Logic Pro X 10.3 and GarageBand Updates out today

[Winstontaneous]

Text is thinner/harder to read, overall interface looks a little cheap/ragged/empty compared to previous version on my non-Retina MBP.

Under-the-hood updates seem cool, need to check out the Selection Render features.

[Jace-BeOS]

I give up. I'm not going to define "better" for you because I don't have the motivation to educate you on human-computer-interfacing, human cognition, human optics and visual neurology/behaviors, psychology... I already gave you a link to start learning about it.

Well, good thing you don't, because that could turn out pretty funny. Especially that you believe that GUI's are designed to look good, and not to offer a good user experience, is funny, because, basically, that's what it's all about when they sit together, and create GUI's. To improve the usability. Hard news, i know.

You don't seem to understand what I'm even talking about. ??? I'm not talking about eye candy. I never said "GUIs are designed to look good and not offer a good user experience". Where the heck do you even get that? Are you just building a straw man for trolling purposes?

The flat fad was not about greater usability. It wasn't about usability outside Apple, and it wasn't about usability inside Apple.

Experts in the field have given clear explanations for why flat implementations are problematic for usability.

Proponents of flat design even made arguments about "people are used to this stuff now, so we don't need to be as clear about the GUI element functions in their visual design", which is basically like saying "any new users from here on are not welcome".

Usability is suffering because people are forced to click/tap on everything in a hopeful gesture, instead of the GUI guiding them into knowing what is and is not a control. It's right there in the link I shared with you several postings back.

The amateur hour aesthetics are just adding insult to the injury.

[el-bo (formerly ebow)]

Experts in the field have given clear explanations for why flat implementations can be problematic for some users

ftfy

[chk071]

The flat fad was not about greater usability. It wasn't about usability outside Apple, and it wasn't about usability inside Apple.

What was it about then, in your opinion? You said that it is not about eye candy either. WTH is it about then, in your opinion?

Experts in the field have given clear explanations for why flat implementations are problematic for usability.

Mh... ok. I actually thought GUI designers were "experts in the field". At least those are the guys spending a lot of times on figuring out which works, and ticks best with humans. Obviously, you don't think so. In the same way that you dismiss GUI design, which is vastly popular, saying it was not designed with usability in mind. Again, i wonder what you think was on the minds of those creating those GUI's though. Maybe we're able to figure that out after some more posts.

[Jace-BeOS]

I'm also a fully paid up member of the flat cult. I don't want the tech I use making demands on my limited daily mental bandwidth.

That's exactly my complaint with flat design. I have to spend extra time discovering what is a control, what's not, what's static text, what's editable, and I have to look harder and with less comfort to read the low-contrast text and squint at the bright white empty space and high-contrast color barf.

I also dig contrasts.

I'm confused. The flat fad suffers greatly with low contrast. iOS is especially egregious. iOS 10 has taken the opposite approach in a clumsy attempt to rectify the complaint in a few select areas with the bright blue button states, but not much else.

As much as is possible, I'd prefer the inorganic parts of our lives to be rendered as flat, plain etc, to allow the organic elements to really pop.

Examples?

And when I'm creating I want the music to sound 3D, without tons of different interface designs pulling focus.

I'm not sure how seeing interface designs interferes with hearing.

It wasn't always this way. When Valhalla first hit the scene, I wasn't convinced. And I'm not going to say that I don't like a little bit of eye-candy, but I really do feel that utilitarian design helps me maintain focus on what is important

I'm fine with utilitarian so long as it's readable and comfortable to look at.

Where I think they have gone a little too far with LPX is with the newer effects. Having a few of these windows open in a project makes it a little more difficult to distinguish, at a glance, which effect I am using. At the point where it becomes a barrier to workflow, then I get a little antsy.

This is a great example of exactly what I'm talking about.

I do wonder which way they will go with re-designs of Ultrabeat, Sculpture etc

Fully agreed. Those two have abysmal GUI designs (especially UltraBeat). I just don't want their existing designs to be replaced with equally obtuse "minimalist" GUI designs.

(It's interesting. to me, that their compressor re-design already looks dated within the latest paradigm).

I agree. The reason is the same as the stuff I'm complaining about: minimalist and lazy design. It looks like clip art from the 90s, only very sharp. That's an immediately recognizable era.

I suspect the new compressor re-design was probably in the works before some Apple management came down hard on the Logic team for not conforming to the new Apple aesthetic. I suspect the Logic team had started on a compromise design, trying to straddle the fence between flat and familiar, but it ended up looking exactly like what early attempts at skeumorphism looked like with a lack of technology/design software (or lack of computer graphics designer experience) to support photo realism in the 90s.

It's cartoony instead of realistic. It doesn't have a consistent design motif (each type of compressor feels like it comes from different manufacturers, which is cool in moderation, but here it's so dramatic that the point of each compressor style being housed in one plugin is seriously compromised. "Which plugin were those? Oh yeah, it's just a schizophrenic mode of this single plugin." But even those different types of compressor, their own individual parts don't feel like they really came from one piece of hardware).

