Why is Big Sur so ugly?

[Bruninho]

This is a valiant effort, but it still just fundamentally looks like Big Sur to me. I just really hate the nonexistent title bar, the over-rounding, thick padding, and paper-white coloring.

View attachment 1748268

I actually like these changes. For example, we can as of now have black or white menubar with a small sleeve trick, painting a thick line on the top of our wallpapers with a small hack dynamic hack. But this is not enough.

Colored icons, white menubar, blue wallpaper, for a minute I thought it was OS X Jaguar/Panther. I have no problem with too much white or too much dark, OK, too much white hurts my eyes, but one can always decrease the screen brightness. Problem solved.

Some icons next to the folders look too big. Yeah, fixing some icon sizes would make these screens a lot more appealing. OS9 icon sizes were perfect IMO.

The dock has an excess of drop shadows, you don't need that. It's a big performance hit for the computer, especially in some years when we would be complaining about its sluggishness in a similar fashion about a G4 Mac mini being too slow with a single core CPU... I just wish Apple could bring back the perfect 3D dock of Leopard/Snow Leopard. That was absolute maximum perfection.

EDIT: Here's what I am talking about the icons. Someone did a different take/lecture of the default OS9 Platinum icons. Very good. https://www.macintoshrepository.org/16605-replatinum

 

[Bruninho]

These guys at MacEnhance are really very, very good. Hats off to them.

Meanwhile, Gnome 40 is following the steps of Big Sur....

See GNOME 40's Best New Features

GNOME 40 features bold design changes and several new features. In this post we rundown what's new in detail, with plenty of screenshots to show you.

www.omgubuntu.co.uk

 

[Bruninho]

@Bruninho you might want to restore that folder icon collection if IconChamp is coming soon as this site says:
IconChamp landing page on macenhance website
and this:
macenhance store

macOS Colored Folders

Get your macOS modern and intuitive with this pack containing all kind of folder icons to replace the old ones 🎨 (56 .icns files included)

gumroad.com

These were the folders I was using, from Victor Heinzen. Absolutely gorgeous folders. They need a few updates to fit the Big Sur design. However, I cannot use them now, because for some reason I cannot change my Documents folder icon and the Applications folder icon. I don't know why, I was using a custom icon for the Documents folder before the Big Sur upgrade and the folder icons did not change after the upgrade. It all started when I decided to try a different icon there, and it all went downhill after that. Was a nightmare, literally.

 

[nickdalzell1]

Well, Mission accomplished, I guess, But I'm pillar-boxed again, just like Snow Leopard:

 

[CasualFanboy]

I actually like these changes. For example, we can as of now have black or white menubar with a small sleeve trick, painting a thick line on the top of our wallpapers with a small hack dynamic hack. But this is not enough.

Colored icons, white menubar, blue wallpaper, for a minute I thought it was OS X Jaguar/Panther. I have no problem with too much white or too much dark, OK, too much white hurts my eyes, but one can always decrease the screen brightness. Problem solved.

EDIT: Here's what I am talking about the icons. Someone did a different take/lecture of the default OS9 Platinum icons. Very good. https://www.macintoshrepository.org/16605-replatinum

One thing that has bothered me more each time I've looked at it is the lack of a full horizontal title bar. The sidebar just goes all the way to the top, splitting the window visually in a way that just looks clumsy to me.

And icons are just a very small piece of what bothers me in the grand scheme. It's even one of the more minor visually annoying things. Much worse is the ridiculous amount of padding and lack of contrast. I shouldn't have to completely disable composite effects just to provide some visual contrast, because some things don't look as good without some transparency.

 

[nickdalzell1]

Oh and I got rid of the pillar-boxing by setting a custom full-screen resolution in Parallels.

I'm still tempted one day to see what would happen if I tried booting the installer on a USB drive. Would it do like Linux and have no keyboard, mouse, sound, wifi, etc or would it just outright deny it?

 

[CasualFanboy]

Oh and I got rid of the pillar-boxing by setting a custom full-screen resolution in Parallels.

I'm still tempted one day to see what would happen if I tried booting the installer on a USB drive. Would it do like Linux and have no keyboard, mouse, sound, wifi, etc or would it just outright deny it?

My guess is the drivers wouldn't work.

 

[nickdalzell1]

I'd bet it would just do as Linux did, due to the T-2 chip.

Performs alright for a VM though. Just need to find a more compatible with Macrumors browser. Default Safari will login and view it, but all kinds of formatting errors. Having trouble locating any 2013-era version of Firefox. Mozilla refuse to allow downloading it, and oldversion.com only goes to version 10.

