
MacOS XI: It's time to take the next step (concept) - okanesen
https://blog.prototypr.io/macos-it-s-time-to-take-the-next-step-ee7871ccd3c7?utm_source=designernews
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0x0
I don't get why people want osx to die and ios to run on mac. They are already
pretty much the same OS. Open up the OSX UIKit port should be enough to solve
that "problem".

Also, removing the file system tree would be a huge step backwards. Organizing
hundreds or thousands of files between dozens to hundreds of projects is just
not suited for a "everything in one searchable bag" for a few reasons: To find
something with search, you have to already know what you're looking for -
something that browsing a folder solves instantly (how can you know you see
all relevant files with a search? Maybe there's an important file that didn't
match your query?!) - and the common "solution" with tagging/labels are just
single-level folders in disguise....

I'm glad Apple decided to not port OSX to the iPad, or replace OSX with an
iPad-esque iOS. Most people I've talked to that experienced windows 8 would
agree that when Microsoft did just that, it was a misstep.

~~~
gardano
An article I read way back in the early days of the internet said people were
in one of two categories: Searchers and Navigators -- that is, people who were
more comfortable getting what they want by searching, and people who were more
comfortable getting what they want by navigating a hierarchy.

That really struck me, because I'm of the latter type, and it makes me
somewhat uncomfortable to have a search paradigm thrust upon me.

~~~
quicklyfrozen
I don't mind searching to find what I want, but I find myself uncomfortable if
I can't then see where it "really" is. In a universe with just tags/labels, it
doesn't feel like it's anywhere.

~~~
lotyrin
In case you hadn't considered the alternative position, I get nervous deciding
where something should "Really" be when that's based on a number of things,
e.g. there's a multitude of hierarchies I could pick when organizing a music
collection, and none is inherently correct over the others. Some things defy a
hierarchical structure entirely. (I hate having a "Various Artists" folder,
and those albums not being visible under each artist. I have considered
symlinks, but too often software treats these as multiple copies.)

I can avoid that by having my files in a content-based-addressing pool with
metainformation.

~~~
graeme
How many files do you have? And how many projects?

I'm not organized by nature, but I _need_ some kind of hierarchy for my
computer files. There's too much.

~~~
lotyrin
Trees and hashes both scale to any size, it's about their performance based on
how you access and modify them that matters.

Some collections of my files are accessed entirely hierarchically, others are
not, I don't think I should have to pick a single paradigm for all my files.

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mmastrac
These concepts look nice, but never take into account the difficulty of
working on complex projects with multiple people that hierarchical filesystem
_actually work well on_.

There's absolutely no way you could build an app in a big "bucket 'o' files".
Sure, you can put together a flyer for a softball game or (maybe) type up a
simplistic report for school, but eventually these "loops" are going to become
big, unusable buckets of content that isn't easily searchable (do we have good
search on music contents yet? better hope the filename is good before it goes
into the bucket!).

Perhaps the answer here is a "subloop". That's starting to look like we've
come around to nested document folders again, isn't it?

Somewhat amusing: the screenshot of Sublime Text in the mockup is _using
folders_.

~~~
jimminy
What I find most funny about it is that HFS actually provides the closest
model framework for a heirarchial distributed FS, where pretty much no other
does (btrfs does have some benefits as well.)

Like the author, I worked on a distributed cloud FS, but hierarchy was a core
goal. The abstracted reference system of HFS that split meta-data from the
data resources is a huge boon to handling various common issues, from rights
management to doing "fast" full-tree cloning over a distributed store and
several other neat tricks like persistence. The biggest issue with distributed
heirarchial file-systems is probably how to handle the full-tree cloning, in a
way that isn't crippling, slow, or causes an enforced depth and file limits.

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danpalmer
I find these sorts of concept look great, and look they would work well, when
you have 10 emails in your mailbox, or 3 tabs open in your browser, or 6 files
in Sublime Text, etc etc.

