It's hard to justify Tahoe icons • Hacker News Board

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#411

Post by walthamstow » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 3:25 PM UTC

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #393

walthamstow wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I hadn't noticed that they killed Launchpad! On my M3's keyboard, F4 is a magnifying glass icon for Spotlight. I've always used cmd+space, which has been around for a while.

What's even worse is I have disabled all search categories for Spotlight except Apps and System Settings. It's searching a list of 40 apps and idk maybe 200 settings, and it still sucks.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#412

Post by misterbishop » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 3:27 PM UTC

Posting about the finer points of UX while your whole page has a geocities snow animation.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#413

Post by tomaskafka » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 3:27 PM UTC

And then you have Sylvio Rizzi (of Reeder fame) just one-shotting the whole Liquid Glass tenet by using the prominent glass element to focus on the actual content instead of that hideous sidebar (a liquid glass element I hate the most, not just for a way it makes Xcode 26 sidebar 1 cm wider than Xcode 18 with the same content).

I would wear the t-shirt with Reeder screenshot to work if I worked at Apple, and would observe who notices it.

https://x.com/tomaskafka/status/2008168483608293873

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#414

Post by apricot » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 3:30 PM UTC

So much effort is spent in the computer industry to un-solve previously solved problems.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#415

Post by queenkjuul » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 3:31 PM UTC

I agree with the piece but i have a hard time admitting that a site with fake snow falling in front of the screenshots is dispensing sound design advice

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#416

Post by throwaway290 » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 3:31 PM UTC

I hate liquid glass a lot but it's hard to take seriously this when there are snowflakes falling in front of the text.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#417

Post by grufkork » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 3:31 PM UTC

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.

Besides the visual design, I've been thinking about the tech part of it. There's so many bits shifting, morphing and having state, that it sounds antithetical to what a UI is supposed to be: a consistent and unnoticeable tool to interact with software. I do like some of the things they do to free up screen space, but having components being to programmatically complex is bound to cause issues. Besides having your presentation desync with your data, your UI now has opportunities to desync with itself...

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#418

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 3:32 PM UTC

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #338

tempodox wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you see what happens when you do? I wouldn’t say it improves readability.

Yup: all the animation stops, the overlaid snowflakes disappear, and the background changes from blue to yellow. I haven't bothered to check the foreground/background contrast of the two versions, but I suspect that, although the yellow version will have less contrast, the removal of the snowflakes will make for a net benefit to readability for the average person.

[deleted]

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#419

Post by Noaidi » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 3:33 PM UTC

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…

> Yeah I'm hopeful that they spend the next software update atoning for their UI sins.

I have heard Liquid Glass was in development for two years, so I see no hope of them spending all that money over again. Nevermind all the developers who have redesigned apps for IOS26.

They could just re-release IOS 18, but that would piss me off as a developer.

This is why I left the Apple Ecosystem last month, I see no hope.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#420

Post by queenkjuul » Mon, Jan 05, 2026, 3:33 PM UTC

juancn wrote: post #150

robinhood wrote: post #38

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…

Seriously? UX in Linux is awful, there's no single desktop metaphor. You have hundreds of distros each with their quirks. There is no "Linux" other than the kernel. There's a lot more consistency in the Apple ecosystem. Don't get me started on the other crap with Linux distros: power management doesn't work, audio barely works, heck even though both Linux and MacOS use CUPS for printing, in MacOS it works way better.

CUPS has "just worked" on Ubuntu for me for like, as long as I can remember. If you use only GTK apps and either gnome or cinnamon, things are a lot more consistent than Windows (like, windows itself, not even 3rd party stuff)