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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

#392
post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Or you could just lighten up and get a sense of humor...

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's weird; almost the only issue I don't have with Tahoe on a 2023 M2 Mini is its performance. Do you have transparency enabled?

Yes, I have 'reduce transparency' set to true. Overnight after upgrade the UI became noticably sluggish. The outstanding example is Spotlight. For years since the M1 release I have been able to bring the bar up and type C-H-R then Enter, in ~500ms I guess, and I would always get Chrome. Now, I have to wait another 1-2 seconds for it to think. If I hit enter before it has finished thinking, Spotlight goes away and not…

Fair enough. With Tahoe's removal of Launchpad, I assume you're talking about Spotlight in the sense of what appears when you press the Launchpad icon (F4)? Anyway, I can confirm that I also get very weird laggy behaviour from it—sometimes a double-press is interpreted as two presses, sometimes as just one.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#395
post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can change the window size in settings

I did. It's set to small and still much too large for me.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#396
post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's somewhat understandable. A lot of us felt at the time that surely laptops and tablets would converge. Otherwise, what a waste of hardware. But it hasn't really happened. From a hardware perspective, things have gotten closer with the iPad's magnetic keyboard. But, I still find that the iPad as laptop replacement to be a compromise that I may tolerate for travel but don't love for a lot of laptop work.

Magnetic keyboard on the iPad is such a lose. Some Thai hacker got full macOS running on his iPhone over Christmas. Apple are cowards collecting dividends.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#397

I never disliked an OS as much as I dislike what Apple is doing with MacOS (and iOS by extension). I've been with MacOS for 20 years, but I've switched at home to Linux full time 2 years ago and I don't regret it. At work I'm forced to be on MacOS. It's concerning how Apple doesn't care anymore about user needs, usability, design and consistency. Where it was the best OS in the past for me, it's not anymore. Other OS…

Consider yourself lucky to have been on that side of the fence instead of suffering the vagaries of Windows since ME.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#398

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…

I agree.

My first rebuttal was going to be Windows 8, but that was actually a lot better.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#399
Looking at a bunch of developers assume expertise in interface design while shitting all over design as a field used to be a rage bait situation for me, but it’s fruitless. I’ve been both, and I was a developer long before I was a designer. I don’t think you have to be an expert to criticize an interface, and you definitely don’t have to like it, and some number of designers undoubtedly agree. But I encourage you to consider that the osmosis-learned nibbles about design and that Edward Tufte book you enjoyed might not qualify you to judge the competence of the better part of an entire set of professions. Most developers don’t even know what actual problems designers are tasked to solve, let alone evaluate their efficacy. Developers are a lot better at knowing when they know something than realizing when they don’t. NOBODY is good at discussing what they’re used to with what’s objectively good or bad. The “I don’t care what anybody says — this is just objectively bad” attitude is something that arises with literally any interface change in any major product. Developers have a very different usage style than most people and when you get a bunch of people in one place agreeing with each other without any outside voices, that’s an echo chamber at best and a circle jerk at worst. To be clear, I’m not even discussing, let alone defending the design: I’m countering the cocky obnoxious designer hate that pops up in these threads.

PS— Edward Tufte has some interesting perspectives on data visualization but the reason he’s so popular with the engineering crowd is because he was an engineer and he makes cut-and-dried rules about things that are easy to understand without any design education, and explains them in a way that appeals to engineers. Reading that book is better than nothing, but it’s gives laypeople about as much understanding of design as a “[language] cookbook” gives laypeople an understanding of programming.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#400
I suspect this sort of thing starts to happen when UX decision-making gets decentralized. No single god-king would allow six or more different new icons; the lack of uniformity is obviously nonsensical to anybody, but not necessarily to a disorganized collective of anybodies.
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