Design language

@danvpeterson Thanks so much for the thoughtful response; it's really important to us to hear from the folks on the inside about all of this. And thanks, as well, for so many years of making an app that always felt like it had a very high level of "fit and finish" with the rest of the OS- that is something that has always made 1Password stand out, and I think that the reason a lot of us are responding the way that we are to the advent of an Electron-based 1P8 is because it seems like there is a very large gap between what the 1Password UI experience has historically been like on Mac OS, and where the new Electron-based UI seems to be going in that regard. Some (much?) of what people are going on about may be unfair baggage that we are bringing from other Electron/cross-platform apps that we may have used or been involved in developing... but I gotta say, just speaking from my own experience, so much of what makes a "proper" Mac app a great experience is just not possible using Electron. Or, if it is, it's far enough off the beaten path that getting it "right" represents extra work, which in turn begins to erase the productivity benefit gained by going cross-platform in the first place. And from an organizational/management perspective, once the engineering decision has been made to go cross-platform with the UI, it's all too commonly the case that Mac-specific fit-and-finish stops being a design priority... I think we've all seen abundant examples of that, in the past. Obviously, this issue is well beyond the question of visual whitespace, but I think it's where a lot of us are coming from.

To your point about custom AppKit widgets- it's true that many of the great apps (including 1P7!) make use of custom controls, but generally, because they are being built using AppKit, and are embedded within an AppKit view hierarchy, they typically "feel" like built-in controls. I'm thinking in terms of things like their scrolling behavior, how they handle/respond to keyboard focus and other events, accessibility APIs, menus behavior, etc. Those are the kinds of things that never seem to be quite "right" in Electron apps, and crucially they are also things that are very difficult to convey using screenshots- but they are immediately apparent when one is using an app.

And you make a good point that the whitespace issue is hardly limited to 1Password's proposed design, of course- it seems to be the way the design wind is blowing in recent years (just look at the ever-growing expanses of whitespace in each new version of Mac OS), so there may be a certain element of "Old Man Yells At Cloud" to my feelings on the subject! 🤣 At any rate, I'm very glad to hear that that part of the design language isn't fully baked in yet. Thanks again for the reply and for the years of excellent software! We critique because we care. :-)