I built a UI where you can add elements and change their text. I then built a listener where if you press backspace twice in the element it will delete to avoid having a “x” in the UI.
I came back to the interface a month later and i forgot about the backspace twice option!
And some of their conferences are just downright awful UI
Not too convenient to carry along with a pocket computer, though.
Gradually, over decades, society has evolved a "shared language of touch-screen actions" for controlling touch-screen devices. Many actions are familiar to everyone here: tap to hide/show controls, press and hold to bring contextual menus, pinch with two fingers to zoom out, etc.
It's OK for UI designers to assume familiarity with this common language to keep UIs clean, calm, and uncluttered. I like it.
Interesting article. Some points I didn't quite agree entirely with. There's a cost and practically limitation to some things (like a physical knob in a car for zooming in and out on a map - although that was probably just an example of intuitive use).
I just recently switched a toggle on a newly installed app that did the opposite of what it was labelled - I thought the label represented the current state, but it represented the state it would switch to if toggled. It became obvious once changed, but that seems the least helpful execution.
As a user, you have no way to see if a photo has been "scanned" with smart features and what it has detected (e,g found person x, found dog, blue sky, beach etc).
Trips features, has this algorithm finished scanning your library? You have no idea, it's just hidden.
Faces, detection, has this completely scanned your library? You don't know. Photos that don't seem to have faces detect, was it scanned or failed or did it not scan yet?
The list is nearly endless - but in line with the rest of the direction of MacOS, getting worse.
First thing I do on new Pixel phones is enable 3 button navigation, but lately that's also falling out of favor in UI terms, with apps assuming bottom navigation bar and not accounting for the larger spacing of 3 button nav and putting content or text behind it.
Essentially it's UI text in random places telling you what steps you should take to activate some other feature, instead of - you know - just providing a button to activate that feature.
A variant of this is buttons or menu items that don't do anything else than move focus onto another button, or open a menu in a different location, so you can then click on that one.
Increasingly seeing this in Microsoft products, especially in VS Code.
My wife's Pixel was hung and I was trying to reboot it. Long press, double tap, triple tap. up-down volume, then power was the answer.
We are at the point where our gadgets expect bespoke Konami codes before they respond to input.
It's maddening!
It would be better for design to be intuitive, but you struggle only the first time, while interfaces overloaded with information will take some of your attention every time you look at them
The author even drives the point home by getting this wrong.
To get to the control panel it’s not a swipe up from the bottom left, it’s a swipe down from the top right.
And you don’t even need to do that. The flashlight and camera icons exist right on the Lock Screen for immediate use without having to bring up the control panel
It’s only the dangerously obsolete iPhones - iPhone 8 / 2016 and earlier - where you swipe from the bottom up. And from the bottom-anywhere straight up, no need to go from any corner. We’ve had 9 years of iPhones with the swipe-down action, and less than 2% of iPhones still in use are iPhone 8 and earlier.
You don’t even know what features Bamboo has that would be nice to use - or ask someone else to use on your behalf - because if you don’t have permission it’s almost all hidden away.
Developer tools in particular and productivity tools in general need to leave everything out there for discoverability to function. Taking it away is a disservice to everyone.
None of this is new. But this kind of dysfunctional product is what a dysfunctional organization ships, despite knowledge.
Why? Because leadership wants features. Leadership also wants a clean, marketable product. Leadership also wants both of those done on a dime, quickly and doesn't care about the details. The only way to satisfy all constraints at the same time is to implement features and hide them so they don't clutter the UI.
The problem isn't awareness. It goes deeper.
Also hiding key navigation behind hamburger menu instead of using tab bar should be discouraged.
Nowadays everything has to be clean and minimalist. No scrollbar, no buttons, just gestures. Hand a modern smartphone to someone who never used one in their life and see how they struggle to ever leave the first app they open. What are the odds they discover one of the gestures?
Then on the software side I find Youtube particularly annoying, especially with their show-on-hover buttons for thumbnails. You want to click on a video, right, so you stop thinking about it and move your mouse to it and click it, but when you hover over it, buttons spawn, meaning there's a fair chance you're not going to click the video to launch it as you intended, but may be redirected to Youtube's ad disclosure policy page instead, as if anyone wanted to read that.
I am a fan of the conceptional clarity, but having to wait for my PC to shutdown only to have to flip a switch myself is not good UX. The absolute ideal would be the switch mechanically turning to off once it is off, and such switches exist, but they are expensive and require extra electronics to drive the electromagnetic part. A really good example of this UX principle are the motor faders in digital audio mixers: You can move them with your hand but if you cange to a different channel layout the mixer can move the faders for you. The downside of those is mainly cost.
The cheap 80/20 solution for the PC is a momentary push-button and a Green/Red LED to display the current state. 5s holding is power-off because everything else has the danger of accidentally switching off — but this isn't obvious to the non-initialized.
I'm convinced advertisers will find a way to leverage that behavior in some new dark UI pattern.
Im especially passionate about this because having ADHD makes one sensitive to irrelevant stimuli in the periphery but being a power user for most software the dumbification of software happening since mobile apps drives me insane. I want software where a feature being used by the top 5 to 10 % power users once a month is not being ripped out if that once a month use provides high value for that group.
I have no idea why some interfaces hide elements hide and leave the space they'd taken up unused.
IntelliJ does this, for example, with the icons above the project tree. There is this little target disc that moves the selection in the project tree to the file currently open in the active editor tab. You have to know the secret spot on the screen where it is hidden and if you move your mouse pointer to the void there, it magically appears.
Why? What is the rationale behind going out of your way to implement something like this?
It makes it impossible to locate files later when I need to move or transfer them.
The other day I was locked out of my car
the key fob button wouldn't work
Why didn't I just use my key to get in?
First, you need to know there is a hidden key inside the fob.
Second, because there doesn't appear to be a keyhole on the car door,
you also have to know that you need to disassemble a portion
of the car door handle to expose the keyhole.
Hiding critical car controls is hostile engineering. In this, it doesn't stand out much in the modern car experience.So my iMac, among many other devices like the light I wear on my head camping, has a button which you long-press to turn on. It is a very common pattern which most people will have come across, and it’s reasonable to expect people to learn it. The buttons are even labelled with an ISO standard symbol which you are expected to know.
We need a viable third option in mobile operating systems. At least with cars, we have high-quality infotainment systems such as those from Tesla and Rivian. In the mobile phone space, we have tow poor options and a few alternatives with vanishingly small market share.
