Steve Troughton-SmithThe more time I spend on macOS Tahoe, the more I genuinely feel like it's not the new design that's out of place, it's the legacy apps that are out of place. Existing Mac apps, or even newly-redesigned-for-Tahoe apps that incorporate too much traditional AppKit UI, tend to look incredibly dated on this OS. Maybe meeting in the middle by walking back some of the changes isn't the right path to take this cycle?
(And I don't mean 'AppKit apps', I mean apps that lean super into older-style Mac layouts like dense NSTableViews, tiny text, and hard dividing lines between nested, squared-off sections. Whether that stuff is 'the traditional Mac UI' I think is debatable, but it doesn't seem like it fits anymore)
GK@stroughtonsmith if traditional Mac apps don’t fit on macOS anymore …well, that’s a problem.
Robert Thompson@gklka Is it? Why is that a problem? The world moves on, Platinum apps don't fit on macOS either and haven't for decades.
John Wells@rothomp3 @gklka For almost as long as the Mac has existed, much of its attractiveness came down to the apps it ran. The fear here is that with Tahoe, it’s largely no longer possible to build such apps — you have to build what’s basically a watered down iOS app even if you’re not targeting iOS or risk looking out of place.
It’s a different kind of transition than the one away from Platinum was.
@johnwells People said almost literally the same thing about Aqua when it launched. Obviously the iPhone didn't exist yet, so the exact wording was different, but the sentiment was the same. That everything was so far apart, had to make interfaces less dense, what's all this candy coating, I want to make Mac apps not NeXT apps, etc. I think it's _exactly_ the same kind of transition.
@rothomp3 @johnwells That’s kind of true and also promising. The end result can be good in a few years.