At this point I'm just hoping Cook (who bears ultimate responsibility) or Ternus will see the error of his ways, but I'm not holding my breath. I doubt they understand what's wrong with this or that they even know about the HIG.
It's hard to justify Tahoe icons
61–70 of 984 posts
Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons
#62Sorry, even though I agree with your piece, the incredible irony of writing about bad design decisions while having fucking snow flying past the text I'm trying to read is just too much... [edit] I just discovered the snow icon, which does turn off the snow but turns the background into bright yellow. Oh and the other icon which turns your cursor into a ...spotlight? On an otherwise black page? Do I have that right?…
I find the snowflakes equally irritating, but believe there is a huge distinction. This is an individual's blog page, their own corner of the internet, where they can share their opinion and present them in any way they'd like, whereas Apple is designing an Operating System for premium devices used by millions of people that depend on its usability.
Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons
#63Sorry, even though I agree with your piece, the incredible irony of writing about bad design decisions while having fucking snow flying past the text I'm trying to read is just too much... [edit] I just discovered the snow icon, which does turn off the snow but turns the background into bright yellow. Oh and the other icon which turns your cursor into a ...spotlight? On an otherwise black page? Do I have that right?…
> What purpose is served by any of the gizmos on this site?
It's a personal website, it's fun. Comparing someones personal website - where the 'fun' things can be turned off - to a $tn company with hundreds of millions of users who rely on the usability their products is not a great basis for disagreeing with a pretty great write-up with many salient points.
Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons
#64Those who want to complain about the snowflake animations, wait till you try out the dark mode
Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons
#65It seems like Apple's hardware design is universally loved with much acclaim, why is their software getting progressively worse?
It's not Microsoft-add-all-the-bloatware-and-adverts-we-can worse, but it's 20-year-old-operating-systems-were-better-designed worse.
We're getting to a point where I think Linux windowing systems like KDE are better designed. And it seems that all they had to do was not change much over the span of a few decades.
Or am I out of touch? It feels like I could use a computer better back when XP was the mainstay.
Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons
#66Is 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.
It's a damned if you don't, damned if you do. Apple could release a new system with zero UI updates and tons of internal improvements and people would call it 'old' and 'dated' and 'lack of innovation'. It's a bit like adding new emojis in an OS release. There's been reports that new emojis are one of the drivers for getting people to upgrade. No one cares about a zero day security flaw, but that new kiss emoji every…
> Apple could release a new system with zero UI updates and tons of internal improvements and people would call it 'old' and 'dated' and 'lack of innovation'.
Apple has released incremental upgrades to macOS for years, and I've never heard this criticism of them. On the contrary, I ofter hear people missing Leopard design, and when UI has changed I've heard pushback (ie, when System Settings was renamed and redesigned). On macOS people care about the apps and interactions, not wether the buttons got a new look.
> There's been reports that new emojis are one of the drivers for getting people to upgrade. No one cares about a zero day security flaw, but that new kiss emoji everyone wants.
I agree with this. New emojis are new functionality; you can now express something you couldn't. A zero day security flaw brings no new functionality. Equally, updates to to apps and interactions bring new functionality. A re-skin of the OS doesn't.
Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons
#67Looking at the old Microsoft menu gave me a pang of nostalgia for what we lost. It was so clear and readable. The icons were clearly colored and so easy to understand.
I think the key issue with macOS is that they don't seem to have someone who is looking at the whole ecosystem holistically to make sure that there's consistency and integration across experiences. You probably have development silos for different applications and they don't really integrate with each other. There should really be a role like Integration Emperor that exists outside of the traditional corporate hierarchy who can go to different teams to push for increased consistency.
Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons
#68Something on this website made my iPhone (16 pro) immediately begin warming up, become hot to the touch, and invoke screen-dimming throttling. I verified by exiting it and reentering, during which the pattern abated and then recurred.
The snow? Something else?
Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons
#69The irony here isn't so much that it's the minutiae of the menu design that's wrong, it's the top-bar menus as a whole are a dead paradigm. Nothing uses them anymore. Leave the mac for a moment and go to your windows device. Pull up Chrome. No menu. The file browser, nope. Not in the terminal either. VSCode still has one![1] But the office suite doesn't anymore[2]. And obviously, the proximate cause of that is that most interaction these days is with phones where horizontal text menus are a non-starter.
No one uses menus. So why so get so upset over the mac implementation of a dead paradigm? Because ironically the Macintosh bakes a "menu" into the screen space for you, and has since 1984. Giving up menus on a mac requires that you give up one of the things that make a mac a mac. And that's hard, for marketers even more so than designers. So it persists and festers.
But in the rest of the world, we walked away and never looked back. The icons aren't the problem here.
[1] "Big" apps for experts still get value out of putting their actions into tightly packed text. Photoshop too, etc... But these are increasingly the exception and not the rule, and even there the next generation of big tools (c.f. Cursor) don't have them.
[2] Even worse there, because the tab bar it does have actually looks like a menu but isn't.
Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons
#70Looking at the old Microsoft menu gave me a pang of nostalgia for what we lost. It was so clear and readable. The icons were clearly colored and so easy to understand. I think the key issue with macOS is that they don't seem to have someone who is looking at the whole ecosystem holistically to make sure that there's consistency and integration across experiences. You probably have development silos for different appl…
>I think the key issue with macOS is that they don't seem to have someone who is looking at the whole ecosystem holistically to make sure that there's consistency and integration across experiences.
That person died in 2011.