Because it can be trivially duplicated, this is minimally capable engineering. Yet automakers everywhere lack even this level of competence. By reasonable measure, they are poor at their job.
Contrast this with something like an airplane cockpit, which while full of controls and assuming expert knowledge, still has them all labeled.
It might seem counter intuitive that hiding your interface stops your users leaving. But it does it because it changes your basis of assumptions about what a device is and your relationship with it. It's not something you "use", but something you "know". They want you to feel inherently linked to it at an intuitive level such that leaving their ecosystem is like losing a part of yourself. Once you've been through the experience of discovering "wow, you have to swipe up from a corner in a totally unpredictable way to do an essential task on a phone", and you build into your world of assumptions that this is how phones are, the thought of moving to a new type of phone and learning all that again is terrifying. It's no surprise at all that all the major software vendors are doing this.
I recall learning that the four corners of the screen are the most valuable screen real estate, because it's easy to move the mouse to those locations quickly without fine control. So it's user-hostile that for Windows 11 Microsoft moved the default "Start" menu location to the center. And I don't think they can ascribe it to being mobile-first. Maybe it's "touch-first", where mouse motion doesn't apply.
Such ambiguous switches are often associated with "opt out" misfeatures.
About the scroll bars: Also stop making them so thin that I have to have FPS skills to hit them! Looking at you, Firefox! (And possibly what standard CSS allows?) Yeah, I can scroll, but horizontally the scrollbar would be more convenient than pressing shift with my other hand.
Take a simple example: Open a read-only file in MS Word. There is no option to save? Where's it gone? Why can I edit but not save the file?
A much better user experience would be to enable and not hide the Save option. When the user tries to save, tell them "I cannot save this file because of blah" and then tell them what they can do to fix it.
![]() | Figure 1. Drop-down menus provide the user with knowledge in the world. It is clear what the user can do in this command window. |
![]() | Figure 2. A DOS command window. Without specific knowledge in the head, the user cannot perform a single action. |
![]() | Figure 3. a) Apple Maps displayed with CarPlay, lacking menu items; b) the hidden control to bring up search and zoom functions when you touch the screen. |
![]() | Figure 4. The hidden controls on an electric door lock. Unlock is supported by a good affordance, but lock is not. |
![]() | Figure 5. Replacing the ubiquitous computer power button with a visible control, such as the one shown here, would retain functionality and ease of use. |
![]() | Figure 6. Navigation in a late GM model, with visible and persistent search and zoom controls. |
Except that screens on phones, tablets, laptops and desktops are larger than ever. Consider the original Macintosh from 1984 – large, visible controls took up a significant portion of its 9" display (smaller than a 10" iPad, monochrome, and low resolution.) Arguably this was partially due to users being unfamiliar with graphical interfaces, but Apple still chose to sacrifice precious and very limited resources (screen real estate, compute, memory, etc.) on a tiny, drastically underpowered (by modern standards) system in the 1980s for interface clarity, visibility, and discoverability. And once displays got larger the real estate costs became negligible.
UI has been taken over by graphic designers and human interaction experts have been pushed out. It happened as we started calling it "user experience" rather than "user interface" because people started to worry about the emotional state of the user, rather than being a tool. It became about being form over function, and now we have to worry about holding it wrong when in reality machines are here to serve humans, not the other way around.
Don’t quote me on this, but I vaguely remember there being an option to toggle hiding it, if not in the settings it is in a context menu on the panel.
That thing is a massive time saver, and I agree—keeping it hidden means most people never learn it exists.
I don't think you can make this assertion without knowing what they were tasked with doing. I very much doubt they were tasked with making the most user friendly cockpit possible. I suspect they were required to minimize moving parts (like switches and buttons) and to enable things like Sirius, iPhone and Android integration, etc.
That said, the site does desperately need a responsive redesign so that you don't need to do what I just described.
(Most of the time I use the scroll gesture on the trackpad to get round this)
Some people are like airliner pilots. They enjoy every indicator to be readily visible, and every control to be easily within reach. They can effortlessly switch their focus.
Of course, there is a full range between these extremes.
The default IDE configuration has to do a balancing act, trying to appeal to very different tastes. It's inevitably a compromise.
Some tools have explicit switches: "no distractions mode", "expert mode", etc, which offer pre-configured levels of detail.
Now that Pixel cameras outclass iPhone cameras, and even Samsung is on par, there is really no reason to ever switch to the Apple ecosystem anymore IMO.
However, I think they do a decent job at resisting it in general, and specifically I disagree that removing the home button constitutes hiding an UI element. I see it as a change in interaction, after which the gesture is no longer “press” but “swipe” and the UI element is not a button but edge of the screen itself. It is debatable whether it is intuitive or better in general, but I personally think it is rather similar to double-clicking an icon to launch an app, or right-clicking to invoke a context menu: neither have any visual cues, both are used all the time for some pretty key functions, but as soon as it becomes an intuition it does not add friction.
You may say Apple is way too liberal in forcing new intuitions like that, and I would agree in some cases (like address bar drag on Safari!), but would disagree in case of the home button (they went with it and they firmly stuck with it, and they kept around a model with the button for a few more years until 2025).
Regarding explaining the lack of home button: on iOS, there is an accessibility feature that puts on your screen a small draggable circle, which when pressed displays a configurable selection of shortcuts—with text labels—including the home button and a bunch of other pretty useful switches. Believe it or not, I know people who kept this circle around specifically when hardware home button was a thing, because they did not want to wear out the only thing they saw as a moving part!
Game Helpin' Squad: World Quester 2
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Gy9hJauXns
Every time I'm using Cursor and select "Cursor => Settings => Cursor Settings" I giggle and think of World Quester 2.
I love World Quester 2 so much, I implemented its most innovative feature, the "Space Inventory", in the WASM version of Micropolis (SimCity):
WARNING: DO NOT PRESS THE SPACE BAR!!!! (And if you accidentally do, then definitely DO NOT PRESS IT AGAIN!!!! Or AGAIN!!! Or AGAIN!!!)
SimCity Micropolis Tile Sets Space Inventory Cellular Automata To Jerry Martin's Chill Resolve:
Go rent a hundred of them. Next try and drive them in 30 different countries.