Wonder what would happen if I tried logging into my Apple ID? Would 2-factor auth cause issues or would it flag my account for any reason?

 

[zakarhino]

This is a valiant effort, but it still just fundamentally looks like Big Sur to me. I just really hate the nonexistent title bar, the over-rounding, thick padding, and paper-white coloring.

View attachment 1748268

The amount of wasted space in those Finder windows makes me want to jump off a bridge.

 

[allan.nyholm]

One thing that has bothered me more each time I've looked at it is the lack of a full horizontal title bar. The sidebar just goes all the way to the top, splitting the window visually in a way that just looks clumsy to me.

And icons are just a very small piece of what bothers me in the grand scheme. It's even one of the more minor visually annoying things. Much worse is the ridiculous amount of padding and lack of contrast. I shouldn't have to completely disable composite effects just to provide some visual contrast, because some things don't look as good without some transparency.

There's one more MacForge plugin called MeMiniMe that could help here - although it doesn't bring back the beloved titlebar as seen in earlier macOS.

Also a Terminal command than does it a little different.

defaults write -g NSWindowSupportsAutomaticInlineTitle -bool true / false

Choose one - default is 'true'

the image on top(hard to see - it's the more right aligned image) is the modified toolbar size for Safari - Finder will be equally as small

 

[allan.nyholm]

I actually like these changes. For example, we can as of now have black or white menubar with a small sleeve trick, painting a thick line on the top of our wallpapers with a small hack dynamic hack. But this is not enough.

Colored icons, white menubar, blue wallpaper, for a minute I thought it was OS X Jaguar/Panther. I have no problem with too much white or too much dark, OK, too much white hurts my eyes, but one can always decrease the screen brightness. Problem solved.

Some icons next to the folders look too big. Yeah, fixing some icon sizes would make these screens a lot more appealing. OS9 icon sizes were perfect IMO.

The dock has an excess of drop shadows, you don't need that. It's a big performance hit for the computer, especially in some years when we would be complaining about its sluggishness in a similar fashion about a G4 Mac mini being too slow with a single core CPU... I just wish Apple could bring back the perfect 3D dock of Leopard/Snow Leopard. That was absolute maximum perfection.

EDIT: Here's what I am talking about the icons. Someone did a different take/lecture of the default OS9 Platinum icons. Very good. https://www.macintoshrepository.org/16605-replatinum

Thank you for that link to the Re-Platinum icons. I don't think I've been much to that particular website.

 

[CasualFanboy]

These guys at MacEnhance are really very, very good. Hats off to them.

Meanwhile, Gnome 40 is following the steps of Big Sur....

It's hard to believe that wasn't designed by the same "genius" behind Big Sur. If Gnome 4 had a global menu it would be hard to tell the difference.

 

[Bruninho]

It's hard to believe that wasn't designed by the same "genius" behind Big Sur. If Gnome 4 had a global menu it would be hard to tell the difference.

With a few post install tweaks it is already hard to tell. Debian or Ubuntu, its customization is from another world. I have a Pi3 box running raspbian and with a heavily customized theme resembling OS9 platinum. A few months ago it had a Windows 98 theme. My dad saw it and asked me, “how the hell are you running Windows on it?” lol

 

[CasualFanboy]

With a few post install tweaks it is already hard to tell. Debian or Ubuntu, its customization is from another world. I have a Pi3 box running raspbian and with a heavily customized theme resembling OS9 platinum. A few months ago it had a Windows 98 theme. My dad saw it and asked me, “how the hell are you running Windows on it?” lol

Yeah, I use Linux all the time. I use KDE/Plasma, and you can literally do almost anything to customize it. I'm struggling now with my next laptop purchase.... will it be another MacBook Pro? After the release of Big Sur, and the direction Apple seems to be headed, I'm just not sure.

 

[Tozovac]

At least we’re not alone with unnecessary functional changes to previously-optimized functions.

Windows 10’s backstage drives me nuts.

Excel 2016 "Save As" is terrible!!!!

Excel 2016 updated a couple of weeks ago and I've been fighting the "save as" screen ever since. First, it tried to default all save actions to the Cloud. It took a while but I figured out how to

answers.microsoft.com

As do various other unnecessary changes to Office applications, such as flat-design scroll bars which are non-obvious as to what’s the scroll bar and what’s the background slider, and how Microsoft dumbed-down the controls for Excel spreadsheet tabs (now takes pressing ctrl to arrow over to the right-most or left-most tab, where previously the arrow icons for that were always visible).

