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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

#431

Post by finnlab »

coldtea wrote: post #348
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…

> 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 working. You shouldn't have to do any of that. Even if Live couldn't trigger the permission prompt, you should be able to give it a microphone permission in Settings.

For whatever reason, apps need to request the microphone permission first to show up in the settings menu. For other permissions you can drag/drop the application into the settings window, but not for the microphone permission.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#432

Post by throwaway270925 »

moogly wrote: post #26
master_crab wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, but you can turn it off with the snowflake icon at the top.

True, but the site owner clearly despises their prospective readers. I found it more prudent to close the tab and flag the submission.

Flagging a submission just because they added a little whimsy for the holidays to their personal website which you dont like? What a sad, sorry, hate-filled way to go through life.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#433

Post by dxdm »

ziml77 wrote: post #226
throwaway_ab wrote: post #8

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

It's easy to justify: it's cute. Just like the other options up at the top. If you click the sun it turns out the lights and turns your cursor into a flashlight. And it has an actual hamburger as the icon for the menu.

Cute AND annoying. Like a racoon. Please don't fling racoons at people, not even for christmas.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#435

Post by InfiniteQwert »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #111
Zealotux wrote: post #81

Tahoe and Liquid Glass™ solidified for me the idea that Apple completely dropped the ball when it comes to design. Clearly they needed an a-hole in charge, Jobs would've crucified a few people. It's painful to see the decay, update after update, into a more confusing, cluttered, and tacky experience.

>Jobs would've crucified a few people Jobs liked to talk this side of the business up because creatives were the substantial part of the business. Now they sell to everybody it doesn't matter so much. The average person won't even notice the complaints in the original article. They aren't sensitive to it in the way that creative people are.

They don't notice, but they can _feel_ it. My aging mother, god bless, doesn't give a crap about design.. but she updated her iPhone and asked me what I thought about it because she hates it. And it wasn't nitpicking design choices - she just said 'it's so hard for me to do anything now and know where anything is'

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#436

Post by ghaff »

carlosjobim wrote: post #422
ghaff wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

iPads are great devices for non-tech savvy people who need a computer for stuff like writing and reading documents and e-mails, planning travel and making reservations, keeping in touch with people on messaging and social media. That's a gigantic market segment, and Apple has to be very careful to not make those devices complicated or vulnerable.

Exactly. I tend not to use my iPad that much except when traveling--partly because I have an old MacBook that lives on my dining room table. If I didn't have that I would certainly use my iPad more (and would doubtless get more comfortable using it for more purposes).

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#437

Post by wang_li »

bargainbin wrote: post #377
torben-friis wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My main gripe with Liquid Glass is how distracting it is. Many top bars have become a group of bubbles over the content, which we’ve been conditioned to see as floating notifications for years. Things shine and move when they don’t require attention, just because. The end result is that my OS feels like a browser without ad blocker. As much as people hated flat design, at least it didn’t grab your attention with tack…

My main gripe is that the visual shenanigans alone were enough of a change, why rearrange the buttons?! In the early iOS beta, the new tab button was at the top of Safari, as far away from your thumbs as it could be. Genuinely believe Apple’s design team are rudderless or have unintentionally been forced to produce something to justify someone’s career, because this whole thing is disastrous.

> to produce something to justify someone’s career,

This is the curse of being a UI designer for a long lived product. Once a thing has been created and future work consists of 99% code and 1% UI, your UI designer job has evaporated. And so we see that everything changes every major release of an operating system, so the UI people can justify their pay checks.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#438

Post by delecti »

paulcole wrote: post #88
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…

I thought that was supposed to be Apple’s thing. “We decide how to make it and you decide to buy it or not.” It makes it seem like they’re designing for you until they’re not.

Importantly, that philosophy relies on the result having merit, and working cohesively on its own terms, even if it's not your preference. Like, if I go to a restaurant that refuses me sugar for my tea, it better be darn good tea.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#439

Post by hopelite »

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 an extremely uncomfortable conflict and contradiction between corporate organization, finance “capitalism”, engineering, and creatives; in addition to individual vs group dynamics.

Corporate structure is driven by exploiting and using value for and by a de facto nobility (the c-suite).

Finance “capitalism” seeks to extract value, be it short or long term.

Engineers are motivated by building and creating value.

Creatives are driven by changes for changing’s sake to remain or get a seat at the table.

The uncomfortable reality is that these are inherently conflicting interests that are pulling and pushing each other, but mostly top down.

It’s essentially the “colonialist” exploitative model of existence using creators to leverage rather than extract natural resources, a system that is increasingly not suitable for the modern, technological, commoditized world. AI is a good example of that; it arguably diminishes the value to n degrees of both engineers and creatives, while also leaving the “nobility” and their neo-aristocratic corporate system out in the open exposed as revealing it not only as having no clothes on, but utterly abusive, useless, and downright evil. And no, that’s across the whole political spectrum, not just the opposite of your silly system approved political sport team.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#440

Post by threetonesun »

dijit wrote: post #398
etempleton wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A lot of Windows 8 I liked, but Windows perpetually suffers from needing to support older versions of Windowing systems, or some corporate usecase from the early 90s that carries too much money to ever say no to implementing.

Windows 11 is, I think, worse than MacOS these days, half for still dragging the past along with it, and half for introducing a second start menu just for ads.

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