537: Worse Than All of Our Toilets
https://atp.fm/537

Hopes for WWDC’s announcements, exit interviews for the outgoing OSes, and how a Virginia man destroyed a car and computer in a single weekend.

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Accidental Tech Podcast: 537: Worse Than All of Our Toilets

Three nerds discussing tech, Apple, programming, and loosely related matters.

@atpfm @siracusa @marcoarment @caseyliss SwiftUI isn’t responsible for what you dislike about System Settings.

By default, SwiftUI uses the AppKit widgets. You have to *opt in* to different styles, which System Settings has done.

And you can quibble about those styles, for sure. But this is about the designers, not the technology.

Difference between the screenshots below:

.formStyle(.grouped)
.toggleStyle(.switch)

Otherwise it’s the same code in both cases.

@clarko Not just different styles, but *new* styles, strongly suggesting that they are the path forward for macOS (just as SwiftUI is the API path forward).

@siracusa Sure, but I buy the design rationale offered by CFed at @gruber’s WWDC show last year, even if I don’t much care for all the gray lines and trapped negative space.

I think the biggest challenge for Mac aficionados going forward is the reality that there just aren’t many designers around anymore who’ve ever designed Mac apps, including the head of software design at Apple. A lot of the current generation of designers grew up with iPads.

@clarko @siracusa @gruber I’m no dev but surely they’ve all seen and used old Mac apps? (They’re literally replacing old design.) By the same token, all designers will have seen (hopefully studied) the work of their predecessors. Without trying to sound pretentious, I’m chalking this down to bad taste.

@dominoslater @siracusa @gruber People become designers for different reasons, have different interests, experience, priorities. Switching is hard. The work gets in your bones.

Analogizing to other professions: TV directors, movie directors, ad directors. Novelists, playwrights, comic book writers, poets. Jazz drummers and punk drummers.

Everyone is technically capable of doing another speciality. They’ve seen it their whole life, studied it, but they don’t switch. They’re not fungible.