Same for Adobe Acrobat. Adobe revamped the interface to where it takes more steps to do what used to take 1 click, and they made accessing the various tools much more cumbersome (with flat-design oversized iOS7-esque dayglow colored icons). Worst of all, the tools atop the menu sometimes “grow” or expand into the working area below when clicked, often blocking the very work area you’re focusing on.

Why did Acrobat change the UI to this simplistic, childish design? Terrible, slower to use.

Acrobat Pro used to be seamless, easy to use and efficiently laid out. Now it looks like some child's puzzle game where you have to access numerous screens to accomplish what you used to be able to do from ONE PLACE. Maddening, dumb redesign that apparently was done for what? Tablet use? Why...

acrobat.uservoice.com

Change for the sake of change, away from methodologies that were refined to work rather well. Apple’s not alone with making dumb decisions that are tolerable enough to many but steps backwards for too many.

 

[Bruninho]

As an UI/UX designer, Linux doesn't meets my requirements/needs atm, even though some distros are really very good to use. It's just a case of "it's nice to have that option now".

 

[fisherking]

Change for the sake of change, away from methodologies that were refined to work rather well. Apple’s not alone with making dumb decisions that are tolerable enough to many but steps backwards for too many.

how many is 'too many'? the 12 people on this thread? seriously, out of all the macusers who've moved to big sur, how many are stressing the GUI changes? as opposed to how many are fine, and not worried about icon shapes, but focused on their work, email, netflix... life.

12 people, going in an endless circle over the same things. this will not effect any change (but i guess it feels good to have others to commiserate with... and probably annoying that ppl like me keep popping up with a different point-of-view).

so will stop... (maybe) 🤔

 

[retta283]

how many is 'too many'? the 12 people on this thread? seriously, out of all the macusers who've moved to big sur, how many are stressing the GUI changes? as opposed to how many are fine, and not worried about icon shapes, but focused on their work, email, netflix... life.

12 people, going in an endless circle over the same things. this will not effect any change (but i guess it feels good to have others to commiserate with... and probably annoying that ppl like me keep popping up with a different point-of-view).

so will stop... (maybe) 🤔

Problem is we don't know how many users are displeased with this but don't speak up about it or do so in channels that we nor Apple see. We don't know to what extent they are displeased either.

UI is a navigational tool and nothing more. But when you remove definition and clarity from this navigation tool it does require more thought and effort to remember what does what and exactly where a button begins/ends. Perhaps some people are good enough at adjusting to the loss of this that they don't notice, but some people are not. It's a lot easier to see a defined box that's a different shade than the surround and remember which order those controls go in than a bunch of sqiuggly lines floating over the window.

 

[Bruninho]

Perhaps some people are good enough at adjusting to the loss of this that they don't notice, but some people are not. It's a lot easier to see a defined box that's a different shade than the surround and remember which order those controls go in than a bunch of sqiuggly lines floating over the window.

My dad is one of these people. Since Jobs era, he was a huge fan. Not so much after the mess of Catalina, when they dropped 32-bit support. Things just got worse for him since that version and I often see him swearing at things that used to be super simple for him but Apple changed completely causing exactly the same reaction you described here.

Like, certain screens or Finder actions. "It used to be there", "Oh come on, I was used to do X and Y before Z and now they changed this (censored)!". Sometimes I have to get in and explain him why the changes (remember, I am an UI/UX designer). Not that I want to defend all the changes they made, but I do understand why some were made.

He hates the transparency, hates the washed full white Big Sur screens (he's still using Catalina on his Mac Mini and iMac, but his MacBook Pro is on Big Sur). Right on Catalina he disabled the whole transparency.

I don't hate the full white so much as him. Maybe a little bit of transparency and some light grey stuff here and there, the white wouldn't hurt so much. During the day, I can deal with it. The problem is at night. It's super white, hurts my eyes, I have to use the dark mode for the entire day or else my eyes will hurt thus causing me a headache. Same happens to me on my iPhone and iPad Pro. It's just me, not the OS, I do not have much tolerance for the huge brightness for the white default theme on my mac being displayed in a 40" Samsung TV.

Other changes were terrible decisions, yes. Like, the dock for parity with iOS. IMO it's iOS who should have run for his money to get UI/UX parity with macOS, not the other way around. Two different systems with two completely interactions (touch screen vs keyboard/mice devices).

A few posts ago, I complained about Apple's decision to make tighter security changes to the OS that ultimately led to me being unable to change the /Applications folder icon and the user /Documents folder icon. I can't customize my OS to the way I like anymore?! I'm not that far from my dad in this aspect, considering that I lost an entire night to fix the mess I caused in an attempt to change them, and another entire day to rebuild my xcode certificates after that mess.

