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Free the Icons

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Re: Free the Icons

#131

Post by paradox460 »

ryukoposting wrote: post #91
al_borland wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing sticking outside of the icon draws the eye to it, which means your focus is at the edge instead of the center, which makes for a more error prone experience. Since the eyes are the cursor, this is a problem. Desktop and mobile don’t have this issue.

> The thing sticking outside of the icon draws the eye to it, which means your focus is at the edge instead of the center, which makes for a more error prone experience. And Apple decided this was a problem with icons, rather than a problem with the way they implemented their vision tracking? Believable, and laughable.

"You're looking at it wrong"

Re: Free the Icons

#132

Post by c0n5pir4cy »

3dGrabber wrote: post #117
soulofmischief wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some differentiation between elements must be sacrificed in order to build shared UX patterns between them. I think we can definitely go too far in either direction. 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.

> user fatigue Citation needed. What is user fatigue? Can it be empirically measured? Fatigued by what? Too much color? Lack of shape? Too much contrast? Lack of contrast? When is the last time you were "fatigued" by icons? Without hard facts the expression is just a wishy-washy way to promote a personal taste.

User fatigue is UX concept and can be measured.

I'd be surprised if squircles reduced user fatigue though - I think a good adjacent example is Googles new icons with the colours that all look similar. Users were complaining immediately that they had to look harder to find the correct app.

Another thing we use everyday - fonts - have differentiated visual spacing and shapes make them easier/quicker to read. So it would make sense for this to apply to icons that serve a similar purpose on a smaller scale.

Re: Free the Icons

#133

Post by geokon »

geraldcombs wrote: post #7
colesantiago wrote: post #4

It might be better to make Linux have these gorgeous icons now that Apple locked them up. Make the icons be Free on Free OSes like Linux.

What's been keeping Linux from having gorgeous icons up to this point?

There are plenty of Icon packs suitable to all aesthetic preferences. Just nobody is going to write a blog post ragging a some Icon Pack b/c if you don't like it then it's trivial to change to a "better" one (that said I still think the arguments in the blog post are interesting and worth considering)

To the blog's point - many KDE Icon Packs have non-uniform shapes (ex: I'm currently using Newaita)

Re: Free the Icons

#134

Post by wett »

dsego wrote: post #118
wpm wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haha yeah! Mac users just buy them to look cool while they write their whatever in the coffee shop! This is definitely not a preposterous and outdated observation/joke!

Wasn't there a trend where kids were just wearing dead apple watches as accessories? It's just a status symbol, like gold bracelets.

I just graduated college and I’ve never heard of this. Can’t find anything about it online either.

You can get a functional Apple Watch on Facebook for 50-100 bucks. So not much of a signal for status.

We have much sillier, trendier accessories to choose from :)

Re: Free the Icons

#135

Post by latexr »

Gigachad wrote: post #130
mrweasel wrote: post #123

There's so little joy and happiness left in computing. Reverting to the older style of icons, plus perhaps a few UI tweaks, certainly help bring a bit of whimsical back into the macOS platform. That's something many of us would love.

Liquid Glass was a good step in the right direction imo. A choice to make visual entertainment and beauty a priority over pure function. I feel like what computers really lost was sounds, we used to have so many joyful sounds and background music on computers while now they are all silent. I think it’s a tragedy the Nintendo switch broke the long history of music in the menus and apps.

> A choice to make visual entertainment and beauty a priority over pure function.

Except that (in my view, which is shared by many others though of course not universal) Liquid Glass is ugly as sin. Even if it worked properly I’d still rather not have it. But there’s also nothing entertaining or beautiful about unreadable overlapping text, flashing UI as you pan, visually cut off scrollbars, excessively rounded corners, or any from a plethora of bad decisions.

Liquid Glass is the worst of both worlds.

macOS used to be both functional and visually entertaining, and they’ve been removing that incompetently and for no apparent reason. One obvious case is removing an app from the Dock: It used to be that it went away in a quick puff of smoke with an appropriate sound; some versions back they removed the puff of smoke but kept the sound.

