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_0xdd 9 hours ago [-]
It's still a bit jarring to me to see how far Apple embraced form over function with iOS and subsequently macOS. I remember reading the Human Interface Guidelines from the late Mac OS 9/early Mac OS X days and being taken aback by the level of detail and thought that went into those interfaces. Don't get me wrong, some things made no sense (brushed metal was... a choice) but there was a certain level of polish that I don't think exists anymore.
matsemann 1 hours ago [-]
Yeah, for a decade now it's been a UX disaster. It "works", because so many people are used to it, but look at a new user trying to navigate iOS, it's bonkers. Swiping from random directions achieves different things (and how would you even know you can?). The home button has like 11 different functions depending on how you press it and when.
KPGv2 10 minutes ago [-]
> Swiping from random directions achieves different things (and how would you even know you can?)
Cultural context, the same way you'd know tapping on an icon opens an app.
altern8 1 hours ago [-]
That's what made me switch to Android.
At least you can have 3-button navigation
KronisLV 20 minutes ago [-]
I moved over from my old Android to an iPhone (needed to develop an iOS app for a freelance thing too) and that was the first thing that cause me off guard - it’s like controls that should be buttons of some kind were just omitted.
petee 18 minutes ago [-]
Even thats slowly being depreciated for gestures as the default option. A bunch of Google's own apps won't play nice with it anymore on the flagship Pixel, drawing buttons underneath
nok22kon 6 hours ago [-]
it's market changed
it started as a computer for professionals
now its for people who want to look cool. so form is much more important than function, it's literally what you buy
wpm 5 hours ago [-]
Haha yeah! Mac users just buy them to look cool while they write their whatever in the coffee shop! This is definitely not a preposterous and outdated observation/joke!
dsego 4 hours ago [-]
Wasn't there a trend where kids were just wearing dead apple watches as accessories? It's just a status symbol, like gold bracelets.
wett 2 hours ago [-]
I just graduated college and I’ve never heard of this. Can’t find anything about it online either.
You can get a functional Apple Watch on Facebook for 50-100 bucks. So not much of a signal for status.
We have much sillier, trendier accessories to choose from :)
dsego 41 minutes ago [-]
Might be just a certain demographic then, there was a viral tiktok with athletes wearing dead apple watches.
lukan 37 minutes ago [-]
Not every kid has 50-100 bucks avaiable.
KPGv2 8 minutes ago [-]
Yeah, and there are kids pooping in litterboxes in Texas schools! /s
I would never trust media covering youth trends. It's a bunch of 50yos whose teenager told them something as a joke and they took it seriously.
See also: latest millennial trend is avocado toast, and that's why they're all broke
andrepd 4 hours ago [-]
Sounds like it hit a nerve to be honest
KPGv2 5 minutes ago [-]
I have one because I am a professional with a job and don't have time to mess around with Linux on my laptop when I'm not getting paid. That leaves Windows and macOS. I haven't had a good Windows experience since XP.
mfru 2 hours ago [-]
MacBooks have the best value/money ratio at the moment. The combination of battery life, processing power and touch pad UX are unmatched
refactor_master 6 hours ago [-]
Is that why their laptops routinely beat the competition year after year in reviews and reliability surveys? Because they “look cool”? I’m going to need some more numbers on that one.
FireBeyond 5 hours ago [-]
All my devices are Apple: laptop, Studio, display, phone, iPad, watch...
I will say that Apple has solidified on the design and reliability "recently". But let's not pretend that the MBP line, to pick on one, didn't go through some rough rough days. I've had laptops that had the delaminating screen, the 'single grain of sand can ruin it' butterfly keyboard, hell, I've had two models that had recalled logic boards. Early Magsafe connectors (fantastic invention) where the rubber would routinely fail even without tension (I had two that failed, exposing bare wire, even though they spent the entirety of their life on a desk, routed through a cable organizer, far away from any UV sunlight hitting them directly.
But now? Things are much, much more solid.
happymellon 5 hours ago [-]
You missed the late Intel MBPs which I remember heating up hotter than the sun and exhausting it out the back which made the touch bar uncomfortable to touch!
nayroclade 2 hours ago [-]
Some of the other examples you could maybe say are just poor industrial design or bad execution of a potentially workable idea, but the Intel MBP thermal debacle was definitely the most egregious example of Apple blindly pursuing form-over-function. They set a goal for ultra-slim laptop forms that the components they were using simply could never achieve. It would have been obvious from prototyping that temperature was a major problem, but whatever decision making process they had in place at the time overrode it. The best you can say is they seemed to have learned from their mistake.
LoganDark 3 hours ago [-]
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TylerE 5 hours ago [-]
Even the worst MBP is light years better than the plasticky crap on the Windows side.
Quothling 5 hours ago [-]
I challenge you to find a laptop that can do what my macbook air m1 with 8gb of ram does at the $899 it was through the education store. No fan, awesome battery life, good trackpad and keyboard, the ability to not get hot while using it.
I'm a senior platform engineer who at the time I bought it was a senior software developer, who can still use it for my daily tasks despite it having 8gb of ram. Until very recently the 32gb T14 I had ad work was frankly worse performant than the little air, while having a battery life of around 45 minutes a fan sounding like a jetengine and a keyboard so hot it made the sun jealous. My new model is way faster than my macbook air though, but the old model was technically newer than the air. Obviously the comparisson isn't completely fair since we run a lot of corporate enterprise stuff on our laptops, but still.
I'd really like a Linux laptop, but a Framework laptop is expensive (and it has loud fans and runs hot). A tuxedo is even more expensive and has fans where you'd place it on your legs for whatever reason, and runs hot. Looking at the laptop market now, I can't see what you'd buy. A week ago I would've said the Neo (if the 8gb of ram holds up as well on the mobile chip as it does on the m1), but today I'm guessing a refurbished air with 16gb would be the only real option for someone who want's a cool low noise machine with decent battery time.
Whether you run OS/X or Asahi, I really can't see what you'd buy other than these. At least if you actually use it on your lap and don't just have it sit in a dock on a table.
Then again, I'm the sort of person who would buy the pink neo because it would fuck with the perception people have of my mid 40 Scandinavian conservativeish dad look. So maybe it is just about the message?
ktallett 27 minutes ago [-]
A Framework isn't loud at all. I regularly do simulations on mine and it works perfectly without noise.
I think if you just compare cost then yes the Mac is a good deal but there is more than cost that matters. I think flexibility, reparibility and so on matter.
chias 3 minutes ago [-]
Mine (11th gen framework 13) is.
I have to keep it in battery saver mode or the fans just spin up when it's idle. They come up anyway (and irregularly) when watching a movie, loud enough to be heard over the movie -- though that may also be partly the fault of the milquetoast speakers that also inexplicably point down (so if you're watching something in bed you'll need to find a hard surface to put it on so that the sound isn't completely muffled).
That said, i have a macbook pro for work and macOS infuriates me, i would not trade my framework for any apple device under any circumstances. I love my framework more than any laptop I've ever owned. I just wish the hardware was more polished.
21asdffdsa12 3 hours ago [-]
Are there any laptops where the cooling is handled by the screen backside?
applfanboysbgon 3 hours ago [-]
> $899 it was through the education store
Comparing a subsidised computer for children to one that isn't isn't exactly a fair comparison, is it?
