Oh, man... What I wouldn't give to have Pages (and other apps) appear like they did in OS X Lion. This is just depressing.

I'll play slight devil's advocate. The buttons in the toolbar are duplicative of the options in the menubar, and I don't want to learn 2 locations for every feature. You can't turn off the menubar items, so I end up turning off the toolbar. So I don't care what that part of the UI looks like, and the sidebar for formatting they added, as pointed out in the article, uses the horizontal space on screens better than options stretched out over the full width of the menu.

Now the visibility of the liquid glass stuff, that is definitely a problem. Can't recognize a UI element if it's constantly rendered differently and with very little contrast with the background elements.

Well, I guess someone is going to vibecode a decent Linux GUI or fix the driver pains there or something and we'll be free of this. Because Microsoft/Apple and to a lesser extent Google have jumped the shark with their UI these days.

The Lion screenshot is just perfect. Everything you need to do is right there. And with every version from then on the usability goes downhill and stuff you need to do is more and more hidden and requires several clicks to access.

Pretty sad state of affairs. Software isn’t build for usability but purely for whatever designers find fashionable at the time.

I think the idea of the Window Chrome "getting out of the way" of the user is a good concept, but we fail to consider what the user expects at arms length. We also have to consider the chicken-or-egg problem

In the example, we have a sidebar for the formatting in the newer example vs havign that in the toolbar in Lion. Was it that back then, people were more likely to configure fonts & formatting settings, and we've gradually as a society de-emphasized our formatting in word processing? Or did UI changes such as this, hiding formatting options push us towards a world where we care less about formatting? I'd like to think it's a bit of both; as the user-based broadened, you had less percentage-based people that cared so heavily about formatting, so UI changes were made to optimize for that, further pushing people in that direction.

On a different note, I want to call out just how badly the sidebar is laid out compared to the toolbar. In the Lion toolbar, there were unlabeled sections but it was pretty clear what the purpose of each group was. Then you have the sidebar, where labels are added in some places, excessive space given where uneccesary, tabs that are sectioned off from the settings they'll show/hide, collapsible sections that can also be shown/hidden, some dropdowns using up/down caret while others just use the down caret, most dropdown carets being right-aligned but not the gear one, and in the liquid glass versions, the overlay of toolbar buttons over the sidebar creating confusion.

Side-by-side, it's incredibly clear that the newest version is total UX garbage. Monochrome icons were a complete mistake, in basically all cases everywhere. A mix of the Lion color, shape/texture, and spacing, plus the Catalina sidebar, would be the best.

I really REALLY love the Lion icons. Colorful but subdued with only mild saturation, distinctive shapes, strong line borders with very slight halo, and mild gradients to make them pop.

Few software companies consider this: users appreciate it when the interface remains constant over time, and especially if we can continue using previous versions without being forced to change, since learning new things again takes time.

“Perhaps Apple has some user studies that suggest otherwise“

I can guarantee you they have done no such research. This redesign is a clear top-down imposition to make the visual language uniform and match some lead designer’s specs, not to actually make anything more useful or usable.

Of these all, I prefer the Big Sur design language, which this article calls an “atrocious regression”.

Arguing aesthetics is pretty pointless (it’s a decided question to me: my taste is great; most others have very poor taste).

What bothers me about Tahoe are all the sloppy bits, like things you can no longer click or scroll to. We’re on 26.3.1 now and it looks/works like 1.0.

Nothing enrages like change.