![]() Yet another inconsistency is that dialogs like this one essentially retain the old design: Perhaps sometimes there isn’t an obvious choice or a suggested choice to highlight, therefore the user can’t just dismiss a dialog by pressing Enter - they have to actively read the dialog’s contents and respond accordingly by purposefully clicking on one of the buttons. By the way, I’m not arguing they’re wrong per se. I presume the no-highlighted-choices in these dialog boxes in Big Sur are just temporary. And of course, for warnings where you don’t have a choice and you just acknowledge them, the OK button would always be preselected. Usually, the reason behind the highlighting was to provide a quick way to select either the most obvious choice, or the safest choice. Historically, in the Mac OS user interface, most (if not all) modal dialogs have had an option highlighted, and its corresponding button preselected. The dialog boxes are better designed and more balanced:Īnother inconsistency is that sometimes - like in previous Mac OS versions - one of the buttons will be highlighted (see the first dialog above, from Mail), other times all buttons are grey. Just for comparison’s sake, here are the same warnings on High Sierra. Sure, a verbose warning isn’t pretty no matter the dialog box design, and verbose warnings don’t happen that often, but this particular tall-and-narrow dialog box design makes the modal dialog look even busier. A small scrollbar will appear next to the text on mouseover, but a clearer hint would be welcome. Something that’s not at all apparent at first glance, by the way. It looks truncated, but actually you can read it in its entirety by hovering over it with the mouse and scrolling down. This second dialog box, as you can see, has an additional problem: the text block is longer than the space afforded. This is the warning you get when you try opening an app coming from an ‘unverified developer’:Īnd this is the similar warning you get when you tell Mac OS to open the application anyway by right-clicking on its icon and choosing Open from the contextual menu: And those buttons, just piled on top of one another, with the same width and comparatively small space between them, don’t strike me as an elegant way of presenting choices. I can understand such a design on an iPhone, since its display is in portrait orientation. ![]() It heavily borrows from iOS, and here’s the thing I don’t get… While using the beta of Big Sur on my 13-inch retina MacBook Pro, I have occasionally encountered some dialog boxes, especially modal dialogs, whose redesign feels rather unpolished. ![]()
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