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

541–550 of 984 posts

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#541

Post by airstrike »

staplers wrote: post #510
xnx wrote: 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.

That statement is just 100% demonstrably false.

I don't think anyone seriously believes Uber, Airbnb and Robinhood won because of "beautiful apps".

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#542

Post by ethbr1 »

hnlmorg wrote: post #471
wang_li wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> to produce something to justify someone’s career, This is the curse of being a UI designer for a long lived product. Once a thing has been created and future work consists of 99% code and 1% UI, your UI designer job has evaporated. And so we see that everything changes every major release of an operating system, so the UI people can justify their pay checks.

I think you have cause and effect the wrong way around. These changes in design are intended to appeal to our magpie brain of wanting the latest, shiniest, things. You have to understand the vanity of consumers. If every new product looked the same then a lot of people wouldn’t both buying the latest gizmo because there’s no magpie appeal. So when the market stagnates, you need to redesign the product to convince con…

In my experience, it's usually just UX hubris and ignorance about a product's expert users.

UX folks usually have no understanding of the impact of moving a common control and/or keyboard shortcut.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#543

Post by naikrovek »

hnlmorg wrote: post #483
williamdclt wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> already barely usable (imo) finder been using a Mac for years, and to this day I don't know how it's possible to navigate directories using Finder. It only has shortcuts for a few folders by default (photos, documents...) and doesn't have a button to navigate to the parent folder. I have literally no idea how to get to my home directory, I need to use the CLI

I’ve said many times before that I think Finder is the worst default file manager of any popular desktop environment. I get it’s supposed to be easy to use but so much functionality is hidden behind non-obvious shortcuts. The end result is you either need to memorise a dozen secret handshakes just to perform basic operations, or you give up and revert to 70s technology in the command line.

> I’ve said many times before that I think Finder is the worst default file manager of any popular desktop environment.

[GNOME enters the chat]: "That's nothing, I'm way worse!"

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#544

Post by 0cf8612b2e1e »

drnick1 wrote: post #461
xnx wrote: 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…

Beyond that, any lag from Win95 era was probably because of spinning hard drives. Running it on a SSD would be instantaneous. Also, file search might even work, instead of whatever we have now.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#545

Post by delecti »

paulcole wrote: post #465
delecti wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Importantly, that philosophy relies on the result having merit, and working cohesively on its own terms, even if it's not your preference. Like, if I go to a restaurant that refuses me sugar for my tea, it better be darn good tea.

> Like, if I go to a restaurant that refuses me sugar for my tea, it better be darn good tea. But if you demand sugar in your tea it doesn't matter how good the tea is, right? You are not going to like that restaurant. > Importantly, that philosophy relies on the result having merit, and working cohesively on its own terms, even if it's not your preference I am too dumb to understand what this means.

I might prefer my tea with sugar, given the choice, but I'll still be satisfied if the tea is very good (this metaphor assumes I don't demand sugar, but merely prefer sugar). I might prefer that Apple products work differently, but if they work well, I'll tolerate that they don't work exactly how I want. In either case, I'm willing to adapt my preferences a bit to an expertly made product.

> I thought that was supposed to be Apple’s thing. “We decide how to make it and you decide to buy it or not.”

This was Apple; your customization options were limited, but things were well designed and cohesive. If you were willing to adapt to their design paradigms, you'd benefit from their expertise, and also have to put in less effort tweaking. Plus you could pick up any random new Apple product and be up to speed immediately.

But to extend the metaphor, if the tea sucks, I'll stop going to that restaurant. If Apple makes their UIs both immutable and bad, I'll use something else.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#547

Post by threethirtytwo »

Little UI elements like that are generally inconsequential. I agree they have changed for the worse in a negligible way.

The reason for all this change is simple.

The first reason is planned obsolescence. The GUI has to change enough such that it looks like there’s constant progress so users think the company is moving forward when in reality GUI design plateaued decades ago.

The second reason is designers need to stay employed. So they change inconsequential things and make up reasoning to justify it. Liquid Glass is one of these things.

I also want to note that the most useable GUI is not the prettiest GUI. The current MAC GUI looks more modern and better then he one in the OPs guideline example. So gui design isn’t just about usability, it’s about manipulating consumer psychology.

As consumers ourselves There’s two traps here that people fall for. The first is aforementioned it’s that it looks better and feels flashier (like Liquid Glass) but isn’t rationally or logically better (in fact it can be worse). Most HNers don’t fall for this trap.

The second trap is to think these changes actually matter. Liquid Glass barely changed anything. More icons barely changed anything. This entire blog post is making it out to be a bigger deal than it is when in actual reality the difference is so minor it’s negligible. Every HNer falls for this trap.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#548

Post by xnx »

0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #544
drnick1 wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Beyond that, any lag from Win95 era was probably because of spinning hard drives. Running it on a SSD would be instantaneous. Also, file search might even work, instead of whatever we have now.

I don't know how I used Windows before I installed Everything.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#549

Post by krferriter »

walthamstow wrote: post #174
postalcoder wrote: post #99

This is an excellent article. Apple has been rudderless on the interaction design front for over a decade now. The windowing mess is evidence of it. We now have the cmd+tab (app switcher), Spaces, Mission Control, (full screen) split screen, Stage Manager, and now tiled window control. None of those interaction metaphors have been expanded upon since their initial launch. I'm a "mac guy". I understood why Apple initi…

I have to say I've never found anything wrong with the alt-tab app I use on macOS. I wonder if you're referring the permissions it has to ask for? https://github.com/lwouis/alt-tab-macos

I think MacOS would be much more unusable without alt-tab, like this app is a critical piece of software that has to be installed on any MacOS machine I'm using. But it does sometimes miss a window, like it doesn't show up in the window list in alt-tab even though it is open. And then I have to use the three finger swipe up thing to find it. Not a huge deal but occasionally annoying, and I assume it is because they are limited in the access they have to this information, which Apple could make available if they wanted, but have decided not to.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#550

Post by lynndotpy »

safety1st wrote: post #15

It's pretty wild how the best screenshot of a usable menu is from, like, Office 2000. What the hell have we been doing for the past 25 years?

If you would like to spend some time in awe, you might fondly regard the screenshots in the GUIdebook gallery: https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots

It's chock full of old screenshots from a variety of old desktops.

Post reply on HN