One press turns on/off the display Two taps enables Apple Pay
Quite often my timing is not perfect or one press isn’t hard enough so I shut off the display
Then, paying with Apple Pay is a double press but paying for transit is no press. but often I’m absent minded and as I’m walking through the transit gate my brain thinks “must pay” “pay = double press” so I subconsciously double press and the gate screams since is not in transit mode now it’s in Apple Pay mode
In my opinion, hidden controls aren’t bad per se. But they are something you have to learn to use. That makes them generally worse for beginners and (hopefully) better for experts. It’s a trade off and sometimes getting users to learn your UI is the right decision. I’m glad my code editor puts so much power at my fingertips. I’m glad git is so powerful. I don’t want a simplified version of git if it means giving up some of its power.
That said, I think we have gone way too far toward custom per-app controls. If you’re going to force users to learn your UI conventions, those learnings should apply to other applications on the same platform. Old platforms like the palm were amazing for this - custom controls were incredibly rare. When you learned to use a palm pilot, you could use all the apps on it.
Agree many of the problems have to do with this, yet it’s barely mentioned by armchair designers. Temporally hidden and narrow scrollbars? Makes perfect sense for scrolling on touch screen (since you don’t touch them directly), but very annoying on desktop.
Back in the pre-touch days we’d have a lot of hover menus. But with a phone today? Nobody likes the hamburger/three dots, but there isn’t a better alternative without losing context. And nobody uses hover anymore for functional purposes.
But, I also don’t think building entirely separate apps and especially web sites for different form factors is desirable. We probably should be better at responsive design, and develop better tooling and guidelines.
When people who are not thinking in that bigger-scale, zoomed-out, societal-level perspective conduct A/B testing or usability testing in a lab or focus group setting, they focus on the wrong metrics (the ones that make an immediate, short-term KPI go up) and then promote the resulting objectively worse UX designs as being evidence-based and data-driven.
It has been destroying software usability for the last 20 years and doing a deep disservice to subsequent generations who are growing up without having been exposed to TRULY thoughtful UX except very rarely.
I will die on this hill.
defaults write com.apple.Finder _FXShowPosixPathInTitle -bool true
It's often more useful to share the directory it's in rather that the file itself. MS Office dies have a way to get that information, but you have to look for it.
Compare to the momentary buttons on ye olde Macs that existed on both the case and the keyboard, which gave immediate feedback. The one on the case also had a longpress action, but only as an override.
"Nope, didn't want this on right now. Bumped it by accident. Long-press!" is easier for me to get behind.
A better example may be a solenoid button, used on industrial machinery which should remain off after a power failure, which stays held in when pushed, but pops out when the power is cut. They are not common outside of such machinery, because they're extremely expensive. In the first half of the 20th century, they also saw some use in elevators: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37385826
So guess what Mr.Auto Manufacturer, you can keep your hifi $30K-70K touchscreen surveillance machine on your lot. I'll keep driving my 20+ year old Corolla until you learn to do better.
Most people for most situations, using most phone apps, do not have that familiarity. Mobile design has to simultaneously provide a lot of power and progressively disclose it such that it keeps users at or just past their optimal level of comfort, and that involves tradeoffs to hide some things and expose others at different levels of depth.
So while I agree that a lot of mobile design, and OS design in particular, pulls back way too far on providing affordances for actions, I would not use an airplane cockpit as a good guide, unless you’re also talking about a specialist tool.
My metaverse client normally presents a clean 3D view of the world. If you bring the cursor to the top or bottom of the screen, the menu bar and controls appear. They stay visible as long as the cursor is over some control, then, after a few seconds, they disappear.
This seems to be natural to users. I deliberately don't explain it, but everybody finds the controls, because they'll move the mouse and hit an edge.
(1) The "fast" path: Provide toolbars, keyboard shortcuts and context menus for quick access to the most important features. This path is for users who already have the "knowledge in the head" and just want to get there quickly, so speed takes priority over discoverability.
(2) The "main" path: Provide an exhaustive list of all features in the "title bar"/"top of the screen" menus and the settings dialogues. This path is mainly for users who don't have the "knowledge in the head" and need a consistent, predictable way to discover the application's features. But it's also a general-purpose way to provide "knowledge in the world" for anyone who needs it, which may also include power users. Therefore, for this path, discoverability and consistency is more important than speed.
Crucially, the "main" features are a superset of the "quick" features. This means, every "quick-access" feature actually has at least two different ways to activate it, either through 1 or through 2.
This sounds redundant, but makes perfect sense if it allows peoples to first use the feature through 2 and then later switch to 1 when they are more confident.
My impression is that increasingly, UIs drop 2 and only provide 1, changing the "fast" into the "main" path. Then suddenly "discoverability" becomes a factor of its own that needs to be implemented separately for each feature - and in the eyes of designers seems to become an unliked todo-list bullet point like "accessibility".
Usually then, it's implemented as an afterthought: Either through random one-time "new feature" popups (if it popped up at an inappropriate time and you just closed it to continue with what you wanted to to, or if you want to reopen it later - well, sucks to be you) - or through unordered "everything" menus that just contain a dump of all features in an unordered list, but are themselves hidden behind some obscure shortcut or invisible button.
An IDE, and the browser example given below, are tools I'll spend thousands of hours using in my life. The discoverability is only important for a small percentage of that, while viewing the content is important for all of it.
This is exactly when I will have the 'knowledge in the head'.
I did know that there must be a physical key (unless Tesla?), and the only way I found the keyhole was because a previous renter had scratched the doorknob to shit trying to access the very same keyhole.
How can I trust a driver to take things like safe maximum load into account when they don't even know they can open their car if their battery ever goes flat?
Basic knowledge about the things you own isn’t hard. My god there is a lot of old man shakes fist at cloud in here.
> Every control in the car is visible
No. And that would be horrible.
Every control _critically needed while driving_ is visible and accessible. Controls that matter less can be smaller and more convoluted, or straight hidden.
The levers to adjust seat high and positions are hidden while still accessible. The latch to open the car good can (should ?) be less accessible and can be harder to find.
There are a myriad of subtle and opinionated choices to make the interface efficient. There's nothing trivial or really "simple" about that design process, and IMHO brushing over that is part of what leads us to the current situation where car makers just ignore these considerations.
My previous one lasted more than 20 years, from when my parents bought it for me when I went to study until some time in my 40s. It was still functional, but its dial had become loose and it didn't look that great anymore.
The one I bought after that follows the new pattern, it has buttons up the wazoo and who even knows what they do? To be honest I just need one power setting with a time and maybe a defrost option?
Because it can be trivially duplicated
While I agree with your sentiment, designing and manufacturing custom molds for each knob and function (including premium versions) instead of just slapping a screen on the dash does have a cost.His perspective was that companies were "run" by engineers first, then a few decades later by managers, and then by marketing.
