Tahoe Search boxes
John Gruber has a, long, running, series, on various Tahoe UX gripes.
I'm inspired to add my own take on the genre: Search boxes in Apple Apps. Especially in Apple Books.
Sequoia
In each of Music, Podcasts, Books and TV, you have a sidebar that looks like the below.
When you ⌘F or click into what is obviously a search box, you see a cursor and can start typing:
Tahoe
Now the sidebars look like this.
At least the app names are consistent (they're all gone) and the new icon is new in both apps. But what's with the different spacing between the top of the window and the menu's starting, and the weights to the icons?
Anyway, why we're here is to see what happens when you want to search for a book, tapping ⌘F then start typing the title?
Absolutely nothing.
Ok. Weird. I guess I'm misremembering and ⌘F doesn't work this way. Was it ⌘/. Nope. Ok fine let me click in the search box and quickly start typing my search again.
Wait what?
Maybe I need to click harder?
Alright lets zoom out here for a sec.
Right! Ok, so that's the search box. Let me try ⌘F one more time. Nope. Ok fine I'll click in it. Yes! I can type, and finaly find that book I came here for.
I use Books a lot. Seemingly more than anyone at Apple. This is one of those things that I've done a heap of times, got vaguely annoyed it didn't work, but thought it was a me problem without interupting what I was doing to really think about what's going on.
Today I went and checked each of the other apps - Music, Podcasts, TV - and they all use the same weird paradigm of clicking a thing that almost looks like a search box to be taken to the actual search box elsewhere. At least clicking it does actually give focus to the real search box in the rest of the apps. And ⌘F works. So it's just Books, as far as I can tell, that is totally broken.
Before I was done, the cynic in me wondered how the app that presumably generates the most revenue for Apple - the App Store - works. Sure enough, it looks and behaves exactly how you'd expect.
