Thank you for writing this! Ever since Tahoe, I've felt EXACTLY the same... Just seems like the left hand not talking to the right hand at Apple, just another sign of failing leadership and lack of coordination between teams. Let's hope they fix this nonsense. Or at minimum, add a setting to disable this gratuity on menus.
Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help
331–340 of 340 posts
Re: Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help
#332I don't know if it's something with me or with some larger population, but I find it very difficult/tedious/debilitating to navigate menu-lists with more than 5-6 items. If your menu is more than that (and in the examples its up to 20) I highly encourage anyone building a UI to add nice descriptive icons. Thank you.
Re: Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help
#333> Send help.
If modern developers were able of accepting help, we wouldn't be in this bad situation in the first place.
I looked at the Safari screenshots. The entry text behind the icons is misaligned.
Menus in KDE show how it's done correctly, entry text is aligned on one vertical axis, then icons if present on another, then checkboxes if present on another. With opposite alignment, key shortcuts are aligned to one axis, then arrows disclosing submenus on another. (GTK gets that last part wrong.)
Re: Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help
#334They are fast to find. It's functional to have something rather than nothing there.
Re: Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help
#335On mobile, there's a small menu to different site sections at the bottom of the screen. You'll never guess what that menu includes.
Re: Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help
#336Earlier quoted context omitted.
Speak for yourself. I remember words. That disk icon stands for "Save". "Save" is what I remember. I also remember location, but the spatial component applies independent from icons or words.
> Speak for yourself >> I'm much faster
You are right. My bad.
Re: Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help
#337Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Pictograms let you parse a lot of information at a glance, because you can pattern match a group of differing symbols much faster than you can a block of text which all looks uniform No you can’t.
I'd disagree but either way throw another factor in: non-native speakers and cross-language usability. If your software is in some language and you are looking at docs or a videotutorial or something in another language, it's often hard to translate specific terms, Icons don't change language. They also help if you have to do something in another machine that uses a different language for some reason.
I concur that the icons aren't just decoration. I have sat down many times in a foreign country at a computer with localized settings and felt quite helpless to do even trivial things.
Re: Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help
#338Earlier quoted context omitted.
Color icons needs to done twice - once for light mode and again for dark mode. It is the reason for removing colors and shadings from all icons.
So in your opinion, monochrome icons are a sign of laziness, rather than an aesthetic choice. Got it.
I never said that. However, I think the entire industry ended up using monochrome icons due to aesthetic, and many practical reasons.
Re: Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help
#339Earlier quoted context omitted.
macOS Tahoe has declared war on app icons with distinctive shapes. No silhouettes. If your icon isn't a squircle, it will be shrunk to fit inside a default shape. The penalty box. https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/2025/6/2.html The loss of icon silhouettes is a big step down in usability. Erases decades of design guidelines. https://pxlnv.com/blog/roundrect-dictator/ Frankly it's senseless. https://www.flarup.email…
MacOS was never fun. I've been using MacOS at work for five years and it's never been fun nor intuitive. I always explained this to myself "that's because I grew up with Windows" but three months ago I switched to KDE on my private machine and it's miles ahead of MacOS. Just a week ago I got a new company Macbook and the UX is even clunkier than before. Shit just doesn't work.
> I've been using MacOS at work for five years
Which means you haven't been around for MacOSes fun times ;)
We are talking about 15+ years ago here. Tiger, Snow Leopard, those were the days!
Agree on KDE though.
Re: Icons in Menus Everywhere – Send Help
#340Earlier quoted context omitted.
2003 was the best/final iteration of it - I still miss old excel new excel is just garbage instead in virtually every way
Yeah, after that they started nuking VBA too. Sad times!
But…LAMBDA()! And LET() and friends.
Also, the Excel Labs formula editor. But it needs a way to tell it "I know I have too many cells! Just let me trace over the 100 nearest rows."
The old scripting language can still be handy if you can keep people from opening the online version of Excel. Especially if you have a certain debugger addin[1]. Excel's JavaScript features are of limited use, if you're offline.
I keep wishing for a spreadsheet to implement all its scripting and formulas in something like Forth behind the scenes, so that every time a competitor announces n-more functions, we can just be like "Oh, really?" and add it.
[1] Related to waterfowl of the plasticised yellow variety. I'm not sure I can mention the name in a post anymore, since ages ago when I tried multiple times to post a properly-referenced (overly-hyperlinked?) message while my connection was very flaky. Note to self: should probably mail dang about this, some day.