Who knows what's next, maybe nothing (as in all decisions are accidentally made by AI because everyone at all levels just asks AI). Could be better than our current marketing-driven universe.
Win NT-Vista style, aka the way web browsers show tabs with an icon + label is peak desktop UX for context switching and nobody can convince me otherwise. GNOME can't even render taskbars that way.
Consider that all the following are true (despite their contradictions):
- "Bloated busy interface" is a common complaint of some of Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Meta. people here share a blank vscode canvas and complain about how busy the interface is compared to their 0-interface vim setup.
- flat design and minimalism are/were in fashion (have been for few years now).
- /r/unixporn and most linux people online who "rice" their linux distros do so by hiding all controls from apps because minimalism is in fashion
- Have you tried GNOME recently?
Minimal interface where most controls are hidden is a certain look that some people prefer. Plenty of people prefer to "hide the noise" and if they need something, they are perfectly capable to look it up. It's not like digging in manuals is the only option
Phones aren’t 747’s, and guess what every normal person that goes into an airplane cockpit who isn’t a pilot is so overwhelmed by all the controls they wouldn’t know what anything did.
Interface designers know what they’re doing. They know what’s intuitive and what isn’t, and they’ve refined down to an art how to contain a complicated feature set in a relatively simple form factor.
The irony of people here with no design training that they could do a better job than any “so called designer” shows incredible levels of egotism and disrespect to a mature field of study.
Also demonstrably, people use their phones really quite well with very little training, that’s a modern miracle.
Stop shaking your fist at a cloud.
Apple's interface shits me because it's all from that one button, and I can never remember how to get to settings because I use that interface so infrequently, so Android feels more natural. Ie. Android has done it's lock-in job, but Apple has done itself a disservice.
(Not entirely fair, I also dislike Apple for all the other same old argument reasons).
This stupidity seems to have spread across Windows. No title bars or menus... now you can't tell what application a Window belongs to.
And you can't even bring all of an application's windows to the foreground... Microsoft makes you hover of it in the task bar and choose between indiscernible thumbnails, one at a time. WTF? If you have two Explorer windows open to copy stuff, then switch to other apps to work during the copy... you can't give focus back to Explorer and see the two windows again. You have to hover, click on a thumbnail. Now go back and hover, and click on a thumbnail... hopefully not the same one, because of course you can't tell WTF the difference between two lists of files is in a thumbnail.
And Word... the Word UI is now a clinic on abject usability failure. They have a menu bar... except WAIT! Microsoft and some users claim that those are TABS... except that it's just a row of words, looking exactly like a menu.
So now there's NO menu and no actual tabs... just a row of words. And if you go under the File "menu" (yes, File), there are a bunch of VIEW settings. And in there you can add and remove these so-called "tabs," and when you do remove one, the functionality disappears from the entire application. You're not just customizing the toolbar; you're actually disabling entire swaths of features from the application.
It's an absolute shitshow of grotesque incompetence, in a once-great product. No amount of derision for this steaming pile is too much.
widget.gtk.overlay-scrollbars.enabled = false
layout.css.scrollbar-width-thin.disabled = true
widget.non-native-theme.scrollbar.style = 3
widget.non-native-theme.scrollbar.size.override = 30
New location is: about:config
layout.testing.overlay-scrollbars.always-visible
Not having anything to do with Google is a pretty good reason I think.
And they aren't even consistent from app to app. That's perhaps the most frustrating thing.
Right, but while it's obvious to everyone that a button is a control, it's not obvious that an edge is a control. On top of that, swiping up from the bottom edge triggers two completely different actions depending on exactly when/where you lift your finger off the screen.
Why not move the physical home button to the back of the phone?
Boggles my mind how badly many interfaces manage to be.
Power, time, start, stop.
It turns out that luckily there is one like that made. The Y4ZM25MMK. Also as bonus no clock.
That said, I realized only very late that the function dial actually has a marker to show which function it selects. An extremely shallow colorless groove.
Right, because it's fucking ridiculous to expect a driver to fumble through menus while driving.
The 1967 Amana Radarange (https://media.npr.org/assets/img/2017/08/28/microwave_custom...) had two dials: short duration under 5 minutes and a long duration out to something like 30 minutes.
My parents still have theirs. It needs some resto love, but it’s still fully functional. I’ve already put my foot down in terms of who’s inheriting it.
I stab a potato and cover it in butter and salt, put it on a plate, press "potato" and it's cooked just perfect every time. Doesn't matter if it's big or small, it's just right.
When I have a plate of leftovers I just press reheat and it's perfect pretty much every time. Could be pork chops and Mac and cheese, could be a spaghetti with marinara sauce, could be whatever. Toss it in, lightly cover, press reheat, and it's good.
When I want to quickly thaw out some ground beef or ground sausage, I just toss it in, press defrost, put in a weight to a tenth of a pound, and it's defrosted without really being cooked yet.
Back when I microwaved popcorn, just pressing the popcorn button was spot on. Didn't matter what the bag size was, didn't matter the brand, the bag was always pretty much fully popped and not burned.
Despite being the same age it's still in excellent working order while yours with the dials fell apart.
The tone of your post and especially this phrase is inappropriate imo. The GP's comment is plausible. You're welcome to make a counter-argument but you seem to be claiming without evidence their was no thinking behind their post.
My car has something like that, but thankfully I have only needed to adjust volume, which can be done from the steering wheel…
You want to mess with your equalizer, do it when stopped. IDGAF if it's dozens of physical buttons and knobs and sliders or hidden in menus; you're supposed to be driving not mastering an audio file.
widget.non-native-theme.scrollbar.style = 4
widget.non-native-theme.scrollbar.size.override = 20
Though I'm not sure if I maybe want:
widget.non-native-theme.scrollbar.style = 3
widget.non-native-theme.scrollbar.size.override = 30
Plus of course that, which I had found earlier and did nothing on it's own:
widget.gtk.overlay-scrollbars.enabled = false
layout.css.scrollbar-width-thin.disabled = true
For example (Kia Carnival): Holding the lock button on the fob for 20 seconds will automatically close the sliding doors and any open windows.
If it’s just a button the user just has to know two things: turn the switch on at the wall socket when plugging in, which becomes habit since childhoood; and press and hold the button on the fan to make it go, which I suspect most children in 2025 can manage. These two things don’t interact and can be known and learned separately.
