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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

#621

Post by hamdingers »

xutopia wrote: post #557
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…

Cmd+~ switches windows of a given app in case you didn't know (not disagreeing with you but it is one shortcut I find super useful and it helps switch windows).

My hate for this behavior grows with each passing year as more and more of the "apps" I use become browser windows.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#622

Post by bigyabai »

fainpul wrote: post #181
jval43 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what happens when the people issuing the orders (assign an icon for every task) are not the ones doing the task. And the ones doing it have no say in how it's done. Being involved and in the loop is how great software is made. Otherwise you can just outsource and have tickets completed.

> This is what happens when the people issuing the orders (assign an icon for every task) are not the ones doing the task. No, this is what happens when the people in charge of UI design have no clue what they're doing.

If your UI designers can get this much crap past upper management, the managers have officially become the problem.

It's like what Miyamoto warned: a delayed UI is eventually good, but a rushed UI is forever bad.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#623

Post by RankingMember »

Oh man I hope some of the people putting stuff in the joke-but-real "personal information" box within the burger menu know that clicking the "download" provides the input from everyone. I'm seeing some seemingly real addresses and social security numbers in there.

Additional thought: It's always interesting to see a website linked from HN with a method for user input and a means to see what other users have posted. Just a funny juxtaposition between the buttoned-up ego (not in the pejorative sense) of the HN poster vs the screaming id of that same user on a different platform.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#624

Post by torben-friis »

etempleton wrote: post #349
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…

Without hyperbole, Liquid Glass on Mac OS is visually the worst commercial desktop UX I have ever had the displeasure of using. It is amateurish and frankly, ill advised to have even tried to unify the aesthetic across devices so universally. I think much of what is on the phone works fine. There are some pain points and some bits that are visually awkward, but generally it works and is new and fresh, but on the Mac…

>Spotlight looks fine.

Keyword “looks”. Because considering behavior, there’s tons of delay introduced and results change under your finger as you’re selecting them, causing you to get the wrong thing.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#625

Post by collingreen »

makapuf wrote: post #575
kergonath wrote: post #567

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We need to get rid of the "It's okay to be a UI/UX designer who doesn't code" cult. I don’t think designers who don’t code are really a problem. They just need to dogfood, and be lead by someone who cares (and dogfoods as well).

In the case of Apple, I really doubt its designers don't dogfood. Do you expect them to have Android phones and linux desktops?

I sometimes wonder if anyone in charge at Apple uses Apple devices the way I do. I expect they have one, consistently-apple, high-end setup and it probably works very well for their style. Some things are great but others are insane and it seems like that happens most when using things like non-apple monitors or not typing a certain way on the phone or if you don't drive the same car.

Switching windows between two non apple monitors after waking from sleep is wildly unpredictable and has insane ux like resizing itself after a drag.

My carplay always starts something playing on my car speakers even when I wasn't listening to anything before connecting. It's so off it's comical.

The iPhone alarm will go off like normal, loudly from the speaker, even if you're currently on the phone and have it up to your ear. This has been a problem since my very first iPhone.

There has been a bug about plugged in physical headphones being unrecognized sometimes after waking from sleep even if it worked fine when going into sleep. I checked once in probably 2014 and Apples' official response was that it literally wasn't physically possible despite all of us people experiencing it. The bug was ancient even at that time and >ten years later my m4 macbook pro STILL DOES IT.

Apple and apple fanboys seem to take the stance that these are all user error on my part (remember the "you just aren't a Mac person" era?). I bet some of these are configurable with settings deep in some menu somewhere so from a certain perspective that's right but also underscores my point about the limitations of myopic dogfooding.

As a fun aside, the ux for turning on the "Voice Over" tutorial is the worse thing I've ever experienced on an Apple device. I was laughing out loud trying to figure out how to get out of it instead of finishing the unknown remaining steps. I feel bad for folks who need that accessibility in order to be effective.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#626

Post by rescbr »

carlosjobim wrote: post #474
gessha wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> software update atoning for their UI sins But how would they do that without scrapping the whole version? Their marketing for this year heavily relies on liquid glass but if they remove the shiny stuff, it’s not very pretty, it’s just functional. Functional is what people with work to do appreciate, marketing people will want the shiny back now that it was introduced.

> But how would they do that without scrapping the whole version? There is a way for them to fix this while saving face. You see, Liquid Glass™ was just the first of their incredible new Material Design paradigm. Now introducing Apple Stone™, Apple Paper™, Apple Linen™ and Apple Brushed Metal™. All just as realistic as Liquid Glass™.

I’d be very happy if we returned to the Brushed Metal era, when they actually followed their own UI guidelines.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#627

Post by msie »

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…

Loved the win95 interface. I've always wanted it on new Windows box but the existing solutions out there seem lacking.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#628

Post by robinhood »

ramon156 wrote: post #129
robinhood wrote: post #38

I never disliked an OS as much as I dislike what Apple is doing with MacOS (and iOS by extension). I've been with MacOS for 20 years, but I've switched at home to Linux full time 2 years ago and I don't regret it. At work I'm forced to be on MacOS. It's concerning how Apple doesn't care anymore about user needs, usability, design and consistency. Where it was the best OS in the past for me, it's not anymore. Other OS…

what distro are you running at home? ive had the most success with fedora x11 / xwayland but lately wayland has been pretty solid

I've used Mint for a long time. Extremely solid, stable and simple. In the last three months I've been on Arch (through Omarchy) and it's also very stable and so powerful. Everything just works. I have a pretty beefy computer and even my favorite game of all times (Path of Exile 1) runs fantastically on it.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#630

Post by pornel »

x0x0 wrote: post #103
aylmao wrote: post #54

This isn't the only aspect of Tahoe that seems amateurishly designed by someone following "wrong rules", the wrong rule here being "for consistency, let's assign an icon to every action. Another wrong rules I've seen blindly followed is making everything an edge-to-edge canvas, so that the sidebar floats on top. Having a full-window canvas with floating sidebars can make sense for applications where content is expans…

but being too lazy to even globally coordinate the icons is some deep rot.

They've got the SF Symbols font, and probably assumed that's enough. Everyone has the same set of icons available, technically.

It seems that Apple has nobody left who has all three at the same time: taste, attention to detail, and authority to demand fixes. Having lots of people who have max two out of these three gives you designs of Microsoft and Glass Apple.

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