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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

#361
post #204
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…

Your Ableton and Logitech issues seem to be the same: screwed up access permissions. Not your fault, macOS has been sucking at it for a while. It’s not unheard of for System Settings to show you some app has some permissions, but in practice it doesn’t. What usually works is fully resetting permissions for an app: tccutil reset All To find the bundle ID for an app: mdls -raw -name kMDItemCFBundleIdentifier

> screwed up access permissions

Bane of my existence. I have wasted so much time on various apps not having some access they need.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#362

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…

It's quite simple: Most people who work in software now aren't actually very good at their jobs, at least in terms of how that job would have been defined 15 years ago. This is because incentives have changed such that being good at your job in your average mega-corp has very little to do with the outcome: To climb their ladder, you optimise for impact and move before you have to deal with the consequences.

When company is small and the leader is competent, it's easy to weed out incompetent employees. But beyond certain size, or when the leader themselves is incompetent, this becomes impossible, and the whole company starts to rot.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#363

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.

>will keep all others on Sequoia until this mess is resolved Good for you, unless Apple changes its mind my MBPro from 2019 will be stuck on Tahoe forever.

Hah, really? If you enter recovery mode and install an OS via network it installs the OS the device originally shipped with, right?

On an Intel-based Mac:

- If you used Option-Command-R to start up from Internet Recovery, you might get the latest macOS that is compatible with your Mac.

- If you used Shift-Option-Command-R to start up from Internet Recovery, you might get the macOS that came with your Mac, or the closest version still available.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/102655

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#364
I think that these icons are a great idea. With the rise of illiteracy, you can no longer count on people being able to read the labels in menus. What better way to ensure that Apple comes out on top in the post-apocalyptic wasteland than the genesis of a new primitive ideographic writing system? 10,000 years from now, when Apple users are grunting and hooting to argue about which icon means "make computer magic remember!", you'll all have been proven wrong.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#365

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…

Without hyperbole, Liquid Glass on Mac OS is visually the worst commercial desktop UX I have ever had the displeasure of using. It is amateurish and frankly, ill advised to have even tried to unify the aesthetic across devices so universally. I think much of what is on the phone works fine. There are some pain points and some bits that are visually awkward, but generally it works and is new and fresh, but on the Mac…

Even on mobile it took a few iterations from when the design was first introduced for it to be usable. Not good mind you, just usable.

Even Apple's own marketing material had screenshots where text was near impossible to read, even for someone with good eyesight: grey text on top of highly transparent glass... what were they thinking!?

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#366
post #198

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

The audacity to critique Apple's use of icons (which is objectively justified critique, IMO) while having animated snowflakes falling over the text and images on the site is something on an entirely different level. Thank goodness for Firefox reader mode. That animation is so incredibly distracting.

A personal blog is not the same as the UI of an operating system. More expressiveness is to be expected in a personal blog. That said it’s so easy to turn off that I was distracted for less than 5 seconds. How easy is it to turn off icons in the menu bar in Tahoe?

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#368

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.

Same. Wish I could go back to Ventura or even Mojave though. There are zero new features I use. Still hate the newish Settings app.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#370

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 will be part of it. The main driver though that they've been working on for years is trying to figure out how to add just enough desktop to UIKit to allow them to kill off AppKit as a separate thing.
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