> No fan,
You know why Macbooks don't need a fan? It's because they aren't powerful enough to draw heat in the first place. A month ago, for the same price as a $1700 Macbook Pro (before the recent increase) I got a laptop with a CPU that is literally twice as fast on parellelisable workloads, has a 5070 Ti vs. nothing at all, and 32GB RAM. A superior screen, keyboard, and I can install my own choice of OS on it, too. Now that same dingy Macbook Pro costs $2000, or $2400 if you want 32GB RAM. Apple's greatest coup was convincing people that paying twice as much for half the hardware was a killer feature, and now everyone goes on and on about how Macbooks are the most premium hardware money can buy because they're so weak they don't need a fan to keep them cool. It's truly remarkable how susceptible people are to status-culture-based marketing.
Username related.
pocketsand 1 hours ago [-]
This comment is untethered from reality. Apple Silicon at present beats every single laptop on the market at CPU-bound workloads using a fraction of the power draw. Exceptions exist but usually those cases are break even or close calls.
It trails GPU workflows on the high end but wins on the low end. It still wins on efficiency.
It falls over on storage and RAM prices (well, for about 6 months it was competitive here).
I say this as someone who over the last year has done the majority of my competition on PC hardware running Linux.
You may be looking at this as a status game but it has clouded your vision. It is implausible that mass market products with mass adoption find their success solely on status. If believing that makes you feel superior, well, enjoy the rush.
applfanboysbgon 50 minutes ago [-]
> Apple Silicon at present beats every single laptop on the market at CPU-bound workloads
[citation needed]
> It is implausible that mass market products with mass adoption find their success solely on status.
People still pay a massive premium for blood diamonds over physically indistinguishable lab diamonds. You underestimate how wildly irrational the market is when it comes to status perception.
lukan 33 minutes ago [-]
Can you recommend me a non apple fanless laptop with similar power/battery life characteristics?
rafram 6 minutes ago [-]
Apple education store isn't subsidized or "for children."
_jackdk_ 1 hours ago [-]
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al_borland 12 hours ago [-]
While I wholeheartedly agree, I suspect the required backgrounds are to create a uniform format between system, where VisionOS requires round icons for more reliable eye tracking.
It seems like every OS got a little harder to use in order to better vibe with VisionOS, the least popular platform they have.
While I applaud the commitment to building a new platform, I don’t like that’s is coming at the expense of the others.
cmovq 4 hours ago [-]
I understand this logic, but at some point it makes sense to design the system for the millions of people on macs rather than make compromises for the sake of dozens of Vision Pro users.
BugsJustFindMe 11 hours ago [-]
> VisionOS requires round icons for more reliable eye tracking
I'm confused here. What do you think is the relationship between round icons and eye tracking?
al_borland 10 hours ago [-]
They found having round icons made people look at the center, rather than the edges and corners. Since the UX relies entirely on where the user is looking, this made it more reliable.
I remember reading it in the HIG when VisionOS came out and everyone was complaining about the shape. I went looking to see if there was a reason, and there was.
BugsJustFindMe 10 hours ago [-]
That's interesting, but I think this is solvable in better ways. If the VisionOS icon grid doesn't have a voronoi hit map, then IMO they're doing a stupid. There's a _lot_ of space between icons in the grid. It should be plenty of distance to reliably determine that you're looking nearer to the center of a particular one.
al_borland 10 hours ago [-]
Here is what they say:
> In general, give an interactive item a rounded shape. People’s eyes tend to be drawn toward the corners in a shape, making it difficult to keep looking at the shape’s center. The more rounded an item’s shape, the easier it is for people to use their eyes to target it.
The page also talks about leaving enough visual space between elements as well as many other considerations for this type of interface.
VisionOS, at least as it stands today, will be dead before you know it. If you don't understand what I mean, look up the rumor about the future of Vision Pro.
What a waste of resource to invent the whole Tahoe "design language" only for nothing.
nrightnour 11 hours ago [-]
Are you sure visionOS requires it? Having an icon be a few px smaller so a microphone can stick out, doesn't seem like a big deal for tracking.
al_borland 10 hours ago [-]
The thing sticking outside of the icon draws the eye to it, which means your focus is at the edge instead of the center, which makes for a more error prone experience.
Since the eyes are the cursor, this is a problem. Desktop and mobile don’t have this issue.
WillAdams 9 hours ago [-]
Obvious solution, two different icons, round one for Vision OS, more shapely one for everyone else.
mrkstu 8 hours ago [-]
Or squirqle jail just on vision OS
pitched 6 hours ago [-]
Or squirgle jail on a transparent background instead of a grey one? Why would cursor collision with an image stop working because a new input method?
WillAdams 10 minutes ago [-]
Maybe an animation which focuses the eye on the center of the icon?
miccou 6 hours ago [-]
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ryukoposting 6 hours ago [-]
> The thing sticking outside of the icon draws the eye to it, which means your focus is at the edge instead of the center, which makes for a more error prone experience.
And Apple decided this was a problem with icons, rather than a problem with the way they implemented their vision tracking? Believable, and laughable.
paradox460 2 hours ago [-]
"You're looking at it wrong"
6 hours ago [-]
jay_kyburz 6 hours ago [-]
Where you are looking should not be the cursor, that is obviously dumb. Should be where your nose is pointing.
moron4hire 11 hours ago [-]
Regardless, you don't need to make the hitboxes one-to-one with the graphics. Indeed, doing so tends to make for unreliable hitboxes, so most picking systems have two different, idealized enter and exit hitboxes for each icon.
MBCook 8 hours ago [-]
So what? Thats not MacOS.
I think things are fine on iOS. I don’t mind the rectangles, they fit the grid. That’s how it’s always been.
I don’t care about VisionOS. Circles are odd, whatever.
But the Mac shouldn’t be forced to lose great design because iOS was under different constraints almost 20 years ago. That’s just dumb.
al_borland 8 hours ago [-]
They were trying to make a unified design language across all their operating systems. If iOS and VisionOS both have their icons sitting on uniformly shaped tiles, macOS would break the convention.
I don't like it, but I believe that's the reason why.
MBCook 7 hours ago [-]
Oh I’m sure that’s why they did it. It’s not a good reason. It’s like saying all the food you eat should be beige.
Sure it’s more consistent, but at what cost? You lose all the benefits. It’s like Chesterton’s Fence, except it has a big sign on it saying “beware of bull” and there is a guy nearby saying “you don’t want to let that bull out dude, it’s vicious”.
But you want to take down the fence because it’s not the same style as the one on the pen for the chickens.
tomaskafka 5 hours ago [-]
Also imo touchscreen Mac tap targets. Sigh.
jpease 9 hours ago [-]
Seeing all those old icons makes me realize how much I miss them.
Superficial, perhaps, but they were one of the things I loved about OS X when I made the switch back in 2005 or 2006.
MBCook 8 hours ago [-]
No they were better. Whether someone likes the style better or not (I do) they were FAR more visually distinct from each other which made it much easier to find the program you wanted to use.
Right now my dock is a soup of squircles. I have to scan multiple times to find icons even though I know roughly where they should be.
They aren’t distinct. They don’t stand out.
That was never a problem until last year. 40 years of Mac was fine. Then that.
eloisant 2 hours ago [-]
I remember getting interested in an app because of the icon looked nice. Also couldn't use apps if the icon was too ugly and spoiled my beautiful dock.
josho 8 hours ago [-]
I don't think it's superficial at all.
I genuinely find my apps harder to navigate now than I used to. Part of that is that I have far more apps installed today, but the uniform white borders also contribute. They make every icon look about 20% more similar, which adds just enough friction that scanning for the app I want takes a little longer.