Re: Free the Icons

#136

Post by mfru »

nok22kon wrote: post #94
_0xdd wrote: post #59

It's still a bit jarring to me to see how far Apple embraced form over function with iOS and subsequently macOS. I remember reading the Human Interface Guidelines from the late Mac OS 9/early Mac OS X days and being taken aback by the level of detail and thought that went into those interfaces. Don't get me wrong, some things made no sense (brushed metal was... a choice) but there was a certain level of polish that I…

it's market changed it started as a computer for professionals now its for people who want to look cool. so form is much more important than function, it's literally what you buy

MacBooks have the best value/money ratio at the moment. The combination of battery life, processing power and touch pad UX are unmatched

Re: Free the Icons

#137

Post by eloisant »

MBCook wrote: post #71
jpease wrote: post #61

Seeing all those old icons makes me realize how much I miss them. Superficial, perhaps, but they were one of the things I loved about OS X when I made the switch back in 2005 or 2006.

No they were better . Whether someone likes the style better or not (I do) they were FAR more visually distinct from each other which made it much easier to find the program you wanted to use. Right now my dock is a soup of squircles. I have to scan multiple times to find icons even though I know roughly where they should be. They aren’t distinct. They don’t stand out. That was never a problem until last year. 40 yea…

I remember getting interested in an app because of the icon looked nice. Also couldn't use apps if the icon was too ugly and spoiled my beautiful dock.

Re: Free the Icons

#138

Post by pjerem »

> With color now so critical to tell icons apart, it should be no surprise that the new “Clear” and “Tinted” icon styles added in Tahoe are seeing so little uptake. As Adam Engst noted, “[I]t’s nearly impossible to identify a particular app when they’re all clear or tinted squircles, as you can see below. My brain just shuts down when it sees them.”

Also, that's true for a lot of normal application icons. Any Google application, including of course Chrome, but also Slack, Apple Photos, etc ... they all decided to use a "abstract red green yellow blue" logo on a white background. Of course, Google is the main culprit here. IntelliJ icons are another variant but still a pain to recognize and they add so much fun when they are mixed with Google ones.

And that's for the multicolor icons. Less problematic but still are "one color abstract on white background", like how am I supposed to distinguish Jira from Confluence ?

Also my personal bonus is that I have slimmed down high reflective glasses which creates chromatic aberrations so all those multicolor icons are dismantled when they are in my peripheral vision.

Re: Free the Icons

#139

Post by nayroclade »

happymellon wrote: post #110
FireBeyond wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All my devices are Apple: laptop, Studio, display, phone, iPad, watch... I will say that Apple has solidified on the design and reliability "recently". But let's not pretend that the MBP line, to pick on one, didn't go through some rough rough days. I've had laptops that had the delaminating screen, the 'single grain of sand can ruin it' butterfly keyboard, hell, I've had two models that had recalled logic boards. Ea…

You missed the late Intel MBPs which I remember heating up hotter than the sun and exhausting it out the back which made the touch bar uncomfortable to touch!

Some of the other examples you could maybe say are just poor industrial design or bad execution of a potentially workable idea, but the Intel MBP thermal debacle was definitely the most egregious example of Apple blindly pursuing form-over-function. They set a goal for ultra-slim laptop forms that the components they were using simply could never achieve. It would have been obvious from prototyping that temperature was a major problem, but whatever decision making process they had in place at the time overrode it. The best you can say is they seemed to have learned from their mistake.

Re: Free the Icons

#140

Post by bcraven »

pjerem wrote: post #138

> With color now so critical to tell icons apart, it should be no surprise that the new “Clear” and “Tinted” icon styles added in Tahoe are seeing so little uptake. As Adam Engst noted, “[I]t’s nearly impossible to identify a particular app when they’re all clear or tinted squircles, as you can see below. My brain just shuts down when it sees them.” Also, that's true for a lot of normal application icons. Any Google…

Your last paragraph is why I no longer have my lenses thinned. It's cheaper too!
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