[HN Gopher] It's hard to justify Tahoe icons
___________________________________________________________________
It's hard to justify Tahoe icons
Author : lylejantzi3rd
Score : 2040 points
Date : 2026-01-05 11:51 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (tonsky.me)
(TXT) w3m dump (tonsky.me)
| jsheard wrote:
| I hate to be that guy, but there's some irony in putting a full
| screen animated snow effect over an article about unnecessary,
| distracting clutter.
| master_crab wrote:
| True, but you can turn it off with the snowflake icon at the
| top.
| alejoar wrote:
| Which also changes the background color to yellow for some
| reason. And then the "night mode" is.. what is that, a
| lantern? Jeez.
| jsheard wrote:
| Ah, so you can. I tried that but the particles don't
| disappear immediately so I thought it was just toggling the
| colour scheme.
| master_crab wrote:
| Yeah I thought the same thing too. Takes a few moments. A
| UX suggestion for the author. If a user wants it off, it
| doesn't need to be graceful, just quick.
| moogly wrote:
| True, but the site owner clearly despises their prospective
| readers. I found it more prudent to close the tab and flag
| the submission.
| throwaway270925 wrote:
| Flagging a submission just because they added a little
| whimsy for the holidays to their _personal_ website which
| you dont like? What a sad, sorry, hate-filled way to go
| through life.
| moogly wrote:
| "Hate"? For flagging a UX-hostile _submission_. Who is
| overreacting here?
| serial_dev wrote:
| Wow, it turns off the snowflakes, but the ones already
| falling will stay there and keep falling. I thought it only
| changed the background color to yellow, so assumed it doesn't
| actually turn off the snowflakes, wanted to come here and
| comment how ridiculous that is on an article talking about
| bad icons, then I saw in the comments that it turns off the
| snow effect... _eventually_ (like a 10s delay).
|
| It's hilarious that it's a great article about clutter, and
| yet, the post is on a theme that is so badly cluttered it
| would have been funny... if I could have read the article...
| jakzurr wrote:
| lol, I really liked this article.
|
| But yeah, maybe it helps that I have the scripting turned off.
| MattRix wrote:
| I thought the article was great, but nearing the end I noticed
| my phone was incredibly hot and realized it must be the snow
| effect.
| Diggsey wrote:
| It's also `position: fixed` which breaks all scroll
| optimizations and makes scrolling feel terrible.
| izacus wrote:
| If you hate to be that guy, why did you decide to be that guy?
| d-lisp wrote:
| So that the role is occupied already
| Avshalom wrote:
| Nobody loves to be that guy more than the guy that hates to
| be that guy.
| esafak wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wfg1c8dyZYM
| diffeomorphism wrote:
| Nah, the irony is that you think that this was not done on
| purpose. E.g. look at the hamburger menu on the top right.
| tardibear wrote:
| I like the article content but it's ironic that I needed to
| switch to Safari reader-mode to be able to comfortably read it.
| alykhalid wrote:
| Reminder, you can turn off the animated snow effect with the
| snowflake icon at the top
| anymouse123456 wrote:
| Sure, if you don't mind having your eyeballs seared by the
| brightest orange on record.
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| At least he didn't use the trick to make the background HDR
| bright.
| Semiapies wrote:
| It's not a "reminder" for people who've never been to the site
| before. Especially not when the icon isn't even visible on some
| devices, like my phone in portrait.
| afandian wrote:
| No you can't, it just turns the background yellow.
|
| EDIT: the snow stops _but after a few seconds_. I toggled it to
| find out if it would turn off the snow, and the immediate
| feedback was that it doesn't. That's really _really_ bad UX.
| aylmao wrote:
| It's a fun little winter feature. People need to give it a
| break.
|
| fwiw I went through the whole article with the snow effect on
| and found it just fine too.
| afandian wrote:
| I get the site has a frivolous feel, which I do like. And
| there's no problem with snow if you can turn it off. But it
| _seems_ like you can't turn the snow off, at which point it
| does become annoying.
|
| And it's actually making a serious point about something I
| care about, so I actually wanted to read the article (which
| I did through the snow).
| throwaway_ab wrote:
| It's hard to justify snowflake animations on your website...
| vegabook wrote:
| or changing my mouse pointer
| archerx wrote:
| Yes can people stop doing this, it was cute 20 years ago now
| it's just annoying and obnoxious.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| That reminds me of this classic:
| https://www.angelfire.com/super/badwebs/
| noduerme wrote:
| FWIW, while I'm complaining about this site I'm actually
| adding a nice easy-on-the eyes particle system in the
| background of a point-and-click online game. You don't put it
| _in front of the content_ or _behind text people are supposed
| to read_.
|
| This is such a common failure mode with coders who do their
| own design. Just because you _can_ do something doesn 't mean
| you _should_.
| pixelesque wrote:
| It's very annoying, but you can turn it off (snowflake icon,
| although then you get a yellow background), and IMO the article
| content is worth reading.
| xnorswap wrote:
| I tried that then discarded it, because it doesn't
| immediately hide the snowflakes that are already on screen.
|
| The article is good but the choice of distracting snowflakes
| or radioactive piss burning your retina is not a welcome one.
| gcanyon wrote:
| I literally didn't notice that the snowflake icon turned it
| off: 1. I scrolled through the article
| getting more and more frustrated with the snow 2. I
| scrolled all the way back to the top and saw the snowflake
| icon 3. I clicked the snowflake, saw the hideous
| yellow, said WTF and clicked again to go back to blue
| 4. **I never noticed** that the snowflake *does* stop the
| snow, but *only* stops *new* snow, so the existing snow
| continues to fall across the screen 5. I clicked
| several other things, then came here to complain and saw this
| thread
| orphea wrote:
| > although then you get a yellow background
|
| Yes, and this is arguably worse. I ended up using Immersive
| Reader mode in Edge.
| nkrisc wrote:
| The snowflake icon that disappears off-screen the instant you
| scroll down past the obnoxiously large header image to read
| the actual content?
| al_borland wrote:
| It takes over 10 seconds to turn off fully. I had to go back
| and try it after your comment, because I thought that button
| just turned the page yellow, which was worse than the blue.
|
| I ended up using reader mode to read the page. The whole site
| design undermined the point being made. One of the first
| things mentioned is not to be distracting. Yet they went out
| of their way to make their own site distracting. "Do as I
| say, not as I do."
| tryauuum wrote:
| ah this is why I heard my coolers spin up
| jgalt212 wrote:
| Scrooge
| NSPG911 wrote:
| The animation isn't even in the background...
| skywhopper wrote:
| Yeah, on an article ranting about clutter in the macOS UI, this
| is a mindboggling design choice.
| csin wrote:
| Once you try the dark mode, you'll realize the irony is done
| on purpose.
|
| Edit: I'm not implying it's a good thing.
|
| It's a joke that did not drop. Given the audience is trying
| to read text. And he's making it annoying to read text.
|
| It's like a stand-up comedian telling a joke, in a wild
| accent; where the audience cannot discern what he's saying.
| Jeremy1026 wrote:
| It's a joke for this specific topic, that is on the entire
| website, and has been for almost a month prior[1] to this
| post being published?
|
| [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20251207071946/https://tons
| ky.me...
| vardump wrote:
| The site has also an amazing night mode. Everyone should try
| it!
| g947o wrote:
| Well, I guess you haven't tried its "dark mode" yet
| webdevver wrote:
| it is an interesting thought: run a vanity fluid sim on your
| website to filter out everyone without discrete GPUs...
| hagbard_c wrote:
| A hint to the site developer: add an option to purchase the
| _Weather Control Pack Platinum Pro+_ to get to choose your site
| weather any way you like. It would fity nicely next to that
| 'Personal Information' section. Who knows, someone might even
| 'purchase' it since that seems to the thing to do in the Cult
| of the Fruit.
| rcarmo wrote:
| The detail on the animations is, as usual, top notch, including
| the way snow doesn't just immediately turn off but stops
| falling slowly. I love it.
| shawabawa3 wrote:
| > including the way snow doesn't just immediately turn off
| but stops falling slowly. I love it.
|
| Funny, i disliked this exact detail. I thought turning it off
| hadn't worked for a few seconds and i retoggled it on and off
| a bunch of times before i got it
| reddalo wrote:
| I think OP was sarcastic. (I hope!)
| llm_nerd wrote:
| Can people actually read it with the snowflakes? The motion
| draws my eyes and makes it extremely unpleasant trying to
| read the underlying text. Very poorly thought out decoration.
|
| And yes, I did think "this is terrible, there must be a way
| to change it", clicking the snowflake icon. The colour
| changed to a new colour but otherwise it didn't seem to
| change, so I just clicked back.
|
| Because, as you noted, the snowflakes slowly end, which I
| didn't realize until seeing your comment.
|
| It's fun. Looks neat. It's an extremely poor idea for a site
| trying to convey textual information.
| necovek wrote:
| I did notice it, but had no trouble reading windowed on a
| large screen (43" 4K screen).
| robofanatic wrote:
| :-) and while doing this, the background turns yellow -- why?
| how annoying it would be if something like this existed in
| real life - turning off the fan switches on the lights, and
| turning off the lights switches on the fan.
| ramraj07 wrote:
| Lookup the Mitch Hedberg bit about hotel lamps with 3 way
| switches
| tempodox wrote:
| Came here to say the same. Not only is it redundant and
| distracting, destroying the reading experience, it even makes
| the fucking fan turn on and make noise because apparently it's
| a lot of work for the video card. A presentation of valid
| arguments destroyed by something completely superfluous and
| ironically the same kind of stupidity that's the target of the
| criticism made.
| Maxion wrote:
| It felt quite ironic reading a complaint about icons and UI
| consistency through a hail of snowflakes that made it hard to
| even see the icons.
| rob74 wrote:
| Sometimes you need an animation to turn your site into a
| special snowflake of a site, and what better way to do that
| than to use a snowflake animation? TBF, you can turn it off by
| clicking on the snowflake icon in the top right corner. But
| then the background turns from blue into an annoying shade of
| yellow. Ok, you can click on the sun icon to fix it by
| switching to night mode. But then... aaaaargh!
| tempodox wrote:
| It seems like the author went out of their way to prove they
| can make an even worse UI than Apple. I suspect they
| succeeded.
| kenty wrote:
| This is exactly my thoughts. If you are reading this,
| author, please either make the snowflakes less distracting
| or toggleable. They are a pain on mobile.
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| > author, please either make the snowflakes less
| distracting or toggleable
|
| They already did, as the grandparent comment already
| explained:
|
| >> TBF, you can turn it off by clicking on the snowflake
| icon in the top right corner.
| tempodox wrote:
| Did you see what happens when you do? I wouldn't say it
| improves readability.
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| Yup: all the animation stops, the overlaid snowflakes
| disappear, and the background changes from blue to
| yellow. I haven't bothered to check the
| foreground/background contrast of the two versions, but I
| suspect that, although the yellow version will have less
| contrast, the removal of the snowflakes will make for a
| net benefit to readability for the average person.
| nosrepa wrote:
| Button doesn't do anything for me.
| montag wrote:
| This is the biggest mistake, imo. The snowflakes should
| disappear immediately...
| dahauns wrote:
| >Ok, you can click on the sun icon to fix it by switching to
| night mode, but then... aaaaargh!
|
| TBF, I felt so perfectly trolled with this one I couldn't
| help but chuckle... :)
| Pxtl wrote:
| The dark mode action got an audible chuckle out of me.
| krackers wrote:
| The site has a history of trolling people, it used to be
| the cursor background.
|
| Also do check his privacy policy
| https://tonsky.me/personal-information/
| ethbr1 wrote:
| > _Sometimes you need an animation to turn your site into a
| special snowflake of a site, and what better way to do that
| than to use a snowflake animation?_
|
| <blink>
| allknowingfrog wrote:
| I genuinely went looking for an "off" button, and was very
| confused when the snowflake icon changed the background color
| instead. I didn't even notice that the snow stops being
| generated until I read your comment and tried again. I'm both
| impressed and annoyed.
| fainpul wrote:
| It's an annoying website, but luckily you can just enable
| reader view and all problems are fixed.
| nkrisc wrote:
| The audacity to critique Apple's use of icons (which is
| objectively justified critique, IMO) while having animated
| snowflakes falling _over_ the text and images on the site is
| something on an entirely different level.
|
| Thank goodness for Firefox reader mode. That animation is so
| incredibly distracting.
| emacdona wrote:
| Yeah. I immediately went to the snowflake icon at the top of
| the page thinking it would turn the animation off. Instead,
| it changed the background color :-(
|
| I can't stand animations while I'm trying to read something,
| and this one is particularly egregious.
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| It change the background color AND turns off the animation.
|
| (TBF, it slowly fades the animation out, probably for
| aesthetic reasons, to avoid a jarring sudden stop. I _do_
| agree, though, that a sudden stop would probably be more
| appropriate in this context)
| scythmic_waves wrote:
| Ohhh thank you! I thought the same as the parent comment:
| I expected that button to turn off the animation
| immediately. I guess the author wanted the yellow
| background to "melt" the snowflakes?
| euroderf wrote:
| > I can't stand animations while I'm trying to read
| something, and this one is particularly egregious.
|
| Let me introduce you to "neko"...
| joombaga wrote:
| Please do! You put an ellipsis where an interesting
| explanation could go.
| euroderf wrote:
| Japanese for "cat". Small programs to add a tiny cat that
| runs to your cursor and then naps - until another cursor
| move.
|
| There's also JS to add a neko to a webpage.
|
| Cute, but also not good when trying to focus on reading.
| abanana wrote:
| Hah, that's a blast from the past! You've reminded me of
| "Ameko", which added a little cat to the Amiga Workbench,
| walking around over the windows. I think I had it from a
| magazine coverdisk.
| necovek wrote:
| In my opinion, I can be a worst UX expert in the world, and I
| still reserve the right to criticize bad UX elsewhere: the
| fact that you are a bad "creator" does not mean that you are
| a stupid "user".
|
| Yes, it is a bit hypocritical, but you can look at the
| content of the message and judge it without judging the
| presentation of the message, even if it talks about usability
| of interfaces in computer software.
| kccqzy wrote:
| A personal blog is not the same as the UI of an operating
| system. More expressiveness is to be expected in a personal
| blog. That said it's so easy to turn off that I was
| distracted for less than 5 seconds. How easy is it to turn
| off icons in the menu bar in Tahoe?
| freehorse wrote:
| It is a personal blog. I would not apply the same kind of
| criticism to a personal blog, even though it does sound
| ironic. Moreover, turning off JS was an easy solution. There
| is no solution right now for apple's UI mess (except not
| updating).
| charles_f wrote:
| I agreed at first, but that the blog has bad UX doesn't make
| the message it conveys wrong though.
| layer8 wrote:
| At least there's a button to turn it off. But yes, I agree.
| tatjam wrote:
| Confusingly, because it stops the "particle spawning" but not
| the animation! At first I thought it just changed the
| background to orange.
| layer8 wrote:
| It helps to reload, as the setting is sticky.
| dewey wrote:
| The rage bait on HN works like clockwork. Usually it's the
| "dark mode" feature of that website that triggers this comment.
| protoster wrote:
| tonsky.me is a troll site that should be banned from being
| posted on HN
| throwaway270925 wrote:
| Or you could just lighten up and get a sense of humor...
| draven wrote:
| What's trollish about his blog ?
| protoster wrote:
| Author seems to enjoy writing posts that get lots of
| votes on site that I would describe as eye-rending,
| especially the "normal" yellow color scheme. It's
| aggressively unpleasant to read.
| maleldil wrote:
| How is it trolling, though? Annoying, sure. But the
| content here is valid and worth reading, even if the
| medium is suboptimal.
| ziml77 wrote:
| It's easy to justify: it's cute. Just like the other options up
| at the top. If you click the sun it turns out the lights and
| turns your cursor into a flashlight. And it has an actual
| hamburger as the icon for the menu.
| dxdm wrote:
| Cute AND annoying. Like a racoon. Please don't fling racoons
| at people, not even for christmas.
| ciabattabread wrote:
| Needs some Alanis Morissette background music.
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| It's Christmas, lighten up. I think the animation adds a
| glorious bit of irony: "look, here's a horribly distracting
| effect that is almost designed to make it difficult to read the
| article, and it's _still_ not as egregious as Apple 's Tahoe
| design!"
| zuhsetaqi wrote:
| The animation is not only on the linked article so no, it's
| not about the irony.
| raldi wrote:
| Design is about how it works (my phone went 100% --> 84%
| while reading this, almost certainly thanks to the snow)
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| It's a shame the author didn't test on mobile, but I think
| we should cut them some slack. It would be understandable
| for this particular article's audience to mostly be viewing
| on desktop.
| ascendantlogic wrote:
| I couldn't tell if the author was being ironic or just
| breathtakingly hypocritical.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| This is hypocrisy in the same way that a rock star
| complaining about construction noise outside his home is
| hypocrisy. Context is everything.
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| Even if they were being hypocritical, I think the impact of
| briefly-bad UI on someone's blog post pales in comparison
| with bad UI in a product of macOS scale.
| ineedasername wrote:
| I don't know, I figure with a billion dollars Apple
| should be able to do much better at being awful than
| this. More proactive rather than accidental awfulness.
| Something that isn't just bad but capital intensive at
| the same time. Anyone can build a bad UX on a few menus,
| or a whole system incrementally over time. But to really
| lean in? Maybe commission famous artists with eye
| watering fees for each icon, truly over the top marketing
| campaigns, really get the cash-fired furnaces going.
| Really just go full-potlatch on things.
| yxhuvud wrote:
| Well, it is kinda cool in my room, so i guess the extra
| warmth from my mobile was helpful.
|
| And it got noticeably warm.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I found this kinda funny. The content of the page is something
| I strongly agree with. But then the page itself was just so
| distracting. I saw the snow flake icon so I tapped it but it
| just turned my snow into the dreaded yellow snow.
| raldi wrote:
| And now my phone is hot
| crazygringo wrote:
| I was wondering why my phone was turning hot in my hand...
| jajuuka wrote:
| The irony of an article about design being on such a badly
| designed page is not lost on me.
| ineedasername wrote:
| It also immediately eats 5% of the raw compute on my RTX 4080
| Super, which is more than a dozen tabs in chrome and 3 active
| youtube videos running, run in each of Chrome, Firefox, Edge--
| all combined, which was 3% before loading this page (which is
| 5% on its own) up to 9% total.
|
| That explains my other comment, which speculated the snow as
| the cause for my iPhone instantly overheating, followed by
| screen-dimming throttling.
|
| Also: this is not a plea to stop putting snow/etc on pages. I
| miss the days of such things in earlier internet. I'd trade
| back janky plugins and Flash player crashes for the humanizing
| & personalized touch many sites had back then.
| myguysi wrote:
| I was starting to wonder why my iPhone got crazy hot. I'm
| using reader mode and it appears to continue running the web
| page and animation in the background... crazy.
| ex-aws-dude wrote:
| Why? Its just a silly personal website
|
| Do you not realize that the stakes are different between that
| and a whole OS?
| morshu9001 wrote:
| It'd be fine if it didn't lag horribly
| charles_f wrote:
| A very distracting one that masks text as well. But to be fair,
| there's a very explicit icon in the header to deactivate them
| cush wrote:
| Hot take: The snowflakes are fun and when blogs integrate fun
| things they make me feel joy like when I was throwing marquee
| elements all over my geocities site in grade school. In an era
| where most of the content I read is written by AI, the more
| personal a blog feels to me, the better.
| vpribish wrote:
| i thought it was very funny :) - try the dark mode
| ThouYS wrote:
| lost 4% battery while reading the blog post
| master_crab wrote:
| Is there a reason Apple can't focus on system improvements
| instead of constantly tweaking with their UI so thoroughly every
| couple years? I don't disagree the OS UI needs to be revamped
| periodically, but it seems they do it too often.
| seb1204 wrote:
| KPI and corp revenue I guess. There was a time I heard that
| Apple had an only fix bugs release.
| realusername wrote:
| Fixing bugs isn't going to give you a promotion.
| matwood wrote:
| It's a damned if you don't, damned if you do. Apple could
| release a new system with zero UI updates and tons of internal
| improvements and people would call it 'old' and 'dated' and
| 'lack of innovation'.
|
| It's a bit like adding new emojis in an OS release. There's
| been reports that new emojis are one of the drivers for getting
| people to upgrade. No one cares about a zero day security flaw,
| but that new kiss emoji everyone wants.
| afandian wrote:
| It's been 16 years since Snow Leopard. I think we're ready
| for another one.
| matwood wrote:
| I agree, but I'm pointing out why UI changes happen. Apple
| could certainly do UI changes as part of a cleanup release
| though. Basically start with getting back to consistency
| pointed out in the article.
|
| But, having worked with users I've seen first hand out tons
| of internal improvements are ignored while one small UI
| change makes 'everything seem new'.
| afandian wrote:
| Don't you feel that the circumstances are similar though?
| There was a pressure (expectation and competition) for
| new features. There were rapid changes in the UI and UX.
| But also bugs. And IIRC Mac OS X upgrades were still
| paid-for.
|
| It was a brave move to spend a major release without
| adding feature. And people were grateful for it, once it
| happened.
| aylmao wrote:
| > Apple could release a new system with zero UI updates and
| tons of internal improvements and people would call it 'old'
| and 'dated' and 'lack of innovation'.
|
| Apple has released incremental upgrades to macOS for years,
| and I've never heard this criticism of them. On the contrary,
| I ofter hear people missing Leopard design, and when UI has
| changed I've heard pushback (ie, when System Settings was
| renamed and redesigned). On macOS people care about the apps
| and interactions, not wether the buttons got a new look.
|
| > There's been reports that new emojis are one of the drivers
| for getting people to upgrade. No one cares about a zero day
| security flaw, but that new kiss emoji everyone wants.
|
| I agree with this. New emojis are new functionality; you can
| now express something you couldn't. A zero day security flaw
| brings no new functionality. Equally, updates to to apps and
| interactions bring new functionality. A re-skin of the OS
| doesn't.
| skywhopper wrote:
| The bosses who are actually in charge likely don't even use
| their Macs (and when they do, they only use the web browser)
| and only care about how the OS is going to look in the demo,
| not how it works.
| rireads wrote:
| What makes you think they don't use macs? What else would
| they use?
| flamwenco wrote:
| Pretty sure Tim Cook has said before he does most of his
| work on the iPad; it doesn't seem like an unreasonable
| guess that too many of the C-suites do the same and don't
| use Macs enough.
| hbn wrote:
| > constantly tweaking with their UI so thoroughly every couple
| years
|
| Between any of the big 3 companies putting out major OSes
| (Apple, Microsoft, Google), Apple is the best for sticking to
| tried and true designs. It's certainly gotten worse the past
| couple of years (like the Photos app redesign they immediately
| changed again in iOS 26) and I hope with their new design lead
| he can pull things back to somewhere sensible, but compared to
| Android or Windows it's not even close. I used Android for the
| better part of a decade and every year they'd completely
| redesign the notification shade, the settings app, they'd
| switch the SMS app out for Hangouts, then put you back on
| Messages, then rename it, then change the logo/branding, then
| redesign it again, etc. Everything was endless changes for no
| reason, felt like a constant beta.
|
| If you look at the basic iPhone apps - Messages, Settings,
| Notes - prior to Liquid Glass it's been pretty much exactly as
| it was when Jobs showed it off at the iPhone reveal 19 years
| ago.
| safety1st wrote:
| It's pretty wild how the best screenshot of a usable menu is
| from, like, Office 2000. What the hell have we been doing for the
| past 25 years?
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Technology moved from being a tool to an ad delivery vehicle.
|
| Tools' success metric is how much they make your task
| easier/faster. Ad delivery machines' success metric is how much
| of your time they waste.
|
| Shitty UI making you spend more time in front of the screen is
| considered a _good_ thing according to those "designers"'
| performance metrics.
| meindnoch wrote:
| Computers became a necessity. You have no choice but to own a
| computer, so there's no evolutionary pressure to prevent their
| enshittification.
| bonesss wrote:
| Web technologies took off, web giants emerged, and the desktop
| monopoly maintaining rough standardization and being forced
| into steady ease of use improvements was hobbled.
|
| Microsoft's desktop dominance was challenged by Google Docs and
| Facebook apps in parallel, Microsoft had to jump to web tech
| late, and the last few decades have been them reconciling their
| stack to the fact they missed the web and mobile despite
| pioneering key user-facing tech for both. Then they entered
| catchup-mode for client and search tech, only to later realize
| maybe they don't care because the cloud catchup efforts
| blossoming into MS-consultant orthodoxy for every-darned-thing
| made their cloud offerings the most profitable bit... Ads and
| desktop stagnation pulled Windows into a weird OSX-at-home
| territory everyone kinda hates. And then LLMania took off,
| entrenching MS cloud and AI strategies into all of it, all the
| time. Pushing so hard that they're gonna spend billions
| distancing their semi-Enterprise office brand from the
| term'Microslop'.
|
| TLDR: the rush to the web/mobile moved the focus off thick
| clients and desktop affordances, the money is elsewhere, a
| universal GUI toolkit isn't obvious for anyone, and SaaS feels
| better online
| nicoburns wrote:
| > What the hell have we been doing for the past 25 years?
|
| For the last ~20 years: designing software for mobile devices
| liveoneggs wrote:
| Check out this actual book that used to come with a computer
| about how to use the desktop:
| https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19253-01/806-4743/806-4743.pdf
| badsectoracula wrote:
| And modern desktops do not even documentation, there are all
| sorts of shortcuts and small features in Windows, for
| example, that seem to be passed around between people like
| computer game cheats instead of being documented somewhere
| :-P
| bambax wrote:
| UI OS for ordinary people peaked with Windows NT (1993).
| lynndotpy wrote:
| If you would like to spend some time in awe, you might fondly
| regard the screenshots in the GUIdebook gallery:
| https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots
|
| It's chock full of old screenshots from a variety of old
| desktops.
| noduerme wrote:
| Sorry, even though I agree with your piece, the incredible irony
| of writing about _bad design decisions_ while having _fucking
| snow flying past the text I 'm trying to read_ is just too
| much...
|
| [edit] I just discovered the snow icon, which does turn off the
| snow but turns the background into bright yellow. Oh and the
| other icon which turns your cursor into a ...spotlight? On an
| otherwise black page? Do I have that right? Which one of those
| things was a design decision that enhanced usability, or
| readability, or... anything at all? These choices can best be
| described as sophomoric. You can disagree with menu icons, but
| they at least _in theory_ serve a _purpose_. What purpose is
| served by any of the gizmos on this site?
| ghrl wrote:
| I find the snowflakes equally irritating, but believe there is
| a huge distinction. This is an individual's blog page, their
| own corner of the internet, where they can share their opinion
| and present them in any way they'd like, whereas Apple is
| designing an Operating System for premium devices used by
| millions of people that depend on its usability.
| flumpcakes wrote:
| > What purpose is served by any of the gizmos on this site?
|
| It's a personal website, it's fun. Comparing someones personal
| website - where the 'fun' things can be turned off - to a $tn
| company with hundreds of millions of users who rely on the
| usability their products is not a great basis for disagreeing
| with a pretty great write-up with many salient points.
| whstl wrote:
| Making HN readers angry is its own reward.
|
| I wonder if JWZ still has the red carpet for HN users. Let's
| test: https://www.jwz.org/blog/2026/01/dali-clock-in-the-wild/
|
| EDIT: Yep, still works!
| diffeomorphism wrote:
| It is called "making fun of" not "irony".
| Klaster_1 wrote:
| Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46196688
| jraph wrote:
| I suppose I wouldn't mind much either way, apart from the
| misaligned text maybe now that you brought my attention to it.
|
| I agree that colors could help.
|
| Don't hesitate to give KDE/Qt a try, it apparently happens to get
| all these things right according to this article from a quick
| glance: everything is correctly aligned, even when in the same
| menu some items both have an icon and a checkbox, and some don't
| have anything; icons are mostly meaningful, some icons are
| colored (most are monochrome though, there's a move to this), and
| not all items have icons.
