David R. MacIver
@drmaciver
I remain extremely confused that people are under the impression that Apple is good at UX.
"Which of the three modifier keys do I have to use for each of the five different ways of switching between open windows, none of which actually do a reasonable thing?" is not a question you have to ask on an operating system made by people who are good at UX.
Anyway I've recently finally given in and switched over to a mac and it's mostly more or less fine and the hardware is very nice, but the window switching system(s!) seems to have been designed by some sort of insane sadist who thinks switching windows is a sin.
This sortof reminds me of how people think mercurial has better UX than git, which is true if you measure UX by lack of sharp edges and the presence of round corners and pastel colours, but false if you think having five different conceptually distinct notions of branch is bad UX
I'm aware that everyone's solution on the window switching thing is to give up on using the keyboard and just use three finger swipe but: 1. I hate this, for a variety of reasons. It is much worse than good keyboard navigation.
2. Having so many bad ways is still not good UX.
BTW I settled on ctrl-left and ctrl-right to navigate between spaces and manually putting my spaces in the right order as the least offensive option. It's nearly but almost not quite half as good as the way alt-tab works on any civilised operating system.
ctrl-left and ctrl-right are of course a ridiculous choice for this, which should clearly be cmd-left and cmd-right, both conceptually and so as to not clash with the significant amount of other usage of ctrl-left and ctrl-right.
That's OK! I'll change it. I'll just go to the unified place where all your operating system level keyboard shortcuts are managed. A thing that definitely exists... right, Apple? I don't have to magically intuit the feature name and use your broken settings search to change it?
I'm aware that all of this is because I'm new to the system and that I'll at some point get used to all this crap. But that's exactly the point where you notice bad UX. The fact that you can get used to bad software doesn't make it good. I mean FFS we're on Twitter aren't we?
BTW the answer on the ctrl-left/ctrl-right thing is that you need to go to the mission control settings, select keyboard shortcuts, and then expand the submenu in the mission control settings named "mission control" and then you can change the shortcut.
(Don't worry BTW, I'm not going to claim Windows or Linux have good UX in the general case. They're bad too. But they're bad in different ways, and I'm just astonished that keyboard shortcuts and basic window management are not something Apple thinks it's worth being good at)
20h