Mac App Store UI is so hideous that it makes me want to kick a swan

http://reverttosaved.com/2011/01/06/mac-app-store-ui-is-so-hideous-that-it-makes-me-want-to-kick-a-swan/

by mikecane • 16 years ago

68 75 16 years ago

reverttosaved.com

wccrawford• 16 years ago

The title bar is swan-kick-worthy, but the price thing is pretty easy to read on my system.

Terretta• 16 years ago

Another change: the red X control quits, not just closes window.

iTunes did the horizontal window controls first. If you don't like these, wait till you try Tweetie 2 aka Twitter for Mac. It makes them smaller and black.

There's more than enough blank area to drag, enough there could have been a bit more space between the window controls and the nav back/fwd buttons. However, it feels like this is a move towards more standard window shapes and icon locations between the desktop and the iDevices. Everything's right where you'd expect it to be on an iPad.

wahnfrieden• 16 years ago

Closing the last window (via the red X or otherwise) quitting the application is nothing new for first-party Apple software. See: Dictionary.app (multi-window software), System Preferences.app (primarily single window).

The pattern seems to be applications where once the window is closed there is little likelihood that the user will want to access it soon again. One-off applications get this behavior - not applications that suit extended use.

rbritton• 16 years ago

To be fair, most single-window apps on OS X already quit when the window is closed. This is typically the desired behavior, especially for those less computer-savvy.

smackfu• 16 years ago

OTOH, how can you tell if it is single-window or not?

iTunes is not, closing it leaves it running. iPhoto is, closing it shuts it down. Both look pretty much the same.

guywithabike2• 16 years ago

Twitter's app completely breaks two of the three window controls.

Close --> Actually just hides the app. Expand --> Does literally nothing. Seriously.

runjake2• 16 years ago

A off-topic question:

This guys website looks like a nacho-colored version of Daring Fireball, complete with a star in the logo and for the favicon. Is there some star motif in the Mac world I'm not aware of?

younata• 16 years ago

No, but IIRC, there is one for blogspot/blogger.

pr0zac• 16 years ago

Its like a modification of classic communist propaganda graphic design. Orange, yellow, and black, the star, strong font styling. Kind of weird way to design a blog.

runjake2• 16 years ago

Yes, I think you're right. As a colorblind dude, the colors work well for me, but I wonder how they look to the color-ungimped.

raz0r2• 16 years ago

The icon is horrible too.

jinushaun• 16 years ago

Looks too much like the iTunes icon in the dock. Should've gone with a different color. In iOS, iTunes is purple and the App Store is blue.

mishmash2• 16 years ago

They both remind me of the Start menu icon in Windows 7.

zoul• 16 years ago

It’s very similar to the new iTunes icon. I sincerely hope that Apple is not going away from the realistic icons, I have always loved those. I am not much impressed by symbols on blue circular backgrounds.

maukdaddy• 16 years ago

No offense, but this blog is so hideous it makes me want to kick a panda.

pssdbt• 16 years ago

Serious, looks like the top of a hot dog.

glhaynes• 16 years ago

Reminds me of Windows 3.x's Hot Dog Stand theme.

ronnier• 16 years ago

Ahhh, better http://viewtext.org/article?url=http://reverttosaved.com/201...

nicksergeant• 16 years ago

Really? That bad? I'm not so sure the swans deserve such treatment. While there are some questionable design decisions in the UI, I'm more concerned with the UI performance (sluggish scrolling, interactions, etc).

gnaffle2• 16 years ago

I have a 4 year old machine and no sluggish scrolling, unlike with iTunes. Is this a common problem?

huertanix• 16 years ago

I generally agree with your points, however, if I recall correctly, iTunes's window controls/style changed slightly before Leopard, and when Leopard was released, everything lost its white/pinstripe style and looked like iTunes. I think what we're looking at it is what every window in Lion will look like.

On the issue of dragging windows, I think that Apple is a bad boy that doesn't care about convention and wants to re-invent this. Right now, users have to know that only a specific narrow upper border is draggable. With any blank space replacing that tradition, users don't have to think about where they grab a window as long as they hit something gray that isn't a button.

gnaffle2• 16 years ago

Maybe it's just me, but I automatically dragged the window by the empty space between the icons - and it works as expected. Hopefully they have done some testing on this to feel safe enough about the change.

scrrr• 16 years ago

That will not hinder its success, heh. Vanity blogpost. Look at HN, Reddit, ebay etc. to see how much design really matters. OSX is pretty but I'd argue it's not the neat icons that make it a success. Tsts.. Designers and their worldview.

jokermatt999• 16 years ago

Arguably, HN and Reddit's minimal design are part of their success/charm. They have a minimalist style that doesn't get in the way of posting, and doesn't needlessly change.

guywithabike2• 16 years ago

100% agreed. I'm sick of self-professed design experts slamming Reddit's design. Reddit has one of the best designs of the sites I use regularly. It's one of my favorites to navigate around and read. That's a lot more than can be said about Craig Grannell's eye melting blog.