|
| I guess it's the kind of things that are hard to get right for a
| hobby OS like macOS that lacks professional UX designers. :-)
| mosura wrote:
| It is incredible just how widely held the view is that Win2k (or
| XP in classic mode) was close to peak desktop UI. (Contenders
| also being Tiger to Snow Leopard and Windows 7).
|
| A key problem is that big US corps have always had a product
| design mentality that can produce monstrosities like your average
| cable TV remote and think it is in any way a good solution. That
| was clearly already an influence on things like XP.
| whateverboat wrote:
| Win XP was excellent, as was Win 7 I thought. However, since
| then KDE has in my opinion, gone even further and become even
| better. So, the peak is not gone, it has just moved to KDe.
| robin_reala wrote:
| I was somewhat buying the article until I got to the monstrosity
| that is the "Special mention", at which point I flipped to
| completely agreeing. That really is atrocious.
| robinhood wrote:
| I never disliked an OS as much as I dislike what Apple is doing
| with MacOS (and iOS by extension). I've been with MacOS for 20
| years, but I've switched at home to Linux full time 2 years ago
| and I don't regret it. At work I'm forced to be on MacOS. It's
| concerning how Apple doesn't care anymore about user needs,
| usability, design and consistency. Where it was the best OS in
| the past for me, it's not anymore. Other OSes are better suited
| for where I'm at in my life.
| paulcole wrote:
| I thought that was supposed to be Apple's thing. "We decide how
| to make it and you decide to buy it or not."
|
| It makes it seem like they're designing for you until they're
| not.
| delecti wrote:
| Importantly, that philosophy relies on the result having
| merit, and working cohesively on its own terms, even if it's
| not your preference. Like, if I go to a restaurant that
| refuses me sugar for my tea, it better be darn good tea.
| paulcole wrote:
| > Like, if I go to a restaurant that refuses me sugar for
| my tea, it better be darn good tea.
|
| But if you demand sugar in your tea it doesn't matter how
| good the tea is, right? You are not going to like that
| restaurant.
|
| > Importantly, that philosophy relies on the result having
| merit, and working cohesively on its own terms, even if
| it's not your preference
|
| I am too dumb to understand what this means.
| delecti wrote:
| I might prefer my tea with sugar, given the choice, but
| I'll still be satisfied if the tea is very good (this
| metaphor assumes I don't _demand_ sugar, but merely
| _prefer_ sugar). I might prefer that Apple products work
| differently, but if they work _well_ , I'll tolerate that
| they don't work exactly how I want. In either case, I'm
| willing to adapt my preferences a bit to an expertly made
| product.
|
| > I thought that was supposed to be Apple's thing. "We
| decide how to make it and you decide to buy it or not."
|
| This was Apple; your customization options were limited,
| but things were well designed and cohesive. If you were
| willing to adapt to their design paradigms, you'd benefit
| from their expertise, and also have to put in less effort
| tweaking. Plus you could pick up any random new Apple
| product and be up to speed immediately.
|
| But to extend the metaphor, if the tea sucks, I'll stop
| going to that restaurant. If Apple makes their UIs both
| immutable and bad, I'll use something else.
| philistine wrote:
| How is that different with other companies? Like with
| Windows? Do you have a choice of UI when loading the OS? Are
| there ways to remove the taskbar and replace it with a third-
| party one? Can you change all the core OS shortcuts?
|
| The fact Apple makes and sells the only hardware to run macOS
| does not mean the software is fundamentally different from
| the rest of the industry. Apple has deprioritized backwards
| compatibility, not user choice.
| kibwen wrote:
| _> Apple has deprioritized backwards compatibility, not
| user choice._
|
| ?Por que no los dos?
| bigyabai wrote:
| > does not mean the software is fundamentally different
| from the rest of the industry.
|
| I bet you wish that was the case. XServe existed though,
| and for all of Apple's confidence in the product it was
| (and is) treated like a second-class citizen that doesn't
| compete with free alternatives.
|
| There is literally nothing that stops macOS from falling
| into the same pit of irrelevance besides first-party
| hubris. How much do you trust Apple to make smart,
| responsive decisions?
| x0x0 wrote:
| if they're going to just crap on their software, I'd be far
| happier with just neglect.
|
| They did desperately need a distraction from the complete
| bedshitting mess they've made of AI though. Regardless of
| whether you think AI is good or wildly overpromised, getting on
| stage and lying through your teeth about what your AI does is
| what C-tier companies do, not Apple. Except they do now.
| ramon156 wrote:
| what distro are you running at home?
|
| ive had the most success with fedora x11 / xwayland but lately
| wayland has been pretty solid
| E39M5S62 wrote:
| XWayland runs on top of Wayland, and is a way for X11-only
| applications to still work. It does not run inside a native
| X11 session.
| robinhood wrote:
| I've used Mint for a long time. Extremely solid, stable and
| simple. In the last three months I've been on Arch (through
| Omarchy) and it's also very stable and so powerful.
| Everything just works. I have a pretty beefy computer and
| even my favorite game of all times (Path of Exile 1) runs
| fantastically on it.
| juancn wrote:
| Seriously? UX in Linux is awful, there's no single desktop
| metaphor. You have hundreds of distros each with their quirks.
| There is no "Linux" other than the kernel.
|
| There's a lot more consistency in the Apple ecosystem.
|
| Don't get me started on the other crap with Linux distros:
| power management doesn't work, audio barely works, heck even
| though both Linux and MacOS use CUPS for printing, in MacOS it
| works way better.
| hyperbovine wrote:
| I don't understand why this comment is downvoted, it is
| undeniably true.
| throwaway173738 wrote:
| Whereas on my laptop and my distro it works. And a lot of
| other people probably feel the same way. I use Linux at
| work and have never had issues with it in the last 6 years.
| Prior to that, yes.
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| Often, when we don't understand something, asking questions
| helps us learn. Happy to answer any you might have, to help
| you understand.
| gessha wrote:
| GNOME and KDE have stepped up with their design and user
| experience. I recommend you give them another try.
| robinhood wrote:
| Because for most of us, it's simply not true. It's as
| stable, if more, than MacOS, by far.
| hyperbovine wrote:
| The word "stable" literally does not appear in the
| comment to which I was responding.
|
| Maybe I'm just scarred from laboring much too hard in the
| 90s and aughts to get desktop and laptop Linux working,
| but here is my current take:
|
| - Yes there is fragmentation. Perhaps there are not
| hundreds of Linux distros but, off the top of my head:
| Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora, RHEL, CentOS, Rocky, Alma,
| Arch, Manjaro, openSUSE, Kali, PopOS, elementary OS,
| Zorin, Gentoo, Alpine, NixOS are all viable options.
| Next, pick a desktop: GNOME, KDE Plasma, Xfce, LXQt,
| Cinnamon, MATE, Budgie, Pantheon, Deepin, Enlightenment.
| Each has different UX conventions, configuration systems,
| and integration quality. There is no single Linux desktop
| and its bewildering. - Power management now "works" in
| the sense that, when you close your laptop lid and re-
| open it, yay! the machine (mostly) comes back to life
| instead of just crashing. It took us at least 15 years to
| get to that point. However, PM does not work in the sense
| that battery like on my M4 Macbook Air is literally 2x
| what I would get from a comparably priced Linux laptop.
| Part of that is better hardware, but _a lot_ of that is
| better power management. - Audio now mostly works without
| glitching, just like it did in OS X circa 2002. But God
| help you if you're not using a well-supported setup and
| find yourself manually having to dick around with kernel
| drivers, ALSA, Pulseaudio. (Just typing these words gives
| me PTSD.) Here is a typical "solution" from *within the
| past year* for audio troubles in Linux:
| https://www.linux.org/threads/troubleshooting-audio-
| problems.... There are thousands more threads like this
| to be found online. For typical, 99%-of-the-time use
| cases, experiences of this sort are rarely if ever
| encountered on Mac. - Printing is arguably the closest
| because, as previously noted, they are both using the
| same underlying system. But printing, thanks to AirPrint,
| is still smoother and more pain-free on Mac than on
| Linux. - Don't even get me started on Bluetooth.
|
| It's not that I'm anti-Linux, I wanted sooo bad for Linux
| on the desktop and laptop to succeed, for a variety of
| reasons. But Steve J came along 25-30 years and
| completely pulled that rug out from under us.
| pedrogpimenta wrote:
| But Linux is getting better each year (seriously, KDE is
| amazing, Gnome works well if you like it), made by hundreds
| of independent people, while Mac is getting worse, made by
| one focused company.
|
| I've had no problem whatsoever with 2 laptops regarding power
| management or audio.
|
| Get a major distro and major software if you don't want to
| wander into problems.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Judging from this article, Linux seems to have more
| consistency between the thousands of applications all built
| by different people with no guidelines than MacOS right now.
|
| At least half of those complaints on the article have
| standard, close to universally agreed icons.
| dandellion wrote:
| > there's no single desktop metaphor
|
| I use both Linux (home) and Mac (work) and I don't see one in
| Mac either. Also over time Linux has been getting more
| consistent, and Mac less.
| queenkjuul wrote:
| CUPS has "just worked" on Ubuntu for me for like, as long as
| I can remember. If you use only GTK apps and either gnome or
| cinnamon, things are a lot more consistent than Windows
| (like, windows itself, not even 3rd party stuff)
| lynndotpy wrote:
| Your experiences are not universal. I'm sorry that happened
| to you, but I've personally never had a power management,
| audio, or printing problems with Linux in 17 years of using
| it.
|
| Having no single desktop is a huge bonus. If you don't like
| one distro, you might like another. "Consistency" is a poor
| way to restate, "Windows or MacOS might be bad, but at least
| someone can unilaterally make it worse against your will."
|
| I'd rather choose a drink from a soda fountain than get a
| more consistent flavor from a urinal. But to each their own.
| robinhood wrote:
| It looks like an old comment from 5 years ago. I bet you
| haven't tried Linux lately. Yes there are many flavors of
| this OS, and that's alright. Everyone will find what it
| needs. As for the other crap that doesn't work: again,
| install and use any popular distro. You'll see for yourself.
| Most recent hardware is perfectly supported and things just
| work(tm).
| ruszki wrote:
| The other way is true too. I'm reading for about 20 years
| quite often that Linux is perfect at last, no issues exist
| at all, and it improved immensely the year before, because
| "back then" (ie one year before) it was terrible. And of
| course if you mention a problem under an article mentioning
| problems, you obviously just somebody who doesn't know
| anything. You just need to "configure" it bro, because a
| famously unreliable thing cannot be unreliable, because it
| worked for them in a completely different setup. And
| probably I will read these in 5 years too.
| dominicrose wrote:
| Nowadays AI can help with Linux. For example AI helped setup my
| bluetooth mouse and set up an action for each of the extra
| buttons.
| touristtam wrote:
| Consider yourself lucky to have been on that side of the fence
| instead of suffering the vagaries of Windows since ME.
| mrcino wrote:
| Low quality, inconsistent software is a result of a lack of
| standards, QA, internal communication and rigged corporate
| processes that are serving the private interests of managers
| trying to satisfy the board, not the users.
|
| This is a symptom of no strong leadership that's capable of
| enforcing standards, Apple downslide as a whole firm where
| departments and people are fighting each other for resources.
| duggan wrote:
| I thought I was going to disagree with this; on the surface I
| think the icons are something of an improvement, but the rest of
| the post is persuasive.
|
| This is a bad sign for design at Apple. It suggests a fundamental
| lack of attention to detail that would have been harder to
| imagine a few years ago.
|
| What's driving it?
| Xmd5a wrote:
| > Burger menu > User agreement "User
| disagrees with the content of this site."
|
| I recommend playing with the top-right buttons, it made me
| chuckle audibly.
| layer8 wrote:
| Leadership doesn't understand and/or care anymore.
| dankobgd wrote:
| Funny thing is that i didn't see that "icon" that disables snow
| effect.
| nirava wrote:
| that part looks to be a parody of bad ui. the burger icon, the
| dark mode switch, the snow thing all are purposely built to
| subvert common expectation.
| stavros wrote:
| All the icons look easily center-justified to me!
| bayindirh wrote:
| I'll voice the unpopular opinion: As someone who can parse images
| faster than text, I tend to find what I'm looking for faster in
| macOS Tahoe.
|
| Still, my primary OS is Linux, but for laptops I prefer macOS,
| and it's still in acceptable shape.
|
| However, I'll agree that Tahoe has far more papercuts than its
| predecessors. It needs a "Snow Tahoe" version.
| aylmao wrote:
| This isn't the only aspect of Tahoe that seems amateurishly
| designed by someone following "wrong rules", the wrong rule here
| being "for consistency, let's assign an icon to every action.
|
| Another wrong rules I've seen blindly followed is making
| everything an edge-to-edge canvas, so that the sidebar floats on
| top. Having a full-window canvas with floating sidebars can make
| sense for applications where content is expansive and inherently
| spatial (like say, Figma) or applications where the sidebar is an
| actual floating element that can be moved around (like Photoshop
| once was).
|
| It doesn't make sense in Finder, or Reminders, where the content
| is ultimately just a list. Forcing the sidebar "to float on top
| of the content" yields no benefit because the content wont ever
| scroll under it, and because it can't be moved anyway, but it
| does lead to wasted space, that ugly "double border", etc.
| x0x0 wrote:
| but being too lazy to even globally coordinate the icons is
| some deep rot.
| pornel wrote:
| 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.
| wpm wrote:
| I despise SF Symbols. Cheap, lame, boring, flat little
| hieroglyphics do not make good icons. They're just cheap.
| stefanfisk wrote:
| If rather have a boring but consistent and usable UI than
| something jazzy but inconsistent and broken.
|
| Every app should not be its own little universe as if it
| was a videogame.
| jval43 wrote:
| This is what happens when the people issuing the orders (assign
| an icon for every task) are not the ones doing the task.
|
| And the ones doing it have no say in how it's done.
|
| Being involved and in the loop is how great software is made.
| Otherwise you can just outsource and have tickets completed.
| fainpul wrote:
| > This is what happens when the people issuing the orders
| (assign an icon for every task) are not the ones doing the
| task.
|
| No, this is what happens when the people in charge of UI
| design have no clue what they're doing.
| reactordev wrote:
| I'm afraid you both may be right in this case. "Make it
| blue!" - stakeholder. "Ok, but then we'll have to change
| everything for consistency." - VP of UI. Produces the
| horror that we have today.
| bobbylarrybobby wrote:
| In theory, the problems highlighted in the article would
| have become apparent shortly into the process of assigning
| an icon to every menu item. Forging ahead despite the
| impossibility of doing a good job on the task is a sign of
| orders being issued from top to bottom without feedback
| working its way from the bottom to the top.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| Top down micromanaging of design is how Apple has always
| worked. It's not what's different now.
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| Yeah, if anything it seems like there is not enough top-
| down micromanaging. Especially with the icon consistency
| parts.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| The difference is the lack of top-down QA and taste.
| bigyabai wrote:
| If your UI designers can get _this_ much crap past upper
| management, the managers have officially become the
| problem.
|
| It's like what Miyamoto warned: a delayed UI is eventually
| good, but a rushed UI is forever bad.
| Gravityloss wrote:
| I hadn't noticed, but I checked. One tiny correction: content
| can flow under the floating sidebar in Finder.
| xnx wrote:
| 28 days ago. 334 comments:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46196688
| echoangle wrote:
| Thanks, I was thinking I was having a deja vu because I was
| sure I had read something like this recently.
| josalhor wrote:
| Interesting.
|
| The article starts with this: > Sequoia - Tahoe It's bad
|
| And I look at the image... And I like it? I agree with the author
| that it could be _better_ , but most of the icons (new, open
| recent, close, save, duplicate, print, share etc), do make it
| easier, faster and more pleasant for my brain to parse the menu
| vs no icons.
|
| Again, I don't disagree that you could do it better, I just
| disagree with the premise that the 1992 manual is "the
| authority". Display density has increased dramatically; people
| use their computers more and have been accustomed to those
| interfaces, which makes the relationship of the people with the
| interfaces different. Quoting a 1992 guideline on interfaces in
| 2026 feels like quoting the greeks on philosophy while ignoring
| our understandings of the world since then.
| afandian wrote:
| I wouldn't take too much into a book about optimising database
| storage written for 90s-era hard disks and CPUs.
|
| But a file menu is still a file menu, and save is still save.
| In fact it's remarkable how little that has changed since 1983.
| vehemenz wrote:
| The author addresses this. Humans are the same in 2026 as 1992.
|
| Besides, that interface designers or even the average computer
| user understands more than in 1992 is highly implausible on its
| face.
| paulcole wrote:
| Why is it highly implausible on its face other than the fact
| it makes arguing against him harder?
| jollyllama wrote:
| Why would UX be getting worse across the board if there is
| greater understanding now?
| paulcole wrote:
| Did you mean to reply to me?
|
| The person I replied to said, "that interface designers
| or even the average computer user understands more than
| in 1992 is highly implausible on its face"
|
| Think of computer users at the ages of 10, 20, 30, 40,
| 50, 60, 70, and 80 in 1992. For each group, estimate
| their computer knowledge when they sat down at a computer
| in 1992.
|
| Now do the same exercise for the year 2026.
|
| How is it highly implausible on its face that the average
| computer user in 2026 understands less than the average
| computer user in 1992?
| jollyllama wrote:
| > Did you mean to reply to me?
|
| I think so.
|
| > The person I replied to said, "that interface designers
| or even the average computer user understands more than
| in 1992 is highly implausible on its face"
|
| Yes, I agree with this person.
|
| >How is it highly implausible on its face that the
| average computer user in 2026 understands less than the
| average computer user in 1992?
|
| I don't think it is. Particularly with the average user,
| the bar of understanding is lower now.
| paulcole wrote:
| > Particularly with the average user, the bar of
| understanding is lower now.
|
| Can you explain how this is true given that everyone
| using a computer today has had a lifetime of computer use
| whereas in 1992 many people were encountering computers
| for the first time?
| jollyllama wrote:
| > Can you explain how this is true given that everyone
| using a computer today has had a lifetime of computer use
| whereas in 1992 many people were encountering computers
| for the first time?
|
| The userbase has been watered down with a larger
| proportion of individuals who are not highly technical.
| vehemenz wrote:
| Here are a few perfectly acceptable explanations.
|
| 1. Computer users were generally well-educated, unlike
| today.
|
| 2. UX designers didn't inherit any mess and could operate
| from first principles.
|
| 3. The "experience" of modern users--phones, tablets, and
| software that does everything for you--doesn't translate
| the way you think. And it explains why Gen Z seems to
| have regressed in terms of tech knowledge.
| mxfh wrote:
| Humans are definitely not the same as in 1992 when it comes
| to their everyday knowledge of computer interactions.
|
| And even if human cognition itself were unchanged, our
| understanding of HCI has evolved significantly since then,
| well beyond what merely "feels right."
|
| Most UX researchers today can back up their claims with
| empirical data.
|
| The article goes on at great length about consistency, yet
| then insists that text transformations require special
| treatment, with the HIG example looking outright unreadable.
|
| Menu text should remain stable and not mirror or preview
| what's happening to the selected text IMHO.
|
| Also, some redundancy is not necessarily a bad thing in UI
| design, and not all users, for various reasons, can read with
| a vocabulary that covers the full breadth of what a system
| provides.
| iainmerrick wrote:
| _Most UX researchers today can back up their claims with
| empirical data._
|
| HCI work in 1992 was very heavily based on user research,
| famously so at Apple. They definitely had the data.
|
| I find myself questioning that today (like, have these
| horrible Tahoe icons _really_ been tested properly?)
| although maybe unfairly, as I 'm not an HCI expert. It does
| feel like there are more bad UIs around today, but that
| doesn't necessarily mean techniques have regressed.
| Computers just do a hell of a lot more stuff these days, so
| maybe it's just impossible to avoid additional complexity.
|
| One thing that has definitely changed is the use of
| automated A/B testing -- is that the "empirical data"
| you're thinking of? I do wonder if that mostly provides
| short-term gains while gradually messing up the overall
| coherency of the UI.
|
| Also, micro-optimizing via A/B testing can lead to frequent
| UI churn, which is something that I and many others find
| very annoying and confusing.
| mxfh wrote:
| I there not any user testing as we know it today, mostly
| top down application of priciples.
|
| This was all experts driven in that time to my knowledge.
|
| Empirical validiton did not really take off until the
| late 00s.
|
| https://hci.stanford.edu/publications/bds/4p-guidelines.h
| tml
|
| Don had the explicit expert knowledge first stance in
| 2006 and 2011, nothing inherently wrong with that, but
| it's defenitly no research driven.
|
| "Always be researching. Always be acting."
|
| https://jnd.org/act-first-do-the-research-later/
|
| Tognazzini and Norman already criticized Appple about
| this a decade ago, while the have many good points, I
| cannot shake the feeling that they simply feel like the
| were used to just brand Apple as user friendly in the 90s
| and that Apple never actually adopted their principles
| and just used it as it fit the company's marketing.
|
| https://www.fastcompany.com/3053406/how-apple-is-giving-
| desi...
|
| there are a bunch of discussions on this
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10559387 [2015]
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19887519 [2019]
| iainmerrick wrote:
| That's interesting, I hadn't heard that point of view
| before.
|
| _Empirical validiton did not really take off until the
| late 00s.
|
| https://hci.stanford.edu/publications/bds/4p-guidelines.h
| tml_
|
| Hmmm, I don't quite see where that supports "Apple didn't
| do empirical validation"? Is it just that it doesn't
| mention empirical validation at all, instead focusing on
| designer-imposed UI consistency?
|
| ISTR hearing a lot about how the Mac team did user
| research back in the 1980s, though I don't have a
| citation handy. Specific aspects like the one-button
| mouse and the menu bar at the top of the screen were
| derived by watching users try out different variations.
|
| I take that to be "empirical validation", but maybe you
| have a different / stricter meaning in mind?
|
| Admittedly the Apple designers tried to extract general
| principles from the user studies (like "UI elements
| should look and behave consistently across different
| contexts") and then imposed those as top-down design
| rules. But it's hard to see how you could realistically
| test those principles. What's the optimal level of
| consistency vs inconsistency across an entire OS? And is
| anyone actually testing that sort of thing today?
|
| _I cannot shake the feeling that they simply feel like
| the were used to just brand Apple as user friendly in the
| 90s and that Apple never actually adopted their
| principles and just used it as it fit the company 's
| marketing._
|
| I personally think Apple _did_ follow their own
| guidelines pretty closely in the 90s, but in the OS X era
| they 've been gradually eroded. iOS 7 in particular was
| probably a big inflexion point -- I think that's when
| many formerly-crucial principles like borders around
| buttons were dropped.
| mxfh wrote:
| Like the whole _recoverability_ paradigm, seems more like
| a feature from developer perspective looking for a reason
| to exist, than a true user demand.
|
| You have state management for debugging purposes already,
| so why not expose it to the user.
|
| As an example in photoshop no non-professional users care
| about non-destructive workflows, these things have to be
| learned as a skill.
|
| Undo is nice to have in most situations, but you can
| really only trust your own saves and version management
| with anything serious.
|
| Sonething as simple as a clipboard history is still
| nowhere to be found as built in feature in MacOS, yet
| somehow made it's way into Windows.
| christophilus wrote:
| If you haven't done so, I'd suggest reading that HIG. It is
| clear thinking, expressed well, and it stands the test of time.
| jaffa2 wrote:
| most of your points are refuted in the article. but I'll pick
| this one : "Display density has increased dramatically" Yes, it
| has, and Tahoe does not take advantage of this, infact the
| icons are smaller, and harder to read, using fewer pixels than
| windows icons of 25 years ago.
| josalhor wrote:
| > most of your points are refuted in the article
|
| Sure, we can debate about the general points.
|
| Yet, we can't refute that my subjective opinion evaluation of
| the opening image looks better (for me) , reads better (for
| me) and is easier (for me) to parse. Either I don't fit the
| general guidelines, or the general guidelines need a
| revision, that's my point overall.
| jaffa2 wrote:
| Well - that's just your --- opinion, man.
|
| But answer me this. You say "but most [but not all? -
| interesting] of the icons do make it easier, faster and
| more pleasant for my brain to parse the menu vs no icons."
|
| How does a list of icons that are used inconsistently,
| duplicated, used in other places, sometimes used and
| sometimes not used, not to mention illegible, positioned
| inconsistently, go directly against the broad (reasoned)
| rules of the Apple HIG, help 'make it easier' as you say?
|
| This is literally what half the article is explaining and
| you are just saying - no it's easier to not be able to tell
| an icon apart, and it's easier to have the icons sometimes
| be the same or move locations, be so small as to be
| illegible.
|
| How many did you get when the menu text was removed ? I
| just don't believe it makes it easier. But who am I to
| argue against someones 'subjective opinion evaluation' I'm
| just a guy on the internet.
|
| ps I assume by the opening image, you mean the first
| screenshot supplied by the author of the article - the
| Sequoia to Tahoe menu comparison, which he brilliantly
| posted below a shot of the HIG which literally is
| explaining the exact same thing and why not to do it the
| Tahoe way. That in it self is confusing.
|
| It makes no sense why Apple chose to do that with Tahoe?
|
| I'll add a general comment - one of the reasons I use Apple
| systems was they had the UI stuff nailed down. Stuff was
| consistent. It looked and behaved in proper ways. It felt
| like a properly designed, holistic approach to UI design.
| Lately it's just a mess. This article touch the surface of
| the issues. My current beef is this stupid 'class of
| window' that appears now and again which is half-way
| between a dialog and a window. Best place to see it is
| immediately after a screenshot - click the thumb that
| appears. This window type doesn't behave like any other
| window. Z-order, closing, focus, actions that occur when
| you click certain things, are all different and
| inconsistent. But it does look a little like IOS though.
| thenaturalist wrote:
| If there is ever a leaked insider story of how whatever Tahoe is
| supposed to be got cooked up and released that would be my read
| of the year.
| aylmao wrote:
| I don't work or have ever worked at Apple, so I don't know the
| full details, but I heard the new design wasn't introduced
| until very late in the development process, and at a point in
| time where teams are supposed to focus on polish, not redesigns
| or introducing new features.
|
| So not only did teams have to rush incroporating this new
| design, they also didn't get time to think things through and
| polish. It sounds like they didn't have time to push-back
| either, and so there was no feedback/iteration loop where they
| could work out with whomever is in charge of wider system
| design what works and what doesn't on what apps.
| 1f60c wrote:
| At this point I'm just hoping Cook (who bears ultimate
| responsibility) or Ternus will see the error of his ways, but I'm
| not holding my breath. I doubt they understand what's wrong with
| this or that they even know about the HIG.
| g947o wrote:
| Those who want to complain about the snowflake animations, wait
| till you try out the dark mode
| flumpcakes wrote:
| It seems like Apple's hardware design is universally loved with
| much acclaim, why is their software getting progressively worse?
|
| It's not Microsoft-add-all-the-bloatware-and-adverts-we-can
| worse, but it's 20-year-old-operating-systems-were-better-
| designed worse.
|
| We're getting to a point where I think Linux windowing systems
| like KDE are better designed. And it seems that all they had to
| do was not change much over the span of a few decades.
|
| Or am I out of touch? It feels like I could use a computer better
| back when XP was the mainstay.
| teddy-smith wrote:
| It's just enshittification.
|
| Going to continue to get worse as time goes on.
|
| Even the hardware will go at some point I'm betting.
| Maxion wrote:
| It's just entropy. It takes a special kind of person to be
| able to fight it in a big org. Jobs, Musk et. al. are
| assholes but they do manage to push their vision through.
| Probably because they are assholes.
| esafak wrote:
| Jobs and Musk are CEOs; of course they can push their
| visions!
| ex-aws-dude wrote:
| It seems like apple is missing a design dictator
| einsteinx2 wrote:
| > It's just enshittification.
|
| That's not what enshittification means.
|
| Somehow its usage has quickly devolved from a very specific
| pattern companies used to squeeze "value" out of their
| customers over time into just "something getting worse in any
| way" or even just "something I don't like now but I did
| before" which is not at all the point.
