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It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

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Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#861

Post by arzig »

matthewkayin wrote: post #645
wolvoleo wrote: post #616

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft totally screwed up the windows interface with windows 8 to suit tablets which they viewed as the future of computing. Not only were they wrong, they also really broke the UX for the users they did have for a new product that hardly sold and still doesn't (windows tablets). Eventually they had to cave in but Apple is more stubborn than Microsoft. Even if Apple is right, why shoehorn the future into the prese…

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.

It’s not that bad if you configure it. Much like much of Linux…

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#862

Post by dpark »

prmoustache wrote: post #841
bandrami wrote: post #765

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Do they sell many Apple Watches? Maybe it is an euro thing but I only very rarely see people wearing one. I would see 9 garmins for 1 Apple Watch for instance and many more people wearing cheap casios or no watch at all.

I dunno. I see them all the time here (Seattle). Wikipedia estimates 267 million sold as of 2023.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#863

Post by calf »

brailsafe wrote: post #808
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'd say this is a pretty unhelpful, demanding, and borderline damaging take to spread. I've learned from experience that it's unlikely "a designer" should follow this advice or accept the archaic guilt-trip "because you make six figures" whatever that means. If you run your own design agency, you've got your own company's reputation and yours on the line, so be as opinionated as you find necessary, but otherwise if y…

I think your take is unhelpful, demanding, and damaging to engineering ethics. If you want to live in a 90s corporate workplace hierarchy model, that's your value system. But it is untenable and harms people in the long run.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#864

Post by FarmerPotato »

canucker2016 wrote: post #468

One of the touted advantages when Microsoft introduced the Office product suite was the integration and consistency of the apps. Whether you opened Word, Excel or Powerpoint, when the user wanted to quit the app, they'd use the same command - they didn't need to realize that the Quit command at a certain location in one menu had the same functionality as the Exit menu that was positioned in another location in anothe…

Look at where it came from. Excel was a Macintosh app. By 1989, Microsoft had designed one or two Mac applications to blend seamlessly with MacPaint, MacWrite, and MacDraw. (MacProject became MS Project IIRC.) Word on Mac was a native GUI while Word remained DOS based and Word for Windows was still launched from DOS by typing WINWORD.EXE.

Apple Human Interface Guidelines were foundational to Win 3.1. At the same time, doing UI on Unix I was always asked to solve problems by “doing it the Apple Way.” My secret was the MITRE Corp UI book which surveyed best practices from all platforms and underlined the reasoning.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#865

Post by gyomu »

publicdebates wrote: post #196

I used to be a die hard UI perfectionist. I thought there were perfect UIs, and that you could go more or less away from or toward perfection with choices. But lately, over the past 5 or 10 years, it seems to me that perfection in UI is just as arbitrary and mutable as people's tastes and preferences. It's hard to admit it to myself, but I think my love for the early Mac OS and Windows 9x UIs was mere puppy love at f…

Perfection doesn't exist, but you can measure outcomes. For example, how quickly users are able to complete a certain task, or how many mistakes they make while trying to complete a certain task, etc.

Based on the measurement of these outcomes you can absolutely say whether an interface is better or worse than another.

Anyone in software design in the 90s/early 00s was quite familiar with this subfield of human factors. Very few people making software today are. As vibe coded UIs become more and more widespread, it's only going to get worse.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#866

Post by recursive »

karmakaze wrote: post #718
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.

How would this work? The only place I've ever heard of liquid glass is from iPhone users complaining about it incessantly and tutorials on how to turn it off or diminish it. What would I fear missing out on?

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#867

Post by threethirtytwo »

OsrsNeedsf2P wrote: post #551
threethirtytwo wrote: post #547

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…

I agree, but this concept of updating a design every year was actually a business decision. Planned obsolescence. You see cars do it when they update every year with a new look.

It is as much of an actual business strategy as it is a method used to stay relevant in the company.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#868

Post by userbinator »

CapsAdmin wrote: post #857
0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Beyond that, any lag from Win95 era was probably because of spinning hard drives. Running it on a SSD would be instantaneous. Also, file search might even work, instead of whatever we have now.

The responsiveness of windows 2000 in a vm is insane. It feels like every action happens instantaneously. Contrast this with the "os" of my LG oled monitor. It seriously takes 5 seconds to open the settings menu.

Contrast this with the "os" of my LG oled monitor. It seriously takes 5 seconds to open the settings menu.

I'm not sure what they use these days, but 10-15 years ago the MCU in a monitor was likely to be a ~10MHz 8051.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#869

Post by userbinator »

0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #544
drnick1 wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Beyond that, any lag from Win95 era was probably because of spinning hard drives. Running it on a SSD would be instantaneous. Also, file search might even work, instead of whatever we have now.

A whole installation of Win95 with Office95 is only a few hundred MB and would fit entirely in RAM on a modern system. You can run a VM of it like that to experience the extreme speed. Even a browser these days uses several times that.

Re: It's hard to justify Tahoe icons

#870

Post by FarmerPotato »

nmeofthestate wrote: post #175

Windows 11 Explorer adds an accent colour to otherwise monochrome icons, which does help distinguish them. I still don't consciously use the icons when picking a menu item though. Explorer also "promotes" copy/paste commands to the top of the context menu as just icons with no text label, which can be confusing - your instinct is to just to look for a "Copy" or "Paste" item in the menu, but no - for some commands you…

Oh MacOS Sequoia the menu items will dodge away as you navigate a right-click menu.
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