[m3047]

I feel you. There is nothing today quite like _Inside Macintosh Volume I_ laying out out in drawings and prose (!) what the elements of a UI are, what they do, and how they work... almost like people had never seen a UI before. People must have had to think about it, they wrote a book for F sake. /s

They devote ink and paper to declaring that modes are to be avoided, and why. The do's and don'ts of UI on page 70 are worth repeating:

Do:

* Let the user have as much control as possible over the appearance of objects.

* Use verbs for menu commands that perform actions.

* Make alerts self explanatory.

* Use controls and other graphics instead of just menu commands.

Don't:

* Overuse modes (again!).

* Require keyboard / mouse when the operation would be easier with the other.

* Change the way the screen looks unexpectedly, especially scrolling.

* Redraw objects unnecessarily.

* Make up your own menus and give them the same name as standard ones (they define the standard ones in this book, you know: About, File, Edit as well as what goes in them. yes, yes, this is where it all started).

We've meandered into a bullshit local minimum where there is the One True UI and it's different for every app, but the same for every user. Meanwhile in industrial control where a $50,000 piece of equipment has its own app, used by maybe one person or three if it's operated 24 hours a day, the responsive mobile interface is as easy to lay out as slides in a slide deck and takes about as long to do. Hell, a customizable dashboard is a widget.

If the cloud made shoes there would be different shoes for grass and concrete, but they'd all be the same size and you'd have to cut off toes if your feet were too big or stuff them with prostheses if they were too small.

[_a_a_a_]

Today is your lucky day. Have a new word; Procrustean.

"forcing strict conformity through disregard of individual differences or special circumstances"

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/procrustean

"In Greek mythology, Procrustes ... was a rogue smith and bandit from Attica who attacked [read: killed] people by stretching them or cutting off their legs, so as to force them to fit the size of an iron bed."

"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procrustes"

[ShadowBanThis01]

Eh, Apple's ideas are not to be taken as gospel. This is the company that fielded UI that's as bad (or worse) than everything we're complaining about here, decades earlier.

For example: secret alternate menus. You can actually press modifier keys on the Mac while a menu's open and sometimes you get totally different menus. These are not indicated anywhere. So theoretically every menu on a Mac may have... let me do the math here... eight sets of contents using Control, Option, Shift and all combos of those. So according to Apple, you should open every menu and mash every combo of modifier key to see what's in each... and memorize them.

Another Apple menu defect is to start every entry with the same word:

VIEW

Show meters

Show clips

Show this

Hide that

Hide the sense

Show WTF the point is

This makes the first word of every entry nearly useless, and massively degrades the usability of the View menu. You have to sit there and parse the first part of every line, which only has two options... both of which are four characters, BTW, and thus visually the same size.

You don't do this; you use CHECKMARKS, which we learned decades ago. Some Mac apps do this, but many Apple ones still have this asinine convention of "show" and "hide" repeated over and over.

VIEW

• Meters

• Clips

  This

• That

• The sense

  WTF the point is

But that brings us to another classic Mac menu defect: The misuse of the Window menu. This menu is supposed to show names of open windows in an MDI-type situation. But Mac apps often bury View options in the Window menu, apparently expecting the user to guess that whatever they're looking for has been implemented as a window. Why would I go into the Window menu to activate audio meters, for example?

And most of the time, whatever the option is has NOT been implemented as a window.

[airstrike]

I'm a UI/UX layperson by any measure, but as an avid vim user, I actually wish modes were everywhere and I could use every app with the keyboard alone

[Enginerrrd]

The way Microsoft office handles this is pretty wonderful. Alt reveals the keyboard shortcuts and they work in a very intuitive way. All pretty discoverable once you learn the one "alt" key trick.

(Side note, for mouse-work, They're now starting to f** with their ribbon a bit and the hidden/simplified version is just terrible, but they haven't forced that upon us yet.)

To handle the lack of vim modes in other apps, I just use a keyboard with my own custom QMK firmware that makes my keyboard have modes. That works well enough for 90% of what I'd be doing in VIM.