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It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

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Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#831

Post by etempleton »

threetonesun wrote: post #440
dijit wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. My first rebuttal was going to be Windows 8, but that was actually a lot better.

A lot of Windows 8 I liked, but Windows perpetually suffers from needing to support older versions of Windowing systems, or some corporate usecase from the early 90s that carries too much money to ever say no to implementing. Windows 11 is, I think, worse than MacOS these days, half for still dragging the past along with it, and half for introducing a second start menu just for ads.

I think Windows greatest strength is their greatest weakness, which is backwards compatibility. MacOS greatest weakness is their UX, which has slowly been going downhill for the past few years and on this release took a nose dive. It is a wild reversal from the mid 2000s when Apple's UX was so far superior to anything else that it felt revelatory to switch from Windows XP to OSX.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#832

Post by [deleted] »

AlotOfReading wrote: post #489
bobbylarrybobby wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In theory, the problems highlighted in the article would have become apparent shortly into the process of assigning an icon to every menu item. Forging ahead despite the impossibility of doing a good job on the task is a sign of orders being issued from top to bottom without feedback working its way from the bottom to the top.

Top down micromanaging of design is how Apple has always worked. It's not what's different now.

[deleted]

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#833

Post by gyomu »

Bluestrike2 wrote: post #818
cyberge99 wrote: post #482

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.

If it's a strategic play, it's a terrible one that douses usability in gasoline and sacrifices it at the altar of visual novelty for no real gain. Apple has spent literal decades working on and refining their Human Interface Guidelines for different devices. Between Tahoe and Liquid Glass, they seem to have just tossed them on the bonfire for no justifiable reason. VisionPro was meant to literally overlay its interfa…

> Apple has spent literal decades working on and refining their Human Interface Guidelines for different devices

Things like “human interface guidelines” get written by nerds who dive deep into user studies to make graphs about how target size correlates to error rate when clicking an item on screen.

Things like Liquid Glass get designed by people who salivate over a button rendering a shader backed gradient while muttering to themselves “did I cook bro???”

They’re just two very orthogonal cultures. The latter is what passes for interface design in software these days.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#834

Post by ndiddy »

kridsdale1 wrote: post #563
ndiddy wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard rumors that part of why iOS 7 was so garish is because Dye's background was in product packaging so his team were doing design reviews on paper and didn't realize that the colors would look different on device due to CMYK vs RGB. Not sure if it's ever been confirmed but it would explain a lot.

I was in the room for a few design reviews for my part of iOS 7 (I was an engineer writing the new screens). Everything was done on a 90+ inch HDTV that we AirPlayed from our Macs or iPhones to for the room to view. Not printed, though the design studio walls were covered in printed explorations of variations of concepts, that is true. Dye was the senior rep of the Design org present and commenting on all our softwar…

Thanks for the clarification! Out of curiosity, do you have any other insight into how/why iOS 7 turned out the way it did? What was the internal attitude towards it like?

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#836

Post by hombre_fatal »

Noaidi wrote: post #419
gnarlouse wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I'm hopeful that they spend the next software update atoning for their UI sins. I remember being really excited for Liquid Glass, because it felt like a return to the good old days of Skeuomorphism, at least in some spirit. In reality, it was a botched delivery, I suspect for two reasons: 1. Trying to unify all of their design (in one year no less) against one style -- developed primarily on Apple Watch & the no…

> Yeah I'm hopeful that they spend the next software update atoning for their UI sins. I have heard Liquid Glass was in development for two years, so I see no hope of them spending all that money over again. Nevermind all the developers who have redesigned apps for IOS26. They could just re-release IOS 18, but that would piss me off as a developer. This is why I left the Apple Ecosystem last month, I see no hope.

They bailed on the touch strip, and that was built into the hardware and required every app developer to integrate with it.

The off-ramp for liquid glass is what they’ve already been doing: repeatedly nerf it until it’s just tinted glass again.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#837

Post by hombre_fatal »

galenko wrote: post #735
walthamstow wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Can even vibe code your own like I did.

Claude Code wrote a single file AppKit program that uses 30mb memory (avoid SwiftUI).

Extended it with dictionary, quick translations, and more. Since I use it every day, I keep polishing it without writing code.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#838

Post by hombre_fatal »

throwaway132448 wrote: post #192
flumpcakes wrote: post #65

It seems like Apple's hardware design is universally loved with much acclaim, why is their software getting progressively worse? It's not Microsoft-add-all-the-bloatware-and-adverts-we-can worse, but it's 20-year-old-operating-systems-were-better-designed worse. We're getting to a point where I think Linux windowing systems like KDE are better designed. And it seems that all they had to do was not change much over th…

It's quite simple: Most people who work in software now aren't actually very good at their jobs, at least in terms of how that job would have been defined 15 years ago. This is because incentives have changed such that being good at your job in your average mega-corp has very little to do with the outcome: To climb their ladder, you optimise for impact and move before you have to deal with the consequences.

The other issue is the general organizational challenge of ensuring people good at their jobs are stacked into every part of your organization.

The default is that it’s not the case, and it requires eternal vigilance to do otherwise. Everything good is a fluke.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#839

Post by prmoustache »

lossyalgo wrote: post #780
matthewkayin wrote: post #645

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft may have "caved", but we're still stuck with two different settings menus and a start menu that prioritizes ads and search results over your own programs.

2 settings menus? We have every version of Windows from 3.1 all the way to 11 styled settings menus, sometimes multiple styles depending on which settings you want to look at. It's a total shitshow.

Yeah, windows make linux desktop using 3 versions of GTK, QT +motif an gnustep look homogenous in comparison.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#840

Post by gedy »

btown wrote: post #724
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.

My hot take on this is that there is a business goal to Liquid Glass that extends beyond ego - but it's about the restoration of Apple UI as an exclusive status symbol, not as a usable experience. Apple looked at innovations in hardware form factor and, rather than trying to out-innovate in that sphere, said, instead: how do we make something in software that nobody would ever try to imitate, and thus position oursel…

I honestly think they could have done that and still had some taste and considered usability much more than they did.
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