SAQ wrote:
I couldn't believe it when I sat down at the first Mac I'd used running Lion and found out that they decided to hide the scroll bars now. They sell 27" iMacs - there's enough real estate for a scroll bar in there. Perhaps back in the days of the 9" Mac Plus it might have made sense - and now all the "me too" guys are doing it as well.
Like I said, I'm not a fan of everything that Apple has been doing, and the scroll bars are good examples. You can turn them on, but it does seem to be a step backwards, imho. And don't get me started on that skeuomorphic crap in Calendar and Contacts! It almost drove me back to pen and paper!
SAQ wrote:
It would be interesting to hear from all the professional UI people on here about the tabletization of everything. It seems to me that forcing the (WIMP-y) PC into the (tile-y) tablet world is the same mistake in reverse that the early tablet people made of trying to make it WIMP-y (think Windows CE).
Now that Windows 8 has gone to manufacturing, it'll be interesting to see how quickly it's adopted. I've been using the various previews, and you can add me to the list of people who think the addition of Metro to the desktop system is half-baked, at best, or downright disastrous, at worst. Too bad, really. Win7 seems like the release where MS finally got Windows "right," and Win8 feels like someone has been hitting the hallucinogens. I expect that businesses will stick with Win7 as long as possible.
As for the Apple side of things, I think the most insightful remark about it came
at the end of the latest John Siracusa review of OS X
over at Ars Technica: "Apple's online platform is the unifying force in its product line, not any one OS. Think of Mountain Lion as the best desktop iCloud client Apple knows how to make." One may argue about whether Apple's online platform
should
be the unifying force in its product line, but I do think that iCloud'ification is really what is happening to OS X, rather than simply tablet'ification. My own opinion for several years has been that Apple is trying to create the equivalent of the Star Trek environment, where you can walk up to any device, start talking to it, and get what you need from Majel Barrett's disembodied voice, and the current OS X / iOS changes are like the awkward adolescent stages on the way to reaching that scenario.
...
-
(single-CM)
