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Hide macOS Tahoe's Menu Icons

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Re: Hide macOS Tahoe's Menu Icons

#71

Post by troupo »

neom wrote: post #18

I was really happy when they added the pictures! Dyslexia, the icons are 100% faster for me, I don't use those menus often enough to know what is in there word wise, but I can read the icons super fast.

In article we discuss has a link to this article: https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2025/icons-in-menus/ Which has a good paragraph with an example:

--- start quote ---

Get a bunch of people in a room, show them menus where the textual labels are gone, and see who can get the most right.

--- end quote ---

Icons won't help you when they are inconsistent, or don't mean anything.

It's impossible to find a suitable visual metaphor for every possible action of every possible app and cram it into a tiny monochrome icon.

Re: Hide macOS Tahoe's Menu Icons

#73

Post by josteink »

halapro wrote: post #66
Synaesthesia wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know, I always see this pattern with iOS or MacOS releases. Everyone piles on at the time. I've actually quite enjoyed some design changes in Tahoe, and looking at older versions of MacOS just looks old fashioned once you're used to them.

I've always been "pro-change" for UIs, as opposed to the bunch of people in the "bring the old UI back" camp, but Tahoe looked like fecal matter from the moment it was introduced. On iOS it's manageable with reduced transparency, but on macOS it's just so awful I won't upgrade.

I was forced to upgrade at work.

So I’ve enabled reduced transparency and all the other accessibility settings I can find to remove the terribleness.

The UI is now mono-coloured gray and looks like MacOS back in the days before OS X was a thing - but it’s still better than what Apple “envisioned” with Tahoe.

Re: Hide macOS Tahoe's Menu Icons

#75

Post by fainpul »

With all these commandline and registry hacks to make macOS and Windows bearable, why not use Linux? You will also have to use the commandline if you want total customizability, but at least the OS doesn't actively fight you.

Re: Hide macOS Tahoe's Menu Icons

#76

Post by stevekemp »

orion7 wrote: post #39

I use Linux at home and MacOS at work; I am quite fond of every visual change in Tahoe with sole the exception of the obscenely large radius rounded window corners which make no sense on a rectangular screen and make resizing windows a relatively slow and arduous task. I really wish they could be disabled.

I've used Linux at home for 20+ years, and sometimes mac at work.

To be honest I struggle to notice many changes, my machine was already configured the way I liked it and at work I basically live in only four applications:

Firefox for personal-browsing, chrome for work-browsing, terminal for running terraform, git, etc, and emacs for all development work.

Sure resizing is less good, but I do that once a day, in the morning, when I login. The rest of the changes I just don't notice or care about.

Re: Hide macOS Tahoe's Menu Icons

#77

Post by drooopy »

andy_ppp wrote: post #6

Usually I like Apple’s OS updates but Tahoe is absolutely awful from the glass to the noddy sizing of everything. MacOS does not have to harmonise with VisionOS at all and it’s been a disaster for macOS to try.

Tahoe's UI looks like a generic, "futuristic-like", user-created theme for KDE circa 2009.

Re: Hide macOS Tahoe's Menu Icons

#78

Post by kryptiskt »

Synaesthesia wrote: post #28
andy_ppp wrote: post #6

Usually I like Apple’s OS updates but Tahoe is absolutely awful from the glass to the noddy sizing of everything. MacOS does not have to harmonise with VisionOS at all and it’s been a disaster for macOS to try.

I don't know, I always see this pattern with iOS or MacOS releases. Everyone piles on at the time. I've actually quite enjoyed some design changes in Tahoe, and looking at older versions of MacOS just looks old fashioned once you're used to them.

That's actually a problem with Tahoe, it is not something new and bold, it's old-fashioned. Transparency already has come and gone as a UI fad, and it doesn't really make any big difference if you throw computationally expensive effects at it.

Re: Hide macOS Tahoe's Menu Icons

#79

Post by alifeinbinary »

I use my Mac for film scoring and music production, so I have a long-standing practice of keeping my operating system one major version behind for stability reasons. If you want to do the same and at the same time avoid those annoying Tahoe update notifications then simply enable beta updates for OS 15 in settings. I don’t imagine I’ll ever update to Tahoe because I dislike the UI so much but honestly OS 15 is rock solid and it looks great, I’d be very happy sticking with it until EOL for this machine.

Re: Hide macOS Tahoe's Menu Icons

#80

Post by microtonal »

drooopy wrote: post #77
andy_ppp wrote: post #6

Usually I like Apple’s OS updates but Tahoe is absolutely awful from the glass to the noddy sizing of everything. MacOS does not have to harmonise with VisionOS at all and it’s been a disaster for macOS to try.

Tahoe's UI looks like a generic, "futuristic-like", user-created theme for KDE circa 2009.

The only missing thing are wobbly windows and a cube desktop switcher.

(Yes, I know, don’t give them ideas.)

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