Poorly executed icon shapes were distracting, but when they were done well they provided subtle visual cues that made the interface easier to navigate. I miss that more than I expected.
hbn 10 hours ago [-]
> the much-celebrated Liquid Glass opacity slider
The Liquid Glass slider is an embarrassing outright admission of failure. Apple built its brand as a tastemaker, so to put out this new, controversial design language, and after a year of tweaking, finally throw their hands up and say "we don't know what looks good, you decide" is so disappointing.
That said, all the changes in iOS 27 are such a massive improvement from 26. The first design turnout with Alan Dye gone is making me feel very optimistic of their direction.
knollimar 1 hours ago [-]
It's prideful too since just undoing it would be an actual admission of failure. This is a hollow apology and compromise
zapzupnz 8 hours ago [-]
> outright admission of failure
Right!? Who's out there going "oh no, translucent is too translucent; opaque is too opaque; but now that I can have 72.93% glass, my life is complete"?
uncircle 8 hours ago [-]
Apple designers
wpm 5 hours ago [-]
I'll take an admission of failure over slavishly refusing to and trying to pretend it's fine.
There were plenty of people saying Liquid Glass was fundamentally an utterly flawed, bad design, that even if you subjectively liked the way it looked, that its design philosophy was wrong, and led to logically consistent but unusable and ugly interfaces, all to solve a problem no one had.
I'm cautiously optimistic now that the bozo cardboard box designer dope with the ugly glasses is gone we'll see a quiet but rapid change of direction. I'll take "mea culpa". I'll take "whelp, this shit does actually just suck, here's a slider while we work on something better".
lopis 5 hours ago [-]
To me the cherry on top was that they started modifying how third party icons look to match the Liquid Glass. People started complaining to us that our app icon looked blurry because of it.
mrweasel 3 hours ago [-]
There's so little joy and happiness left in computing. Reverting to the older style of icons, plus perhaps a few UI tweaks, certainly help bring a bit of whimsical back into the macOS platform. That's something many of us would love.
vintagedave 3 hours ago [-]
> There's so little joy and happiness left in computing
Liquid Glass was a good step in the right direction imo. A choice to make visual entertainment and beauty a priority over pure function.
I feel like what computers really lost was sounds, we used to have so many joyful sounds and background music on computers while now they are all silent. I think it’s a tragedy the Nintendo switch broke the long history of music in the menus and apps.
latexr 2 hours ago [-]
> A choice to make visual entertainment and beauty a priority over pure function.
Except that (in my view, which is shared by many others though of course not universal) Liquid Glass is ugly as sin. Even if it worked properly I’d still rather not have it. But there’s also nothing entertaining or beautiful about unreadable overlapping text, flashing UI as you pan, visually cut off scrollbars, excessively rounded corners, or any from a plethora of bad decisions.
Liquid Glass is the worst of both worlds.
macOS used to be both functional and visually entertaining, and they’ve been removing that incompetently and for no apparent reason. One obvious case is removing an app from the Dock: It used to be that it went away in a quick puff of smoke with an appropriate sound; some versions back they removed the puff of smoke but kept the sound.
crazygringo 11 hours ago [-]
I've got to disagree.
I really disliked previously, when icon prominence could be wildly different because one icon takes up the full area with a big square, while another is a circle that necessarily has a significantly smaller area within the same extent. Icons from Apple were all nicely balanced in size, but third-party apps could be anything.
Giving equal visual weight to each icon is an improvement. iOS was a step forward in this direction, and now they finally brought the same standard to Mac.
Squircles aren't ugly, they're functional. "Shape" hasn't disappeared as a distinct visual cue, as the area within the squircle is made of, well... different shapes.
And let's not forget the fact that Macs still effectively use icon masks. A smaller icon is harder to click, because clicking on a transparent area... doesn't click at all. I remember icons like a skinny letter "S" that you had to click just right or you couldn't at all.
BugsJustFindMe 11 hours ago [-]
> Giving equal visual weight to each icon is an improvement.
Equal visual weight is another way of saying less differentiated.
> "Shape" hasn't disappeared as a distinct visual cue, as the area within the squircle is made of, well... different shapes.
Shape refers to a boundary outline, not interior patterning. A square with polkadots is still shaped like a square.
> A smaller icon is harder to click, because clicking on a transparent area... doesn't click at all.
That problem is only tangential to what shape they allow your icon to be within an enclosing NxN hitbox. Assume an implied framework where clicking on them isn't broken.
soulofmischief 10 hours ago [-]
Some differentiation between elements must be sacrificed in order to build shared UX patterns between them. I think we can definitely go too far in either direction.
An example of a nice compromise would be the macOS menu bar. Most status icons are monotone, which allows the ones with meaningful color differentiation to shine through without being drowned in the noise or increasing user fatigue.
3dGrabber 4 hours ago [-]
> user fatigue
Citation needed.
What is user fatigue? Can it be empirically measured? Fatigued by what? Too much color? Lack of shape? Too much contrast? Lack of contrast?
When is the last time you were "fatigued" by icons?
Without hard facts the expression is just a wishy-washy way to promote a personal taste.
c0n5pir4cy 2 hours ago [-]
User fatigue is UX concept and can be measured.
I'd be surprised if squircles reduced user fatigue though - I think a good adjacent example is Googles new icons with the colours that all look similar. Users were complaining immediately that they had to look harder to find the correct app.
Another thing we use everyday - fonts - have differentiated visual spacing and shapes make them easier/quicker to read. So it would make sense for this to apply to icons that serve a similar purpose on a smaller scale.
materialpoint 8 hours ago [-]
You seem to conflate different facts that have nothing to do with each other to arrive at a conclusion: There is nothing preventing Apple from not using said click masks while icons retain their distinct shapes. iOS is for mobile, its lessons don't transfer to desktop, and this was proven by Windows 8.
That "squircles aren't ugly because they are functional" - how on Earth can those be mutually exclusive even in recognition? Functional very often is at the cost of making things ugly, the history lesson is that Apple more often than others managed to be both functional and beautiful.
You also conflate convex pixel area with visual weight, but that is false too.
etrautmann 10 hours ago [-]
I’m not a designer but I disagree. I want to be able to easily distinguish apps without much focus or concentration or searching. Making them visually distinct with shape and color is superior. Uniformity is a problem not a target.
8 hours ago [-]
throwwwll 1 hours ago [-]
> I've got to disagree.
That's because you're dumb...
DStiego 3 hours ago [-]
Great design is more about consistency than uniformity.
Just imagine how hard it would be to read a text if all the words had a similar shape! You want them to look very distinct while the predictability of the layout helps you read (which is consistency).
hoistbypetard 13 hours ago [-]
Hard agree! Not only is it less fun and less visually appealing to me, I think forcing the uniform squircle everywhere makes it harder (than it used to be) to distinguish one app from another by icon alone.
boxed 13 hours ago [-]
In fact the HIG used to explicitly say so with clear examples proving it.
1over137 12 hours ago [-]
and which was backed by scientific evidence from controlled trials and human factors and psychology.
pjerem 2 hours ago [-]
> With color now so critical to tell icons apart, it should be no surprise that the new “Clear” and “Tinted” icon styles added in Tahoe are seeing so little uptake. As Adam Engst noted, “[I]t’s nearly impossible to identify a particular app when they’re all clear or tinted squircles, as you can see below. My brain just shuts down when it sees them.”
Also, that's true for a lot of normal application icons. Any Google application, including of course Chrome, but also Slack, Apple Photos, etc ... they all decided to use a "abstract red green yellow blue" logo on a white background. Of course, Google is the main culprit here. IntelliJ icons are another variant but still a pain to recognize and they add so much fun when they are mixed with Google ones.
