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It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

tonsky.me

231–240 of 984 posts

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#231
post #98

I’ve always respected macOS for being the 'stable' choice for not-as-techy people. But recent versions feel like a mess. Running Tahoe on my 2019 Mac Pro (Yes the cheese grater one) has been surprisingly frustrating. Simple things are broken: Ableton couldn't even trigger a microphone permission prompt, forcing me to meddle with a SQLite database, which is definitely not meant for end users to touch, just to get it w…

from what i've read on macrumors, Tahoe on the 2019 MP is quite messy. A lot of people complain about the UIs being sluggish.

Liquid Glass is horrible on my iPhone SE 2020. Slow and looks weird on the smaller screen. I tried to turn most effects off but it still is just worse in every way

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#233

It 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 th…

I'm feeling they're veering towards a "common ui" where every action is an icon like on a phone where every app is an icon. Maybe someday they'll completely remove the text to just keep the icons like the Office ribbon did, and I'm still confused with it.

In the early 2000s I helped an engineering from transitioning from the CAD software CATIAv4 to v5.

While v4 was pretty much text based in early v5 every item and action had an icon, often only an icon. The manual read something like this:

"To do ⌘ you navigate from the ⌙ page to the ⌟, while holding the middle mouse button. The⌇will open and you will see the ⌆."

I think they did that with good intentions. CATIA being a French product sold all over Europe and beyond, localization must have been a significant line item. The result was a nightmare though and they to toned the reliance on symbols down in subsequent versions.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#234
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The detail on the animations is, as usual, top notch, including the way snow doesn't just immediately turn off but stops falling slowly. I love it.

:-) and while doing this, the background turns yellow — why? how annoying it would be if something like this existed in real life - turning off the fan switches on the lights, and turning off the lights switches on the fan.

Lookup the Mitch Hedberg bit about hotel lamps with 3 way switches

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#235
post #98

I’ve always respected macOS for being the 'stable' choice for not-as-techy people. But recent versions feel like a mess. Running Tahoe on my 2019 Mac Pro (Yes the cheese grater one) has been surprisingly frustrating. Simple things are broken: Ableton couldn't even trigger a microphone permission prompt, forcing me to meddle with a SQLite database, which is definitely not meant for end users to touch, just to get it w…

Yeah I'm hopeful that they spend the next software update atoning for their UI sins. I remember being really excited for Liquid Glass, because it felt like a return to the good old days of Skeuomorphism, at least in some spirit. In reality, it was a botched delivery, I suspect for two reasons: 1. Trying to unify all of their design (in one year no less) against one style -- developed primarily on Apple Watch & the no…

> software update atoning for their UI sins

But how would they do that without scrapping the whole version?

Their marketing for this year heavily relies on liquid glass but if they remove the shiny stuff, it’s not very pretty, it’s just functional. Functional is what people with work to do appreciate, marketing people will want the shiny back now that it was introduced.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#236
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!

>Ok, you can click on the sun icon to fix it by switching to night mode, but then... aaaaargh!

TBF, I felt so perfectly trolled with this one I couldn't help but chuckle... :)

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#237
post #207
post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least there’s a button to turn it off. But yes, I agree.

Confusingly, because it stops the "particle spawning" but not the animation! At first I thought it just changed the background to orange.

It helps to reload, as the setting is sticky.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#238
Given the headline, the article took longer to deal with the alignment issue that I was expecting! However, I noticed that some of the screenshots were less affected than I remembered, so I checked my own OS. It turns out that Apple has, sort of, addressed the mismatched alignment problem in its own apps.

Oh, but Google hasn't, so Chrome's icons are still all over the place. Apparently, that's not for the OS to sort out, but every single individual app.

Oh, while some of the menus in Preview are fixed (File, Edit), others aren't (View, Tools). So it's not just down to each app to manage its own icon alignment, but each menu!

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Steve Jobs died 14 years ago. If we're attributing this to those in charge, Jony Ive's departure is much more correlated.

Apple's UI design started going downhill with the iOS 7 "flat design" release which was very shortly after Steve's death, and seemed to correspond to Ive being given a little too much free rein in the leadership vacuum that followed. Jobs had his own flaws, but he was definitely a huge part of why Apple's UI design (and product design in general) has historically been as good as it has.

Pretty sure iOS 7 was regarded as awful on launch and then a little while later people decided it was amazing and lovely to look at once the kinks were ironed out.

People just don't like new things that change what they are used to.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#240

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.

> And it pisses me off that there's no easy way to upgrade to Sequoia (15).

Open the Mac App Store and search for Sequoia.

https://apps.apple.com/app/macos-sequoia/id6596773750

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