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It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

tonsky.me

221–230 of 984 posts

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#221
post #138

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

Sometimes you need an animation to turn your site into a special snowflake of a site, and what better way to do that than to use a snowflake animation? TBF, you can turn it off by clicking on the snowflake icon in the top right corner. But then the background turns from blue into an annoying shade of yellow. Ok, you can click on the sun icon to fix it by switching to night mode. But then... aaaaargh!

It seems like the author went out of their way to prove they can make an even worse UI than Apple. I suspect they succeeded.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#222

I'm still on Sonoma (14). And it pisses me off that there's no easy way to upgrade to Sequoia (15). I really don't want to touch Tahoe at all.

I found it extremely easy to find the "macos sequoia installer" to download from Apple's servers. Literally those search terms will do it; download -> install.

Admittedly it would be "easier" if Apple gave you the choice of which version to upgrade to in macOS, but that's generally not how software is provided.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#223

Good that Alan Dye is no longer at apple. Liquid Glass on macOS is a mass. The icons, the floating side menus, the inconsistent corners, the new tabs in Safari.. On iOS it's totally fine, but on macOS it's a disaster. I've only updated one machine so far and will keep all others on Sequoia until this mess is resolved.

You can get away with sloppy, cluttered and inconsistent UI on mobile when everything runs serially, full-screen.

But bring that to desktop, where your UI is windowed and appears alongside (or overlapping) other windows, and you end up with chaos.

The floating sidebars are a prime example of this. Why should I have to expend mental energy to differentiate what's an actual window -vs- what's just a novelty round-rect with a shadow (oh, and and window controls for the parent round-rect, which is a window)?

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#224

This is an excellent article. Apple has been rudderless on the interaction design front for over a decade now. The windowing mess is evidence of it. We now have the cmd+tab (app switcher), Spaces, Mission Control, (full screen) split screen, Stage Manager, and now tiled window control. None of those interaction metaphors have been expanded upon since their initial launch. I'm a "mac guy". I understood why Apple initi…

I strongly believe we need to return to the drawing board and design a Window Environment from scratch because we've gone so far down the "everything's a mess" route that it's impossible to work our way out again.

Here's an example: panes, tabs, windows, apps, spaces. These things all fight against each other, have their own little silos, get treated differently by every single app, etc, etc.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#225
Also why-o-why is the close menu item directly next to the save item?

Imagine wanting to save and accidentally click close....

> Or two-letter As that only slightly differ in the font size:

In that one case having a large A for bigger and smaller A for smaller makes sense.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#226

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

It's easy to justify: it's cute. Just like the other options up at the top. If you click the sun it turns out the lights and turns your cursor into a flashlight. And it has an actual hamburger as the icon for the menu.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#227
post #79

This is the second time in just a few weeks I see a post from some UX person complaining about how some major tech company doesn't "understand" design while themselves having a design that is absolutely abysmal. What made this person think that having gigantic snowflakes flying down a page serving only text and images would be a good idea? _edit_: I'd also like to point out that I know it can be disabled, the questio…

It’s not obvious to me how black on yellow is a mistake. It’s quite readable, the contrast is broad enough for clarity but not so broad the background overwhelms the foreground. Yellow’s a recommended “light” background for visually impaired people so the choice has precedance (although I confess that many other examples of it I’ve seen use a softer pastel yellow which is more comfortable).

The huge area of intense yellow (or any highly saturated color actually) is very jarring. The eyes get tired quickly. It's really a weird choice coming from a person who is apparently into visual communication.

Btw, I'm using a desktop PC with a large browser window. Maybe on a small mobile screen the problem is less apparent.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#228

This is an excellent article. Apple has been rudderless on the interaction design front for over a decade now. The windowing mess is evidence of it. We now have the cmd+tab (app switcher), Spaces, Mission Control, (full screen) split screen, Stage Manager, and now tiled window control. None of those interaction metaphors have been expanded upon since their initial launch. I'm a "mac guy". I understood why Apple initi…

I have to say I've never found anything wrong with the alt-tab app I use on macOS. I wonder if you're referring the permissions it has to ask for? https://github.com/lwouis/alt-tab-macos

Alt tab is okay but it has performance issues (sometimes window switching is instant, sometimes there's a slight but perceptible delay). The devs have acknowledged it and said that it cannot be fixed.

Other pet peeves include the smallest window thumbnails are enormous and enabling mouse hover to switch windows causes me to switch to the wrong window, and thumbnails are often stale.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#229

Apple still get quite good revenue and best in class engineers, how does this allowed to happen?

Because it doesn’t noticeably affect revenue (yet?), and because presumably it’s not the “best-in-class” engineers who are making these decisions, but misguided designers and managers, or engineers who don’t know any better.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#230

Tahoe feels like at some level a manager had said "the rule is every menu item needs an icon" and just left individual engineers to figure out what to use.

I bet it’s simpler than that: I reckon the management don’t give a shit, and the engineers just got away with whatever they (incorrectly) thought was right because nobody whatsoever was critiquing their work.
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