Monday, November 1, 2021

macOS 12 Monterey and User Interface Inconsistencies

Corbin Dunn:

At Apple I worked on the main User Interface (UI) framework called AppKit for about 13 years. I would help enforce UI consistency in applications by logging bugs and helping the application developers fix any issues. Back then a lot of people really cared about consistency and the small details really mattered. I just installed macOS 12.0.1 Monterey and I have found that the system is moving away from being homogeneous. Application-to-application consistency is getting lost, and it is becoming more like the web where every website is different. Part of the problem is the lazy-port of iOS applications over to macOS via Catalyst.

Previously:

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>Part of the problem is the lazy-port of iOS applications over to macOS via Catalyst.

Is it, though? It's still a UI framework (and not a young one, either, just young on the Mac). E.g., if they found a consistent "source list" style for table views for AppKit once, and then applied the same style as the default on Catalyst, that would be more work than if every app were AppKit, but surely it's possible for Apple to implement that style twice and then have all of their own apps conform to that.

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