It's hard to justify Tahoe icons • Hacker News Board

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#31

Post by afandian » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 12:24 PM UTC

alykhalid wrote: post #7

Reminder, you can turn off the animated snow effect with the snowflake icon at the top

No you can't, it just turns the background yellow.

EDIT: the snow stops _but after a few seconds_. I toggled it to find out if it would turn off the snow, and the immediate feedback was that it doesn't. That's really _really_ bad UX.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#32

Post by jraph » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 12:25 PM UTC

I suppose I wouldn't mind much either way, apart from the misaligned text maybe now that you brought my attention to it.

I agree that colors could help.

Don't hesitate to give KDE/Qt a try, it apparently happens to get all these things right according to this article from a quick glance: everything is correctly aligned, even when in the same menu some items both have an icon and a checkbox, and some don't have anything; icons are mostly meaningful, some icons are colored (most are monochrome though, there's a move to this), and not all items have icons.

I guess it's the kind of things that are hard to get right for a hobby OS like macOS that lacks professional UX designers. :-)

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#33

Post by mosura » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 12:26 PM UTC

It is incredible just how widely held the view is that Win2k (or XP in classic mode) was close to peak desktop UI. (Contenders also being Tiger to Snow Leopard and Windows 7).

A key problem is that big US corps have always had a product design mentality that can produce monstrosities like your average cable TV remote and think it is in any way a good solution. That was clearly already an influence on things like XP.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#34

Post by jgalt212 » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 12:27 PM UTC

throwaway_ab wrote: post #8

It's hard to justify snowflake animations on your website...

Scrooge

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#35

Post by robin_reala » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 12:27 PM UTC

I was somewhat buying the article until I got to the monstrosity that is the “Special mention”, at which point I flipped to completely agreeing. That really is atrocious.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#36

Post by serial_dev » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 12:27 PM UTC

master_crab wrote: post #5

jsheard wrote: post #2

I hate to be that guy, but there's some irony in putting a full screen animated snow effect over an article about unnecessary, distracting clutter.

True, but you can turn it off with the snowflake icon at the top.

Wow, it turns off the snowflakes, but the ones already falling will stay there and keep falling. I thought it only changed the background color to yellow, so assumed it doesn't actually turn off the snowflakes, wanted to come here and comment how ridiculous that is on an article talking about bad icons, then I saw in the comments that it turns off the snow effect... eventually (like a 10s delay).

It's hilarious that it's a great article about clutter, and yet, the post is on a theme that is so badly cluttered it would have been funny... if I could have read the article...

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#37

Post by seb1204 » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 12:28 PM UTC

master_crab wrote: post #11

Is there a reason Apple can’t focus on system improvements instead of constantly tweaking with their UI so thoroughly every couple years? I don’t disagree the OS UI needs to be revamped periodically, but it seems they do it too often.

KPI and corp revenue I guess. There was a time I heard that Apple had an only fix bugs release.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#38

Post by robinhood » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 12:29 PM UTC

I never disliked an OS as much as I dislike what Apple is doing with MacOS (and iOS by extension). I've been with MacOS for 20 years, but I've switched at home to Linux full time 2 years ago and I don't regret it. At work I'm forced to be on MacOS. It's concerning how Apple doesn't care anymore about user needs, usability, design and consistency. Where it was the best OS in the past for me, it's not anymore. Other OSes are better suited for where I'm at in my life.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#39

Post by ChrisMarshallNY » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 12:29 PM UTC

archerx wrote: post #23

throwaway_ab wrote: post #8

It's hard to justify snowflake animations on your website...

Yes can people stop doing this, it was cute 20 years ago now it’s just annoying and obnoxious.

That reminds me of this classic: https://www.angelfire.com/super/badwebs/

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#40

Post by mrcino » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 12:29 PM UTC

Low quality, inconsistent software is a result of a lack of standards, QA, internal communication and rigged corporate processes that are serving the private interests of managers trying to satisfy the board, not the users.

This is a symptom of no strong leadership that's capable of enforcing standards, Apple downslide as a whole firm where departments and people are fighting each other for resources.