It turns out he posted a better example in his blog post about it - https://thismightnotmatter.com/a-little-website-i-made-for-a... - which is technically linked to in the bottom of the site. I guess if you spend your life learning UX from Apple this is what you get...
Thats a pretty snarky thing to say about Apple. They were arguably the pioneers in OS UX... granted, its not the end all, be all, but still. You could do worse.
Who is "they"? The employees at Apple when the HIG was first published in 1986, 40 years ago? That Apple is dead, what you see before you is an empty and rotted husk.
When I began at Apple in 1995, we followed "Tog on Interface" to the letter. It was not uncommon to expect arguments over what the Right way was during lunch.
I watched as Steve Jobs came back to Apple—he really took hold of the reins of UX (aided by his team of designers).
Personally, (and I say this as it is often a matter of taste) I didn't care for a lot of it.
A simple example: the URL field of Safari should have been, to my Tog sensibilities, an editable text field only. Perhaps somewhere (below?, to the right?) you might include a progress bar to indicate the page loading. But a designer (I will not name, ha ha) came up with a combined textfield/progress bar. It looked to my eye as though, as the page loaded, the text was being selected!
Jobs loved it though.
It was then I think that Apple departed "Tog" for these "one-off" UX experiments.
I have rationalized this move away from a standard since, with the advent of the web, the customer is now being bombarded with all manner of UX—ought to be comfortable with one-off UX.
(Thankfully I see that now we have a thin line that seems to grow along the lower edge of the URL field.)
First is not the same as best. First is not even the same as good. First is only first. Just because someone was the pioneer doesn't mean they should be considered a positive example.
Introduced a concept decades ago in no way implies that their current implementation of the concept is at all ideal or market leading.
“I would argue that…” is a weaker statement, because it ends with an implied “…but since I don’t care that much, I’m not ‘seriously’ arguing that.” It’s not at all equivalent to the strong statement “I argue that…”, which has no such qualifier.
Why cure yourself of useful conversational nuance?