And that's for the multicolor icons. Less problematic but still are "one color abstract on white background", like how am I supposed to distinguish Jira from Confluence ?
Also my personal bonus is that I have slimmed down high reflective glasses which creates chromatic aberrations so all those multicolor icons are dismantled when they are in my peripheral vision.
bcraven 2 hours ago [-]
Your last paragraph is why I no longer have my lenses thinned. It's cheaper too!
altern8 13 hours ago [-]
Tahoe was such a huge mess, but I'm hopeful that the new CEO will turn things around and bring things back to normal.
If they do, I'll consider upgrading both OS and laptop, but right now I'm holding on to Sequoia
schappim 13 hours ago [-]
It really was Mac OS X's Vista moment.
Edit: It'll always be Mac OS X to me, not macOS.
felixding 11 hours ago [-]
Yes! You are not alone. The name Mac OS X has always felt special to me.
zapzupnz 9 hours ago [-]
Mac OS X 27.
10.27?
But that means there were two each of 10.11, 10.12, 10.13, 10.14, and 10.15 :-)
VladVladikoff 12 hours ago [-]
They have a new head designer too IIRC, but probably is going to take some time for him to slowly move away from the mess he inherited.
hbn 10 hours ago [-]
Alan Dye was brought in during the Jony Ive era when they were launching the first Apple Watch because he came from a fashion/print background. Before Apple really figured out what the Watch was going to be (a health/fitness accessory for your phone) they were going for the "luxury fashion" angle.
Somehow when Ive left, Dye got put in charge of design even though he had zero experience in software design that anyone seems to be aware of. He was criticized for the years following for a lot of bizarre design regressions that were happening across all of Apple's OSes. Then a few months after Dye himself announced Liquid Glass at WWDC last year, he blindsided Apple by accepting a poaching offer from Meta, seemingly because Zuck isn't aware of how untalented the guy is.
Now Stephen Lemay is in charge, who's been at Apple for many years and actually knows stuff about software design. It's said that within the walls of Apple, a lot of people were very happy about the change, and the first showing of design changes we got since then are looking very good for Apple.
wmanley 3 hours ago [-]
> seemingly because Zuck isn't aware of how untalented the guy is.
Maybe Zuck just wanted his laptop to get better.
troupo 7 hours ago [-]
> Now Stephen Lemay is in charge, who's been at Apple for many years and actually knows stuff about software design
And who was Dye's second in command, and who was integral in coming up with Liquid Glass, designing it, and forcing it down everyone's throat.
saagarjha 10 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
hbn 10 hours ago [-]
The bit about internal rumblings at Apple I definitely read from him but the rest is just things we saw play out publicly over the past decade.
saagarjha 9 hours ago [-]
I have no real love for Alan Dye but you should probably understand that Gruber feels it is a personal affront that someone might work for a company that is not Apple.
hbn 9 hours ago [-]
Are you suggesting Gruber is upset at Dye for leaving Apple?
We all disliked Dye before he left. People were taking potshots at Apple's design direction under him for 10 years.
saagarjha 9 hours ago [-]
He thinks Dye was never good enough to be at Apple and that he would think of leaving proves it
hbn 9 hours ago [-]
Is there something you perceive as unfair about judging a guy on the output of the work he was responsible for over a long period of time?
saagarjha 7 hours ago [-]
You will note that this is not what is being judged as I described in my comment that you just replied to
tambourine_man 9 hours ago [-]
Gruber does not have a monopoly on disliking Alan Dye’s work. On the contrary, I never met anyone who knew UI design was a thing that liked what he did.
When you’re using a tool for 40 years and someone who really has no clue gets in charge, starts breaking basic functionality for no good reason and affecting your day to day work, it’s not hard to get infuriated.
troupo 7 hours ago [-]
How do you think thay worked? Alan Dye alome came up with, designed and somehow forced Liquid Glass into every platform? Lemay, who was his second in command had nothing to do with it? It was Alan Dye single-handedly doing it?
saagarjha 7 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
troupo 7 hours ago [-]
> slowly move away from the mess he inherited.
The mess he actively implemented and was an integral part of?
Why do people keep thinking that Alan Dye was the only person (apparently with God-like powers) who somehow forced and designed Liquid Glass alone, in isolation, and somehow sneaked it in to every Apple platform.
vikingcat 13 hours ago [-]
Apple CEOs always seem to want to make a splash via hardware (especially since the guy worked in hardware engineering) but it would be nice if an engineer brings more focus on the software as well.
saagarjha 13 hours ago [-]
Golden Gate is better but it hasn't fixed your icons unfortunately
WillAdams 9 hours ago [-]
The thing which kills me, is that with entirety of the State of California's Gazetteer to pull from, Apple didn't pull a page from Android and use an alphabetically ordered naming scheme so that folks could determine ordering of versions.
7 hours ago [-]
Cockbrand 4 hours ago [-]
As an aside, Rogue Amoeba are one of an ecosystem of great and greatly passionate indie software houses for the Mac.
All of them create excellent software with polished UIs, provide excellent support and never forget to have fun. This seems to be unique to the Mac, at least at this scale.
klntsky 4 hours ago [-]
Any linux kid with a slightest experience with desktop ricing would tell them that uniformly customized icons are a nightmare for visual recognition. Why didn't they run some internal tests, it's so obvious
matzie 5 hours ago [-]
I'm on Tahoe and when i built an app using neutralino js the png icon was way bigger than the other icons, i needed to add padding to make the squircle look normal. So honestly i dont think this is a software thing, its more of designers designing it this way or only using their icon composer software which creates imaginary limitations.
bze12 11 hours ago [-]
They've gone too far on enforcing uniformity of icons and abusing liquid glass, but I disagree that arbitrary shapes were better. All the random icon shapes looked cool in isolation, but were harder to scan at a glance. The uniform squircle is a useful constraint.
I wouldn't mind if they allowed something similar to that audio hijack icon, where you require the rounded rect as the guiding frame but are allowed to have some elements protruding out of it. But completely arbitrary shapes are too jarring imo.
tambourine_man 9 hours ago [-]
Early on, when UI/UX was emerging as a discipline, user reaction times and accuracy were measured across a large number of participants. There are many stories during the development of the Lisa and Mac of unexpected user behavior and results.
We shouldn’t be guessing if uniformity helps distinguish between apps or not. We could very easily test it.
But UI/UX has long distanced itself from science, for whatever reason. Maybe because users are so proficient these days that almost anything works. We used to required training on how to use a mouse, menus and windows.
It’s been probably a decade since I’ve heard anyone mention Fitt’s law, for instance, and Liquid Glass atrocities are direct a consequence of disregarding all that was learned in this field.
wpm 5 hours ago [-]
I'm pretty sure Nielsen already tested it, if I had to guess they probably found that different icon shapes are broadly better but that gets ignored because "it's cheaper to use some shitty vector squiggle in a round rect", just like the research that found "icons are better when there is text" is widely ignored too because internationalization costs money.
bze12 11 hours ago [-]
I mostly lament the simplification of app icons as an artistic loss, not as a usability loss. Shameless plug, but I made a project based on the idea of icons as pure art with no utility https://www.benedelste.in/post/__001
ryandrake 11 hours ago [-]
I can see both sides. Artistic constraints can suck, but on the other hand, for every app with a truly beautiful icon design, like the ones listed in the "It Doesn’t Have to Be Like This" section, how many apps have truly awful icon designs? The dock is prime visual real estate, and as a user, I'd like some kind of constraint that makes it less likely some crazy art style is going to be imposed on my desktop just because I need an app there.
voidUpdate 4 hours ago [-]
Maybe it's just me, but I never really liked the detailed older mac icons, like the examples at the bottom of the page. I've always enjoyed more minimalist, simple user interfaces. And I can understand what Apple are trying to do by standardising their icons on the squircle (even if the execution is a bit iffy sometimes, the big grey border doesn't look great). Though, judging by everyone else's writings, I'm probably in the minority
OuterVale 10 hours ago [-]
My personal take is that icons should conform to the squircle, but have a permitted amount of break out from the core shape. For example, Audio Hijack’s icon as presented in the article should be allowed to have the microphone extend past the border slightly. The squircle should be mandated as the core shape, but with just tad bit of flexibility and shape definition.