Designers need to pull their heads out of their collective arses and realize that design is not just coordinated colors and the latest gradient button trends.

stevejohnson• 16 years ago

If you think that the "neat icons" are why people think the OS X interface is good, then you have a serious case of programmer tunnel vision.

bradly• 16 years ago

The article doesn't talk about icons or prettiness or anything like that. The author mostly talks about the user experience and interactions with the toolbar and the clarity of the text in the download buttons.

zck• 16 years ago

There's a difference between spartan design and bad usability. This blogpost is about the usability of the design, not how attractive or fancy the design is.

mkramlich• 16 years ago

If I wanted ugly or dumb I'd use Windows. I don't. Don't turn my Mac into Windows or you reduce the relative attraction.

mechanical_fish2• 16 years ago

If it makes you sad because Apple is no longer devoting thousands of pixels at the top of each window to a big "drag this window" control, you'd better brace yourself, because the next step for many consumer applications is to have windows that cannot be dragged at all.

This design looks like an iPad screen to me. Did the implications of Apple's stated mission to "make the Mac more like the iPad" not sink in? The iPad doesn't have draggable windows. And putting big title bars on a nondraggable window is a waste of pixels.

As for the critique of various shades of gray and nonscalable text and laggy performance: It is launch day, people. We are lucky the app works at all. (It apparently doesn't quite work for everyone; those bugs are going to need to be fixed first.) It is hell on earth to meet a Steve Jobs launch date, I'm grateful to all those who made it happen, and I'd like to encourage the rest of the peanut gallery to be patient and see if revision 1.0.1 brings some improvements.

sudont2• 16 years ago

I highly doubt that that Apple will remove dragable windows. Their iPad-ification of applications is the full-screen mode that can be toggled.

More likely: a bar-wide drag handler that takes precedence over widget clicking.

commandar2• 16 years ago

>Their iPad-ification of applications is the full-screen mode that can be toggled.

The problem is that app UIs are going to pick a paradigm and it's going to feel out of place if you use a different one. The dragbar being replaced is a pretty good example of this.

It's a lot of why I'm not particularly looking forward to Lion.

mechanical_fish2• 16 years ago

Sure, that is what I meant. My guess is that this app is giving us an early vision of what apps will look like in the upcoming full-screen mode. When that mode comes out, not long from now, the App Store will continue to look exactly as it does now.

Why design the window twice inside of a year when designing it once will do?

Of course Apple won't take away OS support for draggable windows. That would be silly. What will happen, though, if the new full-screen mode takes off, is that app developers will redesign their windows to be more suitable for full-screen. And that may well involve smaller or nonexistent title bars.

tehjones3• 16 years ago

I would prefer to see an X Window style alt to drag system, makes life moving windows much easier.

Raphael2• 16 years ago

OS X only has one corner for resizing windows, so it wouldn't surprise me.

lovskogen• 16 years ago

It's launch day at Apple. We expect no peanuts!

cesarsalazar12• 16 years ago

Other things that the App Store lacks (again):

- A wishlist or a very simple way to mark apps that you are willing to buy in the near future.

- Price tags on every product. Not just the one's you haven't purchased. As I already have the iWork suite installed, I can't read the prices of those articles.

- Good autocomplete. The app store universe is a finite one, not a chaotic infinite one such as the entire web. Therefore, the autocomplete should respond accordingly. Terms that are actually app names should have some visual cue.

- A prominent search box. To be fair, they have the search box in the conventional place. However, being discovery on the the priorities of the store, search should be more visible.

- And let's not talk about recommendations. If Amazon is a tiger in terms of targeted recomendations, Apple's App Store is not more than a snail.

thwarted• 16 years ago

Good autocomplete. The app store universe is a finite one, not a chaotic infinite one such as the entire web. Therefore, the autocomplete should respond accordingly. Terms that are actually app names should have some visual cue.

Agreed. If Google can do autocomplete with Google Instant against the entire internet, then the ability to do it against the "more than a thousand apps" that are in the app store should be entirely within Apple's reach.

wtn• 16 years ago

Minimum viable product.

CamperBob• 16 years ago

Apple is a startup now?

orcabeat• 16 years ago

About your second point: it looks like App Store.app only scans your /Applications folder for matches, so if you want to see the prices of products you already own, just quit the App Store, move the application out of your /Applications directory, and relaunch App Store.

tewks• 16 years ago

However, the store feels very snappy, which is a welcome change from the iTunes Store being very slow even on a Core i7 machine.

ludwigvan• 16 years ago

Definitely. At first, I thought 'wow, that's fast, but of course this is not an iOS device', but then I remembered that iOS Store through iTunes was not this fast.

lotusleaf1987• 16 years ago

People in glass houses shouldn't throw stones... his blog looks terrible.

siglesias• 16 years ago

Apple's clearly trying to conserve vertical pixels given that they are moving to wider screens. That's what they did with the new iTunes.

