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

711–720 of 984 posts

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#711

Post by krackers »

shantara wrote: post #519
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

Even after decades of using macOS I still cannot wrap my head around the fact that Finder has no single button shortcut for opening a file - the most common operation a file manager should do. It’s Cmd+O, and it cannot be changed to anything sane like Enter key.

You can remap it to any shortcut you want (as long as it has a modifier key in it)

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#712

Post by selkin »

Zealotux wrote: post #81

Tahoe and Liquid Glass™ solidified for me the idea that Apple completely dropped the ball when it comes to design. Clearly they needed an a-hole in charge, Jobs would've crucified a few people. It's painful to see the decay, update after update, into a more confusing, cluttered, and tacky experience.

No one might be Job-level ahole, but I'm certain Cook ain't less ruthless. It's a matter of priorities, not attitude.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#713

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

bobbylarrybobby wrote: post #304
qn9n wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty sure iOS 7 was regarded as awful on launch and then a little while later people decided it was amazing and lovely to look at once the kinks were ironed out. People just don't like new things that change what they are used to.

Apple spent the next several years walking lots of the changes back, in particular the thin text and overdone translucency

One thing I'll definitely give Apple is that they have walked back some design decisions that were total flops in the past, such as the butterfly keyboard and the touchbar (though I found it more than a bit annoying when I'd see reviews saying how great and visionary Apple was for simply undoing bad decisions - it deserved an "OK, good" not an "OMG Apple is amazing!!)

I like this article because it points out how undeniably awful some of these decisions were in a "this signifies something is seriously, fundamentally wrong with Apple design" way. I really hope Apple listens a does a major course correction.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#714

Post by ZoomZoomZoom »

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…

Wayland is supported with LXQt, labwc replacing openbox. If anything, UX is snappy.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#715

Post by cyberax »

finnlab wrote: post #354
latexr wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your Ableton and Logitech issues seem to be the same: screwed up access permissions. Not your fault, macOS has been sucking at it for a while. It’s not unheard of for System Settings to show you some app has some permissions, but in practice it doesn’t. What usually works is fully resetting permissions for an app: tccutil reset All To find the bundle ID for an app: mdls -raw -name kMDItemCFBundleIdentifier

I did try that amongst other things. Launching Ableton via Terminal also brought up the microphone permission pop-up...for the Terminal app. One has to wonder if a System that regularly "forgets" permissions is even secure at all.

> One has to wonder if a System that regularly "forgets" permissions is even secure at all.

It does not "forget", the permissions are limited to 30 days. So you have to re-grant them periodically.

Oh, and if you miss the popup (because sometimes it pops _under_ other windows) then you just start getting silent failures. With absolutely NO indication in the UI that something is wrong. There is literally no way to find that out without looking directly into the TCC database.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#716

Post by hex4def6 »

EGreg wrote: post #669
groundzeros2015 wrote: post #639

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let’s focus on the specific claims in your comment. > People got canned for resisting the corporate overlords. That’s capitalism Being told to do things by your boss is a problem as old as time. Except with capitalism you can change bosses — a luxury which has not existed throughout history.

Okay great. Now keep going with the rest of my comment and address the rest point by point. You’ll find that it expands from that first point, and describes the consequences of capitalism and competition as an organizing principle.

We are discussing UI/Icon design, not the geopolitical implications of AGI or the Holocene extinction event.

Why should someone that disagrees with you on whether capitalism is uniquely responsible for bad icon design now be forced to defend it for every sin / shortcoming ranging from the social inequity to ecological collapse?

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#717

Post by flamwenco »

rireads wrote: post #429
skywhopper wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bosses who are actually in charge likely don’t even use their Macs (and when they do, they only use the web browser) and only care about how the OS is going to look in the demo, not how it works.

What makes you think they don't use macs? What else would they use?

Pretty sure Tim Cook has said before he does most of his work on the iPad; it doesn't seem like an unreasonable guess that too many of the C-suites do the same and don't use Macs enough.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#718

Post by karmakaze »

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…

The problem with Apple's execution of Liquid Glass is that the intended audience isn't the iOS user, it's the onlooker watching the iOS user (FOMO). That was an effective strategy when iPhone popularity was growing rapidly. Now that we're in a plateau of market saturation (post-peak Apple), anything directed at the onlooker which detracts for the actual user will hurt their bottom line.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#719

Post by DenisM »

vanviegen wrote: post #683
DenisM wrote: post #673

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> User interfaces are not art.

Do UI designers think that way?

I imagine some see it as engineering - make things work efficiently for the users. Others see it as art. The outcome will depend on which group gains the upper hand.

Post reply on HN