This keeps grids feeling proper, organised, and aligned, without feeling like the icons of Android Honeycomb.
brikym 2 hours ago [-]
I never understood this sick decision. I used to use the shapes to identify apps.
Most cartoon characters have very distinctive silhouettes and I don't think it's a coincidence. Remember "Who's that Pokemon?"
knollimar 1 hours ago [-]
Squircle from above!
mortenjorck 12 hours ago [-]
The great thing about the new multi-layer icon format in Golden Gate is that it finally separates an icon's foreground from the background.
So in theory, it opens the door to returning shape-differentiated icons to MacOS if a future display theme (a successor to the poorly-conceived Clear and Tinted themes) allows the background to be minimized while the foreground is emphasized.
What I would love to see, and should now be possible, is a revision of the Clear theme where the squircle is transparent/refractive and the foreground retains its native color.
BugsJustFindMe 11 hours ago [-]
> This time, however, the changes are genuine improvements. Here’s the refined Automator icon, for example
Uh, maybe. Parts of it are certainly slightly sharper in an unimportant way when viewed at normal icon size and not zoomed way in. I'm not sure that it's any better. And if that Automator icon is the exemplar, then any improvement is extremely marginal. My god it's just such a bad icon. Whoever is managing icon design should be extremely ashamed of themselves.
Show anyone the pre-Tahoe Automator icon and ask them what it depicts and why that fits and they'll be able to tell you that it looks like a robot and robots are used in automation and therefore every time they see the little robot they'll think Automator. Ask them what the post-Tahoe icon depicts and why that fits and they'll be able to tell you fuck all because what the fuck even is that supposed to be if you don't already know.
overgard 11 hours ago [-]
I find the squircle jail just creates a lot of confusion for me, having distinct shapes helps a lot at a glance.
nanapipirara 6 hours ago [-]
Someone posted an old MacOS screenshot on Reddit and it was immediately obvious that the icons without a silhouette were the worst out of all of them.
Like iTunes / Books / App Store. And that's basically what they went with eventually...
Dashboard and Launcher are fine, but they have a reason to be a circle. (Well Launcher less so maybe)
Chrome is terrible, it represents nothing. But I guess it's just a brand.
I wish we could go back to this instead of squircles...
Tangential related, but i find Icons should have a animated tooltip- when hovered over prolonged, they should tell what the program should do in a cyclical svg-animation.
stevebmark 10 hours ago [-]
It is always great to see more people be vocal about the poison of flat design
pitched 6 hours ago [-]
The only reason to run MacOS over Linux is the hardware. Arm MacBooks are unreasonably good but don’t support Linux (Asahi is still a bit WIP).
They sell hardware, not software, so the state of things makes sense. It is so disappointing though.
nixpulvis 11 hours ago [-]
I was originally excited by the flat design revolution because it appealed to my affinity with uniformity and consistency. But I believe now that I was ignorant and lazy. Bad design still exists within flat style rules, and it has an even worse and cheap feel to it. Meanwhile we've lost whole dimensions of expression.
sunaookami 3 hours ago [-]
Same for Android. Hate adaptive icons...
rglover 10 hours ago [-]
I honestly forgot icons used to be a lot of different shapes. Used Panic Coda way back in the day and that leaf icon from this post is unmistakable.
Jyaif 8 hours ago [-]
Ever since the android debacle with icons having shadows going in different directions or length I've been thinking that icons should be 3D models (with restrictions to make them fast to render and/or fast to bake into flat images).
That would be a marvelous way to make icons unified and a differentiating move for Apple.
bleakenthusiasm 8 hours ago [-]
Oh yes, I hate this. OneUI has that as well. It makes searching for an app so much more conscious and bothersome. I don't want my app drawer to look as neat as possible, I want it to work with the least amount of attention that I can possibly get away with.
anal_reactor 6 hours ago [-]
Android started mandating all icons to have the same shape like 9 years ago. In 2026 there are still some apps on my phone that haven't updated their icons yet.
colesantiago 13 hours ago [-]
It might be better to make Linux have these gorgeous icons now that Apple locked them up.
Make the icons be Free on Free OSes like Linux.
geraldcombs 13 hours ago [-]
What's been keeping Linux from having gorgeous icons up to this point?
geokon 2 hours ago [-]
There are plenty of Icon packs suitable to all aesthetic preferences. Just nobody is going to write a blog post ragging a some Icon Pack b/c if you don't like it then it's trivial to change to a "better" one (that said I still think the arguments in the blog post are interesting and worth considering)
To the blog's point - many KDE Icon Packs have non-uniform shapes (ex: I'm currently using Newaita)
edoceo 13 hours ago [-]
Someone with 5000 hours design experience needs to make a common icon theme for a few 100 GTK and QT libraries and standard-names. It feels like it's 1000s of hours of work. And then you have to make them available in a few formats, HDPI, maybe a build system, etc. there are a number of themes but the ones I try seem to be missing one or more of the icons from the set. Just need the right volunteers to build them, and also get a bunch of app-builders to adopt them, and figure out what colour the bike-shed should be (blue).
r3trohack3r 12 hours ago [-]
Why volunteer? Why not find a way to pay someone for the value of their time at market rate and release the product of their labor under a permissive license?
edoceo 11 hours ago [-]
For the last 25+ years I've been hearing folks say: "why not find a way". But then not suggest anything more than that obvious answer.
Please suggest an actual path forward, an actual plan that is more than just "figure it out". And the plan needs to address at least 1/2 of the points I made above.
It's a "Hard Problem". The answer needs lots of time, likely money and at least two humans with strong drive to fix the problem.
akerl_ 10 hours ago [-]
We've managed to make the entire corpus of open source software but the thing that's a "Hard Problem" that nobody can find a way to do is making the icons look good?
It's almost like it's not a technical challenge, it's that getting good looking icons would require a unified userbase, and Apple has that but Linux does not.
troupo 6 hours ago [-]
Linux these days is almost exclusively developed by companies with combined value exceeding Apple's several-fold.
Finding money and designers is not really a hard problem.
Teever 12 hours ago [-]
Yeah what if these open source developers just got jobs and then they paid someone to do what they used to do for free?
r3trohack3r 12 hours ago [-]
Yeah, it’s amazing what you can accomplish when you find a way to pay people a livable wage for the things you want.
Gualdrapo 12 hours ago [-]
As a bit of a shameless plug, I did some in the past[0] and am working sporadically on a "fork" of those[1] but it's a whole full-time work. There are hundreds of icons to do for apps alone. Each one needs to be done in 16x16, 22x22, 32x32, 64x64, 128x128 and 256x256 so if say you have 150 icons to do for apps, you actually will need to do 900 icons. And add to that that you'll need to cover categories, places, filetypes, actions...
