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It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

tonsky.me

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Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#281

Post by necovek »

Ever since I first tried a modern Mac (around the time of M1 MacBook Pros with Max coming out: work mandated, or I wouldn't), I could easily see inconsistencies all around the system, and could never get to grips to why people cling to the belief that it has consistent, simple UI. It was as inconsistent as GNOME (which I mainly use), and sometimes more so (though this could be my personal bias, since I've used GNOME since before 2.0 days, so 2003 or so -- though, I'd note that 2.x series was significantly more consistent, especially with Sun-contributed GNOME HIG, than 3.x still is).

Not to even mention hardware support, as I had a lot of issues with Realtek external USB network devices randomly disconnecting (and they are in many USB-C hubs, including inside USB-C monitors), with no such issues under Ubuntu.

I imagine there is some history around MacOS being similarly much better in the past, but I've never seen anything great about MacOS UI/UX in comparison to GNOME.

I do like their performance and battery life, but the "shells" it's stuck in also sucks (until recently, only glossy screens; shallow keyboards with sharp palmrest edges; either heavy or passively cooled; no touchpad buttons...). Putting some of this hardware into a new Thinkpad X1 Carbon case would be amazing, though I'd want to run Linux on it.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#282

Post by sneak »

michaelbuckbee wrote: post #277
sirwhinesalot wrote: post #247

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…

The only "real" justification is that this is a long term play to figure out a UI and interaction shift that will work for general augmented reality devices (aka whatever device Apple releases five years and two iterations from now based on the Vision Pro.)

That isn’t a justification for fucking up the icons or using single retina pixels to differentiate them.

It’s just stupid people doing stupid things.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#283

Post by blenderob »

This is genuinely disheartening. As I continued reading the fine article, disappointment began settling in. Does nobody care about doing a good job anymore? When even multi-trillion-dollar companies cannot execute projects with some baseline level of quality and craft, it paints a disappointing picture. Very sad and disappointing. :(

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#284

Post by oneeyedpigeon »

walthamstow wrote: post #166
asimovDev wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

from what i've read on macrumors, Tahoe on the 2019 MP is quite messy. A lot of people complain about the UIs being sluggish.

It's sluggish on a 2023 M3 Pro!

That's weird; almost the only issue I don't have with Tahoe on a 2023 M2 Mini is its performance. Do you have transparency enabled?

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#285

Post by layer8 »

doodlesdev wrote: post #270

These don't seem to be well thought at all. While reading the article, I've started wondering if they were chosen by an LLM after some developers decided it wasn't worth the trouble of going through every single application and choosing icons for every single menu item. That would explain a lot, in my opinion.

What likely happened is that design leadership commanded that everything needs to have an icon, and most of the individual developers tasked with updating the menus just pick the next best icon from the provided icon library, because there exists no further guidance or oversight. There’s probably a designated procedure for requesting new icons, but why bother if nobody is checking your work.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#286

Post by jedwards1211 »

I don’t think it’s a good idea to require an icon for everything, some actions are hard to depict with an icon.

But on the other hand, I think 95% of the icons in the first menu in this article are clear and probably help most people navigate faster.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#287

Post by hexbin010 »

asimovDev wrote: post #154
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…

from what i've read on macrumors, Tahoe on the 2019 MP is quite messy. A lot of people complain about the UIs being sluggish.

Most MacOS major versions slow down older (but perfectly competent) hardware ("hehe whoopsie daisy")

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#288

Post by whynotmaybe »

marcosdumay wrote: post #263
whynotmaybe wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm feeling they're veering towards a "common ui" where every action is an icon like on a phone where every app is an icon. Maybe someday they'll completely remove the text to just keep the icons like the Office ribbon did, and I'm still confused with it.

Imagine how usable computers will be once we remove every instance of text!

As a user of OLauncher on android, it's hard to imagine.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#290

Post by troupo »

JaggerJo wrote: post #119

Good that Alan Dye is no longer at apple. Liquid Glass on macOS is a mass. The icons, the floating side menus, the inconsistent corners, the new tabs in Safari.. On iOS it's totally fine, but on macOS it's a disaster. I've only updated one machine so far and will keep all others on Sequoia until this mess is resolved.

But it wasn't just Alan Dye. He's not tunning the MacOS division. He's not running tge iOS division. There are literally dozens senior management people and several people of the same rank who could've pointed out all the issues and stopped this.

Instead they were all on stage praising it.

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