Big Sur

I updated my Macbook Pro to Big Sur to see what would happen. Big Sur is a lovely stretch of coastline on California 1 and I love a drive along it. What could possibly go wrong with a Big Sur update? I was chilled enough to think that if a few Apps fell over, then it wasn't my main machine and I could survive.

Little did I know that one of the Apps that didn't work on reboot was Mail.

I tried everything, even reading the user forums. Nothing useful anywhere, although others were asking the same question. I decided it was time to hold down the power button and do another reboot.

Pling. Everything started to work. It wasn't like a typical Apple update though. I had the Windows experience of a few anxiety-inducing moments where I wondered if I'd somehow totalled the machine and was already mentally preparing for another 12 Gb download to put it right. 

Then there are the small vendors jiggling money buckets outside the Citadel. Several of my helpful utilities still needed updates and the fees for those varied from £6.50 to £22.00. Now I need to work out what has changed in the various revised user interfaces.

I have received warnings from a couple of big software vendors too, so I'm holding fire on an update to my main machine, in case there is something that I depend upon. 

Fortunately, the Microsoft stuff and the bits of Adobe that I've tried seem to be working. Same with Evernote, Kindle, and Sonos, so I can still dial-up music from the laptop in the lounge.

Notification has been improved which hopefully means I don't need to remember option-click for DND (Do Not Disturb) during Zoom meetings.

I'm used to updates looking so similar that it takes a while to realise there are extra capabilities, but this one is different. There are changes to the fonts and most of the icons look different. I can understand a designer wanting all of the icons to look similar, but it's like with a car, some of the control surfaces warrant different treatments so that they are easy to find. 

Its become more of a problem with the UX on the iPhone as different vendors have followed the rules and the result is somewhat bland. I understand that it is pleasing to remove the greys and round off the corners of everything, but let's not do so at the expense of usability. Sometimes grey is helpful because it tells you that the screen area isn't important.

Notification Centre is different too, surfacing the long-departed widgets from Macs many releases ago. They seem to have a place to go now, so I guess we'll soon all have stock tickers and photo popups in our eye-line. I suppose that Facebook and every other clickaholic App will also bring forward new little jittery distractors to keep us from the main task. They will probably try to monetise the screenspace, I'm sure.

It is increasingly noticeable how much of the iOS design is being brought into the Mac, but I hope it is not at the expense of usability. Sometimes it does work better now, like the surfacing of the most used System Preferences into the Notification Control Center. So Battery life has better reporting. Although I'm not sure if it gives the theoretical maximum of a battery like coconutbattery does. That's the handy utility where we can see when a battery is starting to fail and instead of recharging to 7200Mah it only goes up to a max of say 4200Mah. (ie it can only charge to 60% of its new value) Somehow I can't see manufacturers wanting that to be too well known.

But, I suppose Big Sur is a tidy-up and holding pattern to get everything across from intel to M1 silicon. That'll be interesting.