[anonymouse008]

To everyone who worked on System Settings, you put in a ton of work, and you're all very talented to ship something in a new framework (SwiftUI) that has gone on to millions of devices.

I only have one question: who was in charge of the thumbs up / thumbs down on this new design? Was it Craig Federighi?

You all did amazing work with the tools offered - SwiftUI makes the side bar navigation and simple cell table views the easiest to iterate and create - and you all achieved that. Someone should have stepped up though and waited till next OS release for a change like this (with the new SwiftUI layouts, etc) - or potentially not touched it -

or explain in depth why a side bar makes sense for settings, the most cognitively demanding part of an OS now with superfluous information on the side? That's critical real estate to lose, then doubly hurtful with visual clutter / something were expected to ignore.

[crazygringo]

> explain in depth why a side bar makes sense for settings, the most cognitively demanding part of an OS now with superfluous information on the side? That's critical real estate to lose

What are you talking about?

First of all, there's zero "critical real estate" to lose. Settings doesn't, and never has, taken up even close to full screen width on any regular laptop/monitor. And it still doesn't. Literally nothing is lost.

Second, why doesn't it make sense? The previous icon palette was a usability disaster. I'd spend 15 seconds hunting for which damned icon I was looking for each time. The sidebar has much more logical groupings. Plus, when you follow a button/link in one panel that leads to a different panel (e.g. accessibility to keyboard, or vice-versa) it's clear visually where you are now, because a new category in the sidebar is highlighted.

And I just have no idea what visual clutter you're talking about either. Do you find tab bars at the top of a dialog to also be clutter? Do you find the menu bar to be clutter? Because this works the same as both of those.

[anonymouse008]

A screen only has so many pixels, every pixel matters. Further, is System Settings the only window open at the time? When are you usually entering the panel? Is it to achieve a specific aim when other windows are also open? or to browse and learn features? ... list goes on ...

I attribute System Preference's failure to be not creating additional icons and groupings that were properly descriptive and respectful of user use - for example: Gatekeeper should have been its own icon, not buried inside of Privacy and Security, then under a separate tab. From my experience, it was the primary feature to access within preferences. Further, yes, many improvements should have been made to Preferences, no doubt - Settings doesn't seem it though.

Settings doesn't make sense because the sidebar assumes a 'full screen / most of screen at golden aspect ratios' paradigm for the active window - which is absolutely not true for System Settings on Mac. More clearly: the sidebar works well when your mind can 'group' the edge of the bar, with the edge of the device. This works wonderfully for iPad - your mind can 'section off' without much mental effort. It's how excel usually works too - what madman would use excel at the aspect ratio of System Settings?

You now have a vertical and horizontal visual plane to mentally track - that also doesn't align in it's own window (what is Search, AppleID Profile Pic, etc doing anchoring the layout at top left) - and now all the controls are basically outlined table cells with weird choices for the controls. Try going to Desktop & Dock and identify what exactly are the groupings for the tables for 'Dock'? now I have to figure that out, too?

[crazygringo]

System Settings only uses half of my 13" MacBook's screen width. That seems entirely reasonable. There's no shortage of pixels here...

And why would you have to mentally put the sidebar together with the left side of the screen? Do you complain about tabbed dialogs not having the tabs align with the top of your physical screen?

When you have more "tabs" than can fit horizontally (e.g. more than 5-7), the best solution is to turn them into a vertical list on the side where you can see and scroll more of them comfortably. This is better. (Whereas icon-based "table of contents" that disappears when you navigate and requires a "back button", as System Preferences was, is just terrible all around.)

You know all the way back in System 6, Control Panel used a left sidebar, and the overall window was a little more than half as wide as a Mac SE's screen. It's a pretty classic layout.

The new System Settings is totally clear on how to use, and totally reasonably sized. No unreasonable "mental effort" needed. Sure you can nitpick the precise organization of a few panels but for the many hundreds of settings, nothing will ever leave you perfectly happy.

[anonymouse008]

Right on - so I'd much prefer the focused user pane of leaving the previous "table of contents" view. This is what happens in Privacy & Security System Settings now, click any of them and leave to a focused pane about the topic you just asked about. If you're wrong, go to the back button.

Focused Panes of action to me in a desktop environment is correct for the context. Trackpad and MagicMouse environments to me are primary click/twitch, not 'tap thing under glass' based UIs. Click/twitch means back like UIs are easily accessed, while 'tap thing under glass' means vertical scrolls and the like are easier.

System Settings are made as if the cursor doesn't exist on the Mac, which is plain wrong. Just look at the iCloud pane: it has so much wasted real estate to the table cell space from title to toggle switch, why?? God forbid you actually just click the 'Contact' cell itself, nope! you must click the smaller toggle switch all the way to the right!! And this is after you just swiped down to see the rest of the page. Oh yeah, and the whole consistent paradigm of swipe-to-edge to go back -- nah, that doesn't exist either [0].

