The problem with Microsoft is that they “simply have no taste.”
Windows has always had their Windowish / Microsoftish smell to its design. Much like Linux, You could spot a linux desktop from 100 miles away. And everyone thought these were simple you could just copy it. Turns out there are trillions of small details that make it all coherent and beautiful.
I think I put it best: "Apple likes to make people think they have taste and that they're good at design, but they're actually really, really bad at design and their tastes are quite obviously very shallow."
Windows and all the Linux desktop environments that copied Windows have so much more functionality than the brain-dead macOS that can't even get basic features like window management right.
Imagine thinking an OS that won't let you easily maximize or snap application windows is any good?
You can do those last few things pretty easily, by the way, but the desktop philosophy of macOS is just very different. It functions a lot like a real desk. Things are sized however they are meant to be sized, and you kind of pile them up. I don't line up things on my desk edge to edge maximizing space, its not necessary as some overlap and slop is fine. Apple has a lot of tools with sorta redundant functionality that make it easy to sift through the pile and see everything at once. Three fingers swiped up on the trackpad spreads everything out on your desktop, just like spreading out papers on your desk.
It might seem like an issue if you are coming from a tiling window management environment, but over time it becomes quite familiar and intuitive to use because of all the parallels with the physical world and how we interact with physical objects. I have tried the tiling window manager route, and it's more clumsy than anything imo.
Parallels to the real-world certainly make technology easier to learn, but not necessarily easier to use, and I'd argue it goes against the main benefit of computing - simplifying physical processes through abstraction.
You could design a VR environment that lets you walk around your virtual house, open your virtual front door, walk down your virtual driveway to your virtual mailbox, pull out virtual envelopes and open your virtual mail, but you'd just be replicating all the old real world cruft that doesn't matter to achieve your goal. What you really want is just to read some text in an email.
I had an older professor in college who still read and replied to all of his email via terminal, and he was multiples faster than those of use that used Gmail, but I remember thinking I'd never devote the time to learn to do things this way when the way I'm used to works just fine.
Apple has done a tremendous amount to make technology more approachable, and in doing so has brought millions into the digital age, but I do think the pendulum has swung a bit too far - a monitor isn't a desk, it's a monitor. Too much value is placed on "intuitiveness" these days, and while those real-world parallels might feel nice to interact with, there's a time to disavow ourselves of them to take full-advantage of what the technology can be.
I don't line things up on my desk because it is difficult. However using Windows or Linux it is the default and I get to see more. I don't think copying the existing use case blindly makes sense. In some cases it does, and in some cases it may be more intuitive but there is no need to copy the limitations of our past when it is not beneficial.
For me depth is having emacs keybindings everywhere, support for good fonts and high resolution displays, and great touchpad support. Really basic but important stuff that seem to have been in short supply from other vendors.
> Windows and all the Linux desktop environments that copied Windows have so much more functionality than the brain-dead macOS that can't even get basic features like window management right.
The window management on macos is light years ahead of anything on Windows. Ever try to deal with full screen windows on either platform? The macos approach is a breeze where fullscreen windows get their own virtual desktop and window chorme, titlebar, dock, etc are managed by the OS consistently. Switching between fullscreen windows and regular windows is sane.
Meanwhile, the Windows approach to fullscreen windows is to just draw a borderless window on top of everything. A stupid approach that some linux desktops decided to copy for some reason.
> Imagine thinking an OS that won't let you easily maximize or snap application windows is any good?
Macos lets you maximize windows easily. Double Click on the titlebar works in most applications. Clicking on the maximize button makes any window a seamless fullscreen window in ways I wish a linux desktop could.
Yeah, snapping might not be baked into the OS. But there are 3rd party apps available for this so it is not that big of an issue.
I like full screen on macOS because I usually get a 2 minute break to read the news while the junior programmer that I'm helping swipes furiously to find the full screen workspace that they lost. Also opening a popout Chrome devtools window on a Mac gets me a break because nobody knows what workspace it ended up in.
The reason the macOS pushes full screen by default is because their idiotic UI design takes up way too much vertical space with the useless Dock that isn't even half as useful as the Taskbar, and the awful, ever-present global top menu bar.
