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This keeps grids feeling proper, organised, and aligned, without feeling like the icons of Android Honeycomb.
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They have a new head designer too IIRC, but probably is going to take some time for him to slowly move away from the mess he inherited.
Alan Dye was brought in during the Jony Ive era when they were launching the first Apple Watch because he came from a fashion/print background. Before Apple really figured out what the Watch was going to be (a health/fitness accessory for your phone) they were going for the "luxury fashion" angle. Somehow when Ive left, Dye got put in charge of design even though he had zero experience in software design that anyone…
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They found having round icons made people look at the center, rather than the edges and corners. Since the UX relies entirely on where the user is looking, this made it more reliable. I remember reading it in the HIG when VisionOS came out and everyone was complaining about the shape. I went looking to see if there was a reason, and there was.
That's interesting, but I think this is solvable in better ways. If the VisionOS icon grid doesn't have a voronoi hit map, then IMO they're doing a stupid. There's a _lot_ of space between icons in the grid. It should be plenty of distance to reliably determine that you're looking nearer to the center of a particular one.
> In general, give an interactive item a rounded shape. People’s eyes tend to be drawn toward the corners in a shape, making it difficult to keep looking at the shape’s center. The more rounded an item’s shape, the easier it is for people to use their eyes to target it.
The page also talks about leaving enough visual space between elements as well as many other considerations for this type of interface.
https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...
>Apple didn’t just mess with their own icons. They also dictated the shape of every third-party app icon We will never know if this was AI generated or not, but I have started to flinch at this sentence structure.
It's legitimately a useful sentence to assist the point the author is making.
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Alan Dye was brought in during the Jony Ive era when they were launching the first Apple Watch because he came from a fashion/print background. Before Apple really figured out what the Watch was going to be (a health/fitness accessory for your phone) they were going for the "luxury fashion" angle. Somehow when Ive left, Dye got put in charge of design even though he had zero experience in software design that anyone…
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Why volunteer? Why not find a way to pay someone for the value of their time at market rate and release the product of their labor under a permissive license?
For the last 25+ years I've been hearing folks say: "why not find a way". But then not suggest anything more than that obvious answer. Please suggest an actual path forward, an actual plan that is more than just "figure it out". And the plan needs to address at least 1/2 of the points I made above. It's a "Hard Problem". The answer needs lots of time, likely money and at least two humans with strong drive to fix the…
It's almost like it's not a technical challenge, it's that getting good looking icons would require a unified userbase, and Apple has that but Linux does not.
I've got to disagree. I really disliked previously, when icon prominence could be wildly different because one icon takes up the full area with a big square, while another is a circle that necessarily has a significantly smaller area within the same extent. Icons from Apple were all nicely balanced in size, but third-party apps could be anything. Giving equal visual weight to each icon is an improvement. iOS was a st…
> Giving equal visual weight to each icon is an improvement. Equal visual weight is another way of saying less differentiated. > "Shape" hasn't disappeared as a distinct visual cue, as the area within the squircle is made of, well... different shapes. Shape refers to a boundary outline, not interior patterning. A square with polkadots is still shaped like a square. > A smaller icon is harder to click, because clickin…
An example of a nice compromise would be the macOS menu bar. Most status icons are monotone, which allows the ones with meaningful color differentiation to shine through without being drowned in the noise or increasing user fatigue.
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The bit about internal rumblings at Apple I definitely read from him but the rest is just things we saw play out publicly over the past decade.
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The bit about internal rumblings at Apple I definitely read from him but the rest is just things we saw play out publicly over the past decade.
I have no real love for Alan Dye but you should probably understand that Gruber feels it is a personal affront that someone might work for a company that is not Apple.
We all disliked Dye before he left. People were taking potshots at Apple's design direction under him for 10 years.