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It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

tonsky.me

521–530 of 984 posts

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#521
I see a lot of people talking about the past, but I think this is just a reminder that no matter how successful they become, there will always be these periods where companies and people lose focus.

The exact reason/s for this to happen is hard to figure out. Leadership changes, trends, getting too comfortable, lack of competition, the list goes on...

There's always bad reactions to change, but eventually they fade away because the product turns out to be good and just needs some time to get used to it. But this time, this is not the case. Liquid glass sucks and so does the UX that came with it.

Apple will eventually fix this mess, they have all the resources in the world to do so.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#522
post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If a PM tells you to shove a UI style More than likely designers are making up work to justify their jobs. Not good for your career if you admit the desktop interface was perfected in ~1995.

This. The Windows 95 interface was optimal in many regards. Given how much faster computers are now, every UI operation should just be instantaneous. It's ridiculous that desktop interfaces and Web pages became heavier as computers got faster, so that a heavy website today does not load meaningfully faster than a plain text webpage in 1995. Edit: On Linux, you have desktop environments like LXQt for this. Unfortunate…

Wayland being as needful as Liquid Glass itself.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#523

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.

Isn’t this in robust support of science in UX?

I dunno, is it "science" if the top designers in the industry can completely ignore it? Engineers can't ignore physics (for long).

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#524

Tahoe and Liquid Glass™ solidified for me the idea that Apple completely dropped the ball when it comes to design. Clearly they needed an a-hole in charge, Jobs would've crucified a few people. It's painful to see the decay, update after update, into a more confusing, cluttered, and tacky experience.

Liquid Glass was actually a big surprise for me, and it was a shock to see Apple moving forward with this and nobody stopping it. Microsoft did that with Vista back in 2006 and they stopped doing this. So Apple is copying a 2006 design? From Microsoft? Where even Microsoft stopped doing it because of all the known issues? So many questions...

Even Vista did not have nearly as many problems as Liquid Glass. Most of the elements were static images, and the "aero" effects could be disabled, as well as the "Fluent Design" effects in later Windows 10.

Liquid Glass - with its wobbling jiggling jerking, shimmering and flashing, blurry and difficult-to-read, shifting and unpredictable design, and battery-demolishing performance - is so much worse. It's mindblowing how bad it is.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#526

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Liquid Glass was actually a big surprise for me, and it was a shock to see Apple moving forward with this and nobody stopping it. Microsoft did that with Vista back in 2006 and they stopped doing this. So Apple is copying a 2006 design? From Microsoft? Where even Microsoft stopped doing it because of all the known issues? So many questions...

I would be very tempted to place a bet that nobody in the decision making chain used Vista or Compiz to any degree. Commercial software coding glorifies denying anything older than 10 years exist outside of museums, let alone learn anything from it. The same has merely infected design world.

This is why we need more old timers in charge. We've been around the block and seen how all these things play out already.

Now they just promote the youngsters that say the word AI a lot instead of those of us who actually care about the craft.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#527
post #138

It's hard to justify snowflake animations on your website...

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!

> 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?

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#528
post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If a PM tells you to shove a UI style More than likely designers are making up work to justify their jobs. Not good for your career if you admit the desktop interface was perfected in ~1995.

Uber, Airbnb, Robinhood all took off because they created easy to use beautiful apps (compared to their predecessors). The anti-design bias in this forum is genuinely unhinged. I see some saying the entire destruction of the natural world stems from design lol.

design for design's sake is bad, and that's what Liquid Glass is. There was no thought behind it.

It is 2026 and UIs are still abysmally slow in many cases. How is that even remotely possible? Now, with that in mind, consider (just for a moment) why people might think that UX people don't know what they're doing.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just enshittification. Going to continue to get worse as time goes on. Even the hardware will go at some point I'm betting.

> It's just enshittification. That’s not what enshittification means. Somehow its usage has quickly devolved from a very specific pattern companies used to squeeze “value” out of their customers over time into just “something getting worse in any way” or even just “something I don’t like now but I did before” which is not at all the point.

Liquid Glass has worse performance implications, which is bad for older devices with slow processors, and older devices with older batteries. It's also very difficult to use on older devices with smaller screens, like the 2022 iPhone SE. Further, Apple stopped making it possible to upgrade to minor releases for security patches.

All these give someone a reason to replace their otherwise perfectly-working iPhone sooner.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#530
post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If a PM tells you to shove a UI style More than likely designers are making up work to justify their jobs. Not good for your career if you admit the desktop interface was perfected in ~1995.

Uber, Airbnb, Robinhood all took off because they created easy to use beautiful apps (compared to their predecessors). The anti-design bias in this forum is genuinely unhinged. I see some saying the entire destruction of the natural world stems from design lol.

None of those companies had predecessors.
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