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It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

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Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#701

Post by allknowingfrog »

rob74 wrote: post #138
throwaway_ab wrote: post #8

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!

I genuinely went looking for an "off" button, and was very confused when the snowflake icon changed the background color instead. I didn't even notice that the snow stops being generated until I read your comment and tried again. I'm both impressed and annoyed.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#702

Post by az_reth »

Every few months, I will get tired of the current look of my status bar in i3 (or sway on my laptop). For the icons I will go to https://www.nerdfonts.com/, search for ones that look cool, and copy paste them to the relevant-ish sections.

Apparently I'm qualified to be a designer for Apple.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#703

Post by graypegg »

josefresco wrote: post #523
pacifika wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

I mean, if there was only 1 engineering firm that made the iBridge, which represented nearly a quarter of all bridges out there, they might last a bit longer. They really made the bridge experience truly inspiring with the all-new glass I-beams!

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#704

Post by w10-1 »

user2342 wrote: post #588

I fully agree with the article, but the snow effect on the site is more distracting to readability than the shitty menu icons in Tahoe...

The story in the patterns book about architecture: the architect got tired of arguing with the bishops about a church, so they put a hot tub in the corner on the next design. The bishops agreed that the hot tub must go, and the design was approved.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#705

Post by hnlmorg »

gmd63 wrote: post #552
hnlmorg wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If it's coming down from the C suite, that just makes it worse. That's cheap marketing tricks winning priority over lasting intent. It's not just the design folks trying to justify their job at that point, it's the executives surrendering to the "stock must go up during my quarters at all costs" mentality.

Worse in some ways, but understandable an others.

If Company X didn’t reinvigorate their product line then consumers might switch to Company Ys products because they look shiny and new. Which is literally why people switched from BlackBerry et al to iPhones in the previous decade.

Consumers are fickle and want that dopamine hit when they spend money. I know this and even I find myself chasing shiny things. So there’s no way we can change that kind of consumer behaviour.

To be clear, I’m not saying it’s right that companies do this, but I do think they’d go out of business if they didn’t because consumer trends will continue like this regardless of how ethical companies tried to be.

So the problem here isnt that Apple tried to refresh its operating system look. It’s that they completely jumped the shark and created something that was too focused on aesthetics while failing in literally every other metric.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#706

Post by josteink »

naikrovek wrote: post #543
hnlmorg wrote: post #483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!"

When on macOS using Finder I often wish I had something as nice and consistent and usable as Nautilus.

Finder is genuinely horrible. It’s obvious no one at Apple cares about files anymore nor anyone working with them.

We’re all supposed to consume cloud these days or so it seems.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#707

Post by [deleted] »

chuckadams wrote: post #305
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…

I rather like the skeuomorphism ... on the buttons anyway. The distortion effect on the glass is simply annoying, and the overall effect on an already-cramped UI like Safari on a phone is just ... ugh. There's now basically three blobs of mystery meat at the bottom of the screen. So if Liquid Glass was made for mobile first, it's an even bigger failure. It's actually more tolerable on desktop, though the double-borde…

[deleted]

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#708

Post by nish__ »

avidiax wrote: post #613
staplers wrote: post #510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I worked at Uber. The UX designers were pretty obsessed with the iPhone app, making sure it was pixel perfect and the little cars in the city view moved smoothly and every transition was crisp and so on. The vast majority of new users at the time were on the comparatively ugly Android app. Things got pretty bad. More than 95% of all employees (and I'm guessing 99% of designers) were using iPhones at the time. There w…

> people with taste don't use Android

Probably true at the time.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#709

Post by josalhor »

jaffa2 wrote: post #492
josalhor wrote: post #59

Interesting. The article starts with this: > Sequoia → Tahoe It’s bad And I look at the image... And I like it? I agree with the author that it could be better , but most of the icons (new, open recent, close, save, duplicate, print, share etc), do make it easier, faster and more pleasant for my brain to parse the menu vs no icons. Again, I don't disagree that you could do it better, I just disagree with the premise…

most of your points are refuted in the article. but I'll pick this one : "Display density has increased dramatically" Yes, it has, and Tahoe does not take advantage of this, infact the icons are smaller, and harder to read, using fewer pixels than windows icons of 25 years ago.

> most of your points are refuted in the article

Sure, we can debate about the general points.

Yet, we can't refute that my subjective opinion evaluation of the opening image looks better (for me) , reads better (for me) and is easier (for me) to parse. Either I don't fit the general guidelines, or the general guidelines need a revision, that's my point overall.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#710

Post by wpm »

hamdingers wrote: post #621
xutopia wrote: post #557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is why I regard ChromeOS with fear. Because it really does feel like everything is just converging on the browser as the OS, and a browser is not a goddamn OS.
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