I get hundreds of emails a day, work in an editor that is indexing ~11000
files, regularly have 50 tabs open in Chrome, etc. I find many apps that
follow the sorts of aesthetics and principles shown in these mockups just do
not scale to what I would consider normal professional use.

~~~
pbreit
I think your impression of normal professional use is bonkers. For example, we
use Slack and I auto-filter auto-emails so I only get about 30/day in my
inbox. While you probably don't need 50 tabs open, I'm not sure this direction
would preclude handling that in a decent manner. The editing would work the
same whether or not Finder presented the files hierarchically or not...no
change there.

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justinclift
The described behaviour isn't that unusual. Several of the people I've worked
with have said they do things in almost exactly the same way. (and they're not
idiots ;>)

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Kristine1975
I'm not impressed:

Tablets and smartphones have a touch screen, computers most often don't.
Software that doesn't take this into account will be a second-class citizen on
the respective platform.

And while a flat filesystem with a powerful search function certainly has its
uses, I wouldn't want to use it for everything. I'm far too anal when it comes
to organizing my source code, for example.

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ZenoArrow
> "And while a flat filesystem with a powerful search function certainly has
> its uses, I wouldn't want to use it for everything. I'm far too anal when it
> comes to organizing my source code, for example."

The article touches on a concept called 'loops' for cases such as this.

I think there's room for innovation with filesystems. Personally I'm a fan of
the 'database filesystem' ideas from BeOS/Haiku.

~~~
kalleboo
> Personally I'm a fan of the 'database filesystem' ideas from BeOS/Haiku

How do you see that working well?

Microsoft tried to incorporate all the stuff like MP3 metadata into explorer
way back when (XP? Vista? Can't recall)

OS X has supported "saved searches" which act like a live database-backed file
manager ever since Spotlight was added. More recently they added quick tagging
of files.

What are you imagining that would be more usable than these?

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ZenoArrow
I'm not familiar with those other approaches, but customisable metadata is
only half what makes the database filesystem beneficial. Can you specify
folders using a query language (via a GUI or otherwise)?

~~~
msbarnett
Yes. OS X has Smart Folders, whose contents are the results of a Spotlight
query.

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kalleboo
I don't see anything new here. Some apps were redesigned to behave a bit like
Photos.app, but pretending that adding a menu bar and multiple window support
will be an easy port shows an amazing lack of experience. edit: just realized
that there are no multiple window apps. So, the distinction of a computer vs a
mobile device is gone right there

Organizing files into projects is waved away by "just search through an
amorphous blob of data". "Kind: PDF". Who finds files like that?

The user activity thread is nice, but it's clear Apple was already working in
this direction with the links timeline in Safari, but all the social service
TOS's forbid this kind of presentation and they're super-protective of their
presentation to the point even Apple can't negotiate past it at this point.

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mikhailt
I like the concepts presented here but I cannot shake off the feeling that OS
X is pretty much never going to get the love it deserves from Apple.

Apple will just keep improving iOS to be more powerful, more flexible and so
on. The iPad Pro with iOS 9 is just a rough draft, it will be iOS 10 or 11
that'll show the hardware off, at least I hope. iOS 9 was probably the biggest
jump in productivity for the iPads and hopefully, Apple keeps it going from
now on, not neglecting it like it did prior to iOS 9.

~~~
frou_dh
Well the Mac has had a lot of love poured into it over all these years to get
it to where it is today. I enjoy using the Mac in its present incarnation
immensely.

~~~
api
Could we have with OSX a... gasp... stable platform that is just really good
at doing desktop type work?

IOS would have to evolve a lot and in many ways to take over desktop. Maybe it
will. Android N seems to be moving there so maybe that's the future.

~~~
Kristine1975
You mean a second Snow Leopard that just fixes bugs and adds overall polish?
Yes please!

~~~
icedchai
Isn't that pretty much all of the recent OS X releases? What major features
did El Capitan add? Yosemite? Mavericks?

I can't think of a single _major_ thing.

At one point they finally got multi monitor support working properly, but I
forget when.

~~~
Kristine1975
Mavericks finally brought support for OpenGL 4.1. But granted, that's not
something most users will notice.

Also it removed some skeuomorphism, which depending on whether you like it or
not counts as a major feature ;-)

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jupp0r
I would rather have a modern file system optimized for SSDs instead of one
with 16bit alignments for the Motorola 68k. It seems like OSX versions are
more about tabs in Finder nowadays while Linux (and Windows) actually
innovate.

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tsunamifury
This is like looking at Porsche try to make a flatbed truck. It's stupid
because it belays all the use cases that the product ctaegory needs.

