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It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

tonsky.me

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Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#311

Post by jorvi »

gnarlouse wrote: post #153
finnlab wrote: 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…

No, Liquid Glass was stunted from its conception. Any UI designer worth his salt could have pointed out the legibility issues immediately.

The fact that no one (in power) saw a problem with Liquid Glass shows that Jobs was right, that letting the MBAs take the power never works out. And he was wrong for appointing Cook. Remember that Jobs made MacBooks "expensive" (no more expensive or even cheaper than a Vaio or Portege) because he wanted to make great devices with a great UX and UI, which needed a certain level of investment. Jobs loved his users. Cook only loves his shareholders.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#313

Post by protoster »

dewey wrote: post #210
throwaway_ab wrote: post #8

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

The rage bait on HN works like clockwork. Usually it's the "dark mode" feature of that website that triggers this comment.

tonsky.me is a troll site that should be banned from being posted on HN

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#314

Post by afavour »

michaelbuckbee wrote: post #277
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…

The only "real" justification is that this is a long term play to figure out a UI and interaction shift that will work for general augmented reality devices (aka whatever device Apple releases five years and two iterations from now based on the Vision Pro.)

That’s the same logic that led to the Windows 8 UI being designed tablet first because that’s “where we’re all going”. Fast forward to Windows 10 where MS had to concede that, no, turns out it isn’t where we’re all going and rolled most of it back.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#315

Post by esafak »

TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #102
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…

Maybe Apple just got so many things right early on, then the people with experience slowly left and inexperienced people kept showing up and they felt compelled to keep making changes to justify their jobs. How do they justify their job if they can't roll out huge visible changes? So they rationalize whatever change they wanna make and keep advocating for it until they get the green light, regardless of whether or no…

When a feature reaches maturity, you have to be willing to shrink the team.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#316

Post by chuckadams »

Noaidi wrote: post #273
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…

Alan Dye ruined everything at Apple, no idea how he clung on for so long. You know he designed the horrible ios7 as well? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSzjcVZXolc https://tjkelly.com/blog/ios-7-sucks/ And he also takes credit for the dynamic island. It is an assault on my senses to see everything constantly moving around on my screen. I have been working with Macs since 1995, but this year is my first using Pixel…

I will take the bottom bar of iOS7 Safari any day over the wretched mess that it is now.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#317

Post by yoz-y »

Ah least partly I believe the inconsistencies are due to the design of SF Symbols. That is, they are named after what they look like, rather than what they represent. E.g.: “square.and.arrow.up” rather than “share”.

I do prefer this approach because it makes the symbols generally more useful for everything else than menu/toolbar icons. However as the article makes very obvious, unless a consistent scheme is placed in place, program developers will choose whatever they want to represent common actions.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#319

Post by codyb »

reddalo wrote: post #265
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.

MacOS 26 highlights were... and this was _Apple's_ opening modal...

"Icons that look like shit!"

and

"Notification summaries that may not be correct!"

In general I feel as if Apple's software feels buggier and less solid lately across my iPhone and my computers. Won't be upgrading the personal computer for as long as possible

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#320

Post by eddieroger »

bauerd wrote: post #272
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…

It’s not how you get promoted though. Plus implementing complex UIs is challenging which engineers like. The incentives are off.

It's not only not how you get promoted, it's a pretty good way to get canned as well. If you don't like the work you're being asked to do, your options are pretty limited to doing it or going elsewhere. There are a million UXers and engineers who'd love to work at Apple and would be happy making whatever their boss suggests.
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