@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.

@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.

@gruber @siracusa Mmm. But at the time a GUI was aspirational. You were designing the future. I don’t think anybody sees a Mac app as designing the future anymore.

Most companies don’t make a Mac app because they have a web app. Or an iOS app that runs on Apple silicon. “Why spend the time on custom UI for a legacy platform?”

I don’t think Apple agrees with that sentiment. I sure don’t. But I think they see lowering design and development costs on minority platforms as existential.

@clarko @gruber @siracusa It’s not “lowering costs” so much as pushing costs onto users — cognitive load costs, productivity costs, etc. To choose that tradeoff as the world’s wealthiest company, you have to either be willfully ignorant of decades of human factors research (a complaint that goes back at least as far as the Spatial Finder debate) or believe that users choose and stay with platforms for reasons other than ease of use.

Neither possibility makes me feel very good.