Honestly, I don't full screen anything on Windows or Linux unless it's a movie that I'm watching, because I don't need to.
I usually get a 2 minute break to read the news while the junior programmer that I'm helping swipes furiously to find the full screen workspace that they lost.
Three-finger swipe up. Click on the desktop most to the right.
It's four fingers for me. I've not yet managed to train my fingers to click the desktop most to the right on their own, it still involves visual processing and thought. It'll probably come naturally me in a few more years.
Well if you want to use spaces you need to use fullscreen, and since I find multiple workspaces invaluable I need to put up with the pain of using fullscreen.
Spaces works just fine without having anything in full screen mode. Just do a 3-finger swipe up to bring up the spaces bar and click the + button on the side of the screen to create a new space. Then you can drag windows to the new space.
The global menu bar is one of the things that macos just got right. You always know how to acces your basic functions, like closing the application, saving, etc... without having to look in the UI for that small button that does the same thing.
Another advantage of the menu bar is, that you can always see which shortcut belongs to which action, because most items have a shortcut displayed next to them. On Linux and windows it is trial and error, or looking them up online.
Also it makes the windows look a lot less cluttered.
I think that by "global" they mean that it's on top of the screen, rather than on top of the main window of the app to which it belongs. It's actually hella confusing for new users when they get to running apps in parallel, and switching between them. This is exacerbated by not having well-functioning maximize on windows, so a typical macOS desktop is cluttered with windows from several different apps - but the top menu is relevant to only one of them.
Shortcuts for menu items are normally shown in menus on Windows and Linux, right-aligned next to the label. For Windows, it's part of the platform UI design guidelines, and if you're using standard APIs to define your UI, any item with a shortcut assigned will render appropriately.
I used to move the dock to the side, but with dual 4k 27" monitors there was too much mouse movement to get across to it. Now it's back on the bottom and hidden, and I just use spotlight to launch everything
You can't resize it horizontally to fit the screen, such that icons don't shift position relative to the screen when new icons appear (and either enlarge the dock, or make other icons smaller, to fit).
Or that you still call your OS "intuitive" after shuffling keyboard shortcuts around so hard that not only is your OS running a completely different set of hotkeys from everything else you use, but so is every app you used that will run on it.
Or after making it a three-key shortcut to take a fucking screenshot.
Still, that's a common reaction from people who use Windows. I've used both Mac and Windows on a near-daily basis for the past ~30 years. Both have spent roughly equal amounts of time as my dominant platform. My observation is that maximising is such a default behaviour on Windows that most apps seem to be developed with that mode of operation in mind. Whereas Mac apps tend to be developed without that assumption. This in turn influences how people use apps on these respective platforms.
I have a smaller vertical monitor next to my main monitor which I full-screen my code editor. It looked weird at first but nothing beats having oodles of vertical space, enough to convey entire blocks of code at a time. And even though it's a verticalised widescreen monitor and a comfortably large font, I still have enough width for almost 150 columns of monospaced text—plenty for my personal coding style.
Full-screening code editors on a large horizontal widescreen monitor tends to have no tangible benefit other than to conceal clutter behind a bunch of useless whitespace.
I work with a similar setup, on my company-provided Mac. My IDE sits maximized on one vertical screen, with the other vertical screen divided up into two browsers and a bash console. The laptop screen is usually slack, a database app, or reacreational browsing.
Annoyingly, even at 1440p, the code window gets crowded, if I'm using both the file browser and builtin database client. Luckily you can double-click the tab for the file you're on and everything tucks away nicely.
Though I did grow up obsessing over Windows, so you're right about that.
And for the record, having to hold option to maximize is bullshit. I rarely use fullscreen mode.
Dude, you're missing out. I love using a four-finger swipe on the magic trackpad to quickly jump my side monitor between various spaces: my full screen code editor, a space with two web browser windows (typically showing monitoring tools), and a black screen.
> even at 1440p, the code window gets crowded
I loathe customisation, preferring everything to be as generic and standard as possible, but one thing I have done for my own sanity is assign F16–F19 to hiding and showing sidebars in all the various apps which have them. Typically F16 for left bars, F18 for bottom bars, F19 for right bars.