You could fit n-times the number of settings if you removed the left bar and the horrible tableview style for settings. If you're familiar, these should be collection views with as many large icon settings just like Finder's icon view, where a click on the icon or the label will toggle the preference for iCould.

I guess too I'm just looking for consistency from all of Apple's software. These interactions should all be standard subclasses to the whole organization

[0] Safari's swipe to go back should be made available to notes, settings, etc

[crazygringo]

The goal of good UX isn't to "fit n-times the number of settings". It's not about maximizing density (or not wasting pixels or real estate).

It's about clarity, affordance, organization, and not getting lost. And also, yes, consistency as you say -- this has become more consistent with iOS settings, which is a good thing.

(I also don't know what "click/twitch" means. Googling it gives me zero results that aren't for Twitch streaming. But in any case, the navigate/back paradigm has nothing whatsoever to do with which input device you use. Neither mice, trackpads, nor touchscreens have any kind of consistent "back button". Sometimes there's some side button or side swipe that works with some programs, sometimes there isn't.)

[anonymouse008]

Yeah, I'm not classically trained to speak in the right terms. The whole idea for me is, can I get what I want to do, done, in a more enjoyable way? That to me is all things - the ideas I threw out were just brainstorm novice ideas that I would find helpful. Enjoyable also becomes philosophical - which is good - but should be understood through the way it works, obviously + consistently.

Yeah, click/twitch is a made up term just now. Though I would say an affordance of the input device one uses does dictate what is 'easiest‘ or 'most natural' to use - a quick swipe once the edge of a window is reached, to signal either refresh (for pull down) or go back / forward for horizontal edges sure feels nice on a trackpad. I believe had Apple had a slide swipe via edge earlier in its life - we would have gone straight to glass only devices, no home button.

[vanilla_nut]

I hope the SwiftUI devs have accessibility improvements planned for the next year. So many of the SwiftUI GUIs have little or no keyboard support: you have to use the mouse. I know accessibility isn't a sexy feature to work on, but all it takes is one little black swan misfortune and you're plunged deep into the purgatory of NEEDING accessibility features.

Sidenote: I wonder if we'll one day see government enforcement of software akin to the physical spaces governed by the ADA.

[jffry]

> Sidenote: I wonder if we'll one day see government enforcement of software akin to the physical spaces governed by the ADA.

I should think large tech companies would be happy to advocate for such regulation, because it creates another (small) barrier to entry for competitors

[timw4mail]

I don't see the point of the change. It looks too much like iOS.

[reacharavindh]

May be that was the point… Apple trying to make MacOS a little more like iOS, and ipadOS a little more like MacOS, and then boom… transition to commonality between iPad and Mac.

Stage manager definitely gives me that vibes. Apple trying very hard to make the UX feel same in a laptop and iPad.

[akmarinov]

Rumor is macOS is coming to iPads, so makes more sense when you think of it that way

[timw4mail]

So ruin macOS for the sake of inferior hardware.

[russelg]

Inferior hardware? The iPad Pro has the same CPU as a Macbook...

[timw4mail]

Keyboard and trackpad/mouse is a huge difference from only a touchscreen.

[dividedbyzero]

Don't iPads have that as well via the official case?

[behnamoh]

Beg to disagree. There’s only so much computation a handheld device can support, regardless of its nominal CPU.

[barkerja]

This is far from "ruining macOS". System Settings was one of the few areas of the OS that hadn't been updated in forever. This was long overdue.

[als0]

Just because it hasn't been updated in forever doesn't mean it needs to be. I get the feeling that people get bored with a design and expect a design refresh.

[kergonath]

It hasn’t been updated and was really bad. It made sense back in 10.2 or so, but now every preference pane has tabs and buttons for modal dialogs and stuff. It needed about twice as many panes for each one to be manageable, and the icons palette does not scale that far (it’s actually quite confusing now on Monterrey, where all icons are very similar).

The new one is not perfect. For example, the on/off switches are ugly and the layout is far from great, and I like “preferences” better than “settings”, which makes more sense for an appliance than for something you adapt to your liking. But the old one was very much not “not broken”.

[omnibrain]

Windows 8 all over again.

[barkerja]

The previous System Settings UI was long overdue an update. While the new UI does very much resemble macOS, I don't see that as an issue, as it works very well in this context. At least, I believe it does, but I am no UI/UX expert.

[timw4mail]

Why? Did it function poorly? I'm a bit sick of the idea that something has to be changed because it hasn't for a while.

[dividedbyzero]

> Did it function poorly?

I've never been able to find what I needed quickly in the old UI, always felt disorganized and random. I like the one on the iPad a lot better, I find it way easier to navigate, so I'm happy for the change.

[barkerja]

Over the years, more options were added to the system settings, and the old UI did not lend itself well to holding all those various options/configurations. It became a burden to find exactly what you were needing; not to mention it was beginning to look "out of place" with the rest of the OS.

So yes, it functioned poorly, while also looking terrible by today's standards.

[deafpolygon]

They wanted to catch up and copy Microsoft...