It straddles the fence between clipart and low-color GUI design... only at retina sharpness, which just makes it even cheaper and more "clip-arty"-looking because there's a distinct conflict going on between the desire for skeumorphism and the desire for flatness causing an unwillingness to follow through with the necessary details required to let our eyes be convinced by the graphics.

[Jace-BeOS]

Experts in the field have given clear explanations for why flat implementations can be problematic for some users

ftfy

Fair enough. But the research done was an attempt to find a median that is best for most users. Flat design isn't it and is particularly problematic for some people (i, obviously, am one of them).

[Bombadil]

I downloaded it, checked it out, and then went back to 10.2.4. The flat doesn't appeal to me, though I expect I'd adapt to it pretty quickly. I haven't updated to Sierra either. 10.2.4 and El Cap seem pretty stable and fast, for me. So I is standing pat.

[Jace-BeOS]

The flat fad was not about greater usability. It wasn't about usability outside Apple, and it wasn't about usability inside Apple.

What was it about then, in your opinion? You said that it is not about eye candy either. WTH is it about then, in your opinion?

IMO it's about garnering attention by being different, first and foremost. But primate behavior being what it is, any kind of differentness either is shunned and killed or appropriated by insecure people and turned into a fad. So the flat motif might've started in an honest manner, but it quickly turned into people merely following a trend; keeping up with the Joneses, as it were.

Out of all the design motifs we've had so far, minimalism is actually really accessible to non-designers. Suddenly developers could dismiss their designers and do the GUI themselves because, "hey, this isn't so hard! I'm not gonna pay someone else to do this part!" In steps insecurity and misdirected anger aimed at the artist/designer "elitists".

Then the consumers and tech geeks, knowing nothing about human interface design, salivated over change for the sake of change.

At Apple, it was about one person's aesthetic preference (Jony Ive's) overriding the needs of the whole computer-using population. iOS 6.x and earlier was far more successful in accommodating a larger set of humans then iOS 7 and later.

Apple wanted to make a dramatic change from iOS's established visual style because almost the rest of the design world had appropriated it. Apple's OS X and iOS design motifs were no longer unique because everyone else was aping it left and right. There were tutorials on websites dedicated to "Aqua style" design. It was even used in non-technology areas, marketing things that had no relevance to Apple or tech, just to be "hip" (because Apple became a hip sensation and a cultural event).

Desperate to reinvent its image again, all the existing styles were trashed. The people at Apple who favored minimalism attained more corporate political power than the people who had long been in charge of Apple's software aesthetics. They even ousted one of the key iPhone guys to win an internal political battle. Then Jony Ive set the marketing department on the project of redesigning iOS. Marketing. Not the UI specialists. Marketing people!! He wanted a print aesthetic, despite all the obvious difference between the non-interactive print media and the interactive computer user interface world!

It was not about coming up with better usability.

Once Apple got in on it, we were screwed because everyone follows Microsoft and Apple (Microsoft was already doing their own flat crap in their phone OS and then Windows 8, and had long been confusing text labels and controls by making Windows XP have hyperlinks in the GUI, which I will remind you is a concept that came about as a tool for hypertext documents, not controls).

Experts in the field have given clear explanations for why flat implementations are problematic for usability.

Mh... ok. I actually thought GUI designers were "experts in the field".

See above where Apple's marketing team was tasked with redesigning a GUI... Then look at how all kinds of specialist jobs are going away, to have those tasks covered by people who aren't actually specialists in those areas. Austerity, do more with less, cheapness, laziness. There's also the Dunning-Kruger Effect that runs rampant in "do more with less" environments because such environments allow non-specialists to imagine themselves more competent than they really are. They are insulated from awareness of their ignorance of the specialty by not working around actual specialists.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning ... ger_effect

Again, there's also the insecurity, anti-intellectualism, and disregard for experts because they're somehow bad people for having specialized knowledge. That helps companies that want to justify not paying to hire actual experts. The democratization of information makes people think their ignorance is equal to an expert's knowledge. It's not. Again, check the links I already offered. It's a thing. I didn't make it up.

At least those are the guys spending a lot of times on figuring out which works, and ticks best with humans.

I dispute that this goes on these days as much as it ought to.

Obviously, you don't think so.

Not all of them, no. I know enough to question the authority of the people doing the work, though not enough to do the work all by myself. The consensus among GUI design/HUI experts is that the people in these jobs are not experts any more, or are losing their way for the sake of aesthetic preference.