| fragmede wrote:
| Last time pointed that out here, Cory Doctorow himself
| popped up to tell me it's okay, we don't need to word
| police other people.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44776712
| einsteinx2 wrote:
| Man I really disliked him for creating that word that got
| so overused that I saw it in practically every single
| comment thread this past year. Now I dislike him even
| more for actively promoting its overuse. Ugh.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| So let's run this shit into the ground then until it's
| meaningless. Got it.
| einsteinx2 wrote:
| It's the enshittification of the word, to use the new
| definition
| lynndotpy wrote:
| Liquid Glass has worse performance implications, which is
| bad for older devices with slow processors, and older
| devices with older batteries. It's also very difficult to
| use on older devices with smaller screens, like the 2022
| iPhone SE. Further, Apple stopped making it possible to
| upgrade to minor releases for security patches.
|
| All these give someone a reason to replace their otherwise
| perfectly-working iPhone sooner.
| TheAceOfHearts wrote:
| Maybe Apple just got so many things right early on, then the
| people with experience slowly left and inexperienced people
| kept showing up and they felt compelled to keep making changes
| to justify their jobs. How do they justify their job if they
| can't roll out huge visible changes? So they rationalize
| whatever change they wanna make and keep advocating for it
| until they get the green light, regardless of whether or not
| it's a good idea. The best part is that cleaning up this mess
| will probably lead to a whole bunch of promotions, even if just
| ends up circling back to what they should've already known.
|
| I think a lot of key lessons that were studied and learned back
| in the day weren't adequately transferred to the new
| generation.
| esafak wrote:
| When a feature reaches maturity, you have to be willing to
| shrink the team.
| goalieca wrote:
| >How do they justify their job if they can't roll out huge
| visible changes?
|
| This is the core rotting value in so much of big tech. So
| much of your bonus, performance review, promotion package,
| etc is hinging on "delivering impact" (ie: doing the flashy
| stuff). Imagine a world where some internal R&D team took a
| risk on liquid design but then thought it was okay to not
| ship it because it didn't work out.
| hyperhello wrote:
| To push the problem up a level, why can't the company
| change the incentives to "happy customers"?
| goalieca wrote:
| The issue is that so long as you play the "performance"
| game, you'll run into Goodhart's law:
|
| > When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good
| measure.
|
| All this data driven BS about impact is really just that.
| So much of it is just gaming the system.
| bigyabai wrote:
| We used to treat macOS and Windows like direct competitors.
| They used to channel their efforts into competing for
| market share and routing one another from weak customer-
| bases. For a while, they did give us better operating
| systems.
|
| Today, both software products are treated like monopolies.
| macOS is satisfied being an insular underdog, and Microsoft
| has no motivation to compete if Apple won't get off their
| ass.
| llmslave2 wrote:
| Yeah I think this is a well known problem. Humans tend to get
| a lot of stuff right on the first try, and then it's
| subsequently thrown away in the name of "progress".
| Sharlin wrote:
| To be fair, they also made several infamous hardware design
| choices back in 2016, all of which they've later reverted.
| pier25 wrote:
| I'm hopeful Apple will correct course about all these awful
| UI decisions but it'll take some time.
| kibwen wrote:
| Yes, we can all look forward to the breathless bots lauding
| Apple's visionary hardware prowess when they remove that
| damned stupid notch ten years from now, while replacing it
| with something equally egregious.
| data-ottawa wrote:
| I'm optimistic that will happen soon.
|
| My personal theory is that making the menu bar transparent
| by default (and shifting/ritating backgrounds) on Tahoe is
| preparing for OLED laptops and displays, which maybe will
| get under screen cameras or just a nicer cutout.
| bxparks wrote:
| Not all reverted. Still waiting for my USB-A ports and the SD
| card reader, on laptops described as "Pro". It's as if Apple
| forgot that "Pro" is a shorthand for "professional" instead
| of a meaningless marketing term.
| rane wrote:
| Hardware improvements are easier to quantify and progress
| naturally comes in incremental steps.
|
| Software however especially from UX point of view, is more
| likely to be more or less ready at some point. Any improvements
| are marginal and subjective. What are the large UX teams at
| Apple going to do if not redesigns for the sake of redesigning?
| I wish it would happen, but it's hard to imagine Apple shipping
| an annual OS release without noticeable visual changes.
| whynotmaybe wrote:
| I'm feeling they're veering towards a "common ui" where every
| action is an icon like on a phone where every app is an icon.
|
| Maybe someday they'll completely remove the text to just keep
| the icons like the Office ribbon did, and I'm still confused
| with it.
| weinzierl wrote:
| In the early 2000s I helped an engineering from transitioning
| from the CAD software CATIAv4 to v5.
|
| While v4 was pretty much text based in early v5 every item
| and action had an icon, often only an icon. The manual read
| something like this:
|
| _" To do [?] you navigate from the [?] page to the [?],
| while holding the middle mouse button. The[?]will open and
| you will see the [?]."_
|
| I think they did that with good intentions. CATIA being a
| French product sold all over Europe and beyond, localization
| must have been a significant line item. The result was a
| nightmare though and they to toned the reliance on symbols
| down in subsequent versions.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Imagine how usable computers will be once we remove every
| instance of text!
| whynotmaybe wrote:
| As a user of OLauncher on android, it's hard to imagine.
| RunSet wrote:
| > with every extreme of inventiveness of visualization in
| its most exaggerated form, what did we have every fifteen
| seconds? An utter halt to the action, while words flashed
| on the screen.
|
| "The Ancient and The Ultimate"
|
| https://archive.org/details/Fantasy_Science_Fiction_v044n01
| _...
| throwaway132448 wrote:
| It's quite simple: Most people who work in software now aren't
| actually very good at their jobs, at least in terms of how that
| job would have been defined 15 years ago.
|
| This is because incentives have changed such that being good at
| your job in your average mega-corp has very little to do with
| the outcome: To climb their ladder, you optimise for impact and
| move before you have to deal with the consequences.
| anal_reactor wrote:
| When company is small and the leader is competent, it's easy
| to weed out incompetent employees. But beyond certain size,
| or when the leader themselves is incompetent, this becomes
| impossible, and the whole company starts to rot.
| ajam1507 wrote:
| There's plenty to criticize them for on the hardware front. Why
| design round edges on your macbook pro and then put cheese
| grater vent holes on the sides where you're most likely to pick
| it up? Same goes for the Apple TV remote.
| danans wrote:
| > It seems like Apple's hardware design is universally loved
| with much acclaim, why is their software getting progressively
| worse?
|
| It's not so different from the rationale for many consumer
| electronics products: novelty for marketing's sake rather than
| functionality. Similarly, notice the ridiculous trend of
| removing most physical buttons from car dashboards, started by
| Tesla and mindlessly aped by the other carmakers.
| WhyNotHugo wrote:
| > It seems like Apple's hardware design is universally loved.
|
| To be fair, the bar is really really low in terms of mobile
| hardware. It's just really hard (and expensive) for new players
| to design, build and manufacture hardware with competitive
| processing power.
| pornel wrote:
| It used to be the opposite! From the end of the PowerPC era
| throughout most of the Intel era, the Mac OS X was the main
| selling point, while the hardware was slow, overpriced and
| overheating (they've had some nice touches like MagSafe and
| "ears" on power supplies for the cable, but that didn't make up
| for everything else).
|
| People used to build hackintoshes to get Mac OS X without
| paying Apple's RAM tax or suffer having mid-range laptop GPUs
| in the top-of-the-line desktops.
|
| Apple's outstanding success with their ARM chips is more of an
| exception than the rule.
| TheAceOfHearts wrote:
| Looking at the old Microsoft menu gave me a pang of nostalgia for
| what we lost. It was so clear and readable. The icons were
| clearly colored and so easy to understand.
|
| I think the key issue with macOS is that they don't seem to have
| someone who is looking at the whole ecosystem holistically to
| make sure that there's consistency and integration across
| experiences. You probably have development silos for different
| applications and they don't really integrate with each other.
| There should really be a role like Integration Emperor that
| exists outside of the traditional corporate hierarchy who can go
| to different teams to push for increased consistency.
| meindnoch wrote:
| >I think the key issue with macOS is that they don't seem to
| have someone who is looking at the whole ecosystem holistically
| to make sure that there's consistency and integration across
| experiences.
|
| That person died in 2011.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| Rose tinted glasses. Have a look through Jobs era UI again.
| halapro wrote:
| Oh yes Mountain Lion was very very bad.
|
| UI was simple, maybe too simple, but it made sense. The
| only complaint from that era was the thin scroll bars and
| the flipped scroll direction, both of which are forgotten
| about and accepted nowadays.
| egypturnash wrote:
| As someone whose primary interaction with her computer is
| via her drawing tablet stylus I _still_ loathe the thin
| scroll bars; I 've turned them off in prefs but I still
| regularly encounter apps and websites that force them and
| they have to be _really_ special to overcome that.
| saulpw wrote:
| Say what you want about the design of Mountain Lion, at
| least it's an ethos.
| pornel wrote:
| The complaints were that the UI was not customisable, with
| limited functionality, stubbornly did things the Mac way
| even if that was confusing to Windows users. The
| implementation was often slow and sometimes buggy.
|
| But it had taste and attention to detail. It followed
| Apple's own HIG (design guidelines). The UI had some flashy
| details, but they had a purpose or at least didn't get in
| the way. I don't feel any of this in the current Apple
| designs.
| whateverboat wrote:
| They do have a culture of silos and secrecy where employees are
| not allowed to talk to each other. This is actively enforced to
| prevent leaks but this also gets you this.
| ineedasername wrote:
| Something on this website made my iPhone (16 pro) immediately
| begin warming up, become hot to the touch, and invoke screen-
| dimming throttling. I verified by exiting it and reentering,
| during which the pattern abated and then recurred.
|
| The snow? Something else?
| meindnoch wrote:
| You can turn the snow off in the toolbar.
| ajross wrote:
| The irony here isn't so much that it's the minutiae of the menu
| design that's wrong, it's the _top-bar menus as a whole are a
| dead paradigm_. Nothing uses them anymore. Leave the mac for a
| moment and go to your windows device. Pull up Chrome. No menu.
| The file browser, nope. Not in the terminal either. VSCode still
| has one![1] But the office suite doesn 't anymore[2]. And
| obviously, the proximate cause of that is that most interaction
| these days is with phones where horizontal text menus are a non-
| starter.
|
| No one uses menus. So why so get so upset over the mac
| implementation of a dead paradigm? Because ironically the
| Macintosh bakes a "menu" into the screen space for you, and has
| since 1984. Giving up menus on a mac requires that you give up
| one of the things that make a mac a mac. And that's hard, for
| marketers even more so than designers. So it persists and
| festers.
|
| But in the rest of the world, we walked away and never looked
| back. The icons aren't the problem here.
|
| [1] "Big" apps for experts still get value out of putting their
| actions into tightly packed text. Photoshop too, etc... But these
| are increasingly the exception and not the rule, and even there
| the next generation of big tools (c.f. Cursor) don't have them.
|
| [2] Even worse there, because the tab bar it does have actually
| looks like a menu but isn't.
| filchermcurr wrote:
| I use menus all the time...
|
| I much prefer text to inscrutable icons.
| vehemenz wrote:
| The top menu is not necessarily for common functions. Nor is it
| true that no one uses it.
|
| Chrome's unique buried menu breaks user expectations. Casual
| users have trouble finding it.
| ajross wrote:
| Do you have a cite for that? It's a hamburger menu, which is
| _by far_ a more common menu paradigm in the modern world. Do
| you imagine some kind of "casual user" who... doesn't have a
| phone?
|
| I repeat: the menu bar is a dying abstraction, preserved in a
| consistent form only on the Macintosh (even iOS has no
| equivalent), because it's presence is unavoidable. Users of
| modern apps don't see it used consistently, so it's
| absolutely not surprising that Apple's designers aren't doing
| it either.
| wazoox wrote:
| Firefox has the option to display the menu bar. I like it.
| moi2388 wrote:
| Isn't this post a bit ironic given all the random snow on the
| page?!
| hnarn wrote:
| This is the second time in just a few weeks I see a post from
| some UX person complaining about how some major tech company
| doesn't "understand" design while themselves having a design that
| is absolutely abysmal. What made this person think that having
| gigantic snowflakes flying down a page serving only text and
| images would be a good idea?
|
| _edit_: I'd also like to point out that I know it can be
| disabled, the question(s) I then have are 1) why is it enabled by
| default 2) black text on yellow background is yet another obvious
| mistake
| the_other wrote:
| 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).
| fainpul wrote:
| 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.
| beders wrote:
| It is enabled by default so you can enjoy the snowflakes.
| Zealotux wrote:
| Tahoe and Liquid Glass(tm) solidified for me the idea that Apple
| completely dropped the ball when it comes to design. Clearly they
| needed an a-hole in charge, Jobs would've crucified a few people.
|
| It's painful to see the decay, update after update, into a more
| confusing, cluttered, and tacky experience.
| rco8786 wrote:
| Steve Jobs died 14 years ago. If we're attributing this to
| those in charge, Jony Ive's departure is much more correlated.
| nicoburns wrote:
| Apple's UI design started going downhill with the iOS 7 "flat
| design" release which was very shortly after Steve's death,
| and seemed to correspond to Ive being given a little too much
| free rein in the leadership vacuum that followed.
|
| Jobs had his own flaws, but he was definitely a huge part of
| why Apple's UI design (and product design in general) has
| historically been as good as it has.
| postalcoder wrote:
| I agree. Jobs being around for the birth of the GUI
| probably played a big role in that. Pushing past text-based
| terminals to graphical interfaces meant having to spend
| every moment thinking about purposeful interaction and
| design.
| Y_Y wrote:
| Maybe we could use Vison Pro to recreate a visit to Xerox
| Parc in 1979 to inspire the current designers to use UI
| patterns that gave been working well for fifty years.
| qn9n wrote:
| Pretty sure iOS 7 was regarded as awful on launch and then
| a little while later people decided it was amazing and
| lovely to look at once the kinks were ironed out.
|
| People just don't like new things that change what they are
| used to.
| layer8 wrote:
| Count me as someone who never turned around on the iOS 7+
| flat design being a usability degradation.
| bobbylarrybobby wrote:
| Apple spent the next several years walking lots of the
| changes back, in particular the thin text and overdone
| translucency
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| One thing I'll definitely give Apple is that they have
| walked back some design decisions that were total flops
| in the past, such as the butterfly keyboard and the
| touchbar (though I found it more than a bit annoying when
| I'd see reviews saying how great and visionary Apple was
| for simply undoing bad decisions - it deserved an "OK,
| good" not an "OMG Apple is amazing!!)
|
| I like this article because it points out how
| _undeniably_ awful some of these decisions were in a
| "this signifies something is seriously, fundamentally
| wrong with Apple design" way. I really hope Apple listens
| a does a major course correction.
| 12_throw_away wrote:
| > then a little while later people decided it was amazing
| and lovely to look at
|
| Sorry, who decided this? Which people exactly?
| Noaidi wrote:
| Alan Dye designed IOS7 as well.
| wmeredith wrote:
| > Apple's UI design started going downhill with the iOS 7
| "flat design" release which was very shortly after Steve's
| death, and seemed to correspond to Ive being given a little
| too much free rein in the leadership vacuum that followed.
|
| This was so obvious to me. The damage done to Apple by
| losing Jobs as their most vicious editor was almost
| instantly noticeable.
| acdha wrote:
| Jony Ive's elevation was the problem: neither he nor his
| protege Alan Dye (who worked on the boxes) had UI training or
| experience and that has shown since iOS 7 where the focus
| shifted to things which looked nicer on the side of the
| iPhone box than they are in actual use - stuff like Liquid
| Glass shipping with an illegible lock screen keyboard is
| possible because they never put the lock screen in a
| presentation or product screenshot.
|
| As a complete outsider, my impression is that this started
| slow because they had to politically overpower Apple's actual
| UI group. Liquid Glass probably managed that with a unified
| look across all devices pitch which should've weighted the
| relative impact on the popular platforms much higher than the
| niche Vision Pro.
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| >Jobs would've crucified a few people
|
| Jobs liked to talk this side of the business up because
| creatives were the substantial part of the business. Now they
| sell to everybody it doesn't matter so much. The average person
| won't even notice the complaints in the original article. They
| aren't sensitive to it in the way that creative people are.
| curtisf wrote:
| They might not _notice_ but that doesn't mean it's not
| affecting their ability to use their computer smoothly.
|
| With computers such a huge part of almost everyone's lives
| now, it's a travesty for one of the largest companies in the
| world to inflict something so subpar on so many old-style
| InfiniteQwert wrote:
| They don't notice, but they can _feel_ it. My aging mother,
| god bless, doesn't give a crap about design.. but she updated
| her iPhone and asked me what I thought about it because she
| hates it. And it wasn't nitpicking design choices - she just
| said 'it's so hard for me to do anything now and know where
| anything is'
| unethical_ban wrote:
| I'll chime in with the others to say that "amateur" users
| still notice, even if my dad isn't calling me to say "Son,
| why does this new MacOS version have different icons for the
| `New` action across apps?"
|
| I had to help him "get his bookmarks back" meaning see his
| bookmarks toolbar in Firefox. He must have hit a keyboard
| combo on accident. Since Firefox hides the menus by default,
| I had to tell him to tap Alt to see the menu, after which he
| was easily guided to View > Toolbars > Bookmarks Toolbar.
|
| Bad UI design for novices is felt, if not conveyed outright.
| nogridbag wrote:
| I consider myself above average with UI design, but I still
| got confused with that dang "i" icon in the Preview app just
| yesterday.
|
| I had to add my signature and write in the date so it looks
| like it was handwritten. So the plan was to just draw the
| date with a pencil tool and if that failed use the text tool
| to write the date.
|
| First I instinctively clicked the pencil icon which turned
| out to be a highlighter. That's a great example where if they
| had added color for the tip and line it would have clearly
| looked like a highlighter. After that failed, I clicked that
| "i" icon because it looks like it's for inserting text.
| Honestly I was in such a rush I didn't even see the info pane
| popping up and was dang confused when nothing was happening.
|
| I'm very familiar with info icons and have used them in my
| own apps, yet I had never seen one without the circle around
| it.
| DrBazza wrote:
| This release of MacOS is the most retrograde backwards step
| I've seen Apple make.
|
| To use a famous movie quote: "Your scientists were so
| preoccupied with whether or not they could, that they didn't
| stop to think if they should"
|
| Just because you have HDPI and opacity, doesn't mean that you
| have to use it _by default, everywhere_.
| morshu9001 wrote:
| Reminds me of how OSX used to treat opacity in app icons as
| not part of the hithox. So I'd accidentally click the hole in
| the "O" for Outlook and it wouldn't open, haha.
| bdelmas wrote:
| Liquid Glass was actually a big surprise for me, and it was a
| shock to see Apple moving forward with this and nobody stopping
| it. Microsoft did that with Vista back in 2006 and they stopped
| doing this. So Apple is copying a 2006 design? From Microsoft?
| Where even Microsoft stopped doing it because of all the known
| issues? So many questions...
| friendzis wrote:
| I would be very tempted to place a bet that nobody in the
| decision making chain used Vista or Compiz to any degree.
|
| Commercial software coding glorifies denying anything older
| than 10 years exist outside of museums, let alone learn
| anything from it. The same has merely infected design world.
| 8n4vidtmkvmk wrote:
| This is why we need more old timers in charge. We've been
| around the block and seen how all these things play out
| already.
|
| Now they just promote the youngsters that say the word AI a
| lot instead of those of us who actually care about the
| craft.
| dbgrman wrote:
| But they _did_ use early builds of liquid glass and that
| should 've triggered nausea and someone must've said
| "Don't"... yet they still did. You don't have to have gone
| through Windows Vista time to understand UI/UX (least of
| all, Apple Designers).
| lynndotpy wrote:
| Even Vista did not have nearly as many problems as Liquid
| Glass. Most of the elements were static images, and the
| "aero" effects could be disabled, as well as the "Fluent
| Design" effects in later Windows 10.
|
| Liquid Glass - with its wobbling jiggling jerking, shimmering
| and flashing, blurry and difficult-to-read, shifting and
| unpredictable design, and battery-demolishing performance -
| is so much worse. It's mindblowing how bad it is.
| odyssey7 wrote:
| I haven't updated to the new OS because the liquid glass
| experience made me think of historic UI elements that were more
| novelty than substance.
| JaggerJo wrote:
| > ..Jobs would've crucified a few people
|
| And rightfully so. Tahoe is not just a step back, but it throws
| away so many good design elements that have been there for ages
| - and for no good reason.
|
| I really hope they revert most of the design changes in macOS
| 27. I don't mind the Liquid Glass - the other changes they made
| to expose/highlight Liquid Glass are the real issue.
|
| IMO we reached peak design in 2013 with Mavericks.
| data-ottawa wrote:
| I don't think it's about being an a hole, but someone who
| deeply cares about the product is needed.
|
| The experience right now is bad. It's frustrating and there is
| no overarching vision or clear focus on the user.
| selkin wrote:
| No one might be Job-level ahole, but I'm certain Cook ain't
| less ruthless. It's a matter of priorities, not attitude.
| xnx wrote:
| > Jobs would've crucified a few people.
|
| Steve Jobs had good taste in many areas, but he also approved
| the puck mouse.
| core2quad wrote:
| Funnily enough, I find icons an improvement overall - even if
| those are inconsistent, it feels like it gives me more points to
| anchor my eyes on when skimming through an unknown menu and gives
| me any context.
|
| Starting to use Mac ~3 years ago, I often encountered giant
| blocks of text in right-click menus and while pleasing
| aesthetically, those were a chore to actually parse. For someone
| who daily drives macOS for, I assume, multiple years more than
| me, it probably comes down to memorisation, and how it looks
| becomes more important (with Tahoe breaking habits), but I find
| the inconsistencies and icons something that actually helps me
| find my ground.
|
| Granted, the execution leaves a lot to be improved, I won't argue
| against it. Tahoe in some places feels downright amateurish.
| Despite that, I'll still take what Tahoe added over no icons at
| all... I feel like color icons + using them more sparingly would
| certainly be better though.
|
| I guess a justification for Tahoe icons on my end is - those help
| me navigate the UI despite all their shortcomings (and ugliness
| they bring in many places).
| teddy-smith wrote:
| I don't even look at them, they're just visual clutter to me.
| richrichardsson wrote:
| ^ This.
|
| I couldn't quite formulate the exact reason why I disliked
| the Tahoe menus compared to previous versions, but this
| article nailed it.
| layer8 wrote:
| It's best when only _some_ of the items in a menu (like maybe a
| third of them) have icons, preferably the most important
| commands. This gives the menus a visual structure and can also
| help in better recognizing groups of related items.
|
| The classic Windows menu from the article is a good example:
| https://tonsky.me/blog/tahoe-icons/word@2x.webp?t=1767611340
| jacobp100 wrote:
| I hope with Alan Dye now out of Apple they will revisit a lot of
| what just happened. There's been a lot of places where things
| have just become worse
| newsclues wrote:
| Tahoe needs a serious rethink and fixing the problems it created.
|
| Apple (software) has lost its way and needs to return to whatever
| made them great and different.
| quietsegfault wrote:
| I like seeing the icons. It helps me pick the right thing without
| reading. Seems easier for me.
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| You can't read?
| finnlab wrote:
| I've always respected macOS for being the 'stable' choice for
| not-as-techy people. But recent versions feel like a mess.
| Running Tahoe on my 2019 Mac Pro (Yes the cheese grater one) has
| been surprisingly frustrating. Simple things are broken: Ableton
| couldn't even trigger a microphone permission prompt, forcing me
| to meddle with a SQLite database, which is definitely not meant
| for end users to touch, just to get it working.
|
| Logitech's software is also stuck in a loop denying it has
| Bluetooth access (Which it has). And with the added graphical
| glitches (Apple likes to call them liquid glass) and weird window
| artifacts (For some reason, all my windows had a black,
| rectangular border one day), it's honestly less reliable than my
| macOS-style Linux rice from 2015. But I'm still stuck with MacOS
| since I NEED Adobe Lightroom for my work and there is still now
| way to run that with GPU acceleration on Linux. But if there was,
| there would be no device running Windows/MacOS left in my
| household
|
| I've also recently come upon this talk by an ex-apple UI/UX
| engineer: https://youtu.be/1fZTOjd_bOQ I think what he's talking
| about is precisely what got lost at apple.
|
| Edit: In case someone stumbles upon this after experiencing the
| same problem with ableton, here is the command I executed:
|
| sqlite3 ~/Library/Application\ Support/com.apple.TCC/TCC.db
| "INSERT OR REPLACE INTO access VALUES('kTCCServiceMicrophone','co
| m.ableton.live',0,2,4,1,NULL,NULL,0,'UNUSED',NULL,0,1725000000,NU
| LL,NULL,'default',0);"
|
| Disclaimer: I have absolutely no Idea what it does, as it was
| generated by Gemini. I do not have anything super important on
| this computer so I just executed it, but please don't touch
| obscure system files if you have data to lose.
| gnarlouse wrote:
| Yeah I'm hopeful that they spend the next software update
| atoning for their UI sins.
|
| I remember being really excited for Liquid Glass, because it
| felt like a return to the good old days of Skeuomorphism, at
| least in some spirit. In reality, it was a botched delivery, I
| suspect for two reasons:
|
| 1. Trying to unify _all_ of their design (in one year no less)
| against one style -- developed primarily on Apple Watch & the
| now defunct Vision Pro -- was a colossal undertaking.
|
| 2. There's so much _goddamn_ software packed into each OS that
| you 're going to inevitably be stuck with bloated menus.
| Imagine Apple releasing OS 27 this year and saying "we're
| stripping you down to the bare bones. It's going to feel like
| Snow Leopard, but we're going to give you customization menus
| to alter that experience." I would lose my mind with joy. I'd
| be so excited to be able to operate my fucking phone again.
| gessha wrote:
| > software update atoning for their UI sins
|
| But how would they do that without scrapping the whole
| version?
|
| Their marketing for this year heavily relies on liquid glass
| but if they remove the shiny stuff, it's not very pretty,
| it's just functional. Functional is what people with work to
| do appreciate, marketing people will want the shiny back now
| that it was introduced.
| gnarlouse wrote:
| I really don't think the shininess is the issue at hand.
| It's interface clutter. My iPhone is so cluttered. It's
| packed full of software I'll never use. I wade through menu
| options I'll never use.
|
| I like the look of Liquid Glass and I'm generally for it.
| It just needs to be organized better.
|
| > just functional
|
| This is ultimately what I disagree with. I think iOS/macOS
| have become entirely dysfunctional. Software is broken,
| webpages are broken simply because they're running from OS
| 26. Alarms and calendar events either run randomly or not
| at all. The system preferences menu is hardly navigable. I
| could go on. Maybe I'm just getting old and crusty, and
| yearn for the days when Steve Jobs was running the ship.
|
| They just pack needless software in and do nothing to keep
| it organized/usable.
| euroderf wrote:
| Imagine using "Apple" and "featuritis" in the same
| sentence.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Make a Ballmer CEO...
| carlosjobim wrote:
| > But how would they do that without scrapping the whole
| version?
|
| There is a way for them to fix this while saving face. You
| see, Liquid Glass(tm) was just the first of their
| incredible new Material Design paradigm. Now introducing
| Apple Stone(tm), Apple Paper(tm), Apple Linen(tm) and Apple
| Brushed Metal(tm). All just as realistic as Liquid
| Glass(tm).
| rescbr wrote:
| I'd be very happy if we returned to the Brushed Metal
| era, when they actually followed their own UI guidelines.
| jorvi wrote:
| No, Liquid Glass was stunted from its conception. Any UI
| designer worth his salt could have pointed out the legibility
| issues immediately.
|
| The fact that no one (in power) saw a problem with Liquid
| Glass shows that Jobs was right, that letting the MBAs take
| the power never works out. And he was wrong for appointing
| Cook. Remember that Jobs made MacBooks "expensive" (no more
| expensive or even cheaper than a Vaio or Portege) because he
| wanted to make great devices with a great UX and UI, which
| needed a certain level of investment. Jobs loved his users.
| Cook only loves his shareholders.
| Noaidi wrote:
| > Yeah I'm hopeful that they spend the next software update
| atoning for their UI sins.
|
| I have heard Liquid Glass was in development for two years,
| so I see no hope of them spending all that money over again.
| Nevermind all the developers who have redesigned apps for
| IOS26.
|
| They could just re-release IOS 18, but that would piss me off
| as a developer.
|
| This is why I left the Apple Ecosystem last month, I see no
| hope.
| asimovDev wrote:
| from what i've read on macrumors, Tahoe on the 2019 MP is quite
| messy. A lot of people complain about the UIs being sluggish.
| walthamstow wrote:
| It's sluggish on a 2023 M3 Pro!
| Forgeties79 wrote:
| totally possible it's Tahoe but I'd rule some other
| potential issues out as well if you haven't already
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| That's weird; almost the only issue I _don 't_ have with
| Tahoe on a 2023 M2 Mini is its performance. Do you have
| transparency enabled?
| walthamstow wrote:
| Yes, I have 'reduce transparency' set to true. Overnight
| after upgrade the UI became noticably sluggish.
|
| The outstanding example is Spotlight. For years since the
| M1 release I have been able to bring the bar up and type
| C-H-R then Enter, in ~500ms I guess, and I would always
| get Chrome.
|
| Now, I have to wait another 1-2 seconds for it to think.
| If I hit enter before it has finished thinking, Spotlight
| goes away and nothing else happens!
|
| The UI and Spotlight are still fine on my 2020 M1 Air
| running Sequioa
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| Fair enough. With Tahoe's removal of Launchpad, I assume
| you're talking about Spotlight in the sense of what
| appears when you press the Launchpad icon (F4)? Anyway, I
| can confirm that I also get very weird laggy behaviour
| from it--sometimes a double-press is interpreted as two
| presses, sometimes as just one.
| walthamstow wrote:
| I hadn't noticed that they killed Launchpad! On my M3's
| keyboard, F4 is a magnifying glass icon for Spotlight.
| I've always used cmd+space, which has been around for a
| while.
|
| What's even worse is I have disabled all search
| categories for Spotlight except Apps and System Settings.
| It's searching a list of 40 apps and idk maybe 200
| settings, and it still sucks.
