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It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

tonsky.me

661–670 of 984 posts

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#662
post #580
post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 is the howling insanity that drove Microsoft to kill the start button, then reanimate it, then move it to the center of the task bar .

... thus falling into the Pitt of failure, where every way out is just a little too far away.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#663

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…

I don't mind Liquid Glass. What annoys me is how it's seemingly someone's full-time job at Apple to periodically make me relearn how to find my photos or open Safari tabs.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#664
post #643

Hard to justify snow falling in front of the text on a blog post about how a redesign isn’t helpful design.

The irony did not lost on me that an article about superfluous visual elements is overlayed by an unnecessary distraction. But maybe the point is to not be 100% utilitarian but to weave in a "warm" feeling of the season. It did give me that a fuzzy feeling for the first few second. Then I was bored; then annoyed. Which pretty much follow my feeling of using Tahoe: Cool -> Meh -> Uggg!

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#666

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re not looking far enough ahead. Liquid glass isn’t about Mac. It’s about VisionPro and wearables. This is a strategic play by Apple.

Apple just reduced Vision Pro production, but Liquid Glass was in motion well before that. What leaves me scratching my head is I never got the impression Apple believed in Vision Pro. It launched because after years of research, management wanted to see if the effort was worth continuing to invest in, but that wasn't a vote of confidence.

Did they commit to additional production of the Vision Pro? I read their announcement as quiet cancellation of VR products. They announced some kind of vaporware pivot, but I didn't read a single analyst projection that Apple ever intended to bring another wearable to market. Customer usage statistics of the Vision Pro are so low Apple hasn't even hinted about reporting on them.

Wearable products, outside of headphones, have a decade-long dismal sales record and even more abysmal user retention story. No board is going to approve significant investment in the space unless there's a viable story. 4x resolution and battery life alone is not enough to resuscitate VR/AR for mass adoption.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#667

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.

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 compatibil…

> Apple has deprioritized backwards compatibility, not user choice.

¿Por qué no los dos?

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#668
post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It's difficult for me to believe that you might be arguing all of the icons in the drop-down menus are beautiful... I know I have found them distracting.

In my opinion, this article had very clear and direct criticisms; they were hardly "anti-design bias". The increase in visual clutter is, for sure, a net loss for MacOS Tahoe.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#669
post #597

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Capitalism and competition produce the results I describe further down the comment. It escalates to planetary catastrophe

Let’s focus on the specific claims in your comment. > People got canned for resisting the corporate overlords. That’s capitalism Being told to do things by your boss is a problem as old as time. Except with capitalism you can change bosses — a luxury which has not existed throughout history.

Okay great. Now keep going with the rest of my comment and address the rest point by point. You’ll find that it expands from that first point, and describes the consequences of capitalism and competition as an organizing principle.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#670
post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Design is not just pretty visuals but also solving problems. The design of Tahoe doesn't solve any problems the previous designs didn't but it solves many of the previous problems worse than the designs before.
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