Overcoming 25+ years of muscle-memory

Is it worth the initial investment of time?

Maybe not to you now, but clearly it would be to all the Mac users who have raised this issue here (and those who haven't but agree).

I understand that individual Mac users are no longer a priority. All those corporate customers for whom the close button has always been on the top-right in their OS aren't having to change their behaviour. But Mac users choose macOS because they care about the user experience, about consistency of design and are prepared to pay extra for that. Maybe that's why you originally chose a Mac all those years ago, but perhaps your priorities have changed?

Wouldn't it be wiser to invest this time in a new feature or fixing a bug?

Of course you should add features or fix bugs, but this is neither of those, this is something you've changed for the worse - it is different to previous versions, breaks Mac users muscle memory, and is a move away from macOS conventions.

Making the Preferences window different only for Mac means that it will also require on-going effort to keep it this way as the app evolves,

You already have many more complicated platform-specify features to maintain, however, I'm referring specifically to the title bar / window controls (I'm less concerned about whether it floats or not). You don't seem to have any problems maintaining different title bars for the main 1Password window between platforms which are all quite different:

It is also inconsistent design within the same application on the same platform. The main 1Password window has standard macOS controls as you'd expect, but the Preferences and New Item windows don't.

However, I see from the release notes that you do invest time fixing many tiny UI inconsistencies (down to the pixel level), yet this major, in-your-face inconsistency is left untouched.

Today, our cost of writing and maintaining documentation is huge because of so many differences between the platforms

I would not expect anything else. It's a direct consequence of the business decision you and Dave took to expand and release 1Password on so many platforms, and why your workforce has ballooned in recent years to keep up with the workload.

But the location and appearance of a window close button isn't something you would cover in your apps documentation - that's an OS-level feature which users of each OS would already be familiar with.

However, by actually moving and changing the appearance of a standard Mac window close button, you are forcing Mac users to jarringly leave subconscious behaviour and consciously make the effort to do a common action differently.

I was sad to see that many of our docs have removed the screenshots simply because it was so difficult to maintain them

Do you not have an automated screenshot creation process?

Here is a list of apps in my Mac that either do not have a floating window or do not have the traffic light controls or both

I too can find exceptions on my Mac. But this is about 1Password, an app that is much more important and frequently used than all of the exceptions on your list. It is one of the few apps that runs constantly on my Mac and I interact with it hundreds of time a day. Previous versions of 1Password didn't have this issue either.

It always surprises me that you often resort to the "school playground" style response of "Well, so-and-so does it too!", when these kind of topics come up, rather than trying to set an example of exemplary cross-platform support, whilst still honouring OS-specific UI/UX conventions.

snozdop I think we all have to just accept at this point that 1Password 8 will never feel like a native Mac app, and that is largely by design. AgileBits is pushing very hard into the corporate world; the corporate world is largely Windows; hence AgileBits is now heavily focused on Windows (which is quite obvious given that 1P8 has already been released for Windows with no ETA on when the Mac app will be released).

roustem How much investment would it actually take to make a non-modal preference window on the Mac. This is something that other cross-platform Electron apps have managed to accomplish seemingly without issue. Are you really trying to tell us, even with the size (and supposed talent) of your dev team, that implementing certain platform-specific UI elements is just too much work to manage? If so, then I have to seriously question the commitment of you and the dev team in continuing to maintain 1Password as a world-class password manager (which, for the record, 1P7 is absolutely world class; 1P8 not so much). Furthermore, why not make a non-modal preference window for all platforms? Instead of shoehorning a non-Mac interface style on Mac users, why not bring some of the Mac goodness to other platforms?

I'm also quite confused by your argument that just because some apps don't follow Apple's HIG, that this somehow excuses 1Password for not following them. The three first-party Mac apps are horrible examples given that a.) Chess is from the NeXTSTEP days and has barely seen an update since it was first ported; b.) both Music and TV are Catalyst apps, and not only are Catalyst apps still very much a work in progress, they are considered by many to not be good examples of proper Mac apps (though that is changing with the likes of the excellent Catalyst-based Messages app).

As for the other apps, let's go through each one to discover why they are horrible examples to give.