Secondly the navigation can be handled with swipe gestures, which is where Lion is headed.

ceejayoz• 16 years ago

> People complaining about the Mac app store interface are missing the point. Think about the current install interface - DMG, dragging, etc.

@jasonfried [https://twitter.com/jasonfried/status/23111721640009728]

fuzzmeister• 16 years ago

"Instead, you must aim for and click specific blank areas between the various navigation items. This reduces usability and also obliterates accessibility for users who have less dexterity."

I highly doubt that, given that the standard size for the dragging bar on in OS X is only 22 pixels tall, while the bar on the Mac App Store appears to be about 54 pixels tall. The increased vertical size would seem to make up for the smaller horizontal draggable area, from an accessibility standpoint.

jasonfried2• 16 years ago

So what. The actual problem the whole idea is solving is a revolutionary improvement. And this is just v1.

The "interface" problem is not custom controls or back buttons. The interface problem is installing software. That's the interface most average people stumble on. That's where computers suck.

So yeah, some of the UI in the Mac App Store app feels a bit off, but the stuff that matters - one click install of great apps onto your Mac - works beautifully. That's the interface triumph.

pornel2• 16 years ago

Usually Apple has good solutions packaged in very polished UI. Solving problem with "meh" UI is a step down.

jasonfried2• 16 years ago

Not always with v1. Apple UIs generally get better with age. They're still iterating large on things like iPhoto and iMovie.

trobertson• 16 years ago

  >The actual problem the whole idea is solving is a revolutionary improvement.

Last I checked, this was a solved problem in Ubuntu. What makes it revolutionary now that Apple's done it?

mortenjorck• 16 years ago

Reach.

danilocampos• 16 years ago

Most people don't use Ubuntu.

Come on, man, it's a Linux Distro – how many of our moms are installing those?

Plus there's the whole easy monetization thing for developers.

This is like saying Dropbox's functionality was a solved problem thanks to rsync.

cubicle67• 16 years ago

the developers get paid

statictype• 16 years ago

The one-click install without having to dick around with disk images and dragging icons from one part of a window to another is great.

But there's still lots of polish that it lacks.

It puts every app in the dock. What happens when someone wants to remove the app and tries to do so by dragging it off the dock?

The app still resides in the Applications folder but the user thinks it's gone. Now if he wants to download it again and goes back to the App Store the app is still marked as 'Installed' even though he thinks it's gone.

If he knows to look in the Applications folder and then tries to drag it to the trash, you get a UAC dialog asking for the root password.

So, they've partially solved the App install experience but not fully. The interface still has rough edges, which I'm sure they may eventually get right.

pornel2• 16 years ago

I hope it's just something temporary released to meet the deadline or that the app was designed for new Lion UI and that's just Leopardized downgraded version.

In Mac apps adherence of HIG and use of standard Cocoa widgets is very important, and poorly thought out/unnecessary deviations are frowned upon — at least for 3rd party developers.

Many parts of OS X/Cocoa are very polished, so it's disheartening that Apple releases something that's debatable between hideous or barely good enough.

_b8r02• 16 years ago

Just tried it. What I don't understand is this:

To manage apps on my iphone/ipad/ipod I use iTunes. In iTunes I go to an app store if I want to install a new app on those devices.

To access what I perceive to be essentially a form of the same store but for Mac software, I use a dedicated application that now forms part of the Operating System's update management. This makes no sense to me.

Does this mean that we'll start to see iphone/pod/pad management moving towards the mac app store and a (hopefully) slimmer itunes?

benatkin• 16 years ago

Certainly. Every time I see a major iTunes update I'm surprised they haven't fixed it. The pimple's ready to pop.

_b8r02• 16 years ago

I hope so. I don't mind iTunes as a music player on a Mac. It's as a central point of navel lint I have the problem.

kgosser• 16 years ago

One of the more poorly thought out and articulated articles I've read in a long time on Hacker News. Sad, really.

tehjones3• 16 years ago

A note on the upper left hand 'control' buttons. Using the graphite theme there are no colours or controls obviously visible, so i didnt even notice the difference.

It took a comment on this blog post for me to notice that iTunes has vertical buttons. I hope that is a fair indication how often I even look at those buttons.

Raphael2• 16 years ago

You never minimize or close a window?

tehjones3• 16 years ago

Has anyone tried the link system? A quick try gives a link that can only be opened in another instance of the mac store, call be naive, but I was hoping something similar to pages on apples site considering iOS links.

Mac App Store UI is so hideous that it makes me want to kick a swan

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