Granted, you can do a 256x256 and scale it down to 128x128, for example, but if you care for quality some details will be lost anyway. So that's why nowadays you'll see most icon themes are just a bunch of logos plastered over a shaped background.
And what irked me the most was that a few weeks after that I released that first set via deviantart and opendesktop.org there were websites that included them in their sets and made them available for download in their websites, not even a redirect to my deviantart or opendesktop pages or something. And found out after that that some people were using them in commercial projects and stuff so I had to chase them asking to not use them since they were cc-by-nc'ed.
Never got a single cent of any of that. I love making icons, at some point I was even working for the icons that would eventually become the Breeze set for KDE5 with their VDG, but it happens that I also need money to buy the beans.
These are very nice (especially the Betelgeuse set), but -- unless this is just chance from the ones displayed -- don't they mostly all have the same silhouette, a rounded rectangle? While the Betelgeuse ones have more flair and are more differentiable from each other, an excellent thing, locking them in a box is the same kind of jail that this article is about.
I would love to encourage you to free your own icons from the round-rect jail. You have some fantastic designs there.
I think illustration isn't something too much in the mindshare of open source, so overall support for it isn't great. IMO this has contributed to it. The industry standard tools are all closed, with closed formats, so it just sounds like much more of a hassle vs contributing code/text.
I mean this throughout the whole process. The only standard illustration file format I can think of is SVG, but it's largely a format to export to, not one industry-standard software uses as it's main persistence format.
So for starters, contributors tend to need access to speciality software they probably don't have installed to view and edit the source of truth. This also means you're handling at least two files in your VCS, the closed format acting effectively as a blob, no diffs, etc. and an export file (usually more, for different scales) to actually interface with the rest of the ecosystem; this is the file everyone can open, inspect and compare, the one your build consumes, etc.
This already would be a good amount of friction for someone familiar with the tools, but designers are not necessarily familiar with git, the PR process, etc. Add to it that icons are more subjective than code, which overall should follow certain rules and either works or doesn't, and it overall seems not worth it for a casual contributor.
observationist 13 hours ago [-]
They have other, arguably more important, yaks to shave.
dylan604 13 hours ago [-]
a question as old as Linux itself
lern_too_spel 12 hours ago [-]
It'll take just a few prompts to customize all your icons the way you like.
shmerl 7 hours ago [-]
Apple will never care about what users want, they only do what Apple want. If you want to free anything, don't use Apple. It's an obvious lesson that should have been learned a long time ago.
etchalon 12 hours ago [-]
I think this is a battle they won't win, though I applaud the effort.
sublinear 12 hours ago [-]
I agree, but I'm surprised there was no mention of contrast or proposal to restrict colors.
Their first good example bumped up the color contrast. The orange examples in their set of "gorgeous app icons" are just as bad as the slack vs photos example.
I would love if the OS had an option to automatically convert every app icon to greyscale and required a minimum color contrast ratio for the original. Then, the user can pick their own overlay colors (similar to the color tags in finder).
brador 4 hours ago [-]
Design is a cost center now at Apple. Must be reduced and minmaxed.
2d8a875f-39a2-4 5 minutes ago [-]
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itomato 11 hours ago [-]
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SpyCoder77 11 hours ago [-]
I honestly disagree with the author when they say that the Golden Gate icons are better than Tahoes. There are more lines, which is literally removing the point of LIQUID glass. It is supposed to be BLURRY, like LIQUID. I get that it is more readable, but are icons meant to be read? There is no text in them, other than Apple TV which is very distinctive. It seems like they just boosted the sharpness of the icons and pushed to production (or I guess it is technically production-beta?) However I do agree with the point of the article. Icons having things outside of the squircle were unique, fun, and interesting.
dpark 10 hours ago [-]
The real question isn’t whether LIQUID should be BLURRY but whether intentionally choosing a BLURRY user interface design is STUPID.
Apple spent millions convincing everyone they needed Retina displays and then churned out an update that made them all blurry.
healsdata 8 hours ago [-]
If one is this passionate about icons, why not just install (or even make) a custom icon pack? The default icons for Google Apps on Android are awful, but I haven't seen them in years aside from setting up a new device.
MBCook 8 hours ago [-]
You can’t. “Squircle jail” is a real thing. If your icon isn’t the right shape Apple puts it inside one for you.
ceroxylon 10 hours ago [-]
>Apple didn’t just mess with their own icons. They also dictated the shape of every third-party app icon
We will never know if this was AI generated or not, but I have started to flinch at this sentence structure.
hbn 10 hours ago [-]
That's not the "it's not just X—it's Y" AI tell that I assume you've seen other people call out.
It's legitimately a useful sentence to assist the point the author is making.
Cultural context, the same way you'd know tapping on an icon opens an app.
At least you can have 3-button navigation
it started as a computer for professionals
now its for people who want to look cool. so form is much more important than function, it's literally what you buy
You can get a functional Apple Watch on Facebook for 50-100 bucks. So not much of a signal for status.
We have much sillier, trendier accessories to choose from :)
I would never trust media covering youth trends. It's a bunch of 50yos whose teenager told them something as a joke and they took it seriously.
See also: latest millennial trend is avocado toast, and that's why they're all broke
I will say that Apple has solidified on the design and reliability "recently". But let's not pretend that the MBP line, to pick on one, didn't go through some rough rough days. I've had laptops that had the delaminating screen, the 'single grain of sand can ruin it' butterfly keyboard, hell, I've had two models that had recalled logic boards. Early Magsafe connectors (fantastic invention) where the rubber would routinely fail even without tension (I had two that failed, exposing bare wire, even though they spent the entirety of their life on a desk, routed through a cable organizer, far away from any UV sunlight hitting them directly.
But now? Things are much, much more solid.
I'm a senior platform engineer who at the time I bought it was a senior software developer, who can still use it for my daily tasks despite it having 8gb of ram. Until very recently the 32gb T14 I had ad work was frankly worse performant than the little air, while having a battery life of around 45 minutes a fan sounding like a jetengine and a keyboard so hot it made the sun jealous. My new model is way faster than my macbook air though, but the old model was technically newer than the air. Obviously the comparisson isn't completely fair since we run a lot of corporate enterprise stuff on our laptops, but still.
I'd really like a Linux laptop, but a Framework laptop is expensive (and it has loud fans and runs hot). A tuxedo is even more expensive and has fans where you'd place it on your legs for whatever reason, and runs hot. Looking at the laptop market now, I can't see what you'd buy. A week ago I would've said the Neo (if the 8gb of ram holds up as well on the mobile chip as it does on the m1), but today I'm guessing a refurbished air with 16gb would be the only real option for someone who want's a cool low noise machine with decent battery time.
Whether you run OS/X or Asahi, I really can't see what you'd buy other than these. At least if you actually use it on your lap and don't just have it sit in a dock on a table.
Then again, I'm the sort of person who would buy the pink neo because it would fuck with the perception people have of my mid 40 Scandinavian conservativeish dad look. So maybe it is just about the message?
I think if you just compare cost then yes the Mac is a good deal but there is more than cost that matters. I think flexibility, reparibility and so on matter.
I have to keep it in battery saver mode or the fans just spin up when it's idle. They come up anyway (and irregularly) when watching a movie, loud enough to be heard over the movie -- though that may also be partly the fault of the milquetoast speakers that also inexplicably point down (so if you're watching something in bed you'll need to find a hard surface to put it on so that the sound isn't completely muffled).
That said, i have a macbook pro for work and macOS infuriates me, i would not trade my framework for any apple device under any circumstances. I love my framework more than any laptop I've ever owned. I just wish the hardware was more polished.
