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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

#681

Post by gonational »

zaidf wrote: post #556

My hope is that the new generation of designers/UX people question and reject many of the UI/UX patterns made popular in the past 15 years and go back to the 90s for inspiration. Resources like the Apple Design Guidelines from 1992 linked in the OP is excellent! Perhaps my biggest gripe is that many of these terrible UI/UX patterns are built in at such a low level, it is near impossible for developers to override the…

IMHO, the "new generation" of designers is the problem. Same goes for the "new generation" of developers. Want to make a basic HTML page with a contact form? Better get React + 300 dependencies, require the backend to provide a REST endpoint... fast forward six months...

Why has this happened? Everything is too easy. You used to have to have pretty good intelligence to break into UI design and software development. Now, anyone can do it with 30 minutes of "e-learning", and, therefore, the average IQ of a UI designer/or software engineer has decreased, dramatically.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#682

Post by inquirerGeneral »

matthewkayin wrote: post #645
wolvoleo wrote: post #616

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft totally screwed up the windows interface with windows 8 to suit tablets which they viewed as the future of computing. Not only were they wrong, they also really broke the UX for the users they did have for a new product that hardly sold and still doesn't (windows tablets). Eventually they had to cave in but Apple is more stubborn than Microsoft. Even if Apple is right, why shoehorn the future into the prese…

Microsoft may have "caved", but we're still stuck with two different settings menus and a start menu that prioritizes ads and search results over your own programs.

[dead]

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#683

Post by vanviegen »

DenisM wrote: post #673
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.

It’s not just career. Any artistic endeavor suffers from competition with the past, which eventually becomes a guaranteed loss. Negating the frame becomes the primary way to leave a mark.

But for actual art, such as music, constantly doing novel things is kind of the point. Every generation needs its own music that runs counter to what came before.

User interfaces are not art.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#684

Post by 65 »

xnx wrote: post #455
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…

> 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.

Yes this is always how it's been, especially if you're a front end developer. Changing designs every few months just for the hell of it is what designers do.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#687

Post by TheCoreh »

xnx wrote: post #455
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…

> 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.

There have been many, many, desktop improvements since 1995, some of which came from the Mac, some came from Windows and some came from UNIX/Linux & friends.

- Arguably the dock, though it's probably contentious - Ubiquitous instant search (e.g. Spotlight) - Gesture-based automatic tiling of windows to left/right side of the screen, tiling presets - Smooth scrolling, either via scroll wheel or trackpad - Gesture-based multi tasking, etc - Virtual desktops/multiple workspaces - Autosave - Folder stacks, grouping of items in file lists - Tabbed windows - Full-screen mode - Separate system-wide light and dark modes - Enhanced IME input for non-latin languages - App stores, automatic updating - Automatic backup, file versioning - Compositing Window Managers (Quartz, Compiz, DWM, modern Wayland compositors...) - The "sources bar" UI pattern - Centralized notification centers - Stack view controlelr style navigation for settings (back/forward buttons) - Multi device clipboard synchronization - Other handoff features - Many accessibility features - The many iteration of Widgets - Installable web apps - Virtual printers ("print to PDF") - Autocomplete/autocorrect - PIP video playback - Tags/Labels - File proxies/"representations" - Built-in clipboard management - Wiggle the mouse to find the pointer

None of these can be said to be at their final/"perfect" form today, and there are hundreds if not thousand of papercuts and refinements that can be made.

The real issue is probably due to management misunderstanding designer's jobs, and allocating them incorrectly. The focus should be more on the interactions and behaviors than necessarily on the visuals.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#688

Post by schmuckonwheels »

xnx wrote: post #455
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…

> 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.

I would say, "Give me Mac OS 9, now" but smartphone-addicted brain-damaged zoomers don't understand what folders are or how file management works.

I don't need or want art, eye candy, or animations. I need to get work done and the rest of the OS to stay tf out of my way.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#689

Post by krackers »

Pxtl wrote: post #335
rob74 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

The dark mode action got an audible chuckle out of me.

The site has a history of trolling people, it used to be the cursor background.

Also do check his privacy policy https://tonsky.me/personal-information/

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#690

Post by bigyabai »

philistine wrote: post #507
paulcole wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought that was supposed to be Apple’s thing. “We decide how to make it and you decide to buy it or not.” It makes it seem like they’re designing for you until they’re not.

How is that different with other companies? Like with Windows? Do you have a choice of UI when loading the OS? Are there ways to remove the taskbar and replace it with a third-party one? Can you change all the core OS shortcuts? The fact Apple makes and sells the only hardware to run macOS does not mean the software is fundamentally different from the rest of the industry. Apple has deprioritized backwards compatibil…

> does not mean the software is fundamentally different from the rest of the industry.

I bet you wish that was the case. XServe existed though, and for all of Apple's confidence in the product it was (and is) treated like a second-class citizen that doesn't compete with free alternatives.

There is literally nothing that stops macOS from falling into the same pit of irrelevance besides first-party hubris. How much do you trust Apple to make smart, responsive decisions?

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