I don't mind it on my phone, but agreed that the Mac version just is not good. I've never understood the obsession with making sidebars translucent, and the new version made it much worse, and expanded that philosophy to the whole OS. I've been using it since betas (that was a mistake) and I don't like it any better.
Even stuff that uses a more "clear" material now is a bigger obstruction of the content below it than the old translucent gray versions were. The huge play/pause blob over videos looks like a transparent material, but you can't see a goddamn thing through it anymore because they turned it into a crazy lens. For all the talk of the new UI getting out of the way of content, it really is a big shiny attention grabbing blob that blocks your content. You can get a hint of what colors are underneath it, and it's shiny.
The trend in Apple's design for years feels like it's been making things look pretty in screenshots, but less functional and worse to use.
Another recent fuckup is the Apple Watch's redesign where they traded scrolling lists of cards for full screen slideshows, because you wouldn't want to see what's coming or what you've scrolled past. You used to have more than one item in view at a time, and it was a hell of a lot easier to stop scrolling at the exact right spot instead of blowing past the thing you wanted to get to.
Also bad, the System Preferences redesign. The rearrangement of that wouldn't be as bad if the search bar could reliably find and take me to all of the settings, but it can't.
If they put someone in charge who prioritizes usability again, I don't think this is much of a loss for Apple. Heck, maybe he'll bring his design priorities to Meta and help Apple make a comeback with whatever their smart glasses / AR play is.
I will give them credit for one good thing that has come from iOS to Mac: having Control Center in the menu bar is a nice change. A few things I want in the menu bar for immediate access, and for the items that don't quite make the cut it's nice to have all of them two clicks away instead of requiring a trip to System Preferences.
I do wish they would bring Bartender-style menuextra containment as an official feature though. This is particularly awful today for visually impaired users, who are using the "Larger Text" screen scaling, lose a chunk of the menubar to the display notch, and then lose even more space to the big spacing they put between menuextras a couple of years ago.
The amount of bullshit that comes with a work laptop and wants to be in the menu bar is crazy, and when you run out of menu space things just disappear. Where did the VPN go? Sorry, displaced by your VOIP system and wireless presentation remote drivers and Dropbox and Teams and ...
It's nice that this software is quickly accessible without being in the Dock all the time, but the menu extras need to learn the same lesson as Control Center (and the Windows XP system tray 24 years ago) and have a second level that isn't space constrained.
Because this works for the enormous back catalog of games that already exist, many of which I bet companies no longer have the code or a working build system for, and for new games it doesn't require the developers to do anything because many (most?) of them wouldn't bother
They may provide an option for developers to distribute a native ARM build (which some are already building for Quest titles that can be brought over to Steam Frame) but one of Steam's main advantages is their massive x86 games catalog so they certainly don't want to require that
Charts are one I've wondered about, do I need to try to describe the trend of the data, or provide several conclusions that a person seeing the chart might draw?
Just saying "It's a chart" doesn't feel like it'd be useful to someone who can't see the chart. But if the other text on the page talks about the chart, then maybe identifying it as the chart is enough?
It depends on the context. What do you want to say? How much of it is said in the text? Can the content of the image be inferred from the text part? Even in the best scenario though, giving a summary of the image in the alt text / caption could be immensely useful and include the reader in your thought process.
What are you trying to point out with your graph in general? Write that basically. Usually graphs are added for some purpose, and assuming it's not purposefully misleading, verbalizing the purpose usually works well.
I might be an unusual case, but when I present graphs/charts it's not usually because I'm trying to point something out. It's usually a "here's some data, what conclusions do you draw from this?" and hopefully a discussion will follow. Example from recently: "Here is a recent survey of adults in the US and their religious identification, church attendance levels, self-reported "spirituality" level, etc. What do you think is happening?"
Would love to hear a good example of alt text for something like that where the data isn't necessarily clear and I also don't want to do any interpreting of the data lest I influence the person's opinion.
Yeah, I think I misunderstood the context. I understood/assumed it to be for an article/post you're writing, where you have something you want to say in general/some point of what you're writing. But based on what you wrote now, it seems to be more about how to caption an image you're sending to a blind person in a conversation/discussion of some sort.
I guess at that point it'd be easier for them if you just share the data itself, rather than anything generated by the data, especially if there is nothing you want to point out.
An image is the wrong way to convey something like that to a blind person. As written in one of my other comments, give the data in a table format or a custom widget that could be explored.
You can type "--" in most writing software and it will turn into an em-dash. On a Mac, this includes TextEdit by default, or literally every text input field if you enable the "smart dashes" setting. I can type — right now in my web browser with two presses on my ordinary laptop keyboard and no memorizing character ID numbers, not exactly rocket science.
If you're using Word or other fancy word processors, you don't even have to type two hyphens. One will do, and it looks at the grammar and changes to the correct type of dash for you automatically.
Have all the people parroting "dash means it was written by ChatGPT" never used a word processor?
> Have all the people parroting "dash means it was written by ChatGPT" never used a word processor?
Probably not, this is "HACKER" News, if I type two n-dashes on a website, I EXPECT two n-dashes, otherwise things like HTML comments would break the page.
<!-- This is a HTML comment for your reference -->
The compose key and Ctrl+K in Vim both assume the use of Linux, or janky 3rd party software. Compose is the same argument I have already covered with Windows, you need to enter a cryptic key-combination into the keyboard, which is not intuitive.
As for the Vim argument, I'm struggling to work out how to use Vim to type on here? Perhaps you could shed some light? I suppose you could yank-put it, but I fail to see how that is less effort than copy-paste, the other argument I already covered.
Rumors are that Apple Maps advertising is incoming soon
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