They've got the SF Symbols font, and probably assumed that's enough. Everyone has the same set of icons available, technically. It seems that Apple has nobody left who has all three at the same time: taste, attention to detail, and authority to demand fixes. Having lots of people who have max two out of these three gives you designs of Microsoft and Glass Apple.
I despise SF Symbols. Cheap, lame, boring, flat little hieroglyphics do not make good icons. They're just cheap.
But as the article shows - you don't even get consistency, since different apps pick different SF symbols for the same thing.
It's just uniformity that failed to bring real user interface consistency.
I finally talked my company into letting me swap out my MacBook pro for some little Dell. After the last year of updates, my Mac has stopped resuming from sleep reliably, everything is ugly, they took the already barely usable (imo) finder and system settings and found exciting new ways to make them worse. Sadly corporate security means os updates were not optional. I've never really liked macOS but it feels like som…
> 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
I've grown increase hate towards Finder to the point that I avoid using at all costs. I've been migrating to the terminal, using fzf to find files and directories and yazi for a more graphical experience.
How can it be called FINDER, if it can't FIND things? cmd+shift+g should be a fuzzy search, but it returns nothing 80% of the time. cmd+f often can't see files that are in first level folders inside my home folder.
Meanwhile, hitting Esc+C in the terminal (via fzf) it's totally effective.
It’s not obvious to me how black on yellow is a mistake. It’s quite readable, the contrast is broad enough for clarity but not so broad the background overwhelms the foreground. Yellow’s a recommended “light” background for visually impaired people so the choice has precedance (although I confess that many other examples of it I’ve seen use a softer pastel yellow which is more comfortable).
The huge area of intense yellow (or any highly saturated color actually) is very jarring. The eyes get tired quickly. It's really a weird choice coming from a person who is apparently into visual communication. Btw, I'm using a desktop PC with a large browser window. Maybe on a small mobile screen the problem is less apparent.
Sure, but "white" has a pretty similar effect, especially on modern high lumen screens. "Dark mode" is popular for a reason.
Personally, anecdotally, I find the black-on-yellow easier to work with than most sites' black-on-white. I just tested it with my screen at two or three brightness levels, and it was more comfortable than similar content against white. I'm over-sensitive to glare because my eyes lack pigment. I _think_ this makes me more susceptible to contrast issues (it certainly feels like it, but I am only n=1 and I've not done careful study). I'm open to being challenged on this but you'll have to come with broad audience data to contradict a lot of lived experience.
It's fair that you might not like the black-on-yellow; you might feel it's a poor branding choice; but I still contest that it's not "wrong" for any technical, perceptual reason.
It's somewhat understandable. A lot of us felt at the time that surely laptops and tablets would converge. Otherwise, what a waste of hardware. But it hasn't really happened. From a hardware perspective, things have gotten closer with the iPad's magnetic keyboard. But, I still find that the iPad as laptop replacement to be a compromise that I may tolerate for travel but don't love for a lot of laptop work.
iPads are great devices for non-tech savvy people who need a computer for stuff like writing and reading documents and e-mails, planning travel and making reservations, keeping in touch with people on messaging and social media. That's a gigantic market segment, and Apple has to be very careful to not make those devices complicated or vulnerable.
As a tech support for a person with iOS gadgets, this is exactly some tasks which are way too hard on iPad. Emails getting lost because default Mail app was flaky, so I need to install Gmail app. Travel involves tickets, aka files. Now I need to help find the files in the locked down hell of a UI and figure out how to send them to a different app. Bonus points if they were archived and need unpacking. Messaging - some accounts tied to an old number, and a new number is needed to, well, make calls, and Apple generously doesn't provide dualsim option outside of China, so now I need to figure out sync between two devices with two sims, and then some messengers don't allow that while others do, and then I need to explain all that to an elderly non-IT person... In short - it's a mess, every time any task outside of doomscrolling an watching YT arises on iOS.
I don't understand the point you're trying to make. I clicked on your link to your own post on x.com and found pretty much the same text, plus a screenshot that does not explain anything - potentially because I don't know how to get to a full-screen-sized version of that image, but I actually doubt that would help. If it can't be explained in words here on this site, could you please tell me what I'm looking at/for i…
I'm not intimately familiar with the UI/UX principles behind Liquid Glass so I could be wrong, but the main difference I see here is that in the second screenshot, on the Reeder app on the left, the "floating" section is used for emphasis on the main content area (right hand side), while in the Finder screenshot on the right, it's the navigation menu on the left that is floating, and brings unneeded emphasis to itsel…
This. The shadows and highlights tell "this is the main thing on top", and in Apple's world, they wrongly picked the sidebar as worthy of this attention.
And then you have Sylvio Rizzi (of Reeder fame) just one-shotting the whole Liquid Glass tenet by using the prominent glass element to focus on the actual content instead of that hideous sidebar (a liquid glass element I hate the most, not just for a way it makes Xcode 26 sidebar 1 cm wider than Xcode 18 with the same content). I would wear the t-shirt with Reeder screenshot to work if I worked at Apple, and would ob…
I don't understand the point you're trying to make. I clicked on your link to your own post on x.com and found pretty much the same text, plus a screenshot that does not explain anything - potentially because I don't know how to get to a full-screen-sized version of that image, but I actually doubt that would help. If it can't be explained in words here on this site, could you please tell me what I'm looking at/for i…
The tweet contains the actual screenshot of the situation.
If it's coming down from the C suite, that just makes it worse. That's cheap marketing tricks winning priority over lasting intent. It's not just the design folks trying to justify their job at that point, it's the executives surrendering to the "stock must go up during my quarters at all costs" mentality.
Worse in some ways, but understandable an others. If Company X didn’t reinvigorate their product line then consumers might switch to Company Ys products because they look shiny and new. Which is literally why people switched from BlackBerry et al to iPhones in the previous decade. Consumers are fickle and want that dopamine hit when they spend money. I know this and even I find myself chasing shiny things. So there’s…
People switched from BlackBerry to iPhone for far more than just iPhones being "shiny and new." Visual voicemail, Safari, touchscreen, etc. The recent UI redesign effort is not remotely comparable to the investment and strategy that went into distinguishing the iPhone from the rest of the cell phone market.
We're discussing this on one of the most bare and plain sites on the popular internet. Folks who are attracted to value don't care if stuff isn't redesigned if it works well. It's a bad sign if executives at Apple feel the need to invest in cheap dopamine hacks for the sake of novelty farming.
A company that stagnates or even shrinks to a healthy size can be more valuable to society, and the stock market in the long term, than one that mutilates itself in chase of unnecessary growth.
"Beautiful" maybe, not "good UX" for sure. Prior to Uber, calling a cab using the phone app was...suboptimal and easier to actually call a taxi company. They also provided much better services, which is what make them stick around. RH made a lot of investment tool accessible to people that "I just want to buy stock of some company", I used tasty trades for a while, but their mobile app while has all functionality, bu…
The point still stands. The improvement in "usability" in those three cases did not come from app UI/UX.
It came from adjusting IRL to work with better UI/UX rather than adjust UI/UX to work with existing business processes.
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…
The business goal is clear: visionOS. Liquid Glass is designed with AR in mind, that's the only place where it actually makes some sense. Pretty much the same thing as Microsoft did with Windows 8, trying to unify the UX and visual style across PCs and phones. And it's going similarly well.
> 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.
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.
I used to work for one big company.
Every newly hired design director desperately wanted to create a new design for the corporate portal because it would add a new line to his resume.