And this is the very reason why I fell in love with OS9 Platinum theme, the first time I saw it a few months ago - better late than never. I am the kind of designer that likes minimalism and simple things, while others prefere to throw a lot of details and more details into a never-ending design work. But each to their own (philosophies).

 

[fisherking]

Problem is we don't know how many users are displeased with this but don't speak up about it or do so in channels that we nor Apple see. We don't know to what extent they are displeased either.

UI is a navigational tool and nothing more. But when you remove definition and clarity from this navigation tool it does require more thought and effort to remember what does what and exactly where a button begins/ends. Perhaps some people are good enough at adjusting to the loss of this that they don't notice, but some people are not. It's a lot easier to see a defined box that's a different shade than the surround and remember which order those controls go in than a bunch of sqiuggly lines floating over the window.

most people just use their tools, they don't stress the details.

people on forums like this do. and again, you're entitled to your opinion... which is, like all opinions, just your opinion.

 

[retta283]

Like, certain screens or Finder actions. "It used to be there", "Oh come on, I was used to do X and Y before Z and now they changed this (censored)!". Sometimes I have to get in and explain him why the changes (remember, I am an UI/UX designer). Not that I want to defend all the changes they made, but I do understand why some were made.

Reminds me of my old man. When Windows XP came out I upgraded him fairly early on, and he hated the new UI for various reasons, and constantly complained of the changes. After about 5 months he called me and asked if I could downgrade him to 98, even that there was Classic theme in XP he insisted that he be put back to an older system. I convinced him to at least use 2000 for stability's sake and he never complained about the UI again. He used Windows 2000 for the rest of his life.

Likewise my mother complained a lot about the Windows 8 redesigns and she downgraded back to 7, but since I was not there to supervise that she just sold the Windows 8 computer and kept using her older HP. No one but me in my family used Macs.

 

[Feyl]

how many is 'too many'? the 12 people on this thread? seriously, out of all the macusers who've moved to big sur, how many are stressing the GUI changes? as opposed to how many are fine, and not worried about icon shapes, but focused on their work, email, netflix... life.

12 people, going in an endless circle over the same things. this will not effect any change (but i guess it feels good to have others to commiserate with... and probably annoying that ppl like me keep popping up with a different point-of-view).

so will stop... (maybe) 🤔

If you remember or look at articles from the time after Apple released iOS 7, there was a pretty big number of people even from major websites like The Verge that critized the design. There were also people like John Gruber that liked it but now they don’t like it. Everyone at that time wanted some sort of a change. Me too but I definitely didn’t want a complete overhaul that destroyed basic Apple’s design guidelines and their magic. If you don’t hear people complaining about it now they just caved to it like many of us. After all, what else can we do if we want to use Apple products.

 

[benshive]

If you remember or look at articles from the time after Apple released iOS 7, there was a pretty big number of people even from major websites like The Verge that critized the design. There were also people like John Gruber that liked it but now they don’t like it. Everyone at that time wanted some sort of a change. Me too but I definitely didn’t want a complete overhaul that destroyed basic Apple’s design guidelines and their magic. If you don’t hear people complaining about it now they just caved to it like many of us. After all, what else can we do if we want to use Apple products.

I remember absolutely loving the design changes in iOS 7. It was the first developer beta I rushed to install when it was released. The reason I'm a bit scared about Big Sur is that the design hints that Apple is working on some touch screen device that will run macOS. Much larger buttons, sliders that don't make much sense for just mouse input, etc. I always loved that Apple kept the Mac and iPad lineups separate because it meant that macOS could be built in a way that didn't have to make compromises to accommodate touch input.

 

[retta283]

For me when it comes to iOS, out of versions 7-14, 9-10 were by far the best. The move to gigantic bold text and elements everywhere is absolutely disgusting and a major waste of screen space. The fonts got better in iOS 9 to where they still looked stylish but were totally legible. They've made the text on the calendar icon bolder at least 3 times since iOS 11. Some of the icons since 11 are absolutely horrid as well. Looking at iOS 10 now even seems refreshing.

I fear that iOS 15 will bring the Big Sur icons over to iOS and ruin the decent ones that remain. Other design cues from Bi Sur may also creep their way in. On the phone it's whatever to me because I use it very sparingly but I may not update my iPad for a while if they completely redo the UI in 15. I'm not particularly a fan of it the way it is now but it's serviceable.

 

[benshive]

The move to gigantic bold text and elements everywhere is absolutely disgusting and a major waste of screen space.

Oh this was by far the worst. The massive bold text looked awful. I remember there was even a jailbreak tweak thats sole purpose was to get rid of it.