As you said, the knob’s position tells you about the switch. But it’s the fan the user is interested in, not the switch.
(BTW, if the fan has a motion sensor you can’t tell it’s off by the fact the blades aren’t turning. There’s probably a telltale LED.)
I would gladly gladly keep my AC, heat, hazards, blinkers, wipers, maybe a few other buttons and that's it. I don't need back cameras, lane assist, etc.
I find it hard to believe it's cheaper to have all the cameras, chips, and other digital affordances rather than a small number of analog buttons and functions.
This implies it's a consequential cost. Building with tactile controls would take the (already considerable) purchase price and boost that high enough to impact sales.
If tactile controls were a meaningful cost difference, then budget cars with tactile controls shouldn't be common - in any market.
(another reason was because it still has a geared transmission instead of a CVT, but that's a separate discussion)
Most of the cost savings is in having a single bus to wire up through the car, then everything needs a little computer in it to send on that bus...so a screen wins out.
Technically, you never see "all" actions - you only see the actions that make sense for the selected units. However, because there is a predictable place where the actions will show up, and because you know those are all the actions that are there, it never feels confusing.
On the contrary, it lets you quickly learn what the different skills are for each unit.
There is also a "default" action that will happen when you right-click somewhere on the map. What this default action will do is highly context specific and irregular: e.g. right-clicking on an enemy unit will trigger an attack order, but only if your selected unit actually has a matching weapon, otherwise it will trigger a move order. Right-clicking a resource item will issue a "mine" order, but only if you have selected a worker, etc etc.
Instead of trying to teach you all those rules, or to let you guess what the action is doing, the UI has two simple rules:
- How the default action is chosen may be complicated, but it will always be one of the actions from the grid.
- If a unit is following an action, that action will be highlighted in the grid.
This means the grid doubles as a status display to show you not just what the unit could do but also what it is currently doing. It also lets you learn the specifics of the default action by yourself, because if you right-click somewhere, the grid will highlight the action that was issued.
The irony is that in the actual game, you almost always use the default action and very rarely actually click the buttons in the grid. But I think the grid is still essential for those reasons: As a status display and to let you give an order explicitly if the default isn't doing what you want it to do.
The counterexample would be the C&C games: The UI there only has the right-click mechanic, without any buttons, with CTRL and ALT as modifier keys if you want to give different orders. But you're much more on your own to memorize what combination of CTRL, ALT, selected unit, target unit and click will issue which order.
Why is this so expensive it can't even be put into a premium car today when it used to be ubiquitous in even the cheapest hardware a few decades ago?
Manufacturing car components already involves designing and custom molds, does it not? Compared to the final purchase price, the cost of adding knobs to that stack seems inconsequential.
At first it was a bit annoying because frozen meals sometimes want you to run it at lower power and this microwave has no power setting. If that's a problem, I imagine there's some other similar model that does. But in practice, just running it at full power for shorter seems to work just as well.
It would look much nicer if it didn't have a cooking guide printed on it.
In Europe, I saw some consumer-grade microwaves with similarly minimalist designs, like these Gorenje microwaves[2] with two dials. I'd have gotten one of those, but I couldn't easily find them in the US. But I also did not look especially hard.
[1]: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00ZTVIPZ2?ref_=ppx_hzsearch_conn_...
[2]: https://international.gorenje.com/products/cooking-and-bakin...
- Dribbble-driven development, where the goal is to make apps look good in screenshots with little bearing to their practical usability
- The massive influx of designers from other disciplines (print, etc) into UI design, who are great at making things look nice but don’t carry many of the skills necessary to design effective UIs
Being a good UI designer is seeking out existing usability research, conducting new research to fill in the gaps, and understanding the limits of the target platform on top of having a good footing in the fundamentals. The role is part artist, part scientist, and part engineer. It’s knowing when to put ego aside and admit that the beautiful design you just came with isn’t usable enough to ship. It’s not just a sense for aesthetics and the ability to wield Photoshop or Figma or whatever well.
This is not what hiring selects for, though, and that’s reflected in the precipitous fall in quality of software design in the past ~15 years.
The appification of UI is a necessary evil if you want people in their mid twenties or lower to use your OS. The world is moving to mobile-first, and UI is following suit, even in places it doesn't make sense.
Give a kid a UI from the 90s, styled after industrial control panels, and they'll be as confused as you are with touch screen designs. Back in the day, stereos used to provide radio buttons and sliders for tuning, but those devices aren't used anymore. I don't remember the last device I've used that had a physical toggle button, for instance.
UI is moving away from replicating the stereos from the 80s to replicating the electronics young people are actually using. That includes adding mobile paradigms in places that don't necessarily make sense, just like weird stereo controls were all over computers for no good reason.
If you prefer the traditional UX, you can set things up the way you want. Classic Shell will get you your NT-Vista task bar. Gnome Shell has a whole bunch of task bar options. The old approach may no longer be the default one, but it's still an option for those that want it.
... and then they ignore it? It triggers me when someone calls hidden swipe gestures intuitive. It's the opposite of affordance, which these designers should be familiar with if they are worth their salaries.
God, no. I switched to xfce when GNOME decided that they needed to compete with Unity by copying whatever it did, no matter how loudly their entire user base complained.
Why would I try GNOME again?
I do think it's likely more passive than active. People at Google aren't deviously plotting to hide buttons from the user. But what is happening is that when these designs get reviewed, nobody is pushing back - when someone says "but how will the user know to do that?", it doesn't get listend to. Instead the people responsible are signing off on it saying, "it's OK, they will just learn that, once they get to know it, then it will be OK". It's all passive but it's based on an implicit assumption that uses are staying around and optimising for the ones that do, making it harder for the ones that want to come and go or stop in temporarily.
Once three or four big companies start doing it, everybody else cargo cults it and before you know it, it looks like fashion and GNOME is doing it too.
No they don't. The article refutes your points entirely, as does everyone else here who has been confounded by puzzling interfaces.
You see this under macOS, too. A lot of Electron apps for instance replace the window manager’s standard titlebar with some custom thing that doesn’t implement chunks of the standard titlebar’s functionality. It’s frustrating.
Forwhat it’s worth, back tap is a feature of iOS to which you can assign an action, though it only triggers on double or triple tap.
You're welcome
I think they wanted the start menu to be front and center. And honestly, that just sounds like a good idea, because it is where you go to do stuff that's not on your desktop already. But clicking a button in the bottom left and having the menu open in the middle would look weird, so centering the icons would make sense.