I've never been a big fan of virtual screens. I'm always losing track of what is where, and why do I need all that anyway when there's the taskbar (on Windows) or dock (on Mac)?
I know the shortcuts on mac and I don't even use them. alt+tab on Windows and Command-Up on mac are the habits I've been able to remember
I agree, traditional virtual screens are a horrible usability nightmare. Wouldn't ever use it on my main screen. But on a secondary monitor that is used for a narrow set of specific tasks, it's a brilliant way to jump between stuff.
A modern code editor (or better yet, an IDE) is going to also have a file browser next to the editor proper, and usually some other panes like embedded terminal etc. You can also use whitespace to provide a minimap of the code on the margin - the larger it is, the more useful it is for quick navigation.
I run VSCode maximized on a 27" monitor, and the editor field is just about wide enough for 150 columns, with all this other stuff.
I coveted the minimap until I got a vertical side monitor. It's not a direct replacement for it, but it gives me enough vertical context to do the work I do without feeling blinkered.
(Sadly my code editor of choice doesn't offer that feature.)
Option-clicking the green button (usually) maximizes. Full screen in a separate desktop space may resemble maximizing in some ways, but it significantly changes the interaction model when switching between windows, especially when some of the windows are not maximized. Example:
1. Open two apps, at least one of which supporting fullscreen.
2. Open three windows in the app that supports fullscreen.
3. Fullscreen one window.
4. Cmd-tab to the other app.
5. Cmd-tab back to the previous app.
If your window from step 3 was maximized (filling the screen in the same desktop space), you would return to that window, but instead you are now looking at some completely random other window that you were not interacting with at all.
For people who cmd-tab (and cmd-`) frequently to switch between apps, this is super jarring and not at all what we intended to do.
In my experience, the green button would make things maximum tall, but not maximum wide. I did not have any extensions. As opposed to everywhere else where maximize makes the selected window fill the full amount of windowed area.
And I'm reminded by other posters that they changed it to full screening (which is also not maximizing), complete with a disorienting animation, ugh. Pretty happy being Mac free again.
Yeah, but what does it really mean to "fit the content", if it doesn't fit the window at any size, but can reflow horizontally - as in e.g. most webpages? Mac apps seem to prefer increasing the vertical size until the window is as tall as it can be, but for horizontal, they usually stop before they reach full screen width - even if this would fit more content on the screen.
It's supposed to be "smart", in a sense that it gives you the largest window size that it considers usable. But that's too subjective an assessment to enable it by default, and even more so to not make it configurable at all.
No, that's for "zoom" - which doesn't work the same way for every window (after you enable under the Dock category of the system preferences for some reason). Many windows will zoom to the size of their content only, like the Finder window. Maximize is different.
> The problem with Microsoft is that they “simply have no taste.”
You can say that about Apple today too. After all, in iOS7 they copied the Flat UI from Microsoft, including thin fonts, and buttons that don't look like buttons and so on. Although more recently they have removed thin fonts in their designs.
I felt that is what happen when you put a Industrial Designer in charge of Software Design.
I know it feels a little harsh, but Jony without Steve is a Designer without Product Manager. Steve Jobs is great being an Editor and Product Executive.
The decisions made since Ive has left Have me hopeful for a better future at Apple. They’re never going to be perfect, but things are going in the right direction. Their laptops are getting ticker for crying out loud!
I just got a new 16” MBP after hanging onto a 2013 MBP forever (with a brief detour to Windows and running screaming back). It’s practically perfect in every way.
It was also the first time Apple was reacting since the imac days. They were leading of computing UI innovation almost everywhere since.. and then they started to have a me-too moment, trying to make flat-ui right the Apple way. Very odd.
The problem with Microsoft is that they “simply have no taste.”
Windows has always had their Windowish / Microsoftish smell to its design. Much like Linux, You could spot a linux desktop from 100 miles away. And everyone thought these were simple you could just copy it. Turns out there are trillions of small details that make it all coherent and beautiful.