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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

#501

Post by 12_throw_away »

qn9n wrote: post #239
nicoburns wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple's UI design started going downhill with the iOS 7 "flat design" release which was very shortly after Steve's death, and seemed to correspond to Ive being given a little too much free rein in the leadership vacuum that followed. Jobs had his own flaws, but he was definitely a huge part of why Apple's UI design (and product design in general) has historically been as good as it has.

Pretty sure iOS 7 was regarded as awful on launch and then a little while later people decided it was amazing and lovely to look at once the kinks were ironed out. People just don't like new things that change what they are used to.

> then a little while later people decided it was amazing and lovely to look at

Sorry, who decided this? Which people exactly?

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#502

Post by protoster »

draven wrote: post #469
protoster wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

tonsky.me is a troll site that should be banned from being posted on HN

What's trollish about his blog ?

Author seems to enjoy writing posts that get lots of votes on site that I would describe as eye-rending, especially the "normal" yellow color scheme. It's aggressively unpleasant to read.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#503

Post by oneeyedpigeon »

ascendantlogic wrote: post #463
oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Even if they were being hypocritical, I think the impact of briefly-bad UI on someone's blog post pales in comparison with bad UI in a product of macOS scale.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#504

Post by davidivadavid »

dxdm wrote: post #467
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 i…

I'm not intimately familiar with the UI/UX principles behind Liquid Glass so I could be wrong, but the main difference I see here is that in the second screenshot, on the Reeder app on the left, the "floating" section is used for emphasis on the main content area (right hand side), while in the Finder screenshot on the right, it's the navigation menu on the left that is floating, and brings unneeded emphasis to itself.

Looking at it for 30s, I still don't understand what Apple was trying to do. What am I supposed to believe happens to the table as it goes under that floating menu? It clearly doesn't seem to continue all the way to the left edge of the window. Why not? If not, why bother with that whole floating menu concept if the underlying content arbitrarily stops at the menu?

The most surprising part to me is how people keep calling that nonsense "skeuomorphic" when it doesn't replicate any kind of physical intuition known to mankind. It's just made up physics that looks dumb.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#505

Post by unethical_ban »

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.

I'll chime in with the others to say that "amateur" users still notice, even if my dad isn't calling me to say "Son, why does this new MacOS version have different icons for the `New` action across apps?"

I had to help him "get his bookmarks back" meaning see his bookmarks toolbar in Firefox. He must have hit a keyboard combo on accident. Since Firefox hides the menus by default, I had to tell him to tap Alt to see the menu, after which he was easily guided to View > Toolbars > Bookmarks Toolbar.

Bad UI design for novices is felt, if not conveyed outright.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#506

Post by wmeredith »

nicoburns wrote: post #123
rco8786 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Steve Jobs died 14 years ago. If we're attributing this to those in charge, Jony Ive's departure is much more correlated.

Apple's UI design started going downhill with the iOS 7 "flat design" release which was very shortly after Steve's death, and seemed to correspond to Ive being given a little too much free rein in the leadership vacuum that followed. Jobs had his own flaws, but he was definitely a huge part of why Apple's UI design (and product design in general) has historically been as good as it has.

> Apple's UI design started going downhill with the iOS 7 "flat design" release which was very shortly after Steve's death, and seemed to correspond to Ive being given a little too much free rein in the leadership vacuum that followed.

This was so obvious to me. The damage done to Apple by losing Jobs as their most vicious editor was almost instantly noticeable.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#507

Post by philistine »

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.

How is that different with other companies? Like with Windows? Do you have a choice of UI when loading the OS? Are there ways to remove the taskbar and replace it with a third-party one? Can you change all the core OS shortcuts?

The fact Apple makes and sells the only hardware to run macOS does not mean the software is fundamentally different from the rest of the industry. Apple has deprioritized backwards compatibility, not user choice.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#508

Post by WhyNotHugo »

flumpcakes wrote: post #65

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 seems like Apple's hardware design is universally loved.

To be fair, the bar is really really low in terms of mobile hardware. It’s just really hard (and expensive) for new players to design, build and manufacture hardware with competitive processing power.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#509

Post by oneeyedpigeon »

walthamstow wrote: post #411
oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I also never had a problem launching apps from Launchpad (I guess because that was its sole purpose, and it did it well) while I think it was pretty much day 1 that I encountered an app that just refused to show up in the Spotlight replacement.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#510

Post by staplers »

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.

Uber, Airbnb, Robinhood all took off because they created easy to use beautiful apps (compared to their predecessors).

The anti-design bias in this forum is genuinely unhinged. I see some saying the entire destruction of the natural world stems from design lol.

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