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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

#461

Post by drnick1 »

xnx wrote: post #455
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…

> If a PM tells you to shove a UI style More than likely designers are making up work to justify their jobs. Not good for your career if you admit the desktop interface was perfected in ~1995.

This. The Windows 95 interface was optimal in many regards. Given how much faster computers are now, every UI operation should just be instantaneous. It's ridiculous that desktop interfaces and Web pages became heavier as computers got faster, so that a heavy website today does not load meaningfully faster than a plain text webpage in 1995.

Edit: On Linux, you have desktop environments like LXQt for this. Unfortunately, last time I checked, Wayland was not supported.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#462

Post by paulcole »

jollyllama wrote: post #447
paulcole wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you mean to reply to me? The person I replied to said, "that interface designers or even the average computer user understands more than in 1992 is highly implausible on its face" Think of computer users at the ages of 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, and 80 in 1992. For each group, estimate their computer knowledge when they sat down at a computer in 1992. Now do the same exercise for the year 2026. How is it highly…

> Did you mean to reply to me? I think so. > The person I replied to said, "that interface designers or even the average computer user understands more than in 1992 is highly implausible on its face" Yes, I agree with this person. >How is it highly implausible on its face that the average computer user in 2026 understands less than the average computer user in 1992? I don't think it is. Particularly with the average…

> Particularly with the average user, the bar of understanding is lower now.

Can you explain how this is true given that everyone using a computer today has had a lifetime of computer use whereas in 1992 many people were encountering computers for the first time?

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#463

Post by ascendantlogic »

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #291
throwaway_ab wrote: post #8

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

It's Christmas, lighten up. I think the animation adds a glorious bit of irony: "look, here's a horribly distracting effect that is almost designed to make it difficult to read the article, and it's still not as egregious as Apple's Tahoe design!"

I couldn't tell if the author was being ironic or just breathtakingly hypocritical.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#464

Post by massysett »

williamdclt wrote: post #452
queenkjuul wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I finally talked my company into letting me swap out my MacBook pro for some little Dell. After the last year of updates, my Mac has stopped resuming from sleep reliably, everything is ugly, they took the already barely usable (imo) finder and system settings and found exciting new ways to make them worse. Sadly corporate security means os updates were not optional. I've never really liked macOS but it feels like som…

> already barely usable (imo) finder been using a Mac for years, and to this day I don't know how it's possible to navigate directories using Finder. It only has shortcuts for a few folders by default (photos, documents...) and doesn't have a button to navigate to the parent folder. I have literally no idea how to get to my home directory, I need to use the CLI

> doesn't have a button to navigate to the parent folder.

Command + Up Arrow, which is also visible if you click on the "Go" menu. There is also a toolbar button that shows the entire set of enclosing directories; offhand I can't remember whether this is visible by default. There is also "View -> Show Path Bar" which shows all this information at the bottom of the window.

> I have literally no idea how to get to my home directory

Go -> Home, which shows a shortcut key for this, Command-Shift-H.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#465

Post by paulcole »

delecti wrote: post #438
paulcole wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Like, if I go to a restaurant that refuses me sugar for my tea, it better be darn good tea.

But if you demand sugar in your tea it doesn't matter how good the tea is, right? You are not going to like that restaurant.

> Importantly, that philosophy relies on the result having merit, and working cohesively on its own terms, even if it's not your preference

I am too dumb to understand what this means.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#466

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #224
postalcoder wrote: post #99

This is an excellent article. Apple has been rudderless on the interaction design front for over a decade now. The windowing mess is evidence of it. We now have the cmd+tab (app switcher), Spaces, Mission Control, (full screen) split screen, Stage Manager, and now tiled window control. None of those interaction metaphors have been expanded upon since their initial launch. I'm a "mac guy". I understood why Apple initi…

I strongly believe we need to return to the drawing board and design a Window Environment from scratch because we've gone so far down the "everything's a mess" route that it's impossible to work our way out again. Here's an example: panes, tabs, windows, apps, spaces. These things all fight against each other, have their own little silos, get treated differently by every single app, etc, etc.

I feel like there are a million reasons why this is the wrong choice. There are probably 10 xkcd comics alone that explain why this is a bad idea.

"Let's throw every away and start from scratch" is a tempting idea, but it rarely works. Even taking your example of panes, windows, tabs, apps, and spaces, each of those have a separate and identifiable use case that, IMO, is valid. At least in my mind, I have a mental model around where panes, windows, tabs, and apps are appropriate, and I personally rarely use spaces (though I certainly understand people who like them), and they've never bother me because I can safely ignore them.

And when you look at the issues identified in the article, they all seem very fixable to me. Fixable starting with Apple getting new design leadership, and given the guy responsible for Liquid Glass jumped to Meta, sounds like it was a good thing for Apple.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#467

Post by dxdm »

tomaskafka wrote: post #413

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 ob…

I don't understand the point you're trying to make. I clicked on your link to your own post on x.com and found pretty much the same text, plus a screenshot that does not explain anything - potentially because I don't know how to get to a full-screen-sized version of that image, but I actually doubt that would help.

If it can't be explained in words here on this site, could you please tell me what I'm looking at/for in the screenhot?

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#468

Post by canucker2016 »

One of the touted advantages when Microsoft introduced the Office product suite was the integration and consistency of the apps. Whether you opened Word, Excel or Powerpoint, when the user wanted to quit the app, they'd use the same command - they didn't need to realize that the Quit command at a certain location in one menu had the same functionality as the Exit menu that was positioned in another location in another menu in another app.

Same name, same menu location, same shortcut key.

Much easier to train yourself or your employees - learn one app and you'd be familiar with the other apps in the Microsoft Office product line.

Other companies that tried to create Office-like suites didn't/couldn't create the consistency amongst the apps since they had to acquire the missing apps from other software makers to complete their own Office-like suite.

But this consistency was tempered by common sense.

The goal of shortcut keys was to make common actions quickly accessible to users. But for consistency, the same shortcut key should be used across apps.

When Mail/Outlook was introduced, users found that CTRL-F was bound to the Find command. Makes sense on first thought. But what's the most common command in an email app - is it "Find" or is it "Forward email". Especially when the prevailing standard for CTRL-F in email apps was CTRL-F.

When Bill Gates angrily complains that he's always invoking the Find command by mistake, Program Managers are willing to make exceptions to dogma.

It'd be interesting to compare the menus in Apple's iWork suite (Pages / Numbers / Keynote) to see if their menu items /shortcut keys are consistent or unique.

Note that this Microsoft Office suite consistency didn't necessarily extend to other Microsoft apps. There's no one managing menu item consistency company-wide at Microsoft, just within Office.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#469

Post by draven »

protoster wrote: post #313
dewey wrote: 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

What's trollish about his blog ?

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#470

Post by yosser »

rantingdemon wrote: post #460
yosser wrote: post #347

I've just gone through the rather painful and protracted process of reverting from Tahoe to Sequoia.'Reverting' rather than 'downgrading' since Tahoe is in no sense an upgrade. I consider myself quite tolerant of UX quirks, iPhones are still pleasant to use, particularly if you select 'reduce motion' from the accessibility settings. Tahoe though, bugs aside, is just genuinely unpleasant to use and interact with. By f…

Did you follow a guide to revert black?

Sort of, but be warned it wont automatically revert a time machine backup of your Tahoe files to a Sequoia system, you have to manually copy them. Similarly you have to recovery boot into disk utility to flatten your hard drive before installing Sequoia from (say) a memory stick.

It all seems a bit needlessly tricky. Frankly though - for me at least - it's worth the trouble.

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