Article is alright but the website itself induces a LOT of lag. The heavy particle use is very distracting and makes the article hard to read.
It's hard to justify Tahoe icons
421–430 of 984 posts
Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons
#422Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s the same logic that led to the Windows 8 UI being designed tablet first because that’s “where we’re all going”. Fast forward to Windows 10 where MS had to concede that, no, turns out it isn’t where we’re all going and rolled most of it back.
It's somewhat understandable. A lot of us felt at the time that surely laptops and tablets would converge. Otherwise, what a waste of hardware. But it hasn't really happened. From a hardware perspective, things have gotten closer with the iPad's magnetic keyboard. But, I still find that the iPad as laptop replacement to be a compromise that I may tolerate for travel but don't love for a lot of laptop work.
iPads are great devices for non-tech savvy people who need a computer for stuff like writing and reading documents and e-mails, planning travel and making reservations, keeping in touch with people on messaging and social media.
That's a gigantic market segment, and Apple has to be very careful to not make those devices complicated or vulnerable.
Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons
#423The funny thing is the most clear example of useful icons, the eight top/left/bottom/right/corners options, could be more helpfully replaced by a single image where you click on it in the place you want the stuff, and remove the text entirely (other than for screen reader support).
Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons
#424Earlier quoted context omitted.
MacOS 26 highlights were... and this was _Apple's_ opening modal... "Icons that look like shit!" and "Notification summaries that may not be correct!" In general I feel as if Apple's software feels buggier and less solid lately across my iPhone and my computers. Won't be upgrading the personal computer for as long as possible
I finally talked my company into letting me swap out my MacBook pro for some little Dell. After the last year of updates, my Mac has stopped resuming from sleep reliably, everything is ugly, they took the already barely usable (imo) finder and system settings and found exciting new ways to make them worse. Sadly corporate security means os updates were not optional. I've never really liked macOS but it feels like som…
Do you like Windows dark patterns more than Mac's shitty designs? Seems like no one wins here. I personally just refrained from upgrading to Tahoe
Edit:typo
Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons
#425Earlier 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.
Liquid Glass is horrible on my iPhone SE 2020. Slow and looks weird on the smaller screen. I tried to turn most effects off but it still is just worse in every way
I had a 16E and it was buggy, cramped, confusing, and drained my battery. My fault for being poor and not wanting to spend the extra $400 for a 16.
IOS26 broke my device, and what recourse do I have? None.
Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons
#426It'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…
Alan Dye ruined everything at Apple, no idea how he clung on for so long. You know he designed the horrible ios7 as well? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSzjcVZXolc https://tjkelly.com/blog/ios-7-sucks/ And he also takes credit for the dynamic island. It is an assault on my senses to see everything constantly moving around on my screen. I have been working with Macs since 1995, but this year is my first using Pixel…
You know he designed the horrible ios7 as well?
I don't think that's fully accurate, unless you have a link that confirms it? That Dye designed it, I mean, not that it was horrible...
Jony Ive was the head of design at that point (both hardware and UI). Wikipedia says Dye "contributed greatly to the design language of iOS 7" but Ive would have had final say. Certainly at the time as I recall it, iOS 7 was seen as Ive's baby.
Also, I'm not defending iOS 7, but I reckon its visual design was a lot more influential than it gets credit for. Think of those ubiquitous Prime bottles, with their bright saturated color gradients; the first place I remember seeing that style was iOS 7. I bet they picked that style for Prime because kids liked it, and kids liked it because kids like iPhones.
Edit to add: "bright saturated colors" goes back a long way to Fisher Price toys and the like, of course, but it's the gradients specifically that I think iOS 7 popularized.
Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons
#427Earlier quoted context omitted.
Steve Jobs died 14 years ago. If we're attributing this to those in charge, Jony Ive's departure is much more correlated.
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.
Alan Dye designed IOS7 as well.
Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons
#428I 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…
There is a big nostalgia factor which I think corresponds to the UIs you grew up with and are most familiar (would be Windows 2000 and XP for me) however I think it doesn't explain everything. By that logic, you shouldn't have any particular preference for newer UIs (apart from how similar they are to your "primed" UIs) and you shouldn't ever able to discover new UI patterns you particularly like. You should also be…
I don't trust such books and research. The fundamental thing in question here is what makes Beauty beautiful, which I think is indefinitely mysterious and perpetually elusive. If anyone claims to have grasped at a few concrete conclusions or tangible expertise, I think they're just trying to sell it. The concepts of beauty apply equally to all forms of art, which includes GUIs.
I do agree that Steve was somewhat revolutionary in this, bringing his personal quest for beauty into early GUIs through his (overly) perfectionistic command. I remember a decade or more ago being struck by just how genius it was for him to bring professional typography into personal computers, complete with kerning and everything.
Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons
#429Is there a reason Apple can’t focus on system improvements instead of constantly tweaking with their UI so thoroughly every couple years? I don’t disagree the OS UI needs to be revamped periodically, but it seems they do it too often.
The bosses who are actually in charge likely don’t even use their Macs (and when they do, they only use the web browser) and only care about how the OS is going to look in the demo, not how it works.
What makes you think they don't use macs? What else would they use?
Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons
#430Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's somewhat understandable. A lot of us felt at the time that surely laptops and tablets would converge. Otherwise, what a waste of hardware. But it hasn't really happened. From a hardware perspective, things have gotten closer with the iPad's magnetic keyboard. But, I still find that the iPad as laptop replacement to be a compromise that I may tolerate for travel but don't love for a lot of laptop work.
Magnetic keyboard on the iPad is such a lose. Some Thai hacker got full macOS running on his iPhone over Christmas. Apple are cowards collecting dividends.
The magnetic keyboard lets you use the iPad without it having to be resting on a solid surface like basically every tablet/keyboard combination out there. Microsoft has tried various hybrid laptop/tablet arrangements that did both things mediocrely. I have zero interest in what someone has hacked together.