Comparing a subsidised computer for children to one that isn't isn't exactly a fair comparison, is it?
> No fan,
You know why Macbooks don't need a fan? It's because they aren't powerful enough to draw heat in the first place. A month ago, for the same price as a $1700 Macbook Pro (before the recent increase) I got a laptop with a CPU that is literally twice as fast on parellelisable workloads, has a 5070 Ti vs. nothing at all, and 32GB RAM. A superior screen, keyboard, and I can install my own choice of OS on it, too. Now that same dingy Macbook Pro costs $2000, or $2400 if you want 32GB RAM. Apple's greatest coup was convincing people that paying twice as much for half the hardware was a killer feature, and now everyone goes on and on about how Macbooks are the most premium hardware money can buy because they're so weak they don't need a fan to keep them cool. It's truly remarkable how susceptible people are to status-culture-based marketing.
Username related.
It trails GPU workflows on the high end but wins on the low end. It still wins on efficiency.
It falls over on storage and RAM prices (well, for about 6 months it was competitive here).
I say this as someone who over the last year has done the majority of my competition on PC hardware running Linux.
You may be looking at this as a status game but it has clouded your vision. It is implausible that mass market products with mass adoption find their success solely on status. If believing that makes you feel superior, well, enjoy the rush.
[citation needed]
> It is implausible that mass market products with mass adoption find their success solely on status.
People still pay a massive premium for blood diamonds over physically indistinguishable lab diamonds. You underestimate how wildly irrational the market is when it comes to status perception.
It seems like every OS got a little harder to use in order to better vibe with VisionOS, the least popular platform they have.
While I applaud the commitment to building a new platform, I don’t like that’s is coming at the expense of the others.
I'm confused here. What do you think is the relationship between round icons and eye tracking?
I remember reading it in the HIG when VisionOS came out and everyone was complaining about the shape. I went looking to see if there was a reason, and there was.
> In general, give an interactive item a rounded shape. People’s eyes tend to be drawn toward the corners in a shape, making it difficult to keep looking at the shape’s center. The more rounded an item’s shape, the easier it is for people to use their eyes to target it.
The page also talks about leaving enough visual space between elements as well as many other considerations for this type of interface.
https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...
What a waste of resource to invent the whole Tahoe "design language" only for nothing.
Since the eyes are the cursor, this is a problem. Desktop and mobile don’t have this issue.
And Apple decided this was a problem with icons, rather than a problem with the way they implemented their vision tracking? Believable, and laughable.
I think things are fine on iOS. I don’t mind the rectangles, they fit the grid. That’s how it’s always been.
I don’t care about VisionOS. Circles are odd, whatever.
But the Mac shouldn’t be forced to lose great design because iOS was under different constraints almost 20 years ago. That’s just dumb.
I don't like it, but I believe that's the reason why.
Sure it’s more consistent, but at what cost? You lose all the benefits. It’s like Chesterton’s Fence, except it has a big sign on it saying “beware of bull” and there is a guy nearby saying “you don’t want to let that bull out dude, it’s vicious”.
But you want to take down the fence because it’s not the same style as the one on the pen for the chickens.
Superficial, perhaps, but they were one of the things I loved about OS X when I made the switch back in 2005 or 2006.
Right now my dock is a soup of squircles. I have to scan multiple times to find icons even though I know roughly where they should be.
They aren’t distinct. They don’t stand out.
That was never a problem until last year. 40 years of Mac was fine. Then that.
I genuinely find my apps harder to navigate now than I used to. Part of that is that I have far more apps installed today, but the uniform white borders also contribute. They make every icon look about 20% more similar, which adds just enough friction that scanning for the app I want takes a little longer.
Poorly executed icon shapes were distracting, but when they were done well they provided subtle visual cues that made the interface easier to navigate. I miss that more than I expected.
The Liquid Glass slider is an embarrassing outright admission of failure. Apple built its brand as a tastemaker, so to put out this new, controversial design language, and after a year of tweaking, finally throw their hands up and say "we don't know what looks good, you decide" is so disappointing.
That said, all the changes in iOS 27 are such a massive improvement from 26. The first design turnout with Alan Dye gone is making me feel very optimistic of their direction.
Right!? Who's out there going "oh no, translucent is too translucent; opaque is too opaque; but now that I can have 72.93% glass, my life is complete"?
There were plenty of people saying Liquid Glass was fundamentally an utterly flawed, bad design, that even if you subjectively liked the way it looked, that its design philosophy was wrong, and led to logically consistent but unusable and ugly interfaces, all to solve a problem no one had.
I'm cautiously optimistic now that the bozo cardboard box designer dope with the ugly glasses is gone we'll see a quiet but rapid change of direction. I'll take "mea culpa". I'll take "whelp, this shit does actually just suck, here's a slider while we work on something better".
Preach it! https://daveon.design/creating-joy-in-the-user-experience.ht...
I feel like what computers really lost was sounds, we used to have so many joyful sounds and background music on computers while now they are all silent. I think it’s a tragedy the Nintendo switch broke the long history of music in the menus and apps.
Except that (in my view, which is shared by many others though of course not universal) Liquid Glass is ugly as sin. Even if it worked properly I’d still rather not have it. But there’s also nothing entertaining or beautiful about unreadable overlapping text, flashing UI as you pan, visually cut off scrollbars, excessively rounded corners, or any from a plethora of bad decisions.
Liquid Glass is the worst of both worlds.
macOS used to be both functional and visually entertaining, and they’ve been removing that incompetently and for no apparent reason. One obvious case is removing an app from the Dock: It used to be that it went away in a quick puff of smoke with an appropriate sound; some versions back they removed the puff of smoke but kept the sound.
I really disliked previously, when icon prominence could be wildly different because one icon takes up the full area with a big square, while another is a circle that necessarily has a significantly smaller area within the same extent. Icons from Apple were all nicely balanced in size, but third-party apps could be anything.
Giving equal visual weight to each icon is an improvement. iOS was a step forward in this direction, and now they finally brought the same standard to Mac.
Squircles aren't ugly, they're functional. "Shape" hasn't disappeared as a distinct visual cue, as the area within the squircle is made of, well... different shapes.
And let's not forget the fact that Macs still effectively use icon masks. A smaller icon is harder to click, because clicking on a transparent area... doesn't click at all. I remember icons like a skinny letter "S" that you had to click just right or you couldn't at all.
Equal visual weight is another way of saying less differentiated.
> "Shape" hasn't disappeared as a distinct visual cue, as the area within the squircle is made of, well... different shapes.
Shape refers to a boundary outline, not interior patterning. A square with polkadots is still shaped like a square.
> A smaller icon is harder to click, because clicking on a transparent area... doesn't click at all.
That problem is only tangential to what shape they allow your icon to be within an enclosing NxN hitbox. Assume an implied framework where clicking on them isn't broken.
An example of a nice compromise would be the macOS menu bar. Most status icons are monotone, which allows the ones with meaningful color differentiation to shine through without being drowned in the noise or increasing user fatigue.
Citation needed. What is user fatigue? Can it be empirically measured? Fatigued by what? Too much color? Lack of shape? Too much contrast? Lack of contrast?
When is the last time you were "fatigued" by icons?
Without hard facts the expression is just a wishy-washy way to promote a personal taste.
I'd be surprised if squircles reduced user fatigue though - I think a good adjacent example is Googles new icons with the colours that all look similar. Users were complaining immediately that they had to look harder to find the correct app.
