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It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

tonsky.me

761–770 of 984 posts

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#761

Little UI elements like that are generally inconsequential. I agree they have changed for the worse in a negligible way. The reason for all this change is simple. The first reason is planned obsolescence. The GUI has to change enough such that it looks like there’s constant progress so users think the company is moving forward when in reality GUI design plateaued decades ago. The second reason is designers need to st…

> The second reason is designers need to stay employed. So they change inconsequential things and make up reasoning to justify it. Liquid Glass is one of these things. Working at BigTech, this is the answer. ICs need to find their own impact. That's how you get things like Material Design 3 which talked about how "Bold" it made a brand look - "Boldness" is something you can measure with user tests, and designers need…

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Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#762

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Apple just reduced Vision Pro production, but Liquid Glass was in motion well before that. What leaves me scratching my head is I never got the impression Apple believed in Vision Pro. It launched because after years of research, management wanted to see if the effort was worth continuing to invest in, but that wasn't a vote of confidence.

Recent moves have convinced me that Apple is getting ready to push Vision Pro substantially harder.

In recent weeks, I’ve been getting push notifications about VP.

They hired Alex Lindsay for a position in Developer Relations.

And there’s the M5 update.

Just remember, it’s a lot cheaper than the original Mac(inflation adjusted). Give it 40 years – hell, given the speed of change in tech these days, it won’t even take 10.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#763
Some really excellent points, here. I think reading the old HIG documents should be mandatory in UI design, and departure from it should require serious justification.

One small nitpick: the ellipsis reuse in item #8 - that’s actually valid and would have been back in the 1990s as well. A menu item that is followed by an ellipsis indicates that selecting that menu option will open a dialog box. Inconsistently applied, but that’s always been the meaning.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#764
post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I there not any user testing as we know it today, mostly top down application of priciples. This was all experts driven in that time to my knowledge. Empirical validiton did not really take off until the late 00s. https://hci.stanford.edu/publications/bds/4p-guidelines.html Don had the explicit expert knowledge first stance in 2006 and 2011, nothing inherently wrong with that, but it's defenitly no research driven. "…

That's interesting, I hadn't heard that point of view before. Empirical validiton did not really take off until the late 00s. https://hci.stanford.edu/publications/bds/4p-guidelines.html Hmmm, I don't quite see where that supports "Apple didn't do empirical validation"? Is it just that it doesn't mention empirical validation at all, instead focusing on designer-imposed UI consistency? ISTR hearing a lot about how the…

Like the whole recoverability paradigm, seems more like a feature from developer perspective looking for a reason to exist, than a true user demand.

You have state management for debugging purposes already, so why not expose it to the user.

As an example in photoshop no non-professional users care about non-destructive workflows, these things have to be learned as a skill.

Undo is nice to have in most situations, but you can really only trust your own saves and version management with anything serious.

Sonething as simple as a clipboard history is still nowhere to be found as built in feature in MacOS, yet somehow made it's way into Windows.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#765

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple just reduced Vision Pro production, but Liquid Glass was in motion well before that. What leaves me scratching my head is I never got the impression Apple believed in Vision Pro. It launched because after years of research, management wanted to see if the effort was worth continuing to invest in, but that wasn't a vote of confidence.

Did they commit to additional production of the Vision Pro? I read their announcement as quiet cancellation of VR products. They announced some kind of vaporware pivot, but I didn't read a single analyst projection that Apple ever intended to bring another wearable to market. Customer usage statistics of the Vision Pro are so low Apple hasn't even hinted about reporting on them. Wearable products, outside of headphon…

> outside of headphones, have a decade-long dismal sales record

Outside of headphones and watches

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#767

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. I immediately went to the snowflake icon at the top of the page thinking it would turn the animation off. Instead, it changed the background color :-( I can't stand animations while I'm trying to read something, and this one is particularly egregious.

It change the background color AND turns off the animation. (TBF, it slowly fades the animation out, probably for aesthetic reasons, to avoid a jarring sudden stop. I do agree, though, that a sudden stop would probably be more appropriate in this context)

Ohhh thank you! I thought the same as the parent comment: I expected that button to turn off the animation immediately. I guess the author wanted the yellow background to "melt" the snowflakes?

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#768
post #580
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 is the howling insanity that drove Microsoft to kill the start button, then reanimate it, then move it to the center of the task bar .

They also forced us to waste relatively valuable vertical screen space on the task bar, taking away our ability to move it to the left or right screen edges.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#769

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

Not only that, we have teams of people that very obviously (based on OP) dont talk to each other.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#770
post #708

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I remember excitedly switching to a Nexus 5X and then going back to my old iPhone a few months later because every app felt like a bad port of the ”original” iPhone app.
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