I think there are better ways to do it and I'm sure they've been tried, but they would probably confuse existing Windows users even more.
You should check how SW and HW are tested in the car.
A typical SW test is: Requirement: SW must drive a motor if voltage reaches 5 V. A typical SW test is: Increase the voltage to 5 V, see that the motor moves.
Now what happenes at 20 V is left as an exercise for the user.
Or, you know, a switch that is in an off position :p
While it's technically hidden, it can consistently be called within a single swipe, whatever app you're using, whatever the circumstances. The icon positions is also consistent, to the point muscle memory can be built.
It's to me more reliable than the home screen or any other mechanism on the phone (android's double click to open the camera would be on par), I wouldn't mind if more stuff acted that way.
Your average transmission will have an order of magnitude more parts that also needed to be designed and produced with much higher precision.
The interior knob controls are just a rounding error in the cost structure.
It is widely used, the default DE in many installs, and it can be handy to be familiar with, for starters.
This is important, thank you for mentioning it: actions have consequences besides those that motivated the action. I don't like when people say "<actor> did <action>, and it leads to this nefarious outcome, therefore look how evil <actor> must be". Yes, there is always a chance that <actor> really is a scheming, cartoonish villain who intended that outcome all along. But how likely is it that <actor> is just naive, or careless, or overly optimistic?
Of course, the truth is almost certainly somewhere in the middle: familiarity with a hard-to-learn UI as a point of friction that promotes lock-in may not be a goal, but when it manifests, it doesn't hurt the business, so no one does anything about it. Does that mean the designers should be called out for it? If the effect is damaging enough to the collective interest, then maybe yes. But we needn't assume nefarious intentions to do so.
Then again, everyone thinks their own actions are justified within their own value system, and corporate values do tend toward the common denominator (usually involving profit-making). Maybe the world just has way more cartoonish villains than I give it credit for.
I've been calling modern designers "dribbble-raised" for a while now precisely for these reasons. Glad to see I'm not the only one.
> Classic Shell, Gnome Shell task bar options
Yeah mods, hacks, and extensions don't really count for either. The more time passes the more this nonsense becomes mandatory. Luckily KDE still exists for now and has it all native.
As far as the Back button, on iOS the norm is for it to be present somewhere in the UI of the app in any context where there's a "back" to go to. For cross-app switching, there's an OS-supplied Back button in the status bar on top, again, showing only when it's relevant (admittedly it's very tiny and easy to miss). Having two might sound complicated but tbh I rather prefer it that way because in Android it can sometimes be confusing as to what the single global Back button will do in any given case (i.e. whether it'll navigate within the current app, or switch you back to the previous app).
I hate when applications stuff other controls (like browser tabs) into the title bar --- leaving you with no place to grab and move the window.
The irony is that we had title bars when monitors were only 640x480, yet now that they have multiplied many times in resolution, and become much bigger, UIs are somehow using the excuse of "saving space" to remove title bars and introducing even more useless whitespace.
I disable the title bars on almost everything I use. Except some custom applications that resist such attempts. I do not give a rat's ass what is open, it's already immediately obvious. Just wasting valuable screen real-estate.
For example, if the GUI can have more than one instance of the same view open, toggle buttons for view modes become specific to individual view instances. Putting those into a global toolbar is wrong.
Compare this to the databus that is used in today's cars, it really isn't even a fair comparison on cost (you don't have to have 100 wires running through different places in your car, just one bus to 100 things and signal is separated from power).
Except, they don't do it.
Just like your Windows PC is capable of drawing a raised or sunked 3D button, or a scrollbar, but, they don't do it anymore.
That sounds like an incredible bargain to me.
Why do you think you should pay near cost? What’s the incentive for all the people who had to make, test, box, pack, move, finance, unpack, inventory, pick, box, label, and send it to you? I can’t imagine the price between £10 and free that you’d think wasn’t a rip-off for a part that probably sells well under a 100 units per year worldwide.
I would pay more for decent physical switches and knobs, but I would give up AC before the backup camera. Getting this was life changing. I also wish all cars had some kind of blind spot monitoring.
It's not just cost, though. The reality is that consumers like the futuristic look, in theory (i.e., at the time of the purchase). Knobs look dated. It's the same reason why ridiculously glossy laptop screens were commonplace. They weren't cheaper to make, they just looked cool.
With the land tanks we call SUVs today, I can imagine it wasn't hard for politicians to decide that mirrors are no longer enough to navigate a car backwards.
Still, you don't need touch screens. Lane assist can be a little indicator on a dashboard with a toggle somewhere if you want to turn it off, it doesn't need a menu. A backup camera can be a screen tucked away in the dash that's off unless you've put your car in reverse. We may need processing to happen somewhere, but it doesn't need to happen in a media console with a touch screen.
Most microwaves only have the magnetron (the part actually producing the microwaves) on one side. The rotation is needed to cook your food evenly.
This is why food in the middle of the tray often ends up undercooked. No matter how the tray rotates, that part is never particularly close to it.
If they're using it at work they're going to use it anyways because they probably want to keep the job.
The old desktop operating system UIs were designed for people with zero computer experience, yet now...they would be too hard to learn for someone with only Android experience?
Basically, if you remove the knobs you can save, say, 10 dollars on every vehicle. In return, you have made your car less attractive and will lose a small number of sales. You will never, ever be able to quantify that loss in sales. So, on paper, you've saved money for "free".
Typically, opportunity cost is impossible or close to impossible to measure. What these companies think they are doing is minimizing cost. Often, they are just maximizing opportunity cost of various decisions. Everyone is trying to subtly cut quality over time.
Going from A quality to B quality is pretty safe, it's likely close to zero consumers will notice. But then you say "well we went from A to B and nobody noticed, so nobody will notice B to C!". So you do it again. Then over and over. And, eventually, you go from a brand known for quality to cheap bargain-bin garbage. And it happened so slowly that leadership is left scratching their heads. Sometimes the company then implodes spontaneously, other times it slowly rots and loses to competitors. It's so common it feels almost inevitable.
Really, most companies don't have to do much to stay successful. For a lot of markets, they just have to keep doing what they're doing. Ah, but the taste of cost-cutting is much too seductive. They do not understand what they are risking.
A friend got a tesla on lease and it was quite cheap, 250/month. Been driven in that car a few times and was able to study the driver using the controls and it’s hideusly badly designed, driver has to take eyes off the road and deep dive in menus. Plus that slapped tablet in the middle is busy to look at, tiring and distacting. The 3d view of other cars/ pedestrians is a gimmick, or at least it looks like one to me. Does anyone actually like that? Perhaps im outdated or something but I wouldn’t consider such a bad UX in a car.