Another thing we use everyday - fonts - have differentiated visual spacing and shapes make them easier/quicker to read. So it would make sense for this to apply to icons that serve a similar purpose on a smaller scale.
That's because you're dumb...
Just imagine how hard it would be to read a text if all the words had a similar shape! You want them to look very distinct while the predictability of the layout helps you read (which is consistency).
Also, that's true for a lot of normal application icons. Any Google application, including of course Chrome, but also Slack, Apple Photos, etc ... they all decided to use a "abstract red green yellow blue" logo on a white background. Of course, Google is the main culprit here. IntelliJ icons are another variant but still a pain to recognize and they add so much fun when they are mixed with Google ones.
And that's for the multicolor icons. Less problematic but still are "one color abstract on white background", like how am I supposed to distinguish Jira from Confluence ?
Also my personal bonus is that I have slimmed down high reflective glasses which creates chromatic aberrations so all those multicolor icons are dismantled when they are in my peripheral vision.
If they do, I'll consider upgrading both OS and laptop, but right now I'm holding on to Sequoia
Edit: It'll always be Mac OS X to me, not macOS.
10.27?
But that means there were two each of 10.11, 10.12, 10.13, 10.14, and 10.15 :-)
Somehow when Ive left, Dye got put in charge of design even though he had zero experience in software design that anyone seems to be aware of. He was criticized for the years following for a lot of bizarre design regressions that were happening across all of Apple's OSes. Then a few months after Dye himself announced Liquid Glass at WWDC last year, he blindsided Apple by accepting a poaching offer from Meta, seemingly because Zuck isn't aware of how untalented the guy is.
Now Stephen Lemay is in charge, who's been at Apple for many years and actually knows stuff about software design. It's said that within the walls of Apple, a lot of people were very happy about the change, and the first showing of design changes we got since then are looking very good for Apple.
Maybe Zuck just wanted his laptop to get better.
And who was Dye's second in command, and who was integral in coming up with Liquid Glass, designing it, and forcing it down everyone's throat.
We all disliked Dye before he left. People were taking potshots at Apple's design direction under him for 10 years.
When you’re using a tool for 40 years and someone who really has no clue gets in charge, starts breaking basic functionality for no good reason and affecting your day to day work, it’s not hard to get infuriated.
The mess he actively implemented and was an integral part of?
Why do people keep thinking that Alan Dye was the only person (apparently with God-like powers) who somehow forced and designed Liquid Glass alone, in isolation, and somehow sneaked it in to every Apple platform.
All of them create excellent software with polished UIs, provide excellent support and never forget to have fun. This seems to be unique to the Mac, at least at this scale.
I wouldn't mind if they allowed something similar to that audio hijack icon, where you require the rounded rect as the guiding frame but are allowed to have some elements protruding out of it. But completely arbitrary shapes are too jarring imo.
We shouldn’t be guessing if uniformity helps distinguish between apps or not. We could very easily test it.
But UI/UX has long distanced itself from science, for whatever reason. Maybe because users are so proficient these days that almost anything works. We used to required training on how to use a mouse, menus and windows.
It’s been probably a decade since I’ve heard anyone mention Fitt’s law, for instance, and Liquid Glass atrocities are direct a consequence of disregarding all that was learned in this field.
This keeps grids feeling proper, organised, and aligned, without feeling like the icons of Android Honeycomb.
Most cartoon characters have very distinctive silhouettes and I don't think it's a coincidence. Remember "Who's that Pokemon?"
So in theory, it opens the door to returning shape-differentiated icons to MacOS if a future display theme (a successor to the poorly-conceived Clear and Tinted themes) allows the background to be minimized while the foreground is emphasized.
What I would love to see, and should now be possible, is a revision of the Clear theme where the squircle is transparent/refractive and the foreground retains its native color.
Uh, maybe. Parts of it are certainly slightly sharper in an unimportant way when viewed at normal icon size and not zoomed way in. I'm not sure that it's any better. And if that Automator icon is the exemplar, then any improvement is extremely marginal. My god it's just such a bad icon. Whoever is managing icon design should be extremely ashamed of themselves.
Show anyone the pre-Tahoe Automator icon and ask them what it depicts and why that fits and they'll be able to tell you that it looks like a robot and robots are used in automation and therefore every time they see the little robot they'll think Automator. Ask them what the post-Tahoe icon depicts and why that fits and they'll be able to tell you fuck all because what the fuck even is that supposed to be if you don't already know.
Like iTunes / Books / App Store. And that's basically what they went with eventually...
Dashboard and Launcher are fine, but they have a reason to be a circle. (Well Launcher less so maybe)
Chrome is terrible, it represents nothing. But I guess it's just a brand.
I wish we could go back to this instead of squircles...
https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/s/9MZsGioCG6
They sell hardware, not software, so the state of things makes sense. It is so disappointing though.
That would be a marvelous way to make icons unified and a differentiating move for Apple.
Make the icons be Free on Free OSes like Linux.
To the blog's point - many KDE Icon Packs have non-uniform shapes (ex: I'm currently using Newaita)
Please suggest an actual path forward, an actual plan that is more than just "figure it out". And the plan needs to address at least 1/2 of the points I made above.
It's a "Hard Problem". The answer needs lots of time, likely money and at least two humans with strong drive to fix the problem.
It's almost like it's not a technical challenge, it's that getting good looking icons would require a unified userbase, and Apple has that but Linux does not.
Finding money and designers is not really a hard problem.
Granted, you can do a 256x256 and scale it down to 128x128, for example, but if you care for quality some details will be lost anyway. So that's why nowadays you'll see most icon themes are just a bunch of logos plastered over a shaped background.
And what irked me the most was that a few weeks after that I released that first set via deviantart and opendesktop.org there were websites that included them in their sets and made them available for download in their websites, not even a redirect to my deviantart or opendesktop pages or something. And found out after that that some people were using them in commercial projects and stuff so I had to chase them asking to not use them since they were cc-by-nc'ed.
Never got a single cent of any of that. I love making icons, at some point I was even working for the icons that would eventually become the Breeze set for KDE5 with their VDG, but it happens that I also need money to buy the beans.
[0] https://miler.codeberg.page/?prj=rekt
[1] https://miler.codeberg.page/?prj=betelgeuse
I would love to encourage you to free your own icons from the round-rect jail. You have some fantastic designs there.
(They still have different shapes, though)
I mean this throughout the whole process. The only standard illustration file format I can think of is SVG, but it's largely a format to export to, not one industry-standard software uses as it's main persistence format.
So for starters, contributors tend to need access to speciality software they probably don't have installed to view and edit the source of truth. This also means you're handling at least two files in your VCS, the closed format acting effectively as a blob, no diffs, etc. and an export file (usually more, for different scales) to actually interface with the rest of the ecosystem; this is the file everyone can open, inspect and compare, the one your build consumes, etc.
This already would be a good amount of friction for someone familiar with the tools, but designers are not necessarily familiar with git, the PR process, etc. Add to it that icons are more subjective than code, which overall should follow certain rules and either works or doesn't, and it overall seems not worth it for a casual contributor.
Their first good example bumped up the color contrast. The orange examples in their set of "gorgeous app icons" are just as bad as the slack vs photos example.
I would love if the OS had an option to automatically convert every app icon to greyscale and required a minimum color contrast ratio for the original. Then, the user can pick their own overlay colors (similar to the color tags in finder).
Apple spent millions convincing everyone they needed Retina displays and then churned out an update that made them all blurry.
We will never know if this was AI generated or not, but I have started to flinch at this sentence structure.
It's legitimately a useful sentence to assist the point the author is making.