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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

#731

Post by shantara »

josteink wrote: post #706
naikrovek wrote: post #543

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. [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.

My go to example would be long lasting issues with SMB support in Finder. All operations are very slow, the search is almost unusably so. The operations that are instant on every non-Apple device take ages on a Mac. I first ran into these issues 7 years ago when I set up my NAS, and they present to this day. I tried all random suggestions and terminal commands, but eventually gave up on trying to make it perform as it does on Linux.

With Apple's focus on cloud services, fixing the bugs that prevent the user from working with their local network storage runs contrary to their financial incentives.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#733

Post by schmuckonwheels »

cyberge99 wrote: post #482
solfox wrote: post #476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100% this. I recall watching their launch video about Liquid Glass. It was filled with ego-driven "we're changing the world here" nonsense. They were designing in a bubble and wanted to do something different so they could justify the work. It was never about the user.

You’re not looking far enough ahead. Liquid glass isn’t about Mac. It’s about VisionPro and wearables. This is a strategic play by Apple.

>This is a strategic play by Apple

No, this is the fault of a company and industry with way too much money and not knowing what to do with it.

So they hired a bunch of artists who would otherwise be carving wood in a decrepit loft somewhere after taking half a mushroom cap. These people now decide how computers should operate.

I remember watching a documentary from the 80s where Susan Kare explained how every pixel in the Macintosh UI was deliberately put there to help the user in some way. One lady did the whole thing, the whole OS.

Now we have entire teams of people trying to turn your computer into an avant-garde art piece.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#734

Post by dlisboa »

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.

Style matters, maybe unfortunately depending on the point of view. Products like consumer electronics have a large amount of fashion to them. Just like the t-shirt was perfected in the 1950s people still make new ones with little style changes for no functional reason.

Designers at Balenciaga don't have to justify their jobs when they make oversized t-shirts, neither do the ones at Apple.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#735

Post by galenko »

walthamstow wrote: post #411
oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair enough. With Tahoe's removal of Launchpad, I assume you're talking about Spotlight in the sense of what appears when you press the Launchpad icon (F4)? Anyway, I can confirm that I also get very weird laggy behaviour from it—sometimes a double-press is interpreted as two presses, sometimes as just one.

I hadn't noticed that they killed Launchpad! On my M3's keyboard, F4 is a magnifying glass icon for Spotlight. I've always used cmd+space, which has been around for a while. What's even worse is I have disabled all search categories for Spotlight except Apps and System Settings. It's searching a list of 40 apps and idk maybe 200 settings, and it still sucks.

At this point why even use spotlight? Raycast or a list of other maybe more minimalistic replacements would work great.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#738

Post by charles_f »

nkrisc wrote: post #198
throwaway_ab wrote: post #8

It's hard to justify snowflake animations on your website...

The audacity to critique Apple's use of icons (which is objectively justified critique, IMO) while having animated snowflakes falling over the text and images on the site is something on an entirely different level. Thank goodness for Firefox reader mode. That animation is so incredibly distracting.

I agreed at first, but that the blog has bad UX doesn't make the message it conveys wrong though.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#739

Post by jaffa2 »

josalhor wrote: post #709
jaffa2 wrote: post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well - that's just your --- opinion, man.

But answer me this. You say "but most [but not all? - interesting] of the icons do make it easier, faster and more pleasant for my brain to parse the menu vs no icons."

How does a list of icons that are used inconsistently, duplicated, used in other places, sometimes used and sometimes not used, not to mention illegible, positioned inconsistently, go directly against the broad (reasoned) rules of the Apple HIG, help 'make it easier' as you say?

This is literally what half the article is explaining and you are just saying - no it's easier to not be able to tell an icon apart, and it's easier to have the icons sometimes be the same or move locations, be so small as to be illegible.

How many did you get when the menu text was removed ? I just don't believe it makes it easier. But who am I to argue against someones 'subjective opinion evaluation' I'm just a guy on the internet.

ps I assume by the opening image, you mean the first screenshot supplied by the author of the article - the Sequoia to Tahoe menu comparison, which he brilliantly posted below a shot of the HIG which literally is explaining the exact same thing and why not to do it the Tahoe way. That in it self is confusing.

It makes no sense why Apple chose to do that with Tahoe?

I'll add a general comment - one of the reasons I use Apple systems was they had the UI stuff nailed down. Stuff was consistent. It looked and behaved in proper ways. It felt like a properly designed, holistic approach to UI design. Lately it's just a mess. This article touch the surface of the issues. My current beef is this stupid 'class of window' that appears now and again which is half-way between a dialog and a window. Best place to see it is immediately after a screenshot - click the thumb that appears. This window type doesn't behave like any other window. Z-order, closing, focus, actions that occur when you click certain things, are all different and inconsistent. But it does look a little like IOS though.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#740

Post by euroderf »

joombaga wrote: post #725
euroderf wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can't stand animations while I'm trying to read something, and this one is particularly egregious. Let me introduce you to "neko"...

Please do! You put an ellipsis where an interesting explanation could go.

Japanese for "cat". Small programs to add a tiny cat that runs to your cursor and then naps - until another cursor move.

There's also JS to add a neko to a webpage.

Cute, but also not good when trying to focus on reading.

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