In Notes, to create a new Note, tap the pencil-in-a-square icon in the lower right corner.
In Calendar, to create a new appointment, tap the + icon in the upper right corner.
In Reminders, to create a new reminder, tap the + in a blue circle in the lower left corner. At least it offers a text label "New Reminder"
These are all Apple apps and they all do it differently. And that's not even getting into gestures and other actions that you just have to stumble upon to even know they exist.
More seriously, my understanding is that the octopus retina does not have color receptors, just aggregate light, I.e. brightness.
But the octopus practically has a sub-brain behind each respective eye, and the eye brains can extract color from the slight lensing differences across frequencies.
They are amazing magical creatures.
Taking that approach, and some sort of ocular lathe, and we can fix this.
I couldn't disagree more.
A big physical button on the surface of the device that is both visible and touchable is completely unmissable. More importantly, it's unmistakably a control. There is simply no other explanation for its existence than being a control.
The edge of the screen on the other hand exists because the screen has to end somewhere. There is no hint whatsoever that it doubles as a control when touched in a certain way or that it doubles as multiple different controls when touched slightly differently.
That said, I'm not a dogmatic "UI physicalist" (if that's a thing). I hate the physical mute switch for instance and I'm not a huge fan of the physical double click to authorise purchases. And I don't want scrollbars constantly in my face.
I do believe that new ways of interacting with hardware can be introduced over time even if hidden. There's a legitimate trade-off beteween discoverability and productivity once you're familiar with the way a device works.
The problem is that some people really struggle with gestures even when they know they exist. I watched people fail to answer calls on Android because it required them to swipe up an on-screen icon.
The number of things you can do swiping or just touching somewhere near the bottom of the screen is staggering and constantly changing.
“I’m smarter than every designer” is such a common programmer trope at this point that it’s hilarious. Speaking as a developer myself.
Did they though? Quite a few laptops barely have 720 pixels in (scaled) height. That's less than your CRT with 1024x768, back in the days.
As for it being a bit of a rip off yes it was a little bit. I found the same part for cheaper literally the next day.
In any-event. It isn't the important part of what I was trying to communicate.
If I had to guess, it’s because it’s so closely associated with the awful to use touch controlled center console. That and “new features” in general tend to take away from the ease of use and durability of the vehicle.
It may also have to do with now having an additional place to look during a stressful activity, which I’ve now fully adapted to.
I’m 100% on board with it now, if I had a vehicle without one I’d retrofit one. I also want side and front cameras.
I’ve got a big stupid truck (work provided) with a 140” wheelbase that I use for my agriculture job to transport my ATV (my real work vehicle) around. I absolutely hate the bloated, boxy, dangerous designs of modern pickups. Frankly they should be banned and forced to look stupid via visibility and child collision safety requirements.
These days, people grow up with touch screen devices. Swiping and tapping is the default, not pushing and sliding.
There's a reason a checkbox looks like a checkbox: it's a concept taken from the physical world to represent a boolean value. In a world where paper checkboxes are becoming increasingly irrelevant, the metaphor doesn't make sense. The same can be said for square buttons and radio buttons. The "push a single round peg in and the others will pop out" UX from old equipment just isn't around anymore.
People who struggle with mobile devices face the exact same problem as the people who struggle with desktops: the metaphors don't overlap so it's hard to predict behaviour.
Well, you can also just give people different coloured lenses for their two eyes. Eg one that filters out red and one that filters out green.
(OK, just for fairness: StarCraft also has hidden features that are only reachable through modifier keys, like the entire grouping and command chaining systems - and C&C does have some feedback: They do indicate the action by changing the cursor icon. So there are flaws, but I still find Blizzard's system more consistent and information-rich.)
Still, a lot of that knowledge is lost because we don't need to deal with it anymore. We don't need to manually configure the IRQ of our sound cards, we don't need to run chkdsk, we don't need to download defragmenting programs. This stuff was never really intuitive to begin with, it was just a barrier between "nothing works right" and "I can use my computer as intended".
Now that computers are more reliable and easier to use, not everyone who wants to use a computer needs to know the details about path lengths and file systems anymore.
The main one I end up missing most is the swipe to go back gesture within apps. It comes for “free” when using UIKit and SwiftUI navigation primitives (UINavigationController, UISplitViewController, and their SwiftUI counterparts) but it’s almost always missing from apps built with React Native and such.
Like there is no hint for double click, right-click context menu, pinch to zoom, force/long tap, swipe anywhere in any direction, etc. I do not want to repeat my comment. To each their own.
Another comment elsewhere on this page informed me that the universal button no longer exists.
Windows and Unix GUIs had it right: Put an application's menu where it belongs, on the application's main frame.
But now on Windows... NO menu? Oh wait, no... partial menus buried under hamburger buttons in arbitrary locations, and then others buried under other buttons.
I don't need to know that what I'm using is Edge/Chrome/Firefox any more than I need to know that what I'm using is Windows/etc.
Second, I want to give focus to the entire application at once. ALL of its windows need to be brought to the foreground at once.
I don't really want to get into a big debate about this as I haven't worked on Jags, but I don't believe that replacing parts of the loom is would be that expensive. Remaking an entire loom, I will admit that would expensive as that would be a custom job with a lot of labour.
> Compare this to the databus that is used in today's cars, it really isn't even a fair comparison on cost (you don't have to have 100 wires running through different places in your car, just one bus to 100 things and signal is separated from power).
Ok fine. But the discussion was button vs touch screens and there is nothing preventing buttons being used with the newer databus design. I am pretty sure older BMWs, Mercs etc worked this way.
Not really, you legally could have a video camera and a CRT as a backup camera. I wouldn't say that anything is rendered in an analog video system.
Not all. Knobs designed with dated designs and/or materials look dated. There's a million ways to make a knob, just use a modern or novel one.
If you exclusively charged with completely free electricity and still managed to drive that 14K miles in a year, you’d save $187/mo.
If it moved you from 25mpg to 40mpge, it’d save you a little over $70/mo.
Our two cars are a BEV and a hybrid, so I’m no battery-hater, but neither is cheaper than a reasonable gas-only equivalent would be.
For a visual aid, these are pictures of the replacements parts: https://www.partstown.com/panasonic/PANA010T8K10AP https://www.partstown.com/panasonic/PANF202K3700BP
Is there evidence that fancy looking screens don't show better in the showroom than legacy looking knobs and buttons? Where under use, they may be better, I am not sure all that sells better.
