[Macworld]

Post your comments for What's wrong with the Mountain Lion interface here

[rocketriter]

Then there's the iTunes store, a user-interface disaster. My least favorite aspect is the text in recording or app descriptions, which is presented in tiny, difficult to enlarge gray text, often on a gray background. In a high school software design class this would get an F.

[CPD_1]

If you rest our hand on the trackpad (which I assumed until now was a fairly default state) the scroll bar remains visible.

As for the bit about scrolling, it took three days, but the reversed scrolling became natural. It seems like people want to complain about this despite it being a non issue.

[jpellino]

Or you could go into preferences and revers the scroll bar visibility and scroll direction. If you got your way and "they shouldn't be" then the other half of the Mac world would write another article like this, but on the other side. One of the first tenets of UI design is that an interface should be "permissive and forgiving". It seems to be on these issues. Having to go between iPhone iPad and MacBook, the new scroll feels natural, did after about a day. Everything else is mostly style. I doubt anyone's missed a deadline or lost work because sidebar icons are greyscale.

[DCJ001]

"Natural Scrolling," when using a trackpad, makes perfect sense.

[Ventzi_Zhechev]

Hmm I don’t see the issue with the scrolling direction.
I quickly got used to the idea of moving the content instead of the scroll thumb and I indeed find it natural.

The issue with many people (especially the ones (forced to be) working on Windows) is that they associate scrolling solely with the movement of the scroll thumb in the scroll bar and not with the movement of the actual content.

[Jasonvelazquez]

You're a tech writer? Yikes. You sound like a old man that had to give up his rotary phone, complaining about how there's no click-click-click noise when you dial 0 - **old man voice** "how will I know the call went through?"

Everything is foreign to you because you stubbornly ignored 2 major iterations.

Everything you complained about - scroll bar, natural scrolling, finder, are all natural evolutions to a system that is about to make a major paradigm shift (Touch screen iMac) and before it can do that it has to drag your old asses along for the ride by gradually making the changes it needs

Finally, nothing you mentioned didn't feel natural to use after 3 days. You gave it one? Which probably meant you gave it 6 hours.

I close with - You're a tech writer? Yikes.

[pxforti]

You can change scroll bars to be visible and scroll the old way. It's a setting.

The colors I agree with. But again, if you don't want a new car, don't buy one.

[revco]

There are two things that bug me the most about the Finder in ML and Lion. When you're in List view and click on the expand window button it never fully expands to show all the files. Why? And the minimum size for a Finder window is about three times the size of what it is in SL. Again, why?

[AlexD]

I could not agree more about the color icons. I too stalled on upgrading to Lion for months because of this. When I finally bit the bullet and went to Lion (and now Mountain Lion), I find the gray icons just as visually unappealing and workflow-slowing as I had anticipated. What before was a glance is now a reading exercise. I just can't figure out how this is better in any way. I can sort of see the logic (though heartily disagree style-wise) in something like iPhoto where you want to give the content the emphasis and not the photo album icons, but in Finder the icons ARE the content. I'm hoping that the return of some color in the iTunes 11 icons bode well for the return of color in OSX 10.9 (Snow Mountain Lion?)

[keithnteri]

The finder grey icons bugged me too. I found a solution that runs on startup to give me back my colorful icons.

http://www.macupdate.../relaunchfinder

It is free and does the trick.

[quietline]

As crazy as it sounds, the lack of Rosetta is still the main thing holding my organization from moving to ML. We still have applications that we run that need Rosetta. Replacements for these software packages either don't exist or are cost prohibitive due to budgetary concerns. Again, as crazy as it sounds, I predict we'll be going to Windows8 instead of ML (at some vague point in the future) because to many decision-makers here, it appears that Apple has turned its back on those who legitimately need Rosetta. It also hasn't set well with our end users.

But, Snow Leopard still works for us and we're glad to stay with it for now and not need to deal with many of the issues raised above.

[KPOM]

There are some good points, particularly that it would be nice to have some permanent indicator by default that alerts the user that the dialog box has further information below. That said, after about one day, "insanely stupid scrolling" for me described the old method of scrolling. On a trackpad, the Lion/Mountain Lion method makes a lot more sense to me. I can see how it can be confusing on a mouse, but it's clear to me that Apple views the trackpad as the superior input device. I've actually explored ways of getting the trackpad in my office Windows PC to scroll in "natural" form.

[Atgard]

While there are some who believe that Apple can do no wrong, I fully agree with you that the vast majority of user interface changes from Snow Leopard to Lion/Mountain Lion are large steps backwards in usability and intuitiveness.

I also have 10.6 on my iMac, but 10.8 on my laptop because I have to support other users in our organization. I far prefer 10.6.

It's not out of being lazy to adopt the "new" way, it's that the old way is better, borne of decades of UI guidelines. Removing color, removing scroll bars, and making random changes like sticking the Preview sidebar on the left instead of right slows down the workflow of all of our users. Why were these changes made? Because they enhanced usability? Or because someone thought they looked "cool"? I submit it was the latter.

Yes, at least we have the option to change scroll direction back how it should be (for anyone using a mouse, which is still most users). Yes, every single person who works for us asked me to change it for them -- even the ones using trackpads.

Bottom line: ideas that work well on a 3.5" touchscreen interface do not always work well on a 27" display used with a keyboard and mouse.