I don’t mind visual spruce ups to keep things fresh, but over the last few years at Apple there has been a trend in “hiding things in drawers”. Buttons are removed from UIs and moved to hover actions or put inside overflow menus (which is basically a misnomer at this point as there are not enough buttons to fill a toolbar, let alone overflow one).
It’s awful, because you end up with software that is pretty in a screenshot but is objectively less simple to use, because discoverability drops like a lead balloon.
It seemed to start when Forstall was ousted and Jony Ive’s team took over software design as well as hardware. Their recent laptops have shown you can give up a little form in favour of a lot of function, so hopefully the software teams are (re-)learning the same lessons.
It’s awful, because you end up with software that is pretty in a screenshot but is objectively less simple to use, because discoverability drops like a lead balloon.
It seemed to start when Forstall was ousted and Jony Ive’s team took over software design as well as hardware. Their recent laptops have shown you can give up a little form in favour of a lot of function, so hopefully the software teams are (re-)learning the same lessons.