In practice many drivers seem to be dealing fine with the touch screen because they've stopped paying attention to the road, trusting their car to keep distance and pay attention for them. Plus, most of the touch screen controls aren't strictly necessary while driving, they mostly control luxury features that you could set up after pulling over.
Still cars don't last forever - my pervious minivan needed a transmission rebuild so we can cut the cost of the replacement by 10000 since either way that money is spent and now the newer van is break even on payments and it should still work after it is paid off for a few years.
The home button was an important lifeline. It did one thing if you pressed it once. No matter what, it took you home. For my older relatives, that one button made using iOS incredibly easy and safe feeling. No matter what, no matter where you ended up, just hit the home button. There, back to start. Easy peasy.
Now with everything hidden behind stupid gestures that even I don't fully understand, my parents struggle to not inundate their iPads with extra windows and split window "Windows" that show up in the app switcher. My mom has had a none home-button iPhone for years and still can't get the home screen gesture right most of the time, and she hates it. I had to scramble to buy up old 9th gen iPads for them and my grandmother once it was discontinued.
All you have to do to get to it is move your mouse up until you can't move it up any more.
This remains a very valuable aspect to it no matter what changes in the vogue of UIs have come and gone since.
The fact that you think that you've "minimized the application" when you minimized a window just shows that you are operating on a different (not better, not worse, just different) philosophy of how applications work than the macOS designers are.
It is the job (and in my opinion, an exciting challenge) for the UI designers to come up with a modern looking tactile design based on the principles of skeuomorphism, possibly amalgamated with the results of newer HCI research.
All I know is personal anecdotes from people I talk to. I know a couple people who have a Mercedes EQS - they've all said the same thing: the big screen is cool for a little bit, then it's just annoying.
I think it will take a generation or two of cars before some consumers start holding back on purchases because of this. For now, they don't know better. But I'm sure after owning a car and being pissed off at it, they'll think a little bit harder on their next purchase. I think consumers are highly impacted by these types of things - small cuts that aren't bad, per se, but are annoying. Consumers are emotional, they hold grudges, they get pissed off.
I sort of feel the same way about fix-a-flat kits. Once people actually have the experience of trying to use a fix-a-flat kit, they'll start asking car salesmen if the car comes with a spare...
And we're talking about a GUI here, so when I minimize an application's GUI then yes, I expect that I've minimized the application. And again, I think you'll find that the vast majority of users work under this M.O.
But your observation raises another usability issue caused by the single menu: Instead of an "infinite" desktop, the Mac reduces the entire screen to a single application's client area... so, historically, Mac applications treated it that way...littering it with an armada of floating windows that you had to herd around.
The problem is that turning the whole screen into one application's client area fails because you can see all the other crap on your desktop and all other open applications' GUIs THROUGH the UI of the app you're trying to use. It's stupid.
So, to users' relief, the floating-window nonsense has been almost entirely abandoned over the last couple of decades and single-window applications have become the norm on Mac as they have been on Windows forever. Oh wait, hold on... here comes Apple regressing back to "transparent" UI with "liquid glass;" a failed idea from 20+ years ago.
Full circle, sadly.
But yeah... now I'm relieved when I go home from work and get back on my Mac. I waste so much time hunting for stuff on Windows now... it's just incredible.
Pompous pedants used to trot out "Fitt's Law" in defense of the Mac's dumb menu all the time, when in fact it contra-indicates it:
"Fitts’ law states that the amount of time required for a person to move a pointer (e.g., mouse cursor) to a target area is a function of the distance to the target divided by the size of the target. Thus, the longer the distance and the smaller the target’s size, the longer it takes."
Right, so where should an application's menu go? ON ITS WINDOW. Not way up at the top of the screen. It's as if the people citing this "law" don't even read it.
The actual historical rationale for the top menu bar was different, as explained by Bill Atkinson in this video: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44338182. The problem was that due to the small screen size, non-maximized windows often weren't wide enough to show all menus, and there often wasn't enough space vertically below the window's menu bar to show all menu items. That's why they moved the menus to the top of the screen, so that there always was enough space, and despite the drawback, as Atkinson notes, of having to move the mouse all the way to the top. This drawback was significant enough that it made them implement mouse pointer acceleration to compensate.
So targetability wasn't the motivation at all, that is a retconned explanation. And the actual motivation doesn't apply anymore on today's large and high-resolution screens.
In any event. I've never heard a good explanation of why I need all of this to turn the lights on or off in a car, when much simpler systems worked perfectly fine.
They want to go to war with a simple design? Sure, they get a Lee-Enfield bolt action rifle. They fight against people with EF88 Austeyr.
They will die and lose the war.
Longer range, higher rate of fire, lighter, grenade launcher mount, scopes, more accurate, higher lethality, etc, etc.
Simple design so it doesnt't jam doesn't mean you've maximised all the other areas that are important for winning a war.
What do you think handicap spots are for?
Try it on a Mac; the way its mouse acceleration works makes it really, really easy to just flick either a mouse or a finger on a trackpad and get all the way across the screen.
macOS works like this though, IIRC, and no other way.
Reducing the copper content of cars and reducing the size of the wiring bundles that have to pass through grommets to doors, in body channels, etc. was the main driver. Offering greater interconnectedness and (eventually) reliability was a nice side effect.
It used to be a pain in the ass to get the parking lights to flash some kind of feedback for remote locking, remote start, etc. Now, it’s two signals on the CAN bus.
Also, bolt actions aren't exactly the definition of simple.
> Offering greater interconnected news and (eventually) reliability was a nice side effect.
I am not sure about that. You still suffer from electronic problems due to corrosion around the plugs, duff sockets and dodgy earths as the vehicle ages.
A bolt action is simple compared to any semi-automatic gun. Particularly if it is a single shot bolt action thus dispensing with the complexity of a magazine feed.
Another side effect is the uselessness of the Help menu. What help am I looking at? The application owns the menu, so where's the OS help?
Oh right, it's just all mixed together. When I'm searching for information in some developer tool I'm using, I really enjoy all the arbitrary hits from the OS help about setting up printers, sending E-mail, whatever.
There are, of course, ways to indicate "more controls this way" with an arrow or other affordance when there's a toolbar or menu overflow, though.
Anyway, the point is that by the time OS X came along, other platforms had solved the problems but Apple rejected those widely-accepted solutions.