1) If you use Mission Control, there's a linen background hidden behind the desktop. If you open the Notification Center, there's a linen background hidden behind the desktop. But if you change desktop spaces, there's only black - where's the linen (i.e. what happened to that permament physical textured backdrop Apple apparently decided was the bedrock of the UI?)
2) Not to mention that gross effect when you change desktop spaces, and the whole desktop slides over - including the menu bar (that apparently static, foundational part of the UI) - to be replace by a new menu bar! The dock doesn't change, so why does the menu bar?
3) And of course that other gross effect when you click full screen on an app (that little full-screen button nestled oddly in the top right corner of the window chrome above all the other little static buttons) - and the whole thing morphs and bulges and slides into a new space. Yeesh.
4) And yeah, Launchpad. So now apps are scattered between the dock, the application folder, and the Launchpad. Great.
5) Also, the Finder seems to get worse with every generation.
Really though, it's the sum of all the parts that offends me. When I see people with their sleek Macbook Airs on their laps, then I look at their screens, and I see stacks and stacks of scattered windows of all shapes and sizing clustered over the desktop, and everywhere, fiddly little tiny click targets (in the menu bar, in the windows themselves, in the window chrome - don't get me started on those ghastly mini traffic light buttons for mini windows...) And they're moving their fingers around in that little touchpad controlling that little mouse pointer on the screen, tapping on the little targets or slowly dragging things around...
All of this stuff was fine when computers were big slow things that sat on desks, running a handful of low-res apps at a time, driven by a mouse and keyboard. Back then, it wasn't possible to implement the fast, fluid, colourful graphical design and interface features of Metro. Windows had to be static heavy things that you carefully dragged around, resizing individual edges one mouse drag at a time. Nothing had any momentum, the whole window stack just sort of sat there like a pile of lead sheets. But now that computers are in our laps, or in our hands, and our computer use is spread between multiple device, and more often than not the average person is using a touchpad or a touchscreen to browse the internet (which has expanded into something so huge it no longer makes any sense to bottle it up in a single browser window) - and especially now that touchscreens are about to become ubiquitous on every single laptop sold in the world - the old static clunky WIMP model needs to be shuffled off to the side in place of something that makes more sense.
I will note that Mountain Lion isn't qualitatively worse for this new stage of computing than, say, Windows 7. But I have no respect for the small attempts to modernise the OS with ported iOS features. It's putting lipstick on a pig (admittedly a pig that was very good and useful for a long time and still has a lot of value in many different contexts.) Microsoft's hard reset will ultimately produce the right OS for the times, Apple's slow tweaks won't. In my opinion at least.
> When I see people with their sleek Macbook Airs on their laps, then I look at their screens, and I see stacks and stacks of scattered windows of all shapes and sizing clustered over the desktop
> All of this stuff was fine when computers were big slow things that sat on desks, running a handful of low-res apps at a time, driven by a mouse and keyboard
I think this is exactly the wrong way around. This behaviour was never fine on a desktop with a mouse — but it is the best we have to cut through multi-app tasks on an 11"/13" laptop. With Exposé and an Apple trackpad, I have never felt overwhelmed even on my 1024x768 iBook, no matter how many windows I had open (and boy was Exposé fluid in 2005!).
Every attempt at using a "cleaner" screen layout on a laptop screen has failed spectacularly for me. How is Windows 8 any different from any other tiled window manager here? I see all my windows at once, but in exchange they are smaller (too small).
> I have no respect for the small attempts to modernise the OS
Maybe I'm getting old, but I like the slower pace that Apple has taken. Unity Shell and Windows 8 both strike me as highly ambitious but poorly executed attempts to dramatically re-imagine the desktop. Apple's approach has been more measured, and I hope it stays that way.
Maybe I'm just pessimistic about the future of touch-enabled desktop computers. I owned a tablet PC back in the day, and it was truly terrible. I have a 22 inch Cintiq which is great for art, but makes me feel like my arm is going to fall off after 20 minutes of web browsing. Touch makes perfect sense on tablets and phones, but I think that's where it ends. Only time will tell who's right.
As for clunkiness, I recommend a combination of Alfred and Moom for OS X. With a few keystrokes I can launch a half dozen applications and have them perfectly tiled across multiple desktops. Far from being slow and clunky, I've never felt more efficient!
I think Snow Leopard was OS X's last good upgrade. Lion and Mountain Lion mostly add new apps and UI doodads I don't use and introduce app compatibility problems. And I still don't forgive Apple for killing "Save As" in favor of "Duplicate" and "Export".
2) Not to mention that gross effect when you change desktop spaces, and the whole desktop slides over - including the menu bar (that apparently static, foundational part of the UI) - to be replace by a new menu bar! The dock doesn't change, so why does the menu bar?
3) And of course that other gross effect when you click full screen on an app (that little full-screen button nestled oddly in the top right corner of the window chrome above all the other little static buttons) - and the whole thing morphs and bulges and slides into a new space. Yeesh.
4) And yeah, Launchpad. So now apps are scattered between the dock, the application folder, and the Launchpad. Great.
5) Also, the Finder seems to get worse with every generation.
Really though, it's the sum of all the parts that offends me. When I see people with their sleek Macbook Airs on their laps, then I look at their screens, and I see stacks and stacks of scattered windows of all shapes and sizing clustered over the desktop, and everywhere, fiddly little tiny click targets (in the menu bar, in the windows themselves, in the window chrome - don't get me started on those ghastly mini traffic light buttons for mini windows...) And they're moving their fingers around in that little touchpad controlling that little mouse pointer on the screen, tapping on the little targets or slowly dragging things around...
All of this stuff was fine when computers were big slow things that sat on desks, running a handful of low-res apps at a time, driven by a mouse and keyboard. Back then, it wasn't possible to implement the fast, fluid, colourful graphical design and interface features of Metro. Windows had to be static heavy things that you carefully dragged around, resizing individual edges one mouse drag at a time. Nothing had any momentum, the whole window stack just sort of sat there like a pile of lead sheets. But now that computers are in our laps, or in our hands, and our computer use is spread between multiple device, and more often than not the average person is using a touchpad or a touchscreen to browse the internet (which has expanded into something so huge it no longer makes any sense to bottle it up in a single browser window) - and especially now that touchscreens are about to become ubiquitous on every single laptop sold in the world - the old static clunky WIMP model needs to be shuffled off to the side in place of something that makes more sense.
I will note that Mountain Lion isn't qualitatively worse for this new stage of computing than, say, Windows 7. But I have no respect for the small attempts to modernise the OS with ported iOS features. It's putting lipstick on a pig (admittedly a pig that was very good and useful for a long time and still has a lot of value in many different contexts.) Microsoft's hard reset will ultimately produce the right OS for the times, Apple's slow tweaks won't. In my opinion at least.