We'll start with the most obvious offenders, all of them Electron apps (which speaks for itself):
* Evernote
* GitHub Desktop
* Logseq
* Notion
* Obsidian
* Slack
* Visual Studio Core

Let's next look at web browsers:
* Brave - based on Chromium (which ironically is what Electron is based upon), Chrome itself doesn't have a proper Preference window and largely follows Google's own "Material Design" GUI guidelines. Chrome (and subsequently Brave, or really any Chromium-based browser) has a decidedly non-Mac feel to it
* Firefox - another example of a web browser eschewing Apple's HIG for its own. Firefox has a good browser engine, but its interface has been a perpetual work in progress for years. Not a great example to use here.
* Microsoft Edge - not only is this a Microsoft product, it's another browser based on Chromium, and thus will have the same UI quirks as all Chromium apps.

And now some of the outliers:
* Acrobat Reader - Adobe is notorious for ignoring interface guidelines regardless of the platform, and I can't imagine you'll find a single person that praises the Acrobat Reader interface.
* LanScan - this app has no preference window at all, mostly because it simply doesn't need one; and it is not out of the ordinary for certain Mac apps to eschew a preference window when it is simply not needed.
* Journey by Moleskin - to me, this is an app with an interface that is simply trying to be too clever for its own good, with subtle animations all over the place that get old rather quickly.
* Pocket Casts - this is literally an iOS app, so of course it's going to have a different style of interface - one designed for an iPhone/iPad, NOT a Mac.
* Spotify - the Spotify preferences screen is just a tragedy of terrible interface design, full stop. (The app itself isn't terrible, but hardly a shining example of good UX).

Finally, I felt Ishtar Commander needed to have its own entry, because honestly, this is just a terribly silly example. This is a game! Given that one of the main purposes of a game is to let you escape from the real world for a little while, game interfaces are designed to take over the whole computer (hence why they almost always run in full screen mode), to pull you out of your day-to-day computer usage.

The bottom line is that if you and the dev team really wanted to add a proper non-modal Mac style preference window to 1Password, you absolutely could with not a ton of effort. But you simply don't want to, because you don't want to spend the effort (i.e. money) on it. Instead of 1Password 8 being a world class experience on all platforms, with a UI that is at once familiar but also adapts to each platforms UX guidelines, 1P8 has become just another "barely good enough" app. Maybe that's what you were going for? On the one hand, having an app that looks the exact same across all platforms; but on the other hand, leading to an experience that is simply OK, but never great.

It is certainly possible to change the Preferences window.

However, I have a few concerns:

1. Is it worth the initial investment of time? I just checked the issue tracker and there are currently 4,162 open tickets that include new features, improvements, bug fixes. Wouldn't it be wiser to invest this time in a new feature or fixing a bug?
2. Making the Preferences window different only for Mac means that it will also require on-going effort to keep it this way as the app evolves, settings are added/removed/modified, etc. Every build of 1Password that we publish will require a separate test scenario.
3. Today, our cost of writing and maintaining documentation is huge because of so many differences between the platforms. I was sad to see that many of our docs have removed the screenshots simply because it was so difficult to maintain them — I always thought that screenshots make the documentation better. One of the big advantages of 1Password 8 is being able to create a higher quality documentation that covers all platforms.

Finally, there are many popular apps that already have a very different approach.

I went through my Applications folder and launched every app to see how the Preferences are implemented. Here is a list of apps in my Mac that either do not have a floating window or do not have the traffic light controls or both. I don't have a huge selection of apps on this Mac because I just started setting it up from scratch a couple of weeks ago. Still, the list is pretty large:

• Acrobat Reader
• Brave
• Chess (comes with macOS, might be one of the oldest Mac apps?)
• Evernote
• Firefox
• GitHub Desktop
• Ishtar Commander
• Journey by Moleskine
• LanScan
• Logseq
• Microsoft Edge
• Music (comes with macOS)
• Notion
• Obsidian
• Pocket Casts
• Slack
• Spotify
• TV (comes with macOS)
• Visual Studio Code

I'm 100% with you on this.

Especially this bit: "my mouse pointer STILL automatically heads off to the top-left of the Preferences window expecting find the close button EVERY SINGLE TIME. I then have to consciously make the effort to look to the top-right to find the non-standard X button to click. It's annoying." That exact process happens. Cognitively frustrating.

I think there are two possibilities here:

1. Move the close button to the left just on MacOS. (not perfect but acceptable)

2. Switch the Preferences window to be a real popup window that uses native traffic light controls. (Better)