slot is in use, similar to what the old IBM Thinkpads had.
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On the flip side, we're using an old P4 based HP to test Windows 10. 1GB of RAM, Intel chipset integrated graphics and the darn thing is actually quite responsive using IE/etc. Chrome takes forever to load but I want to toss the 64bit beta on there to see if that improves things at all. That's circa 2005 hardware. I need to research to see if my i810e chipset based e-Machine can run it next...