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It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

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Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#261

Post by badsectoracula »

publicdebates wrote: post #196

I used to be a die hard UI perfectionist. I thought there were perfect UIs, and that you could go more or less away from or toward perfection with choices. But lately, over the past 5 or 10 years, it seems to me that perfection in UI is just as arbitrary and mutable as people's tastes and preferences. It's hard to admit it to myself, but I think my love for the early Mac OS and Windows 9x UIs was mere puppy love at f…

I've seen this logic (and similar) posted often and i disagree. By this logic, for example, i should find Windows 3.1 the best UI but actually i think Windows 2000 was peak Windows. Similarly i think Snow Leopard to be peak Mac OS X (i include macOS here) and while it was the first Mac OS X i used, i think i was old enough at the time to not be affected by nostalgia much (and it wasn't that long ago).

Also there are certainly better UIs than others, otherwise people wouldn't complain about software having bad UIs (see GIMP, older versions of Blender, etc).

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#262

Post by xg15 »

publicdebates wrote: post #196

I used to be a die hard UI perfectionist. I thought there were perfect UIs, and that you could go more or less away from or toward perfection with choices. But lately, over the past 5 or 10 years, it seems to me that perfection in UI is just as arbitrary and mutable as people's tastes and preferences. It's hard to admit it to myself, but I think my love for the early Mac OS and Windows 9x UIs was mere puppy love at f…

There is a big nostalgia factor which I think corresponds to the UIs you grew up with and are most familiar (would be Windows 2000 and XP for me) however I think it doesn't explain everything.

By that logic, you shouldn't have any particular preference for newer UIs (apart from how similar they are to your "primed" UIs) and you shouldn't ever able to discover new UI patterns you particularly like. You should also be unable to articulate why certain UIs are good or bad, or your reasons should be wildly inconsistent.

I don't think this is generally the case. There lots of articles like this one, and usually the takeaways are similar: UIs should be predictable and consistent and allow the user to reliably find actions and elements. Ideally they should also have markers and "fast paths" to allow more experienced users to find and do an action quickly. They should not overwhelm the user with too much irrelevant things.

That's the very high-level gist of it. There is actually lots of research in the details of it, which you can get a glimpse of in books like "The Design of Everyday Things".

They just don't seem to have a very high priority in current tech development for some reason.

That a good part of the industry seems to have essentially given up on GUIs, left them to the fashionistas and engagement maximizers and retreated to the command line and TUIs instead also doesn't bode well.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#263

Post by marcosdumay »

whynotmaybe wrote: post #116
flumpcakes wrote: post #65

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.

Imagine how usable computers will be once we remove every instance of text!

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#265

Post by reddalo »

sirwhinesalot wrote: post #247

It's hard to justify Liquid Glass in general. The wastefulness of flat design (in terms of space) married with the visual excess of skeuomorphism, but without even providing any affordances (does the sidebar being raised give you any new information on how to use a sidebar? No). If you're a designer at a top 10 S&P 500 company making 6 figures, you owe it to yourself to have some love for your craft. If a PM tells yo…

I agree, Liquid (Gl)ass is hideous. I'll stick to macOS Sequoia for the time being.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#267

Post by postalcoder »

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #224
postalcoder wrote: post #99

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.

Agreed. Lots of conflicting principles. Like, it doesnt make sense to increase the padding across the UI and at the same time, push quarter-screen layouts. I'm almost begging Apple to create something that I don't like, but in a way that's thoughtful and committed to that bit.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#268

Post by reactordev »

fainpul wrote: post #181
jval43 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what happens when the people issuing the orders (assign an icon for every task) are not the ones doing the task. And the ones doing it have no say in how it's done. Being involved and in the loop is how great software is made. Otherwise you can just outsource and have tickets completed.

> This is what happens when the people issuing the orders (assign an icon for every task) are not the ones doing the task. No, this is what happens when the people in charge of UI design have no clue what they're doing.

I'm afraid you both may be right in this case. "Make it blue!" - stakeholder. "Ok, but then we'll have to change everything for consistency." - VP of UI. Produces the horror that we have today.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#269

Post by layer8 »

bambax wrote: post #215
publicdebates wrote: post #196

I used to be a die hard UI perfectionist. I thought there were perfect UIs, and that you could go more or less away from or toward perfection with choices. But lately, over the past 5 or 10 years, it seems to me that perfection in UI is just as arbitrary and mutable as people's tastes and preferences. It's hard to admit it to myself, but I think my love for the early Mac OS and Windows 9x UIs was mere puppy love at f…

> But lately, over the past 5 or 10 years, it seems to me that perfection in UI is just as arbitrary and mutable as people's tastes and preferences. No. Perfection exists, but it's not how something works or looks. Perfection is stability. A bad solution that you know inside and out is preferable to a "better" solution that you have to spend time to think about every time you use it.

Stability is certainly a quality in itself, but how it works is pretty important as well. And how it looks also has some effect on how it works.

One issue of the recent redesigns is that they degrade rather than improve “how it works”.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#270

Post by doodlesdev »

These don't seem to be well thought at all. While reading the article, I've started wondering if they were chosen by an LLM after some developers decided it wasn't worth the trouble of going through every single application and choosing icons for every single menu item. That would explain a lot, in my opinion.
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