Of course the expert testimony is being combatted by the flourishing anti-intellectualism I mentioned. It's as if the only kind of expert that our culture respects these days is a programmer (and who isn't "a coder" these days, right? ) or an entrepreneur, or a Wall Street shark. Humanities such as art and design (and related skills built up over time via research) are being mocked as "elitist indulgences". Even the skilled designers are trashing their own prior work just to fit in with the new culture norms. This series of articles is awesome and goes into this situation:

http://angryartboy.blogspot.com/2016/09 ... s.html?m=1

If people who spent all the time spent on talking about "responsive design" and replacing perfectly usable desktop websites with perfectly crippled and brain dead mobile sites (https://xkcd.com/869/) had spent that time and effort on actual functionality instead, maybe the "WYSIWYG" editor for this forum would be not classed as "experimental", would be fully functional, reliable, and we wouldn't have to keep doing the computer interface's work for it. How 1990s is this!!?? That's some user interface design that isn't getting done, possibly because programmer mindsets tend to be "force users to work like I'm comfortable working". But it's an intersection between GUI and code that results in UX. You need a designer, a coder, and a manager who is willing to guide it all in the right direction. Something really lacking in the computer industry (briefly appearing and flourishing when the iPhone came out in 2007, due to rare and actual competition making things better for EVERYONE, and then ending around 2013 when Apple threw out their own baby with their not-hot-enough bath water).

In the same way that you dismiss GUI design,

How am I "dismissing GUI design"?

which is vastly popular, saying it was not designed with usability in mind. Again, i wonder what you think was on the minds of those creating those GUI's though. Maybe we're able to figure that out after some more posts.

I hope the above text helps.

[dredd i knight]

Way to derail a thread.
Thanks ebow for the YouTube links.

[Jace-BeOS]

Way to derail a thread.
Thanks ebow for the YouTube links.

Sorry. I respond when replied to. It can become a vicious cycle. Or conversation.

Can't get over the guy saying "Logic ex 10...", personally...

[v1o]

It'd be great if Apple would put even one of the Logic engineers on the OS team. Leaving it to the interns isn't working out.

Arent the Logic team still based in Germany?

I wouldn't think Apple would use interns to write their OS's like Microsoft do. They have a relatively small team working on Mac OS compared compared to the massive size of the Windows dev team.

[v1o]

I hate flat. This is enraging me. Apple's taste in design has turned from the arguably best to the absolute worst. And seeing how excruciatingly long we have had to wait for updates to Logic (pro users and content creators being utterly unimportant to current Apple executives), it'll take forever for this crap to be undone whenever someone new comes to power at Apple and changes the aesthetic direction back away from low-effort, amateur, flat and low-contrast garbage.

the entire industry is going 'flat' (not just on macos/ios) -

The industry was doing it some before Apple followed suit, yes, but then Apple joining the bandwagon made it worse.

Apple was supposed to be a trend setter, not a follower... They've made the fad into an entrenched trend because people tend to copy them, mostly because of the image of knowing what they're doing, and their prior reputation for quality of design they no longer execute on.

If people demand flat, then it would be pretty stupid not to offer that. You see it everywhere. If people considered it ugly or unusable, then GUI designers would hardly follow that trend.

Who's demanding it? People who understand design or people who want novelty? This is a corporate/developer-driven trend, not a user-driven trend. It's cheap and quick and therefore they've decided to make a design aesthetic to promote it.

Trends and fads shouldn't define user interface design functionality. People who aren't UI experts shouldn't be the ones dictating UI design. Developers who suck at design are supposed to work with designers. Instead, it's become "kill all non-code experts, we don't need em".

As for users promoting it... There was never "demand" for flat design in any functional sense. There were geeks demanding change for the sake of change because of their tech geek boredom, the same as end users demanding more novelty. Everyone who defends flat design uses the same memes to talk about it: "clean", "minimal", and "fresh". No one defends it with any actual meaningful language, because the fact is that there's very little objective value to this aesthetic and a lot of negatives. I watch people suffering with this crappy UI convention and it's all because of a fad that they suffer.

Fads are rarely logical choices. They're reactionary, poorly considered, and temporary. They usually end up becoming hated in hindsight. Look to style fads of the 70s, 80s...

It's ludicrous that we FINALLY have high-ppi displays and the level of graphical detail has gone retrograde and plummeted to where GUIs barely look like they've gotten out of the prototype or even planning stage.

The flat functional design trend didn't come from the corporates. It's a movement that originated in the design community - the same people who design fonts and street signs - people like Dieter Ram etc. It's nothing to do with trying to make money, it's about making things more legible, easier to understand and use. There is no functional reason to try and simulate 3D graphics in a computer UI or to make things pretty for the sake of being pretty whilst harming usability. If you look at street signs they have completely flat designs which is what makes them easy to read even for people with poor eye sight or people from different cultures and languages.

[samsam]

Phenomenal update.

Unfortunately my iMac broke last weekend and there are currently zero Apple desktops I'd buy.

6 months I'm prepared to survive with just a laptop and if no new desktop by June it'll be bye bye to Apple/Logic for me.

[LFO8]

also:

"Render any combination of effect plug-ins to a selection of audio using Selection-based Processing."

This freaking RULES.

-M

Everyone is raving about this, but I fail to see how this is any different than setting up you channel strip with fx and bouncing your marqee selection in place

[jacqueslacouth]

Phenomenal update.

Unfortunately my iMac broke last weekend and there are currently zero Apple desktops I'd buy.

6 months I'm prepared to survive with just a laptop and if no new desktop by June it'll be bye bye to Apple/Logic for me.

And 2 weeks later you will be regretting it...