Designer: design isn't just about looking sleek, it's primarily about meeting
the use case as simply and robustly as possible. All these use cases are
better on other devices.

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SimeVidas
I’m not a Mac user; this kind-of looks like Windows 10.

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fit2rule
Things I would do to make OSX great again:

1\. Fix Finder. 2\. Integrate the iDevice simulator into the OSX: all iOS apps
can run on OSX. So let them. 3\. Continue making kick-ass laptop/personal
computers, with keyboards and screens and touchscreen, and make the difference
between iOS and OSX go away, at the hardware layer.

Plan B:

1\. Put Xcode on iOS. 2\. Make an iOS Touchscreen Laptop (8-core ARM with
16gigs RAM, etc.) 3\. Abandon OSX completely.

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blackhaz
Can somebody please tell Apple to get color saturation of the GUI back to how
it was in the Snow Leopard times? These Lego brick colors are HORRIBLE.

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OJFord
This fails to provide any motivation for such a merging/converging iOS/MacOS
experience.

Why do I want Netflix and CNN apps that have been so easily (but nonetheless
with effort) adapted to support the platform from their iOS counterparts? I
expect I'll choose the website in Chrome every time.

~~~
kitsunesoba
Personally I’d love to have native apps for media-intensive and “app like”
websites. Why? Well, for those sorts of sites a native app will easily perform
better and their existence would allow me to dedicate my browser to more
lightweight/traditional sites focused on delivering text and images.

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tambourine_man
I'd love for the name to switch back to plain _system_ like the old days. So
much cooler. I know I have a Mac, it's staring at me every day.

Completely superfluous, of course, and they are probably going with macOS, but
one can dream of a more sensible casing future.

~~~
LeoNatan25
It hasn't been called "Mac OS X" in several years. It's just "OS X", which is
much better.

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thejerz
This is clickbait. There is nothing in here that comes (anywhere) close to XI
-- at best, it's OS X 10.12. OS XI will be a paradigm shift -- the way that OS
9 to OS X was -- not just a slightly different UI, desktop picture, and icons.

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et1337
This is way better for e.g. my mother's use case. It's horrible for power
users. I would be fine with this if Apple introduced some kind of "power user
shell". I kind of do this already (on Win, Mac, and Linux) by almost
exclusively using a terminal window and browser.

edit: "macOS" is absolutely brilliant though. They should go for the throwback
hipster vibe.

~~~
gh02t
> It's horrible for power users. I would be fine with this if Apple introduced
> some kind of "power user shell"

That sounds like it could work in theory, but I dunno if I'd actually want
that as a power user. Mostly because there's more "normal" users out there, I
feel like any alternative UI would be neglected. Seems like you'd be
consigning yourself to being a second class citizen.

Maybe this works on Linux where there's less of a profit incentive because
development on niche WM's and such is largely done by hobbyists, but I'm
having a hard time imagining Apple spending a lot of resources on developing
something large for a minority of users. Maybe if they opened it up a bit and
had some sort of open plugin based build-your-own experience that could shift
some of the effort off of them? I could see that working but it doesn't seem
in line with Apple's philosophy.

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Kjeldahl
OSX and iOS need to converge into something new and unified. Touch and
pen(cils) is becoming standard for new computers in the near future, and
tablets with keyboards also need to support touchpad and mouse. It may not
have been necessary earlier, but with Surface and iPad Pro it's becoming
obvious that these are not completely separate platforms any longer.

~~~
graeme
Can you name an example of desktop software convergence by Apple that went
well?

It wrecked Pages, which was one of my favourite software tools prior. I use
very little Apple software now.

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hk__2
How would you expect 3D Touch to work on a screen that moves if you press on
it? You’d need to maintain the laptop screen in one hand while 3D Touch-ing
with the other; that’s cumbersome.

~~~
sellweek
3D Touch/Force Touch actually currently works on OS X on the 2015 MacBook Pro
and the new MacBook. The touchpad doesn't move, it's just pressure sensitive
and provides haptic feedback so you feel like you can depress it even more
after clicking. OS X provides a dictionary/lookup popover when using it in
Safari and some other apps.

~~~
hk__2
Oh right; I forgot about the touchpad ;)

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thescribe
I think I'm the sole person on earth who hates touch. I'd switch OS's before I
bought a computer with a touch screen.

