Icons in menu bars serve the same purpose as icons elsewhere: quickly identifying buttons. I don't know why this is such a big deal.
Did you read the article? They give great examples.
Sweet Jeebus, macOS 27 Golden Gate Removes the Dumb Icons from Menu Items
111–120 of 173 posts
Re: Sweet Jeebus, macOS 27 Golden Gate Removes the Dumb Icons from Menu Items
#112Icons in menu bars serve the same purpose as icons elsewhere: quickly identifying buttons. I don't know why this is such a big deal.
Did you read the article? They give great examples.
Yes, I have been listening to Gruber complain about them for a year now. His critique is that "Apple's HIG used to say not to," not anything about what actually makes them bad.
Curiously, I haven't heard him talk about Apple Intelligence in Shortcuts, or any of the cool new features in Tahoe. Design is how it looks, I guess.
Re: Sweet Jeebus, macOS 27 Golden Gate Removes the Dumb Icons from Menu Items
#113Icons in menu bars serve the same purpose as icons elsewhere: quickly identifying buttons. I don't know why this is such a big deal.
Or when you're asked to perform a task remotely or whatever, with a user who uses a language other than English. You WILL appreciate icons.
Re: Sweet Jeebus, macOS 27 Golden Gate Removes the Dumb Icons from Menu Items
#114Sometimes who can't be bothered to make the text on their website not extremely tiny when viewing on mobile shouldn't be writing multi-page rants on the other people's UI.
Just double tap the text you want to zoom to, as has been the way for nearly 20 years.
Though it’s been broken for ten.
Re: Sweet Jeebus, macOS 27 Golden Gate Removes the Dumb Icons from Menu Items
#115Good grief, hopefully in v28 Lemay will also throw away the absolute crap that is Liquid glass. Aesthetically it looks horrible, it slows my iPhone 13 — which never before lagged in all its life since iOS 15 – to a maddening crawl. Liquid glass should be taught in design school as an example of what not to do when you design UX. And also in business school as a case of how middle management can fudge up something tha…
> Aesthetically it looks horrible, it slows my iPhone 13 — which never before lagged in all its life since iOS 15 – to a maddening crawl I have an iPhone 13 mini and have not experienced this.
You're lucky then. I wish I could easily downgrade on iOS.
Re: Sweet Jeebus, macOS 27 Golden Gate Removes the Dumb Icons from Menu Items
#116Icons in menu bars serve the same purpose as icons elsewhere: quickly identifying buttons. I don't know why this is such a big deal.
It's one for one or two items to have icons. The vegetarian dishes on a restaurant can have the leaf icon for instance. But it would be stupid if every single dish did. The whole point is that icons pop out so putting them on EVERY item is just counterproductive.
Re: Sweet Jeebus, macOS 27 Golden Gate Removes the Dumb Icons from Menu Items
#117For those that haven’t seen this very well done write up about Tahoe’s use of icons, I would definitely recommend it: https://tonsky.me/blog/tahoe-icons/
Great article.
Main lesson seems to be, it's good to put icons on the standard, most frequently used actions. And make them colorful. That helps the eye find them.
Edit: also consistency and legibility. So basically "don't design it so it's bad!"
Re: Sweet Jeebus, macOS 27 Golden Gate Removes the Dumb Icons from Menu Items
#118Icons in menu bars serve the same purpose as icons elsewhere: quickly identifying buttons. I don't know why this is such a big deal.
The main problem with icons is that they need to be universally understood, otherwise they are a usability issue. In the past, this was achieved through Skeuomorphism and consistency across software.
However, as time has gone on Skeuomorphism has lost value, because people don’t necessarily recognize the old things they’re trying to reference. So we’ve been seeing a movement away from that for the past 10 years. But, then we run into another issue: the icons are new, and therefore unknown if not obvious. In addition, every software company seems to go their own way and have their own “style”, which is actually a big problem because users have to keep an absurd amount of iconography in their minds to use all their day to day software.
Text solves this, because text can inherently be read.
Re: Sweet Jeebus, macOS 27 Golden Gate Removes the Dumb Icons from Menu Items
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
I disagree. https://litter.catbox.moe/3h3atpy3s8ny7ify.png is a lot less readable than https://litter.catbox.moe/tqims20z6biymm3y.png
1) Double tap. 2) Reader mode. There are two excellent solutions built into your browser!
I am literally showing the reader mode view in my screenshot. I know how to work around badly designed websites.
Re: Sweet Jeebus, macOS 27 Golden Gate Removes the Dumb Icons from Menu Items
#120Probably no one caused more damage than John Ive to Apple (post-Jobs period). Removal of skeuomorphism, removal of essential ports, making MacBooks so thin that they wouldn’t work without overheating to name a few. I am so glad he is gone now, it’s not all bells and whistles for Apple now, but at least it’s way more pleasing to own Apple devices any more.
I strongly dislike Ive's influence overall, but skeuomorphism made it incredibly difficult and cost-prohibitive for a single indie developer to make an app that felt like a polished first-party experience for iOS. I'm glad it's gone. You're still welcome to do it if you want and you have the whimsy and artistic talent (or design team) for it.