Long story short - I had duplicate back-up pdf’s in the Apple Books app. Reading experience is so superior, its hard to describe.I discovered during the first day that after annotating a pdf, then entire document would freeze up and not allow me to go to the next page. This is what you can view in GoodReader, plus you can also annotate PDF files and edit TXT files.- PDF Reading and Annotating -PDF files is where GoodReader truly shines. PDF, TXT, MS Office, iWork, HTML, pictures, music & audio-books, videos.But the “Show color in tab bar” option is on by default:Here’s what it looks like as you switch back and forth between tabs with this option on. The “Compact” layout that puts tabs and the location field in the same row — by using the tabs themselves as the text editing fields for URLs — is, thankfully, off by default. Synctex reloading of PDF files so is well favoured as a LaTeX / pdfTeX viewer with forward - inverse.The most controversial Mac Safari changes shown at WWDC — compressing tabs and the URL location field into a single row at the top of each window, and coloring the entire window with the accent color of the currently frontmost web page — are settings that (thankfully) can be turned off in Safari’s Preferences window (under “Tabs”, natch).Click that thinking it’s a menu for Defector and you’ll be surprised to be dumped to your Safari Start Page.I despise the new tabs even when the “Show color in tab bar” and “Compact” layout settings are turned off. Who, for example, owns this button?Is that Defector’s button? Or is it Safari’s? It sure as shit looks like it’s Defector’s — but it’s Safari’s. It just looks like it does. The color matching does not extend web pages at all.“Separate” tab layout / “Show color in tab bar” on “Compact” tab layout / “Show color in tab bar” off “Compact” tab layout / “Show color in tab bar” on Here are four full-window screenshots, in order from worst to best to my liking:
And my brain is very much comfortable with the particular visual metaphor of tabs in a web browser window. My brain likes visual metaphors. They’re a visual metaphor. Tabs that look like real-world tabs aren’t just a decorative style. These new “tabs” waste space because, like buttons, they’re spaced apart. Try different browsers, try different windowing OSes, and you’ll see many different takes on tabs. And those tabs have always looked like tabs, because why would anyone want to make them look like anything other than tabs? There are certainly a lot of ways to style tabs in a UI. Apart from that brief weeks-long stint when it debuted as a public beta in 2003, Safari for Mac has always had tabs. 1Safari actually debuted as a public beta in January 2003 without any support for tabbed browsing (which, humorously, I was OK with — the tab habit hadn’t gotten its grips on me yet), but within a few weeks it had tabs. I have to think, continuously, about something I have never had to think about since tabbed browsing became a thing almost 20 years ago. Thus, trying to use the new Safari 15 on Mac (and iPadOS 15, alas), I feel somewhat disoriented working within Safari. Black and white asianet serialWith Safari 15, it’s almost a guessing game, a coin flip, when you want to determine which tab is active:In Safari 14 — as well as Safari versions 1–13, and every other browser I’m aware of — there’s never any ambiguity about which tab is active, in either light mode or dark mode:There’s no ambiguity because the tabs are visually connected to the rest of the browser chrome, and the browser chrome is rendered in a way to make it visually distinct from the web page content. A very common scenario, I think it’s fair to say. Consider a window with two tabs, perhaps both from the same website. They work because they both look like tabs and embrace the tab metaphor.Not so with Safari 15. It’s a fine design that confuses no one. It was an experiment Apple wound up abandoning, but they didn’t need to — it could have worked well with some tweaking, as I explored in a copiously illustrated post at the time.Google Chrome — and Chrome-derivatives like Brave and Microsoft Edge — now use tabs-on-top layouts very much like what the Safari team experimented with in 2009. Replacing an interface that doesn’t require you to think at all with an interface that requires you to think — even a little — is a design sin of the first order. But the utter failure of the new Safari tab design with exactly two tabs should have been reason enough to scrap this idea while it was experimental. But here we are.Yes, it gets easier to discern the active tab with more than two tabs in a window, because any confusion as to whether darker or lighter indicates “active” is alleviated by having only one tab shaded differently than the others. I can’t believe I had to type that sentence. People think it’s this veneer — that the designers areHanded this box and told, “Make it look good!” That’s not what weThink design is. A good user interface needs to work first, then worry about looking cool.The Safari 15 tab design is a blatant violation of Steve Jobs’s oft-cited “Design is how it works” axiom:Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looksLike. But even if you think it looks cool as fuck, that’s not what user interface design is about. I think it’s novel, obviously, but suspect it’s going to get old quickly. But turning an icon into a close button? Good god. First, hiding functionality behind unguessable hover states is a bad idea, but a hallmark of Apple’s current HI team’s fetish for visual minimalism. In Safari 15, bizarrely, the favicon turns into a close button on hover. In Safari 14, the close tab button is just to the left of each tab’s favicon. If it hadn’t actually shipped to tens of millions of Mac users as a software update, you’d think it was a straw man example of misguided design.Functionality? Here’s functionality. If anything, Safari 15 feels like a ginned-up example — too obviously focused solely on how it looks, too obviously callous about how it works. The icon that represents the web page is a destructive button for that web page. The only place in theEntire OS where clicking an icon will delete the object you wereIt’s hard to express in words how perverse this is. So ifYou aim at the favicon you’ll close the tab. Guess how many people are going to figure that out? (Not many.) Safari 14 does this too, but because its actual tab tabs are more space efficient, you have to open way more tabs in a window to get to the point where close boxes only appear for non-frontmost tabs while holding down the Command key.From a usability perspective, every single thing about Safari 15’s tabs is a regression. So how can you close these tabs without first activating them? To close them while they’re not frontmost, you need to hold down the Command key while you move the mouse over them. When this happens, close boxes stop appearing on non-frontmost tabs, even on hover. Good Readers Movie Or TVSomething designed not by UI designers but by graphic designers, with no thought whatsoever to the affordances, consistencies, and visual hierarchies essential to actual usability. Now, Apple has thrown away Safari’s tab design — a tab design that was not just best-of-platform, but arguably best-in-the-whole-damn-world — and replaced it with a design that is both inferior in the abstract, and utterly inconsistent with the standard tabs across the rest of MacOS.The skin-deep “looks cool, ship it” nature of Safari 15’s tab design is like a fictional UI from a movie or TV show, like Westworld’s foldable tablets or Tony Stark’s systems from Iron Man, where looking cool is the entirety of the design spec. The tabs that are now available in the Finder, Terminal, and optionally in all document-based Mac apps are derived from the design and implementation of Safari’s tabs. The Safari team literally invented the standard for how tabs work on MacOS. Apple never has been and should not be a company that avoids change at all cost.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorVeronica ArchivesCategories |