Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

tonsky.me

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 984 posts

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#251

Post by Y_Y »

postalcoder wrote: post #148
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.

I agree. Jobs being around for the birth of the GUI probably played a big role in that. Pushing past text-based terminals to graphical interfaces meant having to spend every moment thinking about purposeful interaction and design.

Maybe we could use Vison Pro to recreate a visit to Xerox Parc in 1979 to inspire the current designers to use UI patterns that gave been working well for fifty years.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#252

Post by titzer »

publicdebates wrote: post #196

I used to be a die hard UI perfectionist. I thought there were perfect UIs, and that you could go more or less away from or toward perfection with choices. But lately, over the past 5 or 10 years, it seems to me that perfection in UI is just as arbitrary and mutable as people's tastes and preferences. It's hard to admit it to myself, but I think my love for the early Mac OS and Windows 9x UIs was mere puppy love at f…

Imagine if Apple snuck into your house at night and rearranged your partner's face.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#253

Post by reactordev »

Apple design has a designer problem. For far too long they worshiped the Ives of design, distilled it until there was no flavor left, and then lost their Oracle. Ever since, they have produced sub-par UX/UI experiences. They don't follow their own guiding principals, and they let shareholders and executives tell them what they should do. They figured they mastered remote work before anyone else and rested on their laurels while the industry innovated itself beyond. What was once the pinnacle of user experience is now sub-standard. It takes an extra second to unlock my phone now because of the stupid icon animations. The glass effect on the desktop doesn't look good at all. It didn't in 2006 with Vista, it doesn't now. The only thing keeping me on the Mac is the unified memory M series chips and *nix pedigree.

Soon, I'll get my hands on one of those fancy AMD AI Max's and go Linux everywhere.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#254

Post by bloppe »

finnlab wrote: post #98

I’ve always respected macOS for being the 'stable' choice for not-as-techy people. But recent versions feel like a mess. Running Tahoe on my 2019 Mac Pro (Yes the cheese grater one) has been surprisingly frustrating. Simple things are broken: Ableton couldn't even trigger a microphone permission prompt, forcing me to meddle with a SQLite database, which is definitely not meant for end users to touch, just to get it w…

I wonder if this is a symptom of a broader shift away from cathedral-style "owned" software toward bazaar-style free software, perhaps due to the ascendant SaaS model sucking investment away from traditionally shipped product teams, or if Apple is just sleepwalking down the slope of mediocrity.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#255

Post by kenty »

tempodox wrote: post #221
rob74 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes you need an animation to turn your site into a special snowflake of a site, and what better way to do that than to use a snowflake animation? TBF, you can turn it off by clicking on the snowflake icon in the top right corner. But then the background turns from blue into an annoying shade of yellow. Ok, you can click on the sun icon to fix it by switching to night mode. But then... aaaaargh!

It seems like the author went out of their way to prove they can make an even worse UI than Apple. I suspect they succeeded.

This is exactly my thoughts. If you are reading this, author, please either make the snowflakes less distracting or toggleable. They are a pain on mobile.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#256

Post by wazoox »

ajross wrote: post #69

The irony here isn't so much that it's the minutiae of the menu design that's wrong, it's the top-bar menus as a whole are a dead paradigm . Nothing uses them anymore. Leave the mac for a moment and go to your windows device. Pull up Chrome. No menu. The file browser, nope. Not in the terminal either. VSCode still has one![1] But the office suite doesn't anymore[2]. And obviously, the proximate cause of that is that…

Firefox has the option to display the menu bar. I like it.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#258

Post by layer8 »

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.

Count me as someone who never turned around on the iOS 7+ flat design being a usability degradation.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#259

Post by gnarlouse »

gessha wrote: post #235
gnarlouse wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I'm hopeful that they spend the next software update atoning for their UI sins. I remember being really excited for Liquid Glass, because it felt like a return to the good old days of Skeuomorphism, at least in some spirit. In reality, it was a botched delivery, I suspect for two reasons: 1. Trying to unify all of their design (in one year no less) against one style -- developed primarily on Apple Watch & the no…

> software update atoning for their UI sins But how would they do that without scrapping the whole version? Their marketing for this year heavily relies on liquid glass but if they remove the shiny stuff, it’s not very pretty, it’s just functional. Functional is what people with work to do appreciate, marketing people will want the shiny back now that it was introduced.

I really don't think the shininess is the issue at hand. It's interface clutter. My iPhone is so cluttered. It's packed full of software I'll never use. I wade through menu options I'll never use.

I like the look of Liquid Glass and I'm generally for it. It just needs to be organized better.

> just functional

This is ultimately what I disagree with. I think iOS/macOS have become entirely dysfunctional. Software is broken, webpages are broken simply because they're running from OS 26. Alarms and calendar events either run randomly or not at all. The system preferences menu is hardly navigable. I could go on. Maybe I'm just getting old and crusty, and yearn for the days when Steve Jobs was running the ship.

They just pack needless software in and do nothing to keep it organized/usable.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#260

Post by latexr »

josefresco wrote: post #128

What an indictment of not only Apple designers, but the entire "science of UX" It's clear now there is no science, it's just designers making... things. Very similar to other design fields where there is no "logic" just trends & vibes. Several generations of potentially brilliant engineers and designers have wasted their careers building advertising empires with shiny buttons.

Misapplication of the science isn’t proof the science doesn’t exist. Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines used to be fantastic. One of the reasons they’re sucking so bad right now is they’re ignoring their own previously working rules.

That’s what happens when you put in charge arrogant industrial and print designers who think UX and UI are inferior forms of design.

Post reply on HN