16 Responses:

1. G says:

   1 year ago at 2:20 pm

   needs some compost bins.

2. Stu says:

   1 year ago at 2:27 pm

   Vague, indistinguishable monochrome icons. Identical labels. Which folder is selected?

   Ever since UI became UX, I haven't been able to use a computing device without throwing up in my mouth and questioning the point of the entire human endeavour.

   Be careful, if you drag Sent (folder icon) into Sent ( paper airplane icon) your IMAP may become "magnetized".

   • Nick Lamb says:

     1 year ago at 3:39 am

     My friend has a Masters in UX and I'm confident she'd never be responsible for nonsense like this.

     Blame the Designers instead. Remember how the New Jersey style is about prioritizing Simplicity of implementation at the cost of Correctness? Design is about prioritizing how it looks. Sure, now it's impossible to use but it looks nicer and for them that's what matters.

     But the good news is that Correctness is fighting back on the Worse is Better front, Rust is full of things like "Soundness" requirements, and while we weren't looking proof engines got powerful enough that you can hire mathematicians to check whether your protocol design is right rather than relying on gut instinct. So perhaps in our futures UX will likewise triumph over Design after all.

3. Eric TF Bat says:

   1 year ago at 3:29 pm

   The traditional advice is "have you tried switching it off and switching it back on again?" Increasingly, I am coming to suspect that the second half of that suggestion is unreasonable.

4. Carlos says:

   1 year ago at 5:25 pm

   Jeebus. They're not priority-ranked. They're not alphabetical. Could they be doing something as stupid as reordering the folders based on the date of the last item added to them or something batty like that?

   The Sent and Trash local duplicates are great. I wonder what happens if you context-menu empty-trash just one of them.

   We used to have software mostly designed by engineers. Engineer art and engineer UI are frequently ugly, often annoying, usually hard to learn, but they're at least functional and you get to be familiar with them (or at least Stockholm Syndrome sets in). Today we have UX genius hipsters who've never met a real user in their lives, and wouldn't want to.

   C.

   • jwz says:

     1 year ago at 7:23 pm

     To be fair, Mail.app does let you drag folders to re-order them arbitrarily. Though it still insists on segregating them by server.

     • Lambaster says:

       1 year ago at 7:41 pm

       Box bigotry.

     • tfb says:

       1 year ago at 1:40 am

       You can use favourites to desegregate things, and there is some set of magic 'all x' folders which must really be smart folders covering all the underlying xs. I just put all the stuff I cared about in favourites and collapsed all the per server/local things. But I didn't have any of this weird duplication you have.

       • tfb says:

         1 year ago at 1:52 am

         ... but what makes none of this OK is that mail matters, and I spent a bunch of time setting things up (getting the right set of buttons in the toolbar etc) so I could process it efficiently. And now I have to spend another bunch of time reorganising things and learning new shortcuts (previously the toolbar was a lot bigger so now things I used to select via button I have to either do by menu or learn the shortcut). It might even be that the end result is as efficient, but what they're doing is like, I dunno, deciding that the brakes on your bike should be swapped over because why not.

         And it's not just apple and not just GUIs: the amount of gratuitous self-incompatibility across versions in things is just horrifying. Every time I built an Ubuntu VM for a while I had to work out afresh what new and oh-so-clever configuration file set up the interfaces.

         • andyjpb says:

           1 year ago at 7:14 am

           They wouldn't switch the brake levers over because that would lead to people spending less time on the bike (and more time over the handle bars).

           However, they would keep switching the gear levers around because that would lead to more engagement with the gear levers and longer journeys up hills which would allow more time for you to see the advertising.

           • tfb says:

             1 year ago at 8:39 am

             But it's Mail: I've already bought the shiny expensive hardware, what they're doing gains them nothing but fed-up customers less likely to buy the next iteration of the shiny hardware as far as I can see.

             (On the other hand I have swapped the brake levers on every bike I've owned for the last nearly-30 years...)

5. J. Peterson says:

   1 year ago at 12:13 pm

   Only two trashcans? It's supposed to have Landfill / Recycle / Compost bins.

6. Jonny says:

   1 year ago at 9:12 am

   If you want to see some truly shit UI, check out AppleTV in a normal web browser. It has impressive features like a total lack of a search bar, arrows you need to press to scroll that are entirely invisible until you hover a mouse over them, no favorites list, and no continue watching list. Want to continue watching some For All Mankind? Just remember that it's in the drama section, remember the scroll arrow doesn't appear until you mouse hover over it, and find it, duh!

   I've never understood the love affair with Apple's UI choices. "Clean UI" doesn't mean shit if it can't do the thing you want it to do.

7. mattl says:

   1 year ago at 5:59 pm

   Time to switch to Thunderbird. /s

8. Alasdair L says:

   1 year ago at 3:38 am

   Apple Mail is a dumpster fire, I hate using it.

   What I'd really like are GMail style Updates/Promotions/etc folders. Spark does this, but they achieve it by processing all your emails on their servers. Of course that's so they can sell your data. Great.

   Canary Mail seems OK but it is basically a re-implementation of Apple Mail. Not sure why I'd use this over the other.

   I should probably switch to Thunderbird, but my apathy towards email at this point couldn't be stronger and everyone trying to contact me via it knows they're better off using WhatsApp, Slack, post, whatever - anything but email.

9. Thomas J. says:

   1 year ago at 12:31 pm

   Assuming there's no additional invisible weirdness, at least you get to see the folders. My Mail.app decided to store sent mail for one IMAP account in some local folder that cannot be made to properly appear, and crucially cannot be replaced with a server side one. Some of these days I will retrieve the corresponding mbox file and import it into another client, but given that I rely on S/MIME I'm not sure which one to switch to.