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| I also never had a problem launching apps from Launchpad
| (I guess because that was its sole purpose, and it did it
| well) while I think it was pretty much day 1 that I
| encountered an app that just refused to show up in the
| Spotlight replacement.
| galenko wrote:
| At this point why even use spotlight? Raycast or a list
| of other maybe more minimalistic replacements would work
| great.
| finnlab wrote:
| I guess they only work on Apple Silicon software by now and
| only do the absolute minimum on Intel/AMD support. It's
| getting phased out anyway next update, which is also a shame
| for a machine that 5 years ago cost more than a pretty great
| car.
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| Liquid Glass is horrible on my iPhone SE 2020. Slow and looks
| weird on the smaller screen. I tried to turn most effects off
| but it still is just worse in every way
| layer8 wrote:
| That's the case on larger screens as well.
| Noaidi wrote:
| I had a 16E and it was buggy, cramped, confusing, and
| drained my battery. My fault for being poor and not wanting
| to spend the extra $400 for a 16.
|
| IOS26 broke my device, and what recourse do I have? None.
| drnick1 wrote:
| > what recourse do I have?
|
| Buy a Pixel 9a for $399, flash GrapheneOS.
| Noaidi wrote:
| Already did. :)
| hexbin010 wrote:
| Most MacOS major versions slow down older (but perfectly
| competent) hardware ("hehe whoopsie daisy")
| Forgeties79 wrote:
| >In case someone stumbles upon this after experiencing the same
| problem with ableton, here is the command I executed:
|
| And back to your point, a large reason people buy Apple in the
| first place is so they never have to read this sentence/try
| this solution!
| finnlab wrote:
| Exactly. The whole permissions system, while nice in theory,
| just does not work in practice most of the time. Apple needs
| to understand, that unifying experience across mobile/desktop
| is neither possible nor the right thing to do.
| Forgeties79 wrote:
| Yeah I really don't get it at the end of the day.
| Laptop/desktop screen and the couple of inches on my phone
| cannot operate the same way anymore than a car and a
| motorized scooter can. They're just not the same thing.
| latexr wrote:
| Your Ableton and Logitech issues seem to be the same: screwed
| up access permissions. Not your fault, macOS has been sucking
| at it for a while. It's not unheard of for System Settings to
| show you some app has some permissions, but in practice it
| doesn't.
|
| What usually works is fully resetting permissions for an app:
| tccutil reset All <APP BUNDLE ID HERE>
|
| To find the bundle ID for an app: mdls -raw
| -name kMDItemCFBundleIdentifier <APP PATH HERE>
| finnlab wrote:
| I did try that amongst other things. Launching Ableton via
| Terminal also brought up the microphone permission pop-
| up...for the Terminal app. One has to wonder if a System that
| regularly "forgets" permissions is even secure at all.
| cyberax wrote:
| > One has to wonder if a System that regularly "forgets"
| permissions is even secure at all.
|
| It does not "forget", the permissions are limited to 30
| days. So you have to re-grant them periodically.
|
| Oh, and if you miss the popup (because sometimes it pops
| _under_ other windows) then you just start getting silent
| failures. With absolutely NO indication in the UI that
| something is wrong. There is literally no way to find that
| out without looking directly into the TCC database.
| wpm wrote:
| TCC permissions are always evaluated by whether the parent
| process has the permission if it isn't being spawned by
| LaunchServices.
| bix6 wrote:
| > screwed up access permissions
|
| Bane of my existence. I have wasted so much time on various
| apps not having some access they need.
| DarKraD wrote:
| There definitely is something weird with Tahoe permission
| system. I was trying to learn Swift and after a couple
| keystrokes, the banner asking for the permission to access
| other's app data pops up without fail. Making it almost
| impossible to use Swift Playground. And it's been like that
| for a couple months now.
|
| https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/808758
|
| https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/811796
| wpm wrote:
| The System Settings panel for TCC permissions has been fucked
| since Ventura. It _never_ reflects reality properly and won
| 't show managed settings either (like those granted or denyed
| outright by a configuration profile). So users have no idea
| that Firefox can't access their microphone because their
| device administrator explicitly denied that. The redesign of
| System Preferences should have raised far more alarm bells
| than it did, and it did raise a fuck ton of alarm bells that
| something utterly broken is happening in Cupertino. Along the
| same line as the another comment in here said, it's just that
| some amateur is following the "wrong rules". Like, oh, we
| _have_ to have the macOS settings app look and work exactly
| like iOS ', despite being a far more complex system with a
| lot more legacy components.
|
| I am literally writing a bug report right now for 26.2,
| because on my Mac, for whatever reason, running tccutil reset
| All on com.apple.Terminal isn't removing Full Disk Access. It
| removes everything else (screen recording, specific folder
| domain access, but not FDA).
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| That's on point - it really reminds me of a Linux distro that
| someone went a bit too overboard on customizing. The
| inconsistencies are so familiar from cobbling different OS and
| window themes and icon sets etc together. One more reason to
| move away from MacOS since they don't have that anymore either
| finnlab wrote:
| The bug with the outlined windows really threw me back a
| decade. It's exactly how a bad KDE MacOS rice looked back
| then lol
| gessha wrote:
| The talk you cited is excellent. I recommend it if anyone is
| interested in design, UIs and UX :P
| ryandrake wrote:
| It recently made the rounds on HN with discussion[1].
|
| 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46256834
| bloppe wrote:
| I wonder if this is a symptom of a broader shift away from
| cathedral-style "owned" software toward bazaar-style free
| software, perhaps due to the ascendant SaaS model sucking
| investment away from traditionally shipped product teams, or if
| Apple is just sleepwalking down the slope of mediocrity.
| finnlab wrote:
| What you are describing is a symptom of a system already in
| the process of breaking. The "OG Hacker Mentality" is a thing
| of the past, corporations are run by executives looking at
| money, maybe at shareholders but never at users. Most
| companies have internal processes with complexity comparable
| to government processes and outsourcing/using a SaaS for
| everything is just what managers do to get a short term win
| and thereby a promotion. UI/UX design on the other hand has
| to be done by a small group, with a very thought out concept
| and lots of freedom and no financial pressure. However,
| executives see UI/UX developers as glorified icon-generators.
| They are already talking about doing UI/UX design with AI.
| Tell me, when has an AI ever cared for usability?
|
| A UI/UX Dev has two choices in 2026: 1. Try to execute their
| own vision and get shot down into burnout by management 2.
| Just make everything look shiny and modern, create demos that
| look great and get promoted
| coldtea wrote:
| > _Simple things are broken: Ableton couldn 't even trigger a
| microphone permission prompt, forcing me to meddle with a
| SQLite database, which is definitely not meant for end users to
| touch, just to get it working._
|
| You shouldn't have to do any of that. Even if Live couldn't
| trigger the permission prompt, you should be able to give it a
| microphone permission in Settings.
| finnlab wrote:
| For whatever reason, apps need to request the microphone
| permission first to show up in the settings menu. For other
| permissions you can drag/drop the application into the
| settings window, but not for the microphone permission.
| thelopa wrote:
| I know someone who works on the macOS permission system. If you
| submit a bug report and share the feedback number, I will send
| it their way https://bugreport.apple.com/
| PlanksVariable wrote:
| Tahoe broke trackpad scrolling in Safari on my 2023 MBP. Other
| users have been experiencing and reporting the issue for
| months. Apple still hasn't fixed it in any of its updates or
| addressed it. Pretty bad.
| morshu9001 wrote:
| Biggest downside of Mac OS has always been this. It doesn't
| provide a stable platform for third-party anything.
| postalcoder wrote:
| This is an excellent article.
|
| Apple has been rudderless on the interaction design front for
| over a decade now. The windowing mess is evidence of it. We now
| have the cmd+tab (app switcher), Spaces, Mission Control, (full
| screen) split screen, Stage Manager, and now tiled window
| control. None of those interaction metaphors have been expanded
| upon since their initial launch.
|
| I'm a "mac guy". I understood why Apple initially eschewed
| windows style alt-tab, given the emphasis on app-centricism. But
| now, they've created a thousand different ways to switch windows
| without giving us a proper window switcher. There are apps that
| bring alt-tab to Mac, but they are all bad because Apple doesn't
| give developers access to the low-level APIs to create performant
| and fully featured window management.
|
| Before, Apple had an endless well of great ideas to tap. That's
| how we got the term "Sherlocked". However, now that they've
| locked down macOS so much, they've suffocated themselves of new
| ideas.
| walthamstow wrote:
| I have to say I've never found anything wrong with the alt-tab
| app I use on macOS. I wonder if you're referring the
| permissions it has to ask for?
|
| https://github.com/lwouis/alt-tab-macos
| postalcoder wrote:
| Alt tab is okay but it has performance issues (sometimes
| window switching is instant, sometimes there's a slight but
| perceptible delay). The devs have acknowledged it and said
| that it cannot be fixed.
|
| Other pet peeves include the smallest window thumbnails are
| enormous and enabling mouse hover to switch windows causes me
| to switch to the wrong window, and thumbnails are often
| stale.
| soared wrote:
| You can change the window size in settings
| postalcoder wrote:
| I did. It's set to small and still much too large for me.
| krferriter wrote:
| I think MacOS would be much more unusable without alt-tab,
| like this app is a critical piece of software that has to be
| installed on any MacOS machine I'm using. But it does
| sometimes miss a window, like it doesn't show up in the
| window list in alt-tab even though it is open. And then I
| have to use the three finger swipe up thing to find it. Not a
| huge deal but occasionally annoying, and I assume it is
| because they are limited in the access they have to this
| information, which Apple could make available if they wanted,
| but have decided not to.
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| I strongly believe we need to return to the drawing board and
| design a Window Environment from scratch because we've gone so
| far down the "everything's a mess" route that it's impossible
| to work our way out again.
|
| Here's an example: panes, tabs, windows, apps, spaces. These
| things all fight against each other, have their own little
| silos, get treated differently by every single app, etc, etc.
| postalcoder wrote:
| Agreed. Lots of conflicting principles. Like, it doesnt make
| sense to increase the padding across the UI and at the same
| time, push quarter-screen layouts. I'm almost begging Apple
| to create something that I don't like, but in a way that's
| thoughtful and committed to that bit.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| I feel like there are a million reasons why this is the wrong
| choice. There are probably 10 xkcd comics alone that explain
| why this is a bad idea.
|
| "Let's throw every away and start from scratch" is a tempting
| idea, but it rarely works. Even taking your example of panes,
| windows, tabs, apps, and spaces, each of those have a
| separate and identifiable use case that, IMO, is valid. At
| least in my mind, I have a mental model around where panes,
| windows, tabs, and apps are appropriate, and I personally
| rarely use spaces (though I certainly understand people who
| like them), and they've never bother me because I can safely
| ignore them.
|
| And when you look at the issues identified in the article,
| they all seem very fixable to me. Fixable starting with Apple
| getting new design leadership, and given the guy responsible
| for Liquid Glass jumped to Meta, sounds like it was a good
| thing for Apple.
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| I misworded that. See my other comment; tldr, I want
| windows, tabs, etc. to be properly implemented by the OS,
| to a standard, rather than in many different conflicting
| ways.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| > Here's an example: panes, tabs, windows, apps, spaces.
| These things all fight against each other, have their own
| little silos, get treated differently by every single app,
| etc, etc.
|
| Disagree. The fact that these are independent is a huge
| organizational boon for those who know how to apply some
| combination of them.
|
| Example: I set up spaces (virtual desktops) to have themes:
| one of general web, one for iOS dev, one for Android dev,
| etc. within that, it's useful to be able to further organize
| with windows and tabs -- windows can represent projects for
| example, and tabs can represent files. These work together to
| prevent a Cambrian explosion of windows that would be
| impossible to manage no matter how your environment works.
|
| It's useful for apps to be distinct from windows, too. This
| allows things like moving all windows belonging to a
| particular app between screens, or minimizing/maximizing them
| all, hiding them all, etc. Panes in most circumstances are an
| entirely different beast than tabs and windows... it wouldn't
| be useful to turn an inspector palette into a tab.
|
| They work together as long as one's mental model isn't overly
| simplistic.
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| I didn't really explain my objections very well in such a
| throwaway statement. My issue isn't that those things
| exist; pretty much the opposite. I think it's good that
| they exist and they almost certainly always should. My
| problem is when app A implements tabs differently from app
| B, app C uses the same shortcut for switching windows that
| app D uses for switching tabs, etc. It just all seems so
| disjointed.
|
| What I want is for an OS that treats things like tabs as
| first-class citizens, not a byproduct that each app
| implements in its own way.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| macOS actually has native tab support built in. It
| supports everything you'd expect from a tab system,
| including merging windows into tabs and splitting them
| back out. All third party devs have to do is opt in and
| tell the OS which windows are intended to participate.
| It's been a feature for a long time now.
|
| Problem is that most third party apps don't opt in and
| instead reimplement tabs themselves. It's mostly native
| Mac apps made by small boutique developers that use
| native tabs.
| tracker1 wrote:
| You're welcome to use Cosmic desktop then... ;-)
|
| I say this only half in jest, as it's what I'm using on my
| personal desktop. It's far from perfect though, for some
| reason the taskbar/launchpad just feels awkwardly shaped,
| some of the keyboard based navigation gets a little wonky
| sometimes. And I feel that there's a few areas where the
| split brain between docking regions and windows isn't quite
| as polished as it needs to be.
|
| On the plus side, it performs better than Gnome, and is
| slightly more consistent than a lot of Linux desktop options.
| In the end, I do think that OSes need to expose a bit more
| details in a somewhat consistent way as cross-platform apps
| and even electron-like options are boing to become more
| common place as people jump between and need to support
| Window, Linux and MacOS targets, with the variances they all
| have.
|
| Personally, there are a lot of things I like and dislike
| between all of them.. I spent a large amount of time tweaking
| Budgie to be almost exactly what I want at one point, and an
| update borked my setup... I just switched to Pop/Cosmic and
| dealt with it from there.
| lynndotpy wrote:
| I agree. If you (or anyone else who shares your sentiment)
| hasn't tried it before, you might enjoy "distro hopping"
| across different Linux distros, using something like Ventoy
| to make it easy to try out different desktop environments.
|
| There's a veritable zoo to try out. KDE, COSMIC, XFCE, GNOME
| and its many derivatives (like Pantheon or the previous
| COSMIC), Unity, etc. Also interesting are the old XMotif
| based ones like CDE (which has the delightful "chiseled
| marble" look of 90s-era DEs).
|
| Windows also has its own share of alternative shells, but
| AFAIK only Cairo DE is actively supported and developed.
| xutopia wrote:
| Cmd+~ switches windows of a given app in case you didn't know
| (not disagreeing with you but it is one shortcut I find super
| useful and it helps switch windows).
| asadm wrote:
| I heavily use this one actually.
| aaroninsf wrote:
| Me too, in fact watching my hands for a moment, it's the
| _only_ way I switch applications now
| hamdingers wrote:
| My hate for this behavior grows with each passing year as
| more and more of the "apps" I use become browser windows.
| wpm wrote:
| This is why I regard ChromeOS with fear. Because it really
| does feel like everything is just converging on the browser
| as the OS, and a browser is not a goddamn OS.
| nehal3m wrote:
| I have a non-ANSI keyboard so tilde is in a super weird place
| for that (next to left shift). I swapped the shortcut to
| Option+Tab, makes much more intuitive sense.
| dsego wrote:
| For some reason it's currently broken for Firefox on Mac, at
| least on my end.
| JamesSwift wrote:
| Works fine for me
| lerp-io wrote:
| no cuz its easier to read that context menu with icons
| yakkers wrote:
| Have to say, it's quite wild to me that _one_ of the design
| blunders of macOS Tahoe could be a pages long blog post.
|
| I'd actually forgotten about the menu icons in Tahoe (I tried
| Tahoe during the beta period and lasted less than a day) and at
| first thought this would just be a pretty short piece on Tahoe's
| new application icons.
|
| Going back to the article though: another amusing detail is that
| the one menu where having icons is actually helpful (the Move &
| Resize menu) actually had those icons before Tahoe.
| mrichman wrote:
| For someone critical of UI, he has an awful lot of animated
| bullshit on that site.
| diffeomorphism wrote:
| Which is very much on purpose to make fun of exactly that. Try
| some of the other settings in the top right, e.g. the literal
| hamburger menu.
| WaltPurvis wrote:
| In what way does it make fun of it? It's simply an example of
| it. And with no apparent way to turn it off. (Edit: There is
| a _non_ -apparent way to turn it off. I still think having
| irritating visual effects doesn't constitute making fun of
| irritating visual effects.)
| gingersnap wrote:
| A few days ago there was a post on year of the Linux desktop due
| to Windows getting worse. The sense is that MacOS isn't degrading
| as fast, but it still also is looking its lead to linux in
| usability.
| quietsegfault wrote:
| Most of the people I work with use Macs and never talk about the
| UI being good or bad. And boy, do we talk about insignificant
| crap that pisses us off. They just don't care about menu icon
| alignment or whether the design follows 1992 guidelines.
|
| This thread feels like classic HN bikeshedding. The article
| itself is nearly 5,000 words about menu icons. Menu icons! Yes,
| the inconsistencies exist. Yes, they could be better. But the
| level of outrage here doesn't match reality. People are acting
| like Apple has completely lost their way over... inconsistent
| icon styling in dropdown menus that most users don't even notice.
| thomas_ma wrote:
| Apple's "way" for many years included a maniacal focus on
| nailing the details.
| meyum33 wrote:
| Over the years it feels like Federighi's pleasantness and
| enthusiasm in those fun videos just don't translate into the work
| he oversees. The software mostly work fine but they don't make me
| feel "aha" or "this is how it should be done" anymore.
| JaggerJo wrote:
| Good that Alan Dye is no longer at apple. Liquid Glass on macOS
| is a mass. The icons, the floating side menus, the inconsistent
| corners, the new tabs in Safari..
|
| On iOS it's totally fine, but on macOS it's a disaster. I've only
| updated one machine so far and will keep all others on Sequoia
| until this mess is resolved.
| iamcalledrob wrote:
| You can get away with sloppy, cluttered and inconsistent UI on
| mobile when everything runs serially, full-screen.
|
| But bring that to desktop, where your UI is windowed and
| appears alongside (or overlapping) other windows, and you end
| up with chaos.
|
| The floating sidebars are a prime example of this. Why should I
| have to expend mental energy to differentiate what's an actual
| window -vs- what's just a novelty round-rect with a shadow (oh,
| and and window controls for the parent round-rect, which _is_ a
| window)?
| reddalo wrote:
| >will keep all others on Sequoia until this mess is resolved
|
| Good for you, unless Apple changes its mind my MBPro from 2019
| will be stuck on Tahoe forever.
| JaggerJo wrote:
| Hah, really? If you enter recovery mode and install an OS via
| network it installs the OS the device originally shipped
| with, right?
|
| On an Intel-based Mac:
|
| - If you used Option-Command-R to start up from Internet
| Recovery, you might get the latest macOS that is compatible
| with your Mac.
|
| - If you used Shift-Option-Command-R to start up from
| Internet Recovery, you might get the macOS that came with
| your Mac, or the closest version still available.
|
| https://support.apple.com/en-us/102655
| reddalo wrote:
| Ah yes, of course I can install an older version. I meant
| that it won't get new updates to future (and hopefully
| better) versions :(
| troupo wrote:
| But it wasn't just Alan Dye. He's not tunning the MacOS
| division. He's not running tge iOS division. There are
| literally dozens senior management people and _several_ people
| of the same rank who could 've pointed out all the issues and
| stopped this.
|
| Instead they were all on stage praising it.
| ackyshake wrote:
| > Good that Alan Dye is no longer at apple.
|
| Yeah, but I doubt that would change much; the amount of damage
| done would be difficult to roll back. What do you think Apple
| is going to do for the next macOS: "Look we told you to design
| all these extra icons last year. Guess what, this year we want
| you to remove them."
|
| I just can't imagine that happening. This is the fundamental
| thing that is wrong with this. They had the OSes in beta for a
| few months, barely listened to feedback, and now we're stuck
| with the damage. For how many more OS iterations?
|
| I really wish they had at least macOS in a different cycle than
| iOS (and with the idiotic year version names, they've brazenly
| signed themselves up for the yearly schedules.) I really
| couldn't care less about what damage they do to iOS after iOS
| 7, but I still haven't upgraded to Tahoe and I won't do so
| until they roll this design back entirely...which I don't see
| happening.
|
| Maybe I'm just pessimistic about Apple at this point but I feel
| like no amount of criticism is going to change their design
| trajectory now, unless it affects their bottom-line.
| JaggerJo wrote:
| I hope with change in leadership correction of these things
| will be possible again. Not just Alan Dye, but Tim Cook is
| rumored to leave in the next year too.
| sgt wrote:
| Can someone at Apple who's also on HN please forward this to
| Craig Federighi? Seems this is a bit of regression or someone
| asleep at the wheel. I'm overall happy with the stability of
| Tahoe but some of the design is getting a bit sloppy.
| josefresco wrote:
| What an indictment of not only Apple designers, but the entire
| "science of UX" It's clear now there is no science, it's just
| designers making... things. Very similar to other design fields
| where there is no "logic" just trends & vibes. Several
| generations of potentially brilliant engineers and designers have
| wasted their careers building advertising empires with shiny
| buttons.
| pacifika wrote:
| Isn't this in robust support of science in UX?
| josefresco wrote:
| I dunno, is it "science" if the top designers in the industry
| can completely ignore it? Engineers can't ignore physics (for
| long).
| graypegg wrote:
| I mean, if there was only 1 engineering firm that made the
| iBridge, which represented nearly a quarter of all bridges
| out there, they might last a bit longer. They really made
| the bridge experience truly inspiring with the all-new
| glass I-beams!
| latexr wrote:
| Misapplication of the science isn't proof the science doesn't
| exist. Apple's Human Interface Guidelines used to be fantastic.
| One of the reasons they're sucking so bad right now is they're
| ignoring their own previously working rules.
|
| That's what happens when you put in charge arrogant industrial
| and print designers who think UX and UI are inferior forms of
| design.
| SkyPuncher wrote:
| I tend to disagree with the author on this. Reading actual words
| takes time (and, for me, mental energy). I have to look at each
| character, say the word in my head, then visualize what action
| that word means. Where as icons have a lot more built in meaning
| (but lack specificity). I tend to use them as a _local_ fuzzy
| filter (unless it's a common, well known icon like share) then
| read the words to understand exactly what they mean.
|
| In other words, I'm not using icons to find a single action. I'm
| using icons to quickly understand the available options to me.
| Meaning, they're only there to help me compare and contrast
| options within the same visual context. It's fine for the same
| action to have different icons in different places. When I'm
| looking at the "File" menu, I'm not really concerned what the
| action looks like on the toolbar (let alone a different app).
| sovnade wrote:
| But that's the author's point, no? Icons are great when used as
| visual shortcuts, but the way they're implemented makes
| absolutely no sense to the point of being detracting. They're
| inconsistent from menu to menu, even in the same application,
| and don't even necessarily represent the action they're
| assigned to.
| SkyPuncher wrote:
| > They're inconsistent from menu to menu, even in the same
| application, and don't even necessarily represent the action
| they're assigned to.
|
| My point is that none of that matters. They just need to
| represent something within the context they're being used.
| afandian wrote:
| That's different from how menu icons apart have been used
| clasically. In e.g. Microsoft Office the save icon was present
| in the File menu along the text, and also the toolbar, stand-
| alone.
|
| And it was clear enough that you would trust the stand-alone
| save icon to perform the action you expected. Icons were also
| selectively chosen for common actions.
|
| If icons are considered non-deterministic and non-canonical,
| then they can't [confidently] be used stand-alone.
|
| Also, I'll meet your data point of 1 with mine. I have an
| iPhone and find it far easier to pick an app from the list of
| names than pick an icon. I frequently mix them up (and I only
| use a dozen routinely)
| ido wrote:
| > Reading actual words takes time (and, for me, mental energy).
| I have to look at each character, say the word in my head, then
| visualize what action that word means.
|
| It might sound flippant but I'm asking in good faith: do you
| have a reading disability (like dyslexia)? I (and I think this
| is generally the case) don't consciously read words character
| by character or say them in my head, it feels more like my
| brain pattern-recognizes whole words and I understand them "at
| a glance".
| SkyPuncher wrote:
| I don't believe I have dyslexia, but I'm an incredibly slow
| reader. By contrast, I'm an extremely good skimmer - but in a
| are much easier for me than text.
| Pengtuzi wrote:
| My iPhone got really hot reading this. It's either from Steve
| Jobs turning in his grave, or the snow CSS eating all my CPU
| cycles.
| vim-guru wrote:
| Very much agree! Apple has been dropping the ball lately
| rumori wrote:
| It looks like they made a decision to include icons for every
| menu item and the developers for each app had to come up with an
| icon association for all menu items. I'm sure they realized along
| the way that this was a bad idea, maybe it was too late.
| odyssey7 wrote:
| Introduce UX problems today --> enables a big win when you remove
| them next version.
| drooopy wrote:
| "Introducing macOS 27 'Snowy Tahoe' with 0 New Features!"
| Jeremy1026 wrote:
| Including the statement "Adding unpleasant, distracting,
| illegible, messy, cluttered" on a page with unpleasant,
| distracting, illegible, messy, and cluttered snowfall is
| certainly a choice.
| gkanai wrote:
| Good Riddance to Alan Dye.
|
| Tim Cook- if you do one thing before you retire- promote the
| right person to fix both MacOS and iOS. They're both in need of a
| lot of work to fix.
| layer8 wrote:
| > In menus, the ellipsis character means that the user must
| provide more information before a command will operate.
|
| More specifically, to the user it means they'll still have the
| opportunity to back out of the operation; that it won't take
| effect immediately upon clicking the menu item. It allows the
| user to "explore" the command without committing to its execution
| yet. For that reason, IMO the ellipses in "Attach Files..." and
| "Add Link..." are appropriate.
|
| What I'm seeing more often in practice is that menu items that
| _should_ have an ellipsis don't. They make you wonder what the
| immediate effect of the command would possibly be.
| abanana wrote:
| Indeed, the ellipsis means some kind of dialog box will open.
| Regarding the wording "the user must provide more information",
| that's what that dialog box is for, while also providing a
| "cancel" option so that as you say, the user can back out.
| Surely "Attach Files..." brings up a file requestor, so it's
| exactly the correct use. I can't see why the blogger thinks
| otherwise.
|
| It's just a small nitpick though. The article generally seems
| to do a good job of highlighting some frankly shocking (and
| worrying amateurish) problems in these menus.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| I love that I'm reading this on a site that has decided to
| obscure the content with falling snow for the holidays
| rado wrote:
| Great points and my favourite: The menu now draws a blank frame
| first, then populates it with items. Sometimes taking up to half
| a second. Nobody noticed this?
| nmeofthestate wrote:
| 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 must
| learn the icon and the fact that it doesn't appear in the menu
| proper.
|
| Also the context menu populates slowly with dynamic items
| depending on the right-clicked file which causes items to dodge
| out of the way of your cursor, but I don't want to get too deep
| into a wider discussion of the awfulness of Windows 11
| Explorer...
| chrishannah wrote:
| Tahoe feels like at some level a manager had said "the rule is
| every menu item needs an icon" and just left individual engineers
| to figure out what to use.
| danw1979 wrote:
| I bet it's simpler than that: I reckon the management don't
| give a shit, and the engineers just got away with whatever they
| (incorrectly) thought was right because nobody whatsoever was
| critiquing their work.
| JamesSwift wrote:
| A lot of these actually feel like unifying on a swift UI
| component library that has a "menu item" component which has a
| non-nullable icon as a parameter.
| Taek wrote:
| Wow, this article is a tour de force in menu and icon design, I
| learned a lot. For anyone who wants to understand the design
| world better, or wants a glimpse into the brain of a design-
| minded person, this is a great article. Incredibly accessible,
| incredibly insightful, and just overall a gem.
| mintflow wrote:
| Apple still get quite good revenue and best in class engineers,
| how does this allowed to happen?
| layer8 wrote:
| Because it doesn't noticeably affect revenue (yet?), and
| because presumably it's not the "best-in-class" engineers who
| are making these decisions, but misguided designers and
| managers, or engineers who don't know any better.
| gmac wrote:
| Wow: horrifying. I've been delaying the upgrade, and looks like
| I'm going to keep right on delaying it.
| dzonga wrote:
| do posts like this ever reach the higher up at Apple say Tim Cook
| ? or they're buried at the lower levels so the next level boss
| can't look bad.
|
| maybe apple or ex-apple people can comment ?
| weinzierl wrote:
| The story goes that the looped square icon([?]) was introduced
| because Steve Jobs hated to see apples in every menu line. Not
| only because of the clutter but he thought it diluted the brand.
| publicdebates wrote:
| 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 first
| sight, and now is simply nostalgia.
|
| To me, it seems very related to the idea of how to fall in love
| with a person. There seems to be nothing you can measure it
| against. You simply either do or do not feel a connection with
| the person, an inexplicable infatuation. And if you do, then that
| love cools and settles into something more subtle but just as
| real over decades, until you're holding hands on your deathbeds.
| Yet I can't for the life of me figure out how it begins, or what
| its metrics are, or where its catylists come from. I suppose this
| is what Randall Monroe wondered all those years ago when he came
| up with his blog's subtitle. If only I could ask him, perhaps I
| would have the answers to everything.
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| Individual style choices (e.g. whether to use a shadow or not)
| are always going to be opinionated. Even if one choice is
| objectively better, it's not going to be so 100% of the time,
| in every context, to all users.
|
| Consistency is _always_ better. App A and App B _should use the
| same save icon_ , without any caveats, regardless of what it
| actually is. If you offer me a consistent experience, I'll take
| it whether it's Windows 95 or Tahoe.
| bambax wrote:
| > _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._
|
| No. Perfection exists, but it's not how something works or
| looks. Perfection is stability. A bad solution that you know
| inside and out is preferable to a "better" solution that you
| have to spend time to think about every time you use it.
| layer8 wrote:
| Stability is certainly a quality in itself, but how it works
| is pretty important as well. And how it looks also has some
| effect on how it works.
|
| One issue of the recent redesigns is that they degrade rather
| than improve "how it works".
| esafak wrote:
| No, it's not. Otherwise any old solution that does not change
| would be good.
| Supermancho wrote:
| > No, it's not.
|
| Yes, it is. UI is not not about stable form, alone.
|
| > Otherwise any old solution that does not change would be
| good.
|
| UI design is nuanced, regardless of the large number of
| people who dismiss it as borderline irrelevant. eg The most
| common used elements should be the easiest to recognize and
| access. Culture driving change is the most useful, while
| random association is less useful and statistically worse
| for user experience.
|
| Apple has taken a great leap in misinterpreting that if the
| most common functions benefit from iconography, there must
| be a benefit the icons convey, as opposed to the other way
| around. It's disturbing.
| titzer wrote:
| Imagine if Apple snuck into your house at night and rearranged
| your partner's face.
| BugsJustFindMe wrote:
| I don't know if this was intended, but in case it wasn't,
| rearranging someone's face is an idiom that means violent
| bodily harm.
| badsectoracula wrote:
| I've seen this logic (and similar) posted often and i disagree.
| By this logic, for example, i should find Windows 3.1 the best
| UI but actually i think Windows 2000 was peak Windows.
| Similarly i think Snow Leopard to be peak Mac OS X (i include
| macOS here) and while it was the first Mac OS X i used, i think
| i was old enough at the time to not be affected by nostalgia
| much (and it wasn't that long ago).
|
| Also there are certainly better UIs than others, otherwise
| people wouldn't complain about software having bad UIs (see
| GIMP, older versions of Blender, etc).
| publicdebates wrote:
| I wonder how much of it is the seeds of principles of beauty
| being planted, then watered over time, and finally sprouting
| at a ripe age.
|
| For example, I also am old enough to have used DOS before
| Windows 3.1 came out, which was my first GUI. When Windows 95
| came out, it was a clear improvement, but _retained the same
| principles_ as Windows 3.1 began. Windows 98 iterated on it,
| and Windows 2k perfected it in my eyes.
|
| So that when Windows XP came out, it _abandoned_ the
| principles, going for a look that felt cartoonish and
| childish to me, but for others was perhaps casual and
| inviting. It was during this time that I discovered Compiz
| and other Linux eye candy, and although it abandoned the
| fundamental principles that Win 3.1 planted, it almost
| admitted this with pride, submitting a new set of principles
| altogether.
|
| So when Windows Vista came out, clearly trying to compete in
| the arena of that _new_ set of principles of beauty, I was
| ambivalent but mostly impressed. That 's when I found out
| about Mac OS X, which Compiz et al. were clumsily imitating,
| and I fell in love with them, which I realized had perfected
| those principles before Microsoft and Linux even began to
| imitate them.
|
| It almost seems like the same concept as the original purpose
| of MMA (mixed martial arts). There is a perfection
| particularly to a set of principles. You can be the best at
| boxing, or the best at Brazilian Jui-Jitsu, and it's almost
| comparing apples to oranges because they're so fundamentally
| different that they don't actually mix well (the current UFC
| being proof that the experiment has failed and created a
| monster).
|
| It's the same reason movies exist like Home Front: it's that
| age old question, "who would win if ...", in this case London
| gangsters vs Southern American gangsters. Or Freddy vs Jason,
| or Alien vs Predator. I wish I could remember more, because
| those are some of the most interesting types of movies, with
| different real human cultures being pit against each other.
| Like David and Goliath, the top champions of two cultures
| facing off for the world to see.
|
| I think MacPaint is one of the most beautifully designed GUIs
| ever created.
| xg15 wrote:
| There _is_ a big nostalgia factor which I think corresponds to
| the UIs you grew up with and are most familiar (would be
| Windows 2000 and XP for me) however I think it doesn 't explain
| everything.
|
| By that logic, you shouldn't have any particular preference for
| newer UIs (apart from how similar they are to your "primed"
| UIs) and you shouldn't ever able to discover new UI patterns
| you particularly like. You should also be unable to articulate
| _why_ certain UIs are good or bad, or your reasons should be
| wildly inconsistent.
|
| I don't think this is generally the case. There lots of
| articles like this one, and usually the takeaways are similar:
| UIs should be predictable and consistent and allow the user to
| reliably find actions and elements. Ideally they should also
| have markers and "fast paths" to allow more experienced users
| to find and do an action quickly. They should not overwhelm the
| user with too much irrelevant things.
|
| That's the very high-level gist of it. There _is_ actually lots
| of research in the details of it, which you can get a glimpse
| of in books like "The Design of Everyday Things".
|
| They just don't seem to have a very high priority in current
| tech development for some reason.
|
| That a good part of the industry seems to have essentially
| given up on GUIs, left them to the fashionistas and engagement
| maximizers and retreated to the command line and TUIs instead
| also doesn't bode well.
| publicdebates wrote:
| I don't trust such books and research. The fundamental thing
| in question here is what makes Beauty beautiful, which I
| think is indefinitely mysterious and perpetually elusive. If
| anyone claims to have grasped at a few concrete conclusions
| or tangible expertise, I think they're just trying to sell
| it. The concepts of beauty apply equally to all forms of art,
| which includes GUIs.
|
| I do agree that Steve was somewhat revolutionary in this,
| bringing his personal quest for beauty into early GUIs
| through his (overly) perfectionistic command. I remember a
| decade or more ago being struck by just how genius it was for
| him to bring professional typography into personal computers,
| complete with kerning and everything.
| Bjartr wrote:
| > The fundamental thing in question here is what makes
| Beauty beautiful
|
| GUIs are tools first and art second.
|
| Any GUI that looks good, but gets in the way, or fails to
| make the task at hand easy is not a good GUI.
|
| The books and research are about making GUIs functional in
| an _effective_ way. No one is claiming that a GUI that
| follows all the principles will look good. However it will
| make the task at hand easier to perform than it otherwise
| would be.
|
| The problem is when people in charge of GUIs focus
| exclusively on Graphic Design instead of UI design. They
| are different fields, with different goals that only
| sometimes overlap.
| publicdebates wrote:
| I don't disagree with much of what you said. Form and
| function have to be married harmoniously, which
| inherently increases beauty. When form decreases
| function, so does beauty dissipate. And I think GUIs have
| gone in that direction. They have not maintained the
| principles that would help bring proper balance.
| Coeur wrote:
| I fell in love with early macos as well, but it was the
| enormous amount of care they put into it that got me. Maybe it
| was actually the same thing for you, not puppy love.
| BugsJustFindMe wrote:
| "Perfection" is an irrelevant concept here, but "principled" is
| not. The reason people favored certain older OS UIs is because
| they were substantially more principled in their designs, not
| because the executions of those principles looked a particular
| specific way.
|
| The Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines, especially the old
| ones, were seriously well thought out. Apple just doesn't
| follow them anymore, and that leads to demonstrably poor design
| choices. "Consistency" is still one of the three banner
| concepts (see https://developer.apple.com/design/human-
| interface-guideline...), and Apple just fails wildly at paying
| attention to itself.
|
| Windows 2000 and Mac OS 9.x.x were contemporary with each
| other, are both considered to be strong examples of principled
| interface execution, and they were very different from each
| other in both behavior and appearance. They were also notably
| both the last generations of iterative executions of principled
| designs before both companies started veering off into the
| wilderness.
| tuzemec wrote:
| I'm still on Sonoma (14). And it pisses me off that there's no
| easy way to upgrade to Sequoia (15). I really don't want to touch
| Tahoe at all.
| richrichardsson wrote:
| I found it extremely easy to find the "macos sequoia installer"
| to download from Apple's servers. Literally those search terms
| will do it; download -> install.
|
| Admittedly it would be "easier" if Apple gave you the choice of
| which version to upgrade to in macOS, but that's generally not
| how software is provided.
| latexr wrote:
| > And it pisses me off that there's no easy way to upgrade to
| Sequoia (15).
|
| Open the Mac App Store and search for Sequoia.
|
| https://apps.apple.com/app/macos-sequoia/id6596773750
| sxv wrote:
| This doesn't work for me. I see it in the App Store but it
| says not available for my system and redirects me to the
| Tahoe update.
|
| edit: worked after second attempt (via
| macappstores://apps.apple.com/app/macos-
| sequoia/id6596773750?mt=12 )
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| > These are OS basics, these are foundational. Every app has
| them, and they are always in the same place. They shouldn't look
| different!
|
| This is the key point for me. I think I go further than the OP,
| though; I would almost _force_ apps to use the stock menu items.
| Declare that your app has to save stuff, and the OS can take care
| of supplying a 'File -> Save' menu item, a Save toolbar icon,
| and a Save keyboard shortcut.
|
| I guess the more 'liberal' way of doing this would be to make it
| so easy to do the above that you would really have to go very far
| out of your way to purposefully deliver a worse experience. But
| you're free to do that if you're so inclined.
| DemocracyFTW2 wrote:
| I've found the 'same' (abstract) gripe in related fields: for
| example, PostgreSQL allows users to extend the language with
| custom operators that must be composed from multiple punctuation
| marks; the intended use is so you can write succinct formula-like
| operations like `case when my_container <@ my_elements then ...`
| or `set participants = applicants <&&> employees` and so on. The
| problem with these of course is that it's often very hard to
| guess what some kind of !!`#+*@ semantics a given grawlix is
| intended to have; both `case when is_subset_of( my_elements,
| my_container ) then ...` and `set participants = union_of(
| applicants, employees )` are much clearer.
|
| Another example are customized extensions of MarkDown syntax. To
| my mind constructs like `[link title](like_address)` already
| stretch things and the only justification for having brackets
| plus parentheses to stand in for link syntax is their ubiquity.
| One of the downsides of this terse syntax is its resilience to
| extensibility. For example, when you start with an exclamation
| mark as in `` now all of a sudden your code is understood
| as an `<img>` tag, not an `<a>` tag. What if you need extra
| attributes? There have been multiple suggestions how to extend
| `` to include desired image dimensions, none have become
| standard. You probably should fall back to inserting HTML, which
| I am fine with.
|
| Lastly, when designing a user interface, I have found that having
| to choose icons is a significant burden, and often one without
| satisfactory solution. One of my solutions in the past was to
| fall back to Apollo-era text-only buttons; sure, the texts would
| have to be localized, but then the entire application is subject
| to localization anyway. A plus is that each button with a short
| text instead of a picture already provided the mnemonic, the
| identifier for that action, something an icon does not do for
| you.
| Tepix wrote:
| Excellent article. What really got my respect was the fact that
| his videos listed at https://tonsky.me/talks/ are not hosted on
| YouTube.
| guerrilla wrote:
| I'm not even going to finish the article. I never want to see
| these kinds of icons again. You win. Good news is, I'm not seeing
| a lot of these in GNOME and Gtk+ apps, so I'm already okay.
| There's only a couple in Firefox. Actually, good luck even
| locating the menus in GNOME. They keep moving and becoming fewer
| and fewer with every generation.
| foltik wrote:
| The average person can get used to arbitrarily terrible UX. See
| 87% of the workforce that uses sluggish corporate-bloatware-
| filled windows laptops every day. It's only those who have
| experienced and gotten used to something drastically better that
| will be sensitive to all the shortcomings.
|
| Apple software used to _be_ that elevated experience for the
| average person.
|
| Given the lack of basic consistency though, it's evident that
| there are no leaders at Apple that care about UX enough to
| thoroughly design and test the whole software experience anymore.
| Just a bunch of random teams doing whatever.
|
| I wonder why every large company seems to fall off in the same
| way?
| DrScientist wrote:
| Also why-o-why is the close menu item directly next to the save
| item?
|
| Imagine wanting to save and accidentally click close....
|
| > Or two-letter As that only slightly differ in the font size:
|
| In that one case having a large A for bigger and smaller A for
| smaller makes sense.
| oneeyedpigeon wrote:
| Given the headline, the article took longer to deal with the
| alignment issue that I was expecting! However, I noticed that
| some of the screenshots were less affected than I remembered, so
| I checked my own OS. It turns out that Apple _has_ , sort of,
| addressed the mismatched alignment problem in its own apps.
|
| Oh, but Google hasn't, so Chrome's icons are still all over the
| place. Apparently, that's not for the OS to sort out, but every
| single individual app.
|
| Oh, while some of the menus in Preview are fixed (File, Edit),
| others aren't (View, Tools). So it's not just down to each app to
| manage its own icon alignment, but _each menu_!
| titzer wrote:
| As it happens I updated to Tahoe a couple days back.
|
| This entire UI refresh strikes me as completely unnecessary. I
| didn't even notice the menu icons. Thanks for that. Just another
| thing to be annoyed about.
|
| But really, the glaringly obvious ones are already in your face.
|
| 1. There is no setting to get rid of the ridiculously over-
| rounded corners.
|
| 2. The dock, which I put on the left, now has about 10 extra
| pixels between it and the edge of the screen. 10 pixels that now
| will never, ever, be usable again.
|
| 3. All the icons have been forced into a rounded corner box. As
| it turns out, the human brain is _really good_ at recognizing
| silhouettes. This just made that part of my brain useless. It
| retroactively _restyled_ applications ' icons that I've used for
| over a decade.
|
| I'm sure I'll find others, but it's clear that Apple _does not
| care about users_. This all about power. They didn 't even
| include settings to turn any of this off...just "take it like we
| wanna give it to you, plebes".
|
| Infuriating.
|
| And none of these things matter. Literally none of them are core
| to how an operating system works, just how it looks. I just don't
| understand UX people, and at this point I'm starting to hate
| them.
| sirwhinesalot wrote:
| 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 you to shove a UI style meant for an unsuccessful
| VR device onto desktop and mobile platforms, say no. Get your
| colleagues to say no. Make that PM read everything the Nielsen
| Norman group has ever written. Read it too.
| reddalo wrote:
| I agree, Liquid (Gl)ass is hideous. I'll stick to macOS Sequoia
| for the time being.
| codyb wrote:
| MacOS 26 highlights were... and this was _Apple's_ opening
| modal...
|
| "Icons that look like shit!"
|
| and
|
| "Notification summaries that may not be correct!"
|
| In general I feel as if Apple's software feels buggier and
| less solid lately across my iPhone and my computers. Won't be
| upgrading the personal computer for as long as possible
| euroderf wrote:
| > Apple's software feels buggier and less solid lately
| across my iPhone and my computers.
|
| Agreed. Rendering is very flaky. Input events are dropped.
|
| Blinky. Laggy. Two of the Seven Dwarves of Liquid Glass.
| Hamuko wrote:
| I got a new Apple Watch and just getting it set up was a
| pain. For some reason the passcode input would fail to
| register key prompts and I had to spam the buttons until
| something clicked. Then I gave my old Apple Watch to my mom
| and the setup failed like three times before we managed to
| get it done. Did make me wonder if anyone at Apple actually
| tests setting up these devices.
| bix6 wrote:
| Apple has been crashing with increasing frequency for me.
| Luckily all minor but I'm waiting for the big crapout.
|
| Also what happened to their filters? I get daily spam from
| Apple email addresses now.
| codyb wrote:
| What I love is how their own features don't even play
| well together anymore...
|
| For instance you can "hide your e-mail" by using Apple's
| relay, but if you do so... your payments using Apple Pay
| will fail unless you fill all the information in manually
| because the e-mail addresses don't match
|
| It's ridiculous how poorly tested everything is, and that
| combined with their newly entered foray into the world of
| politics has nearly destroyed three decades of steady
| Apple use for me. I'll be actively considering other
| options, not upgrading, and looking elsewhere for
| products in spaces they're in
| queenkjuul wrote:
| 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 someone at
| Apple was hired just to make it even less likable for me
| personally lol
| abustamam wrote:
| Do you like Windows dark patterns more than Mac's shitty
| designs? Seems like no one wins here. I personally just
| refrained from upgrading to Tahoe
|
| Edit:typo
| williamdclt wrote:
| > 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
| massysett wrote:
| > doesn't have a button to navigate to the parent folder.
|
| Command + Up Arrow, which is also visible if you click on
| the "Go" menu. There is also a toolbar button that shows
| the entire set of enclosing directories; offhand I can't
| remember whether this is visible by default. There is
| also "View -> Show Path Bar" which shows all this
| information at the bottom of the window.
|
| > I have literally no idea how to get to my home
| directory
|
| Go -> Home, which shows a shortcut key for this, Command-
| Shift-H.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| I've said many times before that I think Finder is the
| worst default file manager of any popular desktop
| environment.
|
| I get it's supposed to be easy to use but so much
| functionality is hidden behind non-obvious shortcuts. The
| end result is you either need to memorise a dozen secret
| handshakes just to perform basic operations, or you give
| up and revert to 70s technology in the command line.
| naikrovek wrote:
| > I've said many times before that I think Finder is the
| worst default file manager of any popular desktop
| environment.
|
| [GNOME enters the chat]: "That's nothing, I'm way worse!"
| hnlmorg wrote:
| Is it actually though? It's cool to criticise Nautilus
| but, at worst, it's just equally as bad as Finder. Which
| shouldn't be surprising given how much it's styled to
| look like Finder.
|
| However in my personal opinion Nautilus's breadcrumb
| picker does edge it against Finder.
|
| So I stand by my comment that Finder is _the_ worst.
| josteink wrote:
| When on macOS using Finder I often wish I had something
| as nice and consistent and usable as Nautilus.
|
| Finder is genuinely horrible. It's obvious no one at
| Apple cares about _files_ anymore nor anyone working with
| them.
|
| We're all supposed to consume _cloud_ these days or so it
| seems.
| shantara wrote:
| My go to example would be long lasting issues with SMB
| support in Finder. All operations are very slow, the
| search is almost unusably so. The operations that are
| instant on every non-Apple device take ages on a Mac. I
| first ran into these issues 7 years ago when I set up my
| NAS, and they present to this day. I tried all random
| suggestions and terminal commands, but eventually gave up
| on trying to make it perform as it does on Linux.
|
| With Apple's focus on cloud services, fixing the bugs
| that prevent the user from working with their local
| network storage runs contrary to their financial
| incentives.
| shantara wrote:
| Even after decades of using macOS I still cannot wrap my
| head around the fact that Finder has no single button
| shortcut for opening a file - the most common operation a
| file manager should do. It's Cmd+O, and it cannot be
| changed to anything sane like Enter key.
| krackers wrote:
| You can remap it to any shortcut you want (as long as it
| has a modifier key in it)
| shantara wrote:
| >as long as it has a modifier key in it
|
| Why on Earth is this a requirement? When you're
| navigating through Finder using keyboard, it's very
| inconvenient to use two keypresses to perform a very
| basic operation. Using Enter to open a file is how every
| file manager on every operating system works except
| Finder. Why would Enter key be hardcoded to a file rename
| operation instead?
|
| It is a typical Apple behaviour of doing things
| differently from the rest of the world just for the sake
| of it, even when it's detrimental to the user experience.
| dsego wrote:
| Space for preview.
| BalinKing wrote:
| Off the top of my head, I want to say you can right-click
| on the current folder name to see (and navigate to) all
| its ancestors.
| ngcazz wrote:
| Correct - IIRC it's called the "proxy icon"
| cmckn wrote:
| > I have literally no idea how to get to my home
| directory
|
| Just add it to the sidebar. Finder > Settings > Sidebar >
| Locations. Or drag it into Favorites.
|
| > doesn't have a button to navigate to the parent folder
|
| View > Show Path Bar. You can also right click on the
| directory name at the top of the window and it'll give
| you the same options.
| dsego wrote:
| You can add shortcuts to the sidebar by dragging. You can
| right click the folder name in the top bar to get a list
| of parents. You can also View > Show Path Bar and see the
| the full clickable bread crumbs. Not sure why this is so
| confusing if you bother to try.
| port11 wrote:
| Same. And finally thinking that our KDE home server doesn't
| look too bad, it's almost comforting.
|
| The major reason to stay on macOS is stability. Hopefully
| they stop breaking things on the Mac front.
| pier25 wrote:
| Same. Wish I could go back to Ventura or even Mojave though.
| There are zero new features I use. Still hate the newish
| Settings app.
| reddalo wrote:
| Yeah, me too. The old Settings app was easy and intuitive;
| I hate the new one.
| plutokras wrote:
| I too have the techie urge to upgrade my software whenever I
| can, ut after watching the Tahoe demos, I'm staying on
| Sequoia indefinitely.
|
| I would really appreciate it if the next macOS would be about
| stability instead of some fancy features barely anyone asked
| for.
| bauerd wrote:
| It's not how you get promoted though. Plus implementing complex
| UIs is challenging which engineers like. The incentives are
| off.
| bradgessler wrote:
| Yeah, software orgs ship their promotion structures.
| euroderf wrote:
| This explains why all commercial software enshittifies.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| And why open source UIs are anarchist. :)
| eddieroger wrote:
| It's not only not how you get promoted, it's a pretty good
| way to get canned as well. If you don't like the work you're
| being asked to do, your options are pretty limited to doing
| it or going elsewhere. There are a million UXers and
| engineers who'd love to work at Apple and would be happy
| making whatever their boss suggests.
| EGreg wrote:
| Seriously. People got canned for resisting the corporate
| overlords. That's capitalism. Corporations run by their
| employees? Guilds? Cooperatives? Hah!
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynbgMKclWWc
|
| Just that usually the forcefed initiatives have to do with
| corporate profits for shareholders, or trends like shoving
| AI into everything. Imagine saying no to that!
|
| Even at the supra-corporate and supra-national level, if
| the organizing principle is competition, no actor not even
| a CEO or a corporate board or a government can afford to
| stop racing towards disaster. There is a simple mantra: "If
| we don't achieve AGI first, China will and then they'll
| dominate."
|
| Once in a while, the world comes together to successfully
| ban eg chemical weapons or CFCs, and repair the hole in the
| ozone layer. Cooperation and restraint takes effort.
|
| Judging by the way we've drained all the aquifers,
| overfished the last fish, destroyed the kelp forests, cut
| down the rainforsts, bleached the corals, and polluted the
| world with plastic, I don't think there is much hope of
| stopping.
|
| Insects and pollinators are way down, and many larger
| species are practically extinct, 95% of the world's animal
| biomass is humans and their food, and people still pretend
| environmental catastrophe is all about a few degrees of
| temperature.
|
| PS: Yes, that escalated quickly. In the real world, it has
| taken only 80 years... :-/
| mgfist wrote:
| I don't think corporate profits are the reason Apple has
| shitty UX because it's hard to argue how shitty UX
| correlates to higher profit, especially when it costs
| more to create a shitty UX than to keep the good one you
| already have.
|
| I reckon it's more that some Apple VP has to justify
| their million dollar equity package by creating work for
| their org, because otherwise why should you still have a
| job?
| groundzeros2015 wrote:
| That's not capitalism. That's hierarchy. It didn't start
| in the 20th century
| EGreg wrote:
| Capitalism and competition produce the results I describe
| further down the comment. It escalates to planetary
| catastrophe
| groundzeros2015 wrote:
| Let's focus on the specific claims in your comment.
|
| > People got canned for resisting the corporate
| overlords. That's capitalism
|
| Being told to do things by your boss is a problem as old
| as time. Except with capitalism you can change bosses --
| a luxury which has not existed throughout history.
| EGreg wrote:
| Okay great. Now keep going with the rest of my comment
| and address the rest point by point. You'll find that it
| expands from that first point, and describes the
| consequences of capitalism and competition as an
| organizing principle.
| groundzeros2015 wrote:
| Sure, I guess I'm here.
|
| Why is capitalist competition worse than any other form
| of competition? Wouldn't wartime competition over land
| and sovereignty be far worse? Didn't the Soviet Union
| have extreme forms of political competition?
| hex4def6 wrote:
| We are discussing UI/Icon design, not the geopolitical
| implications of AGI or the Holocene extinction event.
|
| Why should someone that disagrees with you on whether
| capitalism is uniquely responsible for bad icon design
| now be forced to defend it for every sin / shortcoming
| ranging from the social inequity to ecological collapse?
| rdiddly wrote:
| That's how you know the "culture" and the "vision" really
| do have to come from the top, and how you know Steve Jobs
| really was providing value.
| grufkork wrote:
| Besides the visual design, I've been thinking about the tech
| part of it. There's so many bits shifting, morphing and
| having state, that it sounds antithetical to what a UI is
| supposed to be: a consistent and unnoticeable tool to
| interact with software. I do like some of the things they do
| to free up screen space, but having components being to
| programmatically complex is bound to cause issues. Besides
| having your presentation desync with your data, your UI now
| has opportunities to desync with itself...
| hopelite wrote:
| It's an extremely uncomfortable conflict and contradiction
| between corporate organization, finance "capitalism",
| engineering, and creatives; in addition to individual vs
| group dynamics.
|
| Corporate structure is driven by exploiting and using value
| for and by a de facto nobility (the c-suite).
|
| Finance "capitalism" seeks to extract value, be it short or
| long term.
|
| Engineers are motivated by building and creating value.
|
| Creatives are driven by changes for changing's sake to remain
| or get a seat at the table.
|
| The uncomfortable reality is that these are inherently
| conflicting interests that are pulling and pushing each
| other, but mostly top down.
|
| It's essentially the "colonialist" exploitative model of
| existence using creators to leverage rather than extract
| natural resources, a system that is increasingly not suitable
| for the modern, technological, commoditized world. AI is a
| good example of that; it arguably diminishes the value to n
| degrees of both engineers and creatives, while also leaving
| the "nobility" and their neo-aristocratic corporate system
| out in the open exposed as revealing it not only as having no
| clothes on, but utterly abusive, useless, and downright evil.
| And no, that's across the whole political spectrum, not just
| the opposite of your silly system approved political sport
| team.
| Noaidi wrote:
| Alan Dye ruined everything at Apple, no idea how he clung on
| for so long. You know he designed the horrible ios7 as well?
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSzjcVZXolc
|
| https://tjkelly.com/blog/ios-7-sucks/
|
| And he also takes credit for the dynamic island. It is an
| assault on my senses to see everything constantly moving around
| on my screen.
|
| I have been working with Macs since 1995, but this year is my
| first using Pixel with GrapheneOS, that is how done I am with
| Apple. Unfortunately I know the UI will not change for years
| and I just could not take it.
| sirwhinesalot wrote:
| Really? Same guy? OUFF. What a track record...
| imbnwa wrote:
| >Alan Dye ruined everything at Apple, no idea how he clung on
| for so long
|
| Cook doesn't seem to a have any taste for product design,
| isn't he a logistics guy?
| jdougan wrote:
| Yup. He is, by all accounts, a _great_ supply-chain guy.
| eg. As far as I can tell, there were no significant breaks
| in Apple 's supplies during COVID.
|
| But he clearly falls afoul of Steve Jobs'warning about
| leaders with no taste.
| Noaidi wrote:
| Tim Cook needs to drop some acid. He has no creativity
| what so ever.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| You'd think a supply chain guy would be able to get ahold
| of some psychedelics too...
| kridsdale1 wrote:
| This is even an understatement.
|
| It's not a stretch to say that Tim Cook created the whole
| Shenzhen microelectronics industry. The thousands of
| specialist component vendors and large integrators that
| assemble products trace to his instigation with Compaq
| and then Apple. The iPod, Macs, iPhone, copied the Swiss
| Watch model of vast redundant networks of component
| competetors working as an ecosystem to drive down costs.
|
| This created the skill and machinery base that made it
| possible for other western design companies (such as
| Android vendors that were not Samsung or Japanese) to
| make clones of the iPhone quickly and easily. (Let's be
| real, every smartphone is an iPhone 1 clone)
|
| China owes a lot to this work.
| chuckadams wrote:
| I will take the bottom bar of iOS7 Safari any day over the
| wretched mess that it is now.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Is it just me, or does answering a Facetime call now
| require pressing buttons at the opposite top and bottom
| corners of the screen?
|
| How does that benefit anyone?
| pier25 wrote:
| Thank god he left for Meta
| kibwen wrote:
| Dye was a symptom, not the cause. At a widespread
| organizational level, Apple just does not give a shit.
| iainmerrick wrote:
| _You know he designed the horrible ios7 as well?_
|
| I don't think that's fully accurate, unless you have a link
| that confirms it? That Dye designed it, I mean, not that it
| was horrible...
|
| Jony Ive was the head of design at that point (both hardware
| and UI). Wikipedia says Dye "contributed greatly to the
| design language of iOS 7" but Ive would have had final say.
| Certainly at the time as I recall it, iOS 7 was seen as Ive's
| baby.
|
| Also, I'm not defending iOS 7, but I reckon its visual design
| was a lot more influential than it gets credit for. Think of
| those ubiquitous Prime bottles, with their bright saturated
| color gradients; the first place I remember seeing that style
| was iOS 7. I bet they picked that style for Prime because
| kids liked it, and kids liked it because kids like iPhones.
|
| _Edit to add:_ "bright saturated colors" goes back a long
| way to Fisher Price toys and the like, of course, but it's
| the _gradients_ specifically that I think iOS 7 popularized.
| ndiddy wrote:
| I've heard rumors that part of why iOS 7 was so garish is
| because Dye's background was in product packaging so his
| team were doing design reviews on paper and didn't realize
| that the colors would look different on device due to CMYK
| vs RGB. Not sure if it's ever been confirmed but it would
| explain a lot.
| kridsdale1 wrote:
| I was in the room for a few design reviews for my part of
| iOS 7 (I was an engineer writing the new screens).
| Everything was done on a 90+ inch HDTV that we AirPlayed
| from our Macs or iPhones to for the room to view. Not
| printed, though the design studio walls were covered in
| printed explorations of variations of concepts, that is
| true.
|
| Dye was the senior rep of the Design org present and
| commenting on all our software progress. I never once
| encountered Ive.
| trinix912 wrote:
| I find it hard to believe that Dye would be so
| incompetent to not even know about CMYK vs RGB. How did
| he even get hired by Apple?
| morshu9001 wrote:
| Is he the one responsible for the 2016 MBP? It took Apple
| like 6 years to fix everything about that
| michaelbuckbee wrote:
| The only "real" justification is that this is a long term play
| to figure out a UI and interaction shift that will work for
| general augmented reality devices (aka whatever device Apple
| releases five years and two iterations from now based on the
| Vision Pro.)
| sneak wrote:
| That isn't a justification for fucking up the icons or using
| single retina pixels to differentiate them.
|
| It's just stupid people doing stupid things.
| afavour wrote:
| That's the same logic that led to the Windows 8 UI being
| designed tablet first because that's "where we're all going".
| Fast forward to Windows 10 where MS had to concede that, no,
| turns out it isn't where we're all going and rolled most of
| it back.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| emchammer wrote:
| Magnetic keyboard on the iPad is such a lose. Some Thai
| hacker got full macOS running on his iPhone over
| Christmas. Apple are cowards collecting dividends.
| ghaff wrote:
| The magnetic keyboard lets you use the iPad without it
| having to be resting on a solid surface like basically
| every tablet/keyboard combination out there. Microsoft
| has tried various hybrid laptop/tablet arrangements that
| did both things mediocrely. I have zero interest in what
| someone has hacked together.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| Exactly. I tend not to use my iPad that much except when
| traveling--partly because I have an old MacBook that
| lives on my dining room table. If I didn't have that I
| would certainly use my iPad more (and would doubtless get
| more comfortable using it for more purposes).
| technothrasher wrote:
| I struggle to find any use case at all for my iPad. Even
| when traveling, I use my phone most of the time and when
| I want something bigger, I have the MacBook Air in my
| bag, which doesn't feel any more cumbersome to have with
| me than an iPad.
| ghaff wrote:
| I won't really argue much. I can get by with just my
| iPhone. I think a MacBook (don't have an Air) is better
| for a lot of things even if the iPad is better for media
| on a plane. The weight difference is minimal if you count
| the keyboard. I don't draw so don't need an iPad for
| that. A Kindle weighs nothing so I can always bring that
| for reading.
|
| Not sure I'll buy another iPad given my current
| lifestyle.
| lonelyasacloud wrote:
| That will be part of it. The main driver though that they've
| been working on for years is trying to figure out how to add
| just enough desktop to UIKit to allow them to kill off AppKit
| as a separate thing.
| chuckadams wrote:
| I rather like the skeuomorphism ... on the buttons anyway. The
| distortion effect on the glass is simply annoying, and the
| overall effect on an already-cramped UI like Safari on a phone
| is just ... ugh. There's now basically three blobs of mystery
| meat at the bottom of the screen. So if Liquid Glass was made
| for mobile first, it's an even bigger failure. It's actually
| more tolerable on desktop, though the double-border effect on
| things like the control panel stick out pretty badly.
| kibwen wrote:
| _> 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._
|
| I think you've unintentionally illustrated the root of the
| problem here.
|
| People motivated by profit are not incentivized to produce
| high-quality results. Rather, people motivated by profit are
| only incentivized to do the least effort that they can get away
| with.
|
| People motivated by _pride_ are those who are incentivized to
| produce good results, because the result reflects on them
| personally.
|
| Which is all to say, pride motives produce a race to the top,
| whereas profit motives produce a race to the bottom. It's no
| wonder our modern economy can only produce slop.
| kace91 wrote:
| My main gripe with Liquid Glass is how distracting it is.
|
| Many top bars have become a group of bubbles over the content,
| which we've been conditioned to see as floating notifications
| for years. Things shine and move when they don't require
| attention, just because.
|
| The end result is that my OS feels like a browser without ad
| blocker. As much as people hated flat design, at least it
| didn't grab your attention with tacky casino tricks.
| bargainbin wrote:
| My main gripe is that the visual shenanigans alone were
| enough of a change, why rearrange the buttons?! In the early
| iOS beta, the new tab button was at the top of Safari, as far
| away from your thumbs as it could be.
|
| Genuinely believe Apple's design team are rudderless or have
| unintentionally been forced to produce something to justify
| someone's career, because this whole thing is disastrous.
| wang_li wrote:
| > to produce something to justify someone's career,
|
| This is the curse of being a UI designer for a long lived
| product. Once a thing has been created and future work
| consists of 99% code and 1% UI, your UI designer job has
| evaporated. And so we see that everything changes every
| major release of an operating system, so the UI people can
| justify their pay checks.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| I think you have cause and effect the wrong way around.
|
| These changes in design are intended to appeal to our
| magpie brain of wanting the latest, shiniest, things.
|
| You have to understand the vanity of consumers. If every
| new product looked the same then a lot of people wouldn't
| both buying the latest gizmo because there's no magpie
| appeal. So when the market stagnates, you need to
| redesign the product to convince consumers to throw away
| a perfectly good, working device.
|
| And it usually works as a sales strategy too.
|
| So designers then get told thy has to come up with
| something that looks newer and more futuristic than the
| current designs. Regardless of how much those designers
| might love or hate those current designs.
|
| They come up with this shit not to justify their jobs but
| because they're hired exactly to come up with this shit.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| In my experience, it's usually just UX hubris and
| ignorance about a product's expert users.
|
| UX folks usually have no understanding of the impact of
| moving a common control and/or keyboard shortcut.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| You're talking about very specific rearrangements of
| controls. Whereas I was talking about why these big
| redesign initiatives get green lit to begin with.
| gmd63 wrote:
| 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.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| 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 no way we can change that kind
| of consumer behaviour.
|
| To be clear, I'm not saying it's right that companies do
| this, but I do think they'd go out of business if they
| didn't because consumer trends will continue like this
| regardless of how ethical companies tried to be.
|
| So the problem here isnt that Apple tried to refresh its
| operating system look. It's that they completely jumped
| the shark and created something that was too focused on
| aesthetics while failing in literally every other metric.
| LoganDark wrote:
| > In the early iOS beta, the new tab button was at the top
| of Safari, as far away from your thumbs as it could be.
|
| Can't you swipe past the end on the tab bar (along the
| bottom by default) to create a new tab?
| wlesieutre wrote:
| Only when you're currently in the rightmost tab, but yes
| brantonb wrote:
| > In the early iOS beta, the new tab button was at the top
| of Safari, as far away from your thumbs as it could be.
|
| It's relatively recent in iOS history that Safari's address
| bar is at the bottom. There's a setting to move it back to
| the top. This specific example is probably as innocent as a
| default getting accidentally changed during the development
| process.
| busymom0 wrote:
| Every distracting visual element of liquid glass looks like a
| tiny Ad to me which is constantly trying to distract me from
| what I am doing and trying to grab my attention. Super
| annoying.
| temp0826 wrote:
| I'm usually in linux (dual boot on a mac) but had to boot
| into macOS for something. I was utterly confused when I moved
| my cursor to the top-left and _missed_ clicking the apple
| menu
| lossyalgo wrote:
| Someone posted these settings on HN recently and it has made
| working on my Mac once again usable:
| https://imgur.com/a/macos-accessibility-settings-simpler-
| ret...
| steve1977 wrote:
| I also don't really understand where the raised sidebar gets
| its color tint from. Wouldn't the desktop background be
| underneath everything else?
| etempleton wrote:
| Without hyperbole, Liquid Glass on Mac OS is visually the worst
| commercial desktop UX I have ever had the displeasure of using.
| It is amateurish and frankly, ill advised to have even tried to
| unify the aesthetic across devices so universally. I think much
| of what is on the phone works fine. There are some pain points
| and some bits that are visually awkward, but generally it works
| and is new and fresh, but on the Mac it is as if no one really
| cared. And that reflects really poorly on where Apple is at,
| because if nothing else, Apple seemed like the company that
| always really cared about the user experience.
|
| There are some things that are nice. The dock looks nice. The
| transparent menu bar is nice enough too and there is a toggle
| off switch if it doesn't work for you. Spotlight looks fine.
| But the rest is so bad that I just cannot fathom how someone at
| Apple did not stop it before release. I would be throwing a fit
| to stop it from being released if I was in Apple and had any
| sway at all. I assume the executive team was all looking at it
| and using it before release. So how did this happen? The new
| side bar and the new tool bars are abominations. I cringe every
| time I have to use the finder; it is just a blob of various
| shades of white or, if you prefer, dark mode, grey.
|
| My hope is that if nothing else they roll back the sidebar and
| the tool bar changes or do a complete rethink on how they are
| implemented. If they rolled back the extra rounded corners I
| wouldn't complain either.
| sirwhinesalot wrote:
| Even on mobile it took a few iterations from when the design
| was first introduced for it to be _usable_. Not good mind
| you, just usable.
|
| Even Apple's own marketing material had screenshots where
| text was near impossible to read, even for someone with good
| eyesight: grey text on top of highly transparent glass...
| what were they thinking!?
| bargainbin wrote:
| Clearly a generation of mobile-first designers not
| understanding how desktops are used.
|
| It's dreadful, it still blows my mind that out of Windows,
| macOS and Linux, my Linux desktop with KDE has the most
| premium experience now.
| dijit wrote:
| I agree.
|
| My first rebuttal was going to be Windows 8, but that was
| actually a lot better.
| threetonesun wrote:
| A lot of Windows 8 I liked, but Windows perpetually suffers
| from needing to support older versions of Windowing
| systems, or some corporate usecase from the early 90s that
| carries too much money to ever say no to implementing.
|
| Windows 11 is, I think, worse than MacOS these days, half
| for still dragging the past along with it, and half for
| introducing a second start menu just for ads.
| cyberax wrote:
| Windows 8's alternative UI was very snappy and fluid. It
| was not great because it was completely disconnected from
| the normal UI.
| etempleton wrote:
| Oh geez, I forgot about Windows 8. Visually it looked nice
| enough, though. Once you got out of the insane touch first
| overlay it was fine, but I reinstalled Windows 7 so fast I
| never had to spend much time with it. I guess by that
| measure Windows 8 was worse.
| kace91 wrote:
| >Spotlight looks fine.
|
| Keyword "looks". Because considering behavior, there's tons
| of delay introduced and results change under your finger as
| you're selecting them, causing you to get the wrong thing.
| Rebuff5007 wrote:
| I generally don't place "conspiratorial" motivations to explain
| the decisions of tech companies, but I can't help but think
| this is a move from apple to keep their ludicrously powerful
| M-chips busy with mundane UI because the average user will
| never need to otherwise upgrade past an M1.
| xnx wrote:
| > 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.
| drnick1 wrote:
| 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. Unfortunately, last time I checked, Wayland was not
| supported.
| RunSet wrote:
| Wayland being as needful as Liquid Glass itself.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| 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.
| xnx wrote:
| I don't know how I used Windows before I installed
| Everything.
| OoooooooO wrote:
| Deactivate web search via regedit, then it works.
| xnx wrote:
| Good advice, but there's still a lot of utility in
| Everything that is not built into Windows.
| komodo99 wrote:
| I can attest to this one, 6 months ago I had a vintage pc
| I needed to rehab due to the curse of the proprietary ISA
| card. Imaged the failing drive to an ssd, sata->IDE
| adapter. P3 733MHz, 128 mb ram, W98SE, its
| _astonishingly_ fast and responsive. Boots nearer to my
| memories of MSDOS 6.22 firing up than anything else.
|
| Acrobat reader still performs like a lead balloon though,
| even a miracle can't fix that one.
| ChoGGi wrote:
| Personally, I can't wait till we have webpages that load
| slower then windows 95 boots.
| msie wrote:
| Loved the win95 interface. I've always wanted it on new
| Windows box but the existing solutions out there seem
| lacking.
| ZoomZoomZoom wrote:
| Wayland is supported with LXQt, labwc replacing openbox. If
| anything, UX is snappy.
| k4rli wrote:
| Wayland with Sway feels toptier already. Tiling WM is just
| so simple, clean, fast, and perfect in every way.
| solfox wrote:
| 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.
| cyberge99 wrote:
| You're not looking far enough ahead. Liquid glass isn't
| about Mac. It's about VisionPro and wearables. This is a
| strategic play by Apple.
| psunavy03 wrote:
| . . . so other devices are required to have the same
| interface? No, they're not. Just because you want to
| share enough design cues to make people understand
| they're dealing with the same brand doesn't mean you have
| to hammer square pegs into round holes.
|
| Not to mention the fact that first, you have to get to a
| point where AR wearables are commercially viable, and we
| don't seem to have hit that point yet.
| dehrmann wrote:
| Apple just reduced Vision Pro production, but Liquid
| Glass was in motion well before that. What leaves me
| scratching my head is I never got the impression Apple
| believed in Vision Pro. It launched because after years
| of research, management wanted to see if the effort was
| worth continuing to invest in, but that wasn't a vote of
| confidence.
| a022311 wrote:
| I'll have to second this. It's not even on Apple's
| homepage! I hadn't heard it mentioned for _months_ before
| today. It had its niche share of users who actually found
| it useful, but apart from them it seems that the world is
| not ready for spatial computing (or maybe current spatial
| computing isn 't ready for people, who knows?).
| wlesieutre wrote:
| If it weren't $3500+ I'd love one. The world isn't ready
| for that price point.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Apple can afford to improve and cheapify this thing for a
| decade.
| josephg wrote:
| Exactly. More expensive than a high end desktop or laptop
| while having less useful software than an iPad. No
| thanks.
|
| If it were around the $500 point I'd pick one up in a
| heartbeat. Maybe even $1000. But $3500 is nuts for how
| little they're offering. It seems like a toy for the
| ultra rich.
|
| I assumed the price would eventually come down. But it
| seems like they'll just cancel the project entirely.
| Pity.
| pixelready wrote:
| I'm assuming Vision Pro is viewed as what the Newton was
| to the iPhone. It will provide some useful insight way
| ahead of its time but the mainstream push will only
| happen after a number of manufacturing breakthroughs
| happen allowing for a comfortable daily driver UX. Optics
| and battery tech will need multiple generational leaps to
| get to a lightweight goggle / sunglasses form factor with
| Apple-tier visuals, tracking, and battery life...
| psunavy03 wrote:
| Magic Leap 2 and HoloLens 2 proved that we still haven't
| cracked the code on AR/XR. Similar price point, plenty of
| feasible enterprise use cases for folks willing to pony
| up money to hire Unity or Unreal devs. And I'm sure there
| are enough of them tired of being flogged to death by the
| gaming industry. But they both went splat.
|
| It's going to take a revolution on miniaturization AND
| component pricing for XR to be feasible even for
| enterprise use cases, it seems.
| justinclift wrote:
| The hardware seems good, but with it being tied to the
| Apple ecosystem there's just no way.
|
| I'd buy one if I could use it with my Linux (KDE)
| workstation, but there's no chance I'm going to be using
| it via a mac.
| BizarroLand wrote:
| I'm hoping the new Valve headset will be like, 60% of
| what the Apple vision is. My boss got the Apple vision on
| launch day and it is really premier hardware, visuals
| that are almost exactly like seeing the thing you're
| looking at in real life, and the hand sensing /
| interactivity was the best I have experienced, even
| though it still had flaws.
|
| But being tied to Apple's ecosystem, not being really
| useful for PC connection, and the fact that at least at
| the time developers were not making any groundbreaking
| apps for it all makes it a failure in my book.
|
| If Valve can get 60% of that and be wirelessly PC tied
| for VR gaming then even if they charge $1800 for their
| headset it will likely be worth it.
| hadlock wrote:
| Did they commit to additional production of the Vision
| Pro? I read their announcement as quiet cancellation of
| VR products. They announced some kind of vaporware pivot,
| but I didn't read a single analyst projection that Apple
| ever intended to bring another wearable to market.
| Customer usage statistics of the Vision Pro are so low
| Apple hasn't even hinted about reporting on them.
|
| Wearable products, outside of headphones, have a decade-
| long dismal sales record and even more abysmal user
| retention story. No board is going to approve significant
| investment in the space unless there's a viable story. 4x
| resolution and battery life alone is not enough to
| resuscitate VR/AR for mass adoption.
| 2muchcoffeeman wrote:
| They need to workout how to drop the price. I want one.
| But really can't justify that price.
| bandrami wrote:
| > outside of headphones, have a decade-long dismal sales
| record
|
| Outside of headphones and watches
| MaysonL wrote:
| Recent moves have convinced me that Apple is getting
| ready to push Vision Pro substantially harder.
|
| In recent weeks, I've been getting push notifications
| about VP.
|
| They hired Alex Lindsay for a position in Developer
| Relations.
|
| And there's the M5 update.
|
| Just remember, it's a lot cheaper than the original
| Mac(inflation adjusted). Give it 40 years - hell, given
| the speed of change in tech these days, it won't even
| take 10.
| treymalikcruz wrote:
| I think this is the right read in terms of intent but I
| also feel it offers a lens into the silliness of Apple's
| current strategy around all this. VisionPro appears to be
| currently floundering, and no matter how much they try to
| make it unintrusive and airy and transparent in its
| interface, it's presently an unwieldy device not designed
| to leave the home or office. Predicating company-wide
| design systems on this line being the future feels
| aspirational at best and delusional at worst. And what
| good is liquid glass on a Mac? To show me an obscured
| glimpse of my desktop background and add visual clutter?
|
| (Apologies to @cyberge99 if my tone comes off intense,
| this is not to come at you but rather is just me venting
| my frustrations with Apple. I think you are correct in
| your assessment of the idea here.)
| eastbound wrote:
| What's frustrating about the VisionPro is their absolute
| refusal to address it as a giant screen.
|
| All people I know describe this usecase first: "Will be
| awesome when it replaces my 2x34" screens". I described
| it to the salesman when he asked me why I wanted to try
| it. He never showed it. Gave him 0/5, he complained, I
| explained this is specifically what I asked. You can
| emulate one screen in VisionPro but it's absolutely
| obnoxious about making it about apps and iPhotos 3D
| whatever. Users desire it. Apple is hell-bent in not
| addressing that usecase, and addressing family usecases
| first.
|
| Imagine they find a proper UI to visualize an infinite
| Typescript file. Something like flinch and you find
| yourself in a method, look elsewhere and you immediately
| see the other method. Make it viral by making it possible
| to write files in a way that is not practical to normal-
| screen users, like the old "max 1 screen height" limit.
| View your team in the corners of your vision. THE tool
| for remote working.
|
| Workplaces would look futuristic. Your experience at the
| workplace would be renewed thanks to Apple.
|
| And then, reuse the desktop's UI on VisionPro instead of
| the desktop using VP's concepts.
|
| But no, Apple prefers killing off VisionPro and imposing
| LiquidGlass to everyone. (In waiting for my threat letter
| from Steve Jobs for suggesting ideas now).
| justinclift wrote:
| > In waiting for my threat letter from Steve Jobs ...
|
| Ummm, you know he died yeah?
| realusername wrote:
| Sounds like Windows 8 designing their touch-first
| interface for a desktop, with about the same success.
| herval wrote:
| It doesnt really introduce anything that makes Vision Pro
| in any way better, though
| CameronBanga wrote:
| Eh, I would disagree as there's nothing in it where you
| go "Oh wow, that's why they did it" in the context of
| Vision Pro or wearables.
|
| It seems much more likely that the driver here was to
| produce a UI that was resource intensive and hard to
| replicate unless you control the processors that go into
| your devices as well as the entire graphics processing
| stack that sits above that as well. It seems created to
| flaunt the concept of "go ahead and try to copy this" to
| Google and Microsoft.
| wolvoleo wrote:
| 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
| present on devices unsuitable for its new paradigms? The
| iOSification also only worsened the macOS UX. It's one of
| the reasons I moved to Linux with KDE which I can
| configure as I like.
|
| If they want make the AR OS of the future then make it on
| the vision pro where it belongs.
| matthewkayin wrote:
| 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.
| lossyalgo wrote:
| 2 settings menus? We have every version of Windows from
| 3.1 all the way to 11 styled settings menus, sometimes
| multiple styles depending on which settings you want to
| look at. It's a total shitshow.
| schmuckonwheels wrote:
| >This is a strategic play by Apple
|
| No, this is the fault of a company and industry with way
| too much money and not knowing what to do with it.
|
| So they hired a bunch of artists who would otherwise be
| carving wood in a decrepit loft somewhere after taking
| half a mushroom cap. These people now decide how
| computers should operate.
|
| I remember watching a documentary from the 80s where
| Susan Kare explained how every pixel in the Macintosh UI
| was deliberately put there to help the user in some way.
| One lady did the whole thing, the whole OS.
|
| Now we have entire teams of people trying to turn your
| computer into an avant-garde art piece.
| yxhuvud wrote:
| Not only that, we have teams of people that very
| obviously (based on OP) dont talk to each other.
| roughly wrote:
| > a bunch of artists who would otherwise be carving wood
| in a decrepit loft somewhere after taking half a mushroom
| cap. These people now decide how computers should
| operate.
|
| ...brother, you've just described the history of the
| personal computer and the Internet. It's not the hippie
| artists causing this problem, I promise you that.
| Bluestrike2 wrote:
| If it's a strategic play, it's a terrible one that douses
| usability in gasoline and sacrifices it at the altar of
| visual novelty for no real gain. Apple has spent literal
| decades working on and refining their Human Interface
| Guidelines for different devices. Between Tahoe and
| Liquid Glass, they seem to have just tossed them on the
| bonfire for no justifiable reason.
|
| VisionPro was meant to literally overlay its interface
| over your field of vision. That's a _very_ different
| context and interaction paradigm. Trying to shoehorn the
| adaptations they made for it into their other, far more
| popular interfaces for the sake of consistency? It 's
| absurd.
| Rumudiez wrote:
| marketers are not designers and vice versa. of course the
| press release is going to be melodramatic no matter what
| the designers thought, or were told
| btown wrote:
| 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 ourselves as
| the innovators once again?
|
| And the monkey's paw curled and said: Liquid Glass is a set
| of translucency interactions that are technically near-
| impossible to imitate, sure, but the real reason nobody
| will try to imitate is because they are user-hostile to a
| brand-breaking extent.
|
| And Apple had nobody willing to see this trainwreck
| happening and press the brakes.
| staplers wrote:
| Uber, Airbnb, Robinhood all took off because they created
| easy to use beautiful apps (compared to their predecessors).
|
| The anti-design bias in this forum is genuinely unhinged. I
| see some saying the entire destruction of the natural world
| stems from design lol.
| progbits wrote:
| No they took of because they used illegal practices and VC
| money to undercut competitors.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Bit of column A, bit of column B.
| oompydoompy74 wrote:
| I think we can pretty safely assume that every large and
| successful company has done horrible and illegal things
| to get themselves there. That being said I think design
| and ease of use still play a significant part in Uber's
| success.
| naikrovek wrote:
| design for design's sake is bad, and that's what Liquid
| Glass is. There was no thought behind it.
|
| It is 2026 and UIs are still abysmally slow in many cases.
| How is that even remotely possible? Now, with that in mind,
| consider (just for a moment) why people might think that UX
| people don't know what they're doing.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| > _It is 2026 and UIs are still abysmally slow in many
| cases. How is that even remotely possible?_
|
| Because UI/X teams were separated from engineering. (Same
| thing happened with modern building architecture)
|
| It's fundamentally impossible to optimize if you're
| unaware of physical constraints.
|
| We need to get rid of the "It's okay to be a UI/UX
| designer who doesn't code" cult. (Looking at you, Adobe
| and Figma...)
| naikrovek wrote:
| Agreed. The further you are away from how a computer
| works internally, the worse your product for a computer
| will be.
|
| We have convinced ourselves as an industry that this is
| not true, but it is true.
| kergonath wrote:
| > We need to get rid of the "It's okay to be a UI/UX
| designer who doesn't code" cult.
|
| I don't think designers who don't code are really a
| problem. They just need to dogfood, and be lead by
| someone who cares (and dogfoods as well).
| makapuf wrote:
| In the case of Apple, I really doubt its designers don't
| dogfood. Do you expect them to have Android phones and
| linux desktops?
| collingreen wrote:
| I sometimes wonder if anyone in charge at Apple uses
| Apple devices the way I do. I expect they have one,
| consistently-apple, high-end setup and it probably works
| very well for their style. Some things are great but
| others are insane and it seems like that happens most
| when using things like non-apple monitors or not typing a
| certain way on the phone or if you don't drive the same
| car.
|
| Switching windows between two non apple monitors after
| waking from sleep is wildly unpredictable and has insane
| ux like resizing itself after a drag.
|
| My carplay always starts something playing on my car
| speakers even when I wasn't listening to anything before
| connecting. It's so off it's comical.
|
| The iPhone alarm will go off like normal, loudly from the
| speaker, even if you're currently on the phone and have
| it up to your ear. This has been a problem since my very
| first iPhone.
|
| There has been a bug about plugged in physical headphones
| being unrecognized sometimes after waking from sleep even
| if it worked fine when going into sleep. I checked once
| in probably 2014 and Apples' official response was that
| it literally wasn't physically possible despite all of us
| people experiencing it. The bug was ancient even at that
| time and >ten years later my m4 macbook pro STILL DOES
| IT.
|
| Apple and apple fanboys seem to take the stance that
| these are all user error on my part (remember the "you
| just aren't a Mac person" era?). I bet some of these are
| configurable with settings deep in some menu somewhere so
| from a certain perspective that's right but also
| underscores my point about the limitations of myopic
| dogfooding.
|
| As a fun aside, the ux for turning on the "Voice Over"
| tutorial is the worse thing I've ever experienced on an
| Apple device. I was laughing out loud trying to figure
| out how to get out of it instead of finishing the unknown
| remaining steps. I feel bad for folks who need that
| accessibility in order to be effective.
| 0x457 wrote:
| I have a strong feeling people working and approving
| Liquid Glass didn't dog food it in dark mode because it
| just looked BAD in the first builds available.
| eszed wrote:
| > Same thing happened with modern building architecture
|
| Yes. Yes, it has. I'm currently in the midst of a
| building project that's ten months behind schedule (and I
| do not know how many millions of dollars over budget),
| and I'd blame every one of the problems on that. I - the
| IT guy - was involved in the design stage, and now in
| construction (as in, actually doing physical labor on-
| site), and I'm _the only person_ who straddles the
| divide.
|
| It's utterly bizarre, because everyone gets things wrong
| - architects and engineers don't appreciate physical
| constraints; construction crews don't understand
| functional or design considerations - so the only way to
| get things right is for _someone_ to understand both, but
| (apart from me, in my area - which is why I make sure to
| participate at both stages) literally no one on the
| project does.
|
| Seen from a perspective of incentives I guess I can
| understand how we got here: the architects and engineers
| don't have to leave their offices, and are more
| "productive" in that they can work on more projects per
| year, and the construction crews can keep on cashing
| their sweet overtime checks. Holy shit, though, is it
| dispiriting to watch from a somewhat detached
| perspective.
| dec0dedab0de wrote:
| None of those companies had predecessors.
| airstrike wrote:
| That statement is just 100% demonstrably false.
|
| I don't think anyone seriously believes Uber, Airbnb and
| Robinhood won because of "beautiful apps".
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Beauty has real value, but _usability_ is far more
| important.
|
| Unfortunately, most of the SW industry isn't even aware
| of the difference:
|
| For beauty you hire a graphic designer
|
| For usability you hire a PhD in cognitive psychology
| 0x457 wrote:
| "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, but realistically you will just look
| to overview portfolio.
| random3 wrote:
| This. Every time Apple made Ui changes, I've seen negative
| reactions. People react negatively to change, not to good
| or bad necessarily. I've been using the ne UI since it was
| in the developer beta, and can't really tell a practical
| difference.
| eschaton wrote:
| There's a huge difference between anti-design bias and
| calling out Liquid Glass for the garbage human interface
| design that it is. If anything, it demonstrates a
| substantial *pro-design* bias because it shows that people
| actually care about design more than any "party line" here.
| avidiax wrote:
| I worked at Uber. The UX designers were pretty obsessed
| with the iPhone app, making sure it was pixel perfect and
| the little cars in the city view moved smoothly and every
| transition was crisp and so on. The vast majority of new
| users at the time were on the comparatively ugly Android
| app.
|
| Things got pretty bad. More than 95% of all employees (and
| I'm guessing 99% of designers) were using iPhones at the
| time. There would be rough edges all over the Android app,
| but as one of our designers said "people with taste don't
| use Android".
|
| Imagine knowing that most of your new users were getting a
| subpar experience, and that not being enough motivation to
| expense a flagship Android and drive it daily.
|
| But the new users kept coming, and despite mostly being
| Android users, they still used the product. Turns out that
| legacy taxis are themselves an ugly interface, and ugliness
| is relative.
| nish__ wrote:
| > people with taste don't use Android
|
| Probably true at the time.
| stefanfisk wrote:
| I remember excitedly switching to a Nexus 5X and then
| going back to my old iPhone a few months later because
| every app felt like a bad port of the "original" iPhone
| app.
| shuntress wrote:
| Using the term "Legacy Taxi" to imply that a taxi you
| don't summon by phone is somehow out-dated is wild. I
| understand the reason you would use it, especially at a
| company like Uber, but it still seems hilariously
| delusional.
| cmiles74 wrote:
| It's difficult for me to believe that you might be arguing
| all of the icons in the drop-down menus are beautiful... I
| know I have found them distracting.
|
| In my opinion, this article had very clear and direct
| criticisms; they were hardly "anti-design bias". The
| increase in visual clutter is, for sure, a net loss for
| MacOS Tahoe.
| trinix912 wrote:
| Design is not just pretty visuals but also solving
| problems. The design of Tahoe doesn't solve any problems
| the previous designs didn't but it solves many of the
| previous problems worse than the designs before.
| koyote wrote:
| Uber very much falls into the category of "useful despite
| the awful app" for me.
|
| It's slow, bloated, buggy and ugly. Probably one of the
| worst apps running on my phone.
| phantasmish wrote:
| No kidding. "Reverting" to something pretty similar to Mac OS
| in the late '90s, as far as visuals and basic UI behavior
| (but not removing modern features) would be a big
| improvement. And once they did that they could just leave it
| that way. It'd be fine. UI churn sucks enough that it's not
| worth it for users unless it's a _huge_ improvement, and
| nothing has been.
|
| Though if we could get the newer settings panel of macOS a
| few versions back, before they inexplicably ruined the best
| OS GUI settings interface I've ever used, that'd be great.
| krylon wrote:
| This is the howling insanity that drove Microsoft to kill the
| start button, then reanimate it, then _move it to the center
| of the task bar_.
| reichstein wrote:
| ... thus falling into the Pitt of failure, where every way
| out is just a little too far away.
| krylon wrote:
| When I started using Linux, I didn't do so because I
| disliked Windows so much, I just was an insatiably
| curious nerd.
|
| But since then, each new version of Windows has made me
| more and more grateful for not having to deal with that
| dumpster fire on my personal devices.
|
| The saddest part to me is that I have the strong
| impression it wouldn't take _that much_ work to turn
| Windows into a much better system. But for whatever
| reason, Microsoft is not interested in making that
| happen. Maybe they are incapable of doing so. But the
| system itself not the reason.
| xenophonf wrote:
| They also forced us to waste relatively valuable vertical
| screen space on the task bar, taking away our ability to
| move it to the left or right screen edges.
| nine_k wrote:
| Sadly, the desktop interface was not perfect by 1995. It was
| _visually_ near-perfect, but the UX, acutal ease of
| interaction, left much to be desired. Sadly, it 's the
| visuals that make pretty screenshots. The actual UX of OSX is
| quite jarringly bad in many regards 30 years later :( But
| developing interactions is much harder.
| DenisM wrote:
| It's not just career. Any artistic endeavor suffers from
| competition with the past, which eventually becomes a
| guaranteed loss. Negating the frame becomes the primary way
| to leave a mark.
| vanviegen wrote:
| But for actual art, such as music, constantly doing novel
| things is kind of the point. Every generation needs its own
| music that runs counter to what came before.
|
| User interfaces are not art.
| DenisM wrote:
| > User interfaces are not art.
|
| Do UI designers think that way?
|
| I imagine some see it as engineering - make things work
| efficiently for the users. Others see it as art. The
| outcome will depend on which group gains the upper hand.
| Terr_ wrote:
| There's some linguistic ambiguity here if we just say
| "art", because it includes things we might divide into
| "artistic choice" versus "craftsmanship", ex:
|
| 1. "Picasso, that's the _wrong_ way to depict a human
| nose. "
|
| 2. "Picasso, that's the _wrong_ material, that vibrant
| paint is poisonous and will turn to black flakes within
| the year and the frame will become warped. "
|
| I interpret parent-poster's "interfaces are not art" as
| meaning they're mostly craftsmanship.
|
| It may not be quantifiable enough to be labeled
| "engineering", but it's still much less-subjective and
| more goal-oriented than the "pure art" portion. All these
| interfaces need to be _useful_ to tasks in the long term.
| (Or at least long enough for an unscrupulous vendor to
| take the money and run.)
| 65 wrote:
| Yes this is always how it's been, especially if you're a
| front end developer. Changing designs every few months just
| for the hell of it is what designers do.
| TheCoreh wrote:
| There have been many, many, desktop improvements since 1995,
| some of which came from the Mac, some came from Windows and
| some came from UNIX/Linux & friends.
|
| - Arguably the dock, though it's probably contentious -
| Ubiquitous instant search (e.g. Spotlight) - Gesture-based
| automatic tiling of windows to left/right side of the screen,
| tiling presets - Smooth scrolling, either via scroll wheel or
| trackpad - Gesture-based multi tasking, etc - Virtual
| desktops/multiple workspaces - Autosave - Folder stacks,
| grouping of items in file lists - Tabbed windows - Full-
| screen mode - Separate system-wide light and dark modes -
| Enhanced IME input for non-latin languages - App stores,
| automatic updating - Automatic backup, file versioning -
| Compositing Window Managers (Quartz, Compiz, DWM, modern
| Wayland compositors...) - The "sources bar" UI pattern -
| Centralized notification centers - Stack view controlelr
| style navigation for settings (back/forward buttons) - Multi
| device clipboard synchronization - Other handoff features -
| Many accessibility features - The many iteration of Widgets -
| Installable web apps - Virtual printers ("print to PDF") -
| Autocomplete/autocorrect - PIP video playback - Tags/Labels -
| File proxies/"representations" - Built-in clipboard
| management - Wiggle the mouse to find the pointer
|
| None of these can be said to be at their final/"perfect" form
| today, and there are hundreds if not thousand of papercuts
| and refinements that can be made.
|
| The real issue is probably due to management misunderstanding
| designer's jobs, and allocating them incorrectly. The focus
| should be more on the interactions and behaviors than
| necessarily on the visuals.
| schmuckonwheels wrote:
| > Arguably the dock
|
| The Dock came from NeXtSTEP circa 1989. It had square edges
| and no Happy Mac. (So did Mail.app, TextEdit, some of the
| OS X Finder, and a whole bunch of other things.)
|
| To the untrained eye it looks like an Apple innovation
| because most people couldn't afford NeXt computers unless
| you worked in a university or research lab.
| schmuckonwheels wrote:
| I would say, "Give me Mac OS 9, now" but smartphone-addicted
| brain-damaged zoomers don't understand what folders are or
| how file management works.
|
| I don't need or want art, eye candy, or animations. I need to
| get work done and the rest of the OS to stay tf out of my
| way.
| dlisboa wrote:
| Style matters, maybe unfortunately depending on the point of
| view. Products like consumer electronics have a large amount
| of fashion to them. Just like the t-shirt was perfected in
| the 1950s people still make new ones with little style
| changes for no functional reason.
|
| Designers at Balenciaga don't have to justify their jobs when
| they make oversized t-shirts, neither do the ones at Apple.
| xnx wrote:
| Fashion is a very appropriate place for style. Tools, less
| so.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Corollary: the extent of fashion-driven variability those
| "tools" support over generations tells us just how little
| utility those tools provide.
|
| In actual tools, the form and function are strongly
| connected. Tools of competing brands look pretty much the
| same, except for color accents, because they can't look
| any different without sacrificing functionality,
| performance and safety characteristics.
|
| You don't see power tool vendors trying to differentiate
| their impact drivers by replacing rubber handles with
| flat glass because it's more "modern", because it would
| compromise safety and make the tool unsuitable for most
| jobs its competitors fulfill. This happens in software
| mostly because the tools aren't doing much of anything
| substantial - they're not powerful enough for design to
| actually matter.
| buredoranna wrote:
| I wish I could remember where I picked up this quote
|
| > No project manager ever got promoted for saying "let's keep
| things the same".
| jbl0ndie wrote:
| I can't see how half of the icon choices made in the article
| would pass internal testing, let alone actual user testing.
|
| Maybe stakeholders were calling the shots and everyone was
| like, "Fine. If you want us to reuse the same icon for
| different purposes, you're the boss. We are done trying to
| explain why this is a bad idea."
| smallstepforman wrote:
| Dont worry, there are thousands of aspiring artists that will
| gladly do it for a 6 figure salary. The person that manages
| your salary, they determine what you work on. Dont like the
| work, walk away ...
| nooee wrote:
| Unpopular opinion, but I find Liquid Glass incredibly
| satisfying (I set it to Tinded though). The transitions are
| just really well done. The glass effect itself is a fun gadget,
| but unnecessary. I dislike how it must waste my battery. Give
| me the transitions of Liquid Glass with a basic frosted glass
| material and I would be perfectly happy, but the current state
| is fine too.
| conductr wrote:
| > If you're a designer at a top 10 S&P 500 company making 6
| figures,
|
| ... your career requires constantly chasing after what amounts
| to fashion trends every few years, otherwise it's a solved
| problem and probably does not provide much of a career
| Eric_WVGG wrote:
| There seems to be two takes on the whole liquid glass thing.
|
| - UI/UX pros who understand this stuff: "I hate it" - everyone
| else: "I didn't notice until you pointed it out"
| morshu9001 wrote:
| I don't mind Liquid Glass. What annoys me is how it's seemingly
| someone's full-time job at Apple to periodically make me
| relearn how to find my photos or open Safari tabs.
| karmakaze wrote:
| 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.
| drewbeck wrote:
| These directions come from above the PMs, especially at a place
| as design-focused as Apple.
| jonwinstanley wrote:
| Just a note on Vision Pro - as it's been priced at $3,500 - I'm
| not sure I'd say it's unsuccessful.
|
| I bet they've sold approx as many as they thought they would.
|
| This product is a placeholder for a cheaper and lighter one in
| the future.
| neor wrote:
| I agree, the Liquid Glass isn't working out for Mac OS.
|
| Few days ago I booted a very old device running High Sierra and
| the UI and old Dock look so clean.
|
| That desktop was peak for me, and the age starts showing a bit
| in Finder, but it's still more usable than today's versions.
| pbreit wrote:
| Tour de force article...well done! (except the snow was highly
| distracting)
|
| Also absurd is that tabs and menus are not attached to their
| elements.
| brailsafe wrote:
| 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 you're just
| an employee without an inordinate amount of clear authority
| within the scope of your discipline at the large company (you
| know if you do or don't) then don't try and create a mutiny, it
| will more than likely be a childish assumption of personal risk
| on your part, much more so than it costs the company, much more
| so than anyone else needs to care, because someone on a forum
| told you to be passionate about round rects or small icons or
| whatever. If you need to tell your boss "google NN group", you
| probably don't have the trust or experience to be successful
| with such a play.
|
| It's okay to have a personal hatred of it and do what you can
| to steer the work appropriately, but when you're tasked with a
| dumbass plan, let it be the decision-makers' dumbass plan,
| unless it's your decision to make. Let it be the project we
| tried and it didn't and couldn't have worked out, which
| sometimes happens, but you learn and then leave if it's
| pervasive and you have other options.
|
| It would be remarkably stupid to single yourself out as the
| person who thinks of themselves as the reincarnation of Steve
| Jobs and risk your livelihood to save Apple's reputation. The
| unlikely upside is that you get your way and that can boost
| your confidence, but the downside is that you fumble your best
| shot at financial security for the rest of your life because
| you thought you'd be received well.
|
| That's not to say you shouldn't say no to nothing, or have love
| for your craft, just don't pretend it's your job to, unless it
| is, which it's probably not. Disagree and let it be a failure
| if it's going to be, feel vindicated if it is, but the money is
| there for you if not. The people who worked on the Vision Pro
| aren't responsible for it being a dud product, and they can be
| proud of what they did design-wise and technologically despite
| that.
| herbturbo wrote:
| Nielsen Norman used to be quoted constantly during UX
| discussions at various places I worked. Seems like UX folks and
| Information Architects have slowly been replaced by a general
| purpose "designer"
| issafram wrote:
| The snow effect made it unbearable for me to finish reading
| reactordev wrote:
| Apple design has a designer problem. For far too long they
| worshiped the Ives of design, distilled it until there was no
| flavor left, and then lost their Oracle. Ever since, they have
| produced sub-par UX/UI experiences. They don't follow their own
| guiding principals, and they let shareholders and executives tell
| them what they should do. They figured they mastered remote work
| before anyone else and rested on their laurels while the industry
| innovated itself beyond. What was once the pinnacle of user
| experience is now sub-standard. It takes an extra second to
| unlock my phone now because of the stupid icon animations. The
| glass effect on the desktop doesn't look good at all. It didn't
| in 2006 with Vista, it doesn't now. The only thing keeping me on
| the Mac is the unified memory M series chips and *nix pedigree.
|
| Soon, I'll get my hands on one of those fancy AMD AI Max's and go
| Linux everywhere.
| Arnt wrote:
| Oh god, collecting these screenshots must've magnified the pain
| so much.
| oliwarner wrote:
| It's hard to take a post about UX and accessibility seriously
| when there's a crappy snow effect precipitously eroding my will
| to read.
|
| Edit: Oh there is an icon to disable it, but still.
| avra wrote:
| The snowflakes are a clever engagement hack. They doubled the
| amount of comments here. I find it funny for the moment, but I
| hope this will not become the norm for hn posts.
| doodlesdev wrote:
| These don't seem to be well thought at all. While reading the
| article, I've started wondering if they were chosen by an LLM
| after some developers decided it wasn't worth the trouble of
| going through every single application and choosing icons for
| every single menu item. That would explain a lot, in my opinion.
| layer8 wrote:
| What likely happened is that design leadership commanded that
| everything needs to have an icon, and most of the individual
| developers tasked with updating the menus just pick the next
| best icon from the provided icon library, because there exists
| no further guidance or oversight. There's probably a designated
| procedure for requesting new icons, but why bother if nobody is
| checking your work.
| ValleZ wrote:
| It's hard to justify the UI rant when there is annoying
| snowflakes animation on top of it.
| soapdog wrote:
| That article almost made me cry. I was reading the NewtonOS 2.0
| Human Interface Guidelines yesterday and it was so clear, so
| well-thought. The mess we find ourselves into in macOS Tahoe is
| impossible to excuse. I have no idea how that got out of the
| door.
| necovek wrote:
| Ever since I first tried a modern Mac (around the time of M1
| MacBook Pros with Max coming out: work mandated, or I wouldn't),
| I could easily see inconsistencies all around the system, and
| could never get to grips to why people cling to the belief that
| it has consistent, simple UI. It was as inconsistent as GNOME
| (which I mainly use), and sometimes more so (though this could be
| my personal bias, since I've used GNOME since before 2.0 days, so
| 2003 or so -- though, I'd note that 2.x series was significantly
| more consistent, especially with Sun-contributed GNOME HIG, than
| 3.x still is).
|
| Not to even mention hardware support, as I had a lot of issues
| with Realtek external USB network devices randomly disconnecting
| (and they are in many USB-C hubs, including inside USB-C
| monitors), with no such issues under Ubuntu.
|
| I imagine there is some history around MacOS being similarly much
| better in the past, but I've never seen anything great about
| MacOS UI/UX in comparison to GNOME.
|
| I do like their performance and battery life, but the "shells"
| it's stuck in also sucks (until recently, only glossy screens;
| shallow keyboards with sharp palmrest edges; either heavy or
| passively cooled; no touchpad buttons...). Putting some of this
| hardware into a new Thinkpad X1 Carbon case would be amazing,
| though I'd want to run Linux on it.
| blenderob wrote:
| This is genuinely disheartening. As I continued reading the fine
| article, disappointment began settling in. Does nobody care about
| doing a good job anymore? When even multi-trillion-dollar
| companies cannot execute projects with some baseline level of
| quality and craft, it paints a disappointing picture. Very sad
| and disappointing. :(
| jedwards1211 wrote:
| I don't think it's a good idea to require an icon for everything,
| some actions are hard to depict with an icon.
|
| But on the other hand, I think 95% of the icons in the first menu
| in this article are clear and probably help most people navigate
| faster.
| tanepiper wrote:
| I'm still on Sequoia, almost 100% of the reason is how bad OSX26
| looks. There's absolutely nothing compelling me to update right
| now
| freehorse wrote:
| Same. All my colleagues had to update, and I feel dread just
| looking at their screens. There is something very deeply
| disturbing in this new design that I cannot even pinpoint.
|
| I wait and hope that some point apple will revert certain
| changes, or at least give more options for disabling some
| stuff.
| quyleanh wrote:
| Sorry, it's because they are busy with marketing liquid glass
| theme.
| botanrice wrote:
| As a fan of pictograms in general and very much a visual learner,
| I don't mind Tahoe icons or menu icons in general. By default I
| look to those first and then the text, it works for me.
|
| That said, Apple's Liquid Glass is really poor UI. It works okay
| on my Macbook but feel like it's basically broken a couple
| features of my second gen iPhone SE, which is kind of untenable
| imo. Apple also clearly seems to design for larger devices now,
| which I get but... am I any less of a customer because I use an
| older device? why should I be de-prioritized?
|
| Lastly, speaking of UI/UX - this blog's website was really bad!
| Ironic that a blog on UI/UX would have bubbles floating down the
| screen interfering with text readability and no way to turn them
| off!
| JamesSwift wrote:
| Im also starting to slowly suffer as a fellow iPhone SE
| enjoyer. Every month another app or website has some UI update
| that doesnt take the SE screen size into account and is either
| awkward to use or sometimes impossible because they dont allow
| scrolling.
| compiotr wrote:
| I love this post. Had me laughing quite a bit.
| Surac wrote:
| I think all the icon ,,bloat" is from the designers that needed
| to stay relevant. They learned to use pictures instead of text
| from some professors and wanted to show how much they are worth.
| The picture for text pattern is valid if you want to replace one
| or two words in a commercial but not if you have about 200 icons
| on your page. Also the trend to a flat black and white design
| makes the icons just to blend together
| simlevesque wrote:
| The old guidelines assumes the user is literate. Apple's focus
| has changed since then. I'm not saying it's working well, but
| this vision leads to things like this.
| yoz-y wrote:
| Ah least partly I believe the inconsistencies are due to the
| design of SF Symbols. That is, they are named after what they
| look like, rather than what they represent. E.g.:
| "square.and.arrow.up" rather than "share".
|
| I do prefer this approach because it makes the symbols generally
| more useful for everything else than menu/toolbar icons. However
| as the article makes very obvious, unless a consistent scheme is
| placed in place, program developers will choose whatever they
| want to represent common actions.
| vincnetas wrote:
| Well at least lots of designers at apple can now claim "I created
| icons for mac os"
| reddalo wrote:
| ...as if they were Susan Kare.
| skerit wrote:
| This is brutal. The examples just kept on coming. Halfway through
| the article I assumed it must have a bunch of comments under it,
| but nope. More brutal examples
| exe34 wrote:
| I love the snow on the web page, it highlights the message really
| well!
| 1718627440 wrote:
| > I'm not saying there's an obvious metaphor for "Open" Apple
| missed. There isn't.
|
| Citation needed. The open icon is general a file containing an
| arrow or a file as a metaphor of taking a file out of a folder. I
| just tested with MS Windows XP, MS Windows 7, MS Windows 10 and
| Mate/Gnome 2.
| Pxtl wrote:
| The inconsistency and monochrome nature is problematic but imho
| including your icons alongside the text representation wherever
| practical is good because it educates the user what those icons
| mean so that when they see the icon _without_ the context of the
| text representation they will know.
|
| Including the hotkeys in the menu is good for similar reasons.
| Does it help me find and click the menu item? No. But does it
| help me use that action next time without going through the menu?
| Yes. Icons are same.
|
| Imho the best layout for menu-bars was Windows Phone 7. In WP7, a
| toolbar of action button icons were shown along the bottom of the
| screen along with a kebab-button. Clicking the kebab-button would
| just expand out the bottom-bar into a menu _showing the icons in
| the same order as they were in the toolbar_ along with a text
| description. Below the toolbar icons would be all other non-
| toolbar commands.
|
| It made it clear that the toolbar and the menu were _the same
| thing_ , just the toolbar is an abbreviated form of the menu for
| the sake of economy of screen real-estate.
|
| Putting icons throughout menus is kind of a cruder version of
| same. I like that.
| yosser wrote:
| I've just gone through the rather painful and protracted process
| of reverting from Tahoe to Sequoia.'Reverting' rather than
| 'downgrading' since Tahoe is in no sense an upgrade.
|
| I consider myself quite tolerant of UX quirks, iPhones are still
| pleasant to use, particularly if you select 'reduce motion' from
| the accessibility settings.
|
| Tahoe though, bugs aside, is just genuinely unpleasant to use and
| interact with. By far the most offensive thing to me is the
| pointless rounded rectangle thing. It delivers absolutely no
| value at all to the user and defies any form of justification.
| How in any form is this a decision designed to improve things for
| the user?
|
| The other multiple weirdnesses commented on elsewhere while
| unpleasant are more liveable with, but I honestly never found a
| single change that improved my interactions with the computer.
| How on earth can you have spent a whole year on this and why
| didn't anyone have the authority to pull the plug?
|
| I would no longer recommend a new mac to my anyone. A second hand
| model running a previous operating system makes far more sense.
| rantingdemon wrote:
| Did you follow a guide to revert black?
| yosser wrote:
| Sort of, but be warned it wont automatically revert a time
| machine backup of your Tahoe files to a Sequoia system, you
| have to manually copy them. Similarly you have to recovery
| boot into disk utility to flatten your hard drive before
| installing Sequoia from (say) a memory stick.
|
| It all seems a bit needlessly tricky. Frankly though - for me
| at least - it's worth the trouble.
| davidmurdoch wrote:
| I don't mind the icons, but the snow effect on the website makes
| it much harder to read.
| meisel wrote:
| What is with the annoying snow going over the text? That is a
| pretty "arbitrary" graphic element
| anymouse123456 wrote:
| The icons are another symptom.
|
| A brand new Apple iPhone 17 Pro.
|
| Constantly lagging and locking up in preparation for another
| transparent animation that absolutely no one asked for.
|
| Feeling like Apple just mugged me and stole $1,000.
| patrick4urcloud wrote:
| very nice article of how apple get confuse of a good ui. is it
| part of global Enshittification or did big tech forgot all past
| good rules ? i guess , steve jobs would have made an heart attack
| reading your article :)
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| I think that these icons are a great idea. With the rise of
| illiteracy, you can no longer count on people being able to read
| the labels in menus. What better way to ensure that Apple comes
| out on top in the post-apocalyptic wasteland than the genesis of
| a new primitive ideographic writing system? 10,000 years from
| now, when Apple users are grunting and hooting to argue about
| which icon means "make computer magic remember!", you'll all have
| been proven wrong.
| kccqzy wrote:
| This article provided a good counterpoint; there is a picture
| where all text labels in menus have been removed and just the
| icons are left. It's worse than having only text labels.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| The end of the world would not be complete without the death
| of humor.
| SamuelAdams wrote:
| Ironically adding a snowfall CSS effect to this blog also makes
| it difficult to read and use.
| facundo_olano wrote:
| Is there a recommended modern day, non mac specific, equivalent
| to those "Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines" linked at the
| beginning of the article?
| dionian wrote:
| am i the only one who likes liquid glass
| 827a wrote:
| Big words coming from the guy rendering dense falling snow over
| the entire article content.
| DrewADesign wrote:
| Looking at a bunch of developers assume expertise in interface
| design while shitting all over design as a field used to be a
| rage bait situation for me, but it's fruitless. I've been both,
| and I was a developer long before I was a designer. I don't think
| you have to be an expert to criticize an interface, and you
| definitely don't have to like it, and some number of designers
| undoubtedly agree. But I encourage you to consider that the
| osmosis-learned nibbles about design and that Edward Tufte book
| you enjoyed might not qualify you to judge the competence of the
| better part of an entire set of professions. Most developers
| don't even know what actual problems designers are tasked to
| solve, let alone evaluate their efficacy. Developers are a lot
| better at knowing when they know something than realizing when
| they don't. NOBODY is good at discussing what they're used to
| with what's objectively good or bad. The "I don't care what
| anybody says -- this is just objectively bad" attitude is
| something that arises with literally any interface change in any
| major product. Developers have a very different usage style than
| most people and when you get a bunch of people in one place
| agreeing with each other without any outside voices, that's an
| echo chamber at best and a circle jerk at worst. To be clear, I'm
| not even discussing, let alone defending the design: I'm
| countering the cocky obnoxious designer hate that pops up in
| these threads.
|
| PS-- Edward Tufte has some interesting perspectives on data
| visualization but the reason he's so popular with the engineering
| crowd is because he was an engineer and he makes cut-and-dried
| rules about things that are easy to understand without any design
| education, and explains them in a way that appeals to engineers.
| Reading that book is better than nothing, but it's gives
| laypeople about as much understanding of design as a "[language]
| cookbook" gives laypeople an understanding of programming.
| smeeth wrote:
| I suspect this sort of thing starts to happen when UX decision-
| making gets decentralized. No single god-king would allow six or
| more different new icons; the lack of uniformity is obviously
| nonsensical to anybody, but not necessarily to a disorganized
| collective of anybodies.
| __bjoernd wrote:
| Oh, that snow backdrop really hits hard while talking about other
| people's UI failures...
| codr7 wrote:
| It's lacking taste, as is everything from Apple these days.
| rozab wrote:
| Similar discussion on similar blog post from last month:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46196688
| saberience wrote:
| This times 100000. I've been using Mac OS since 1992 and this
| version (both IOS and MacOS) has had me pulling my hair out more
| than every other version, and note, I did use OSX 10.0!
|
| The first thing I did with Tahoe was go into the System
| Preferences to try and turn off as much as possible of the new UI
| because it's the biggest regression in Mac OS history (at least
| since I've been using Macs).
|
| I used to mock Windows for the Explorer UI and general GUI
| experience, now I think I prefer using my Windows 10 PC over my
| Mac. It's just such a fucking mess, so inconsistent, shitty
| performance (even on brand new macs and phones), is actively
| harder to grok, much harder to use for my elderly parents, and
| doesn't even look "cooler" or "better" in any way. It's just
| worse on every possible metric, and made me start wondering about
| an Android phone, which has never happened since I bought an
| original iPhone.
|
| I am and have been the ultimate Apple fanboy since 1992, but this
| release fucking sucks balls. I hope you're listening Apple.
| ddon wrote:
| Page about usability has distracting snow all over the page :)
| misterbishop wrote:
| Posting about the finer points of UX while your whole page has a
| geocities snow animation.
| tomaskafka wrote:
| 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 observe who notices it.
|
| https://x.com/tomaskafka/status/2008168483608293873
| dxdm wrote:
| 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 in the screenhot?
| davidivadavid wrote:
| 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 itself.
|
| Looking at it for 30s, I still don't understand what Apple
| was trying to do. What am I supposed to believe happens to
| the table as it goes under that floating menu? It clearly
| doesn't seem to continue all the way to the left edge of the
| window. Why not? If not, why bother with that whole floating
| menu concept if the underlying content arbitrarily stops at
| the menu?
|
| The most surprising part to me is how people keep calling
| that nonsense "skeuomorphic" when it doesn't replicate any
| kind of physical intuition known to mankind. It's just made
| up physics that looks dumb.
| pornel wrote:
| X displays a cut down post preview to people who aren't members
| of the site. There's no context, no comments.
|
| It seems like the preview for not-fans-of-Elon is also missing
| a screenshot?
| apricot wrote:
| So much effort is spent in the computer industry to un-solve
| previously solved problems.
| queenkjuul wrote:
| I agree with the piece but i have a hard time admitting that a
| site with fake snow falling in front of the screenshots is
| dispensing sound design advice
| throwaway290 wrote:
| I hate liquid glass a lot but it's hard to take seriously this
| when there are snowflakes falling in front of the text.
| AutumnsGarden wrote:
| Article is alright but the website itself induces a LOT of lag.
| The heavy particle use is very distracting and makes the article
| hard to read.
| philipallstar wrote:
| The funny thing is the most clear example of useful icons, the
| eight top/left/bottom/right/corners options, could be more
| helpfully replaced by a single image where you click on it in the
| place you want the stuff, and remove the text entirely (other
| than for screen reader support).
| hammeiam wrote:
| I'm not going to take design advice from somebody who animates
| snow falling over the text and images of his blog
| dwoldrich wrote:
| Disgusting. I couldn't even read through to the end.
|
| Are there some perverse incentives to having the OS upgrades be
| free? Is that what is causing this? Do they simply have no taste?
| panzi wrote:
| On my phone that website had some ash rain animation all over it,
| making it unreadable without reader mode. WTF.
| pianom4n wrote:
| It's hard to take complaints about UI consistency seriously when
| the cursor is changed for no reason at all (with a barely-
| different hover state, too).
| canucker2016 wrote:
| 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 another menu in another app.
|
| Same name, same menu location, same shortcut key.
|
| Much easier to train yourself or your employees - learn one app
| and you'd be familiar with the other apps in the Microsoft Office
| product line.
|
| Other companies that tried to create Office-like suites
| didn't/couldn't create the consistency amongst the apps since
| they had to acquire the missing apps from other software makers
| to complete their own Office-like suite.
|
| But this consistency was tempered by common sense.
|
| The goal of shortcut keys was to make common actions quickly
| accessible to users. But for consistency, the same shortcut key
| should be used across apps.
|
| When Mail/Outlook was introduced, users found that CTRL-F was
| bound to the Find command. Makes sense on first thought. But
| what's the most common command in an email app - is it "Find" or
| is it "Forward email". Especially when the prevailing standard
| for CTRL-F in email apps was CTRL-F.
|
| When Bill Gates angrily complains that he's always invoking the
| Find command by mistake, Program Managers are willing to make
| exceptions to dogma.
|
| It'd be interesting to compare the menus in Apple's iWork suite
| (Pages / Numbers / Keynote) to see if their menu items /shortcut
| keys are consistent or unique.
|
| Note that this Microsoft Office suite consistency didn't
| necessarily extend to other Microsoft apps. There's no one
| managing menu item consistency company-wide at Microsoft, just
| within Office.
| drnick1 wrote:
| It's time to try GNOME. It's MacOS-like (without really copying
| any specific aspect of it), incredibly clean and polished. Add a
| dock with the Dash to Dock extension if you want to make it even
| more similar.
| DamnInteresting wrote:
| I personally enjoy changes of scenery, but my parents struggle to
| relearn how to use their computer every time there is a major OS
| update that revamps the UI. It's seldom better, it's just change
| for change's sake, resulting in a lot of time lost to relearning.
| Sticking to the old OS is only viable as long as security updates
| continue.
|
| I wish that OS developers would provide the option to retain the
| bulk of the old UI when a new one comes out, implementing the UI
| like a swappable "theme." People who prefer consistency could
| keep most of their old UI, and those who prefer the newer UI can
| have it.
| WhyNotHugo wrote:
| The world is full of incredibly smart and talented developers...
|
| But where are they? Because they're not leaving their imprint on
| any of the big tech companies in recent years.
| treymalikcruz wrote:
| I am very glad I have maintained my hesitance to update the
| operating systems on my Apple devices. The Liquid Glass
| announcement from the jump seemed really just like 1. a
| transparent (no pun intended) ploy to answer broad anti flat
| design sentiments from the public, without any expressed
| functional benefit and 2. a way to normalize this sort of design
| with an eye on a future of wearables and AR devices, something
| they seemed fairly invested in with the release of the Vision
| Pro. All of this is at the cost of immediate visual clarity, as
| it only adds more visual noise to the interface and removes (or
| at least inhibits) color as a core visual differentiator.
|
| This new system of icons is something I was entirely unaware of
| until now, since I haven't updated or had to use an updated MacOS
| device. I've in the past been a defender of MacOS, but it really
| does feel like the decision making is completely off the rails
| and has no consideration of the most basic principles of design.
| Baffling.
| maipen wrote:
| I see a lot of people talking about the past, but I think this is
| just a reminder that no matter how successful they become, there
| will always be these periods where companies and people lose
| focus.
|
| The exact reason/s for this to happen is hard to figure out.
| Leadership changes, trends, getting too comfortable, lack of
| competition, the list goes on...
|
| There's always bad reactions to change, but eventually they fade
| away because the product turns out to be good and just needs some
| time to get used to it. But this time, this is not the case.
| Liquid glass sucks and so does the UX that came with it.
|
| Apple will eventually fix this mess, they have all the resources
| in the world to do so.
| auxiliarymoose wrote:
| Much of the problem stems from inconsistent application of icons.
| This would have gone better if Apple established (and followed!)
| clear guidelines for exactly which icon to use for which standard
| action (e.g. search).
|
| That the icons exist is not necessarily a problem, since they can
| help teach users which buttons in the UI do which actions. (menu
| bar for discovery, app UI for less mouse travel + contextual
| options). But that requires consistency, which the current
| implementation lacks...
| threethirtytwo wrote:
| 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 stay employed. So they
| change inconsequential things and make up reasoning to justify
| it. Liquid Glass is one of these things.
|
| I also want to note that the most useable GUI is not the
| prettiest GUI. The current MAC GUI looks more modern and better
| then he one in the OPs guideline example. So gui design isn't
| just about usability, it's about manipulating consumer
| psychology.
|
| As consumers ourselves There's two traps here that people fall
| for. The first is aforementioned it's that it looks better and
| feels flashier (like Liquid Glass) but isn't rationally or
| logically better (in fact it can be worse). Most HNers don't fall
| for this trap.
|
| The second trap is to think these changes actually matter. Liquid
| Glass barely changed anything. More icons barely changed
| anything. This entire blog post is making it out to be a bigger
| deal than it is when in actual reality the difference is so minor
| it's negligible. Every HNer falls for this trap.
| OsrsNeedsf2P wrote:
| > 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 something they can point to and call success; even if
| everyone knows it's stupid.
| nomel wrote:
| For any bureaucratic system, the system will slowly
| transition away from the reason it was put into place and
| towards self preservation.
| next_xibalba wrote:
| This article reads like opinions and vibes without a solid
| grounding in data.
|
| For example: "Look how much faster you can find Save or Share in
| the right variant..."
|
| But each variant took me the same amount of time. Or so I think.
| But that demonstrates the issue: is any of this being measured
| and analyzed?
|
| My _opinion_ is that much of design is just "convincing opinion
| wins" (where convincing-ness is often not at all based on
| measurement of some kind), leading to crappy stuff like ultra
| flat design and Corporate Memphis.
| zaidf wrote:
| My hope is that the new generation of designers/UX people
| question and reject many of the UI/UX patterns made popular in
| the past 15 years and go back to the 90s for inspiration.
| Resources like the Apple Design Guidelines from 1992 linked in
| the OP is excellent!
|
| Perhaps my biggest gripe is that many of these terrible UI/UX
| patterns are built in at such a low level, it is near impossible
| for developers to override them in the software they build. For
| example, I really dislike flat UI and particularly flat
| scrollbars. But it is near impossible to add scrollbars that look
| like these in any Windows or Mac app I build:
| https://flowingdata.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/evolution...
|
| Usability has become theatre across Apple products. The sad part
| is that since Microsoft just seems to copy Apple, over time
| Windows usability has also degraded severely. I am so frustrated
| by what Apple, Microsoft and Google have done.
| gonational wrote:
| IMHO, the "new generation" of designers is the problem. Same
| goes for the "new generation" of developers. Want to make a
| basic HTML page with a contact form? Better get React + 300
| dependencies, require the backend to provide a REST endpoint...
| fast forward six months...
|
| Why has this happened? Everything is too easy. You used to have
| to have pretty good intelligence to break into UI design and
| software development. Now, anyone can do it with 30 minutes of
| "e-learning", and, therefore, the average IQ of a UI
| designer/or software engineer has decreased, dramatically.
| ctippett wrote:
| 500+ comments and no one's mentioned the jack of all trades
| "share" button? I would really love to see the internal metrics
| around how many users press share because they're actually
| sharing something versus wanting to use any one of the myriad of
| other functions it hides.
|
| Exhibit A: In Safari I had to "share" this page to use the "Find
| on Page" feature to search whether anyone had mentioned the share
| button yet. Bonkers.
| myguysi wrote:
| Yep also ran into this while trying to search the article. It's
| maddening when the share action is now also hidden within a
| context menu.
| mcslambley wrote:
| > Exhibit A: In Safari I had to "share" this page to use the
| "Find on Page" feature to search whether anyone had mentioned
| the share button yet. Bonkers.
|
| You can also long-press on the address bar to see a whole slew
| of even more hidden functionality
| pmdr wrote:
| Apple has been poisoning the design space the last 5-10 years,
| they're not just doing it to themselves.
| ashleyn wrote:
| I suspect the icons have to do with a non-english or reading
| disabilities accessibility requirement.
|
| I'd argue it's not comparable to the 1992 standards because
| there's not clutter on the right due to dimming for the hotkey
| labels. These guidelines were written only slightly through Mac
| OS's colour era, with an extensive install base of monochrome
| Macintoshes where you could only depict dimming with hard-to-read
| dithering. Now that colour is ubiquitous, this gives designers
| the option to fade or tint UI items to make them look less
| distracting or to deemphasise them.
| eschaton wrote:
| By 1992, the Mac had supported color for almost twice as long
| (5 years) as it had been a monochrome-only system (3 years).
| a022311 wrote:
| It's been a few years since I last used a Mac and the careful
| design I had known no longer exists. This made me realize the
| situation even worse than I imagined it to be based on Tahoe's
| reviews.
|
| Even without a designer's detail-aware eyes, I couldn't stop
| facepalming with what I saw. I'd be embarrassed to ship that and
| call it an improvement! Apple icons may look cool and consistent
| when browsing them all together as part of SF Symbols, but all
| that disappears when used incorrectly.
| ericyd wrote:
| Am I the only one confused why an opinion piece criticizing the
| superfluous and distracting design choices of Tahoe has a
| continuous and uninterruptable snow animation that makes the
| entire thing harder to read?
| mostlysimilar wrote:
| There's a button at the top of the page to disable it.
| hmokiguess wrote:
| This makes me think there's a sort of system level thing applied
| to pairing icons with menu items, so, with SIP disabled, would it
| be possible to modify this? I'm already running things like Yabai
| and Hammerspoon for a lot of mods, might as well look into
| clearing the clutter of icons next.
| nilslindemann wrote:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20121225011818/http://www.useit....
|
| Old but gold
| user2342 wrote:
| I fully agree with the article, but the snow effect on the site
| is more distracting to readability than the shitty menu icons in
| Tahoe...
| w10-1 wrote:
| The story in the patterns book about architecture: the
| architect got tired of arguing with the bishops about a church,
| so they put a hot tub in the corner on the next design. The
| bishops agreed that the hot tub must go, and the design was
| approved.
| binthere wrote:
| The snow flakes of the website are really bad for UX, just
| saying.
| aronowb14 wrote:
| A bit ironic that the website complaining about UI has virtual
| snow on it making reading hard.
| sylens wrote:
| That Windows 9x menu screenshot made me realize how far we've
| fallen. This entire post is a great enumeration of many of the
| problems I have with Tahoe and Liquid Glass
| rick_dalton wrote:
| They should add a button to turn off the icons. The new menu
| icons aren't the only icon annoyance either, their own app icons
| look worse across the board with few exceptions.
| ggfdh wrote:
| It looks good. I think they could be doing this to help people
| recognize iOS icons which don't have any text (a far worse
| "classic HIG" crime IIRC).
| groundzeros2015 wrote:
| I don't think Craig gets enough blame. He's the one who just
| loves gadget features and shiny stuff. I don't think Apple has
| championed a single Mac feature around making your computer more
| a powerful system for professional work since he has taken over.
| breppp wrote:
| _The number of elements and their behaviors should be limited_
|
| Reading that as an animation of snow completely blocks my ability
| to read
| RankingMember wrote:
| Oh man I hope some of the people putting stuff in the joke-but-
| real "personal information" box within the burger menu know that
| clicking the "download" provides the input from _everyone_. I 'm
| seeing some seemingly real addresses and social security numbers
| in there.
|
| Additional thought: It's always interesting to see a website
| linked from HN with a method for user input and a means to see
| what other users have posted. Just a funny juxtaposition between
| the buttoned-up ego (not in the pejorative sense) of the HN
| poster vs the screaming id of that same user on a different
| platform.
| goshx wrote:
| Are the annoying little white circles falling part of the
| critique?
| a2dam wrote:
| Hard to justify snow falling in front of the text on a blog post
| about how a redesign isn't helpful design.
| crumpled wrote:
| I had to open the dev tools and pause the code in the debugger
| before I could tolerate reading the whole article.
| myguysi wrote:
| On mobile there's a snowflake toggle button in the top left
| corner. I only noticed this after reading the whole article
| in reader mode and wondering why my iPhone was on fire...
| borghives wrote:
| The irony did not lost on me that an article about superfluous
| visual elements is overlayed by an unnecessary distraction. But
| maybe the point is to not be 100% utilitarian but to weave in a
| "warm" feeling of the season. It did give me that a fuzzy
| feeling for the first few second. Then I was bored; then
| annoyed. Which pretty much follow my feeling of using Tahoe:
| Cool -> Meh -> Uggg!
| a2dam wrote:
| The snow falling in front of the text here really drives the
| point home
| hiccuphippo wrote:
| Reminds me of me when I started building gui applications.
| Hopefully they'll get over it.
| JBiserkov wrote:
| It's a blunt instrument, but this is how I would justify the
| Tahoe icons: .icon { text-align:
| justify; display: none; }
| mgaunard wrote:
| All Apple software just randomly changes UI with every iteration.
|
| It's the software equivalent of fast fashion.
|
| Just avoid it and stay with true and tried staples instead.
| tgtweak wrote:
| Typical growing pains for a 4 trillion dollar company.
| mattcantstop wrote:
| Agreed about the icons, but sweet mercy, that was a challenging
| read with the snowflakes falling in front of the text.
| mark_mc wrote:
| ok right?! i was getting motion sick trying to read it. really
| ironic given the content of the article.
| arunc wrote:
| This talk by Scott Jenson is just fantastic and he explains some
| nuances and missed opportunities
|
| https://youtu.be/1fZTOjd_bOQ?si=Kiyy_W3Zg3jkCWLG
| eviks wrote:
| > I was reading Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines from 1992
| and found this nice illustration: > Fast forward to 2025
|
| The past wasn't as rosy: while the left column is purposefully
| confusing (the icons don't match the description), the lack of
| keyboard shortcuts is just bad design "for the sake of
| emptiness". It degrades, rather than enhances, the "usability of
| the interface"
|
| And re. icons: while this is correct
|
| > The main function of an icon is to help you find what you are
| looking for faster.
|
| The following isn't as straight-forward
|
| > Perhaps counter-intuitively, adding an icon to everything is
| exactly the wrong thing to do. To stand out, things need to be
| different. But if everything has an icon, nothing stands out.
|
| Not really, there is plenty of difference - length, the presense
| of ... ellipsis ..., the presence of a keyboard shortcut, the
| icon itself. This combo gives visual cues without reading, so
| improves the ease of finding. Yes, it would be better to have
| colors here and there, but then you have the following
| fundamental issue:
|
| > Look how much faster you can find Save or Share in the right
| variant:
|
| But " _Save_ " is something I do NOT want to find fast, I never
| use that menu item! So I'd prefer the slighly worse (but not bad)
| busy version rather than a highlight of useless menu items and no
| icons for the menus I'd actually use!
|
| Of course, there is an easy way out - user customization to match
| user needs (maybe you never use shortcuts, fine, remove the
| "noise" then; maybe you don't care about "Save", fine, remove the
| icon there), but that was anathema even in 1992.
|
| (but otherwise very good criticism of the basic design fails like
| tiny size, inconsistency, lack of vertical alignment, bad
| metaphors, etc.)
| gonational wrote:
| Another great one from Tonsky:
|
| https://tonsky.me/blog/disenchantment/
| nja wrote:
| This makes me think of QGIS. I've recently been learning it for a
| couple different projects. It's an incredibly powerful and
| configurable tool, but its learning curve is incredibly steep. A
| big reason for this is that the UI is almost entirely
| toolbar+button based -- but the meaning of all of the button
| icons are completely opaque to a new user. And, making things
| worse, there's no way to change the UI to show text next to
| buttons. So every time a user wants to do something, even if
| following instructions that say "click the add feature button",
| they have to hunt around for it.
|
| QGIS is free software, so it can be somewhat excused vs a billion
| dollar company. But they could really benefit from some UX
| expertise...
| w10-1 wrote:
| This is a stunning catalog of UI hypocrisy, a call to action for
| fans and haters.
|
| But what's interesting is why such hypocrisy persists - in
| particular, why so bad now?
|
| Yes, designers might need to make work for themselves; yes, a new
| OS has to seem new, to justify upgrades and convince younglings
| that this isn't the oldsters' ride; but haventt these always been
| true?
|
| What's different is Apple's slide into disorganization, as it
| spreads work around the globe in exchange for market access, and
| internal leaders coast in their mutual non-aggression pacts.
|
| What remains of the center can issue global orders (adopt the
| liquid glass aesthetic; put icons on every action) and the
| periphery can comply - nominally, imperfectly, and
| inconsistently. Quality issues come to be tolerated like chronic
| inflammation, and even deployed in passive-aggressive turf
| battles.
|
| "Back in the day" everyone would be pulled into a rock-tumbler
| room and grind it out. That's neither possible nor wanted today
| (as game theory effaced the requisite obliviousness).
|
| What to do? Many YC companies have bonding time, where scattered
| teams join up for intense periods to restore alignment.
| Otherwise, the Apple might be ripe for a round of organizational
| consolidation.
|
| Personally, I think internal competition with some misses and
| inconsistencies are a good thing long term. Inflammation is not
| cancer, and there are better ways to tamp it down.
| az_reth wrote:
| Every few months, I will get tired of the current look of my
| status bar in i3 (or sway on my laptop). For the icons I will go
| to https://www.nerdfonts.com/, search for ones that look cool,
| and copy paste them to the relevant-ish sections.
|
| Apparently I'm qualified to be a designer for Apple.
| divan wrote:
| Next article should be about snow on web page and readability.
| diimdeep wrote:
| I just got old iPhone 4s with iOS 9 from drawer, and hour later
| managed to downgrade to iOS 6, uhh, shapes and colors on these
| icons is something and it's got 3d dock at the bottom that looks
| just like dock from OSX 10.7, what a blast from the past.
|
| links for those interested in downgrading:
|
| https://github.com/LukeZGD/Legacy-iOS-Kit/wiki/How-to-Use
|
| https://github.com/LukeZGD/Legacy-iOS-Kit/wiki/Restore-32-bi...
|
| https://github.com/LukeZGD/EverPwnage
|
| https://sideloadly.io
| haykerman wrote:
| This is why it's important for consumer devices to be "hackable".
| I'm not saying provide 15 different stock themes for the OS. I'm
| saying open up the OS interfaces/APIs enough for the community to
| build their own themes. Give some control back to the power
| users.
| travisgriggs wrote:
| I feel like modern design, in so many cases, missed the science
| for the symptoms.
|
| "It shouldn't look cluttered" --> "Apply ever increasing amounts
| of padding/margin everywhere"
|
| "keep it simple" --> "monochrome is the happy place", etc
|
| etc
| xeckr wrote:
| Man that pre-XP Windows menu really had soul. I miss it.
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| What's your suggestion to deal with Apple's current fail? Wait
| until Tahoe's successor(s) or leave for good? When Jony Ive left,
| Apple managed to listen to their customers and quickly got rid of
| the Touch Bar thing, reintroduced a physical Esc key, etc. so
| there's hope left, isn't there?
| bigyabai wrote:
| > Apple managed to listen to their customers and quickly got
| rid of the Touch Bar thing, reintroduced a physical Esc key,
| etc. so
|
| Those are all hardware upgrades that Apple profits from. What
| incentive does Apple have to make the App Store better, or
| improve the visual clarity in the iOS and macOS interface?
| Shouldn't we be seeing downward pressure _there_ too, if
| innovation can be generalized to software?
|
| Most users don't have a say in the matter, and Apple has
| exploited their ambivalence for decades. If you're the sort of
| person who cares, you're not Apple's target audience.
| charles_f wrote:
| Great article, once you find how to deactivate the snowflakes.
|
| This is only an opinion, but it feels like UX in general is
| moving towards making things cute rather than usable. Liquid
| glass is a case in point.
|
| This is useful to a point, in the same sense that one might
| beauty, but when this is all you care about, it becomes a
| problem.
| kensai wrote:
| However something should be clear here: the author mentions the
| UI guidelines from 1992. These are not current. And definitely
| not some kind of permanent law.
| cush wrote:
| This is so well written
| gambiting wrote:
| You know what's the other thing that's hard to justify - the
| incredibly distracting falling snow background.
| mrexcess wrote:
| Some really excellent points, here. I think reading the old HIG
| documents should be mandatory in UI design, and departure from it
| should require serious justification.
|
| One small nitpick: the ellipsis reuse in item #8 - that's
| actually valid and would have been back in the 1990s as well. A
| menu item that is followed by an ellipsis indicates that
| selecting that menu option will open a dialog box. Inconsistently
| applied, but that's always been the meaning.
| yayitswei wrote:
| Love Tonsky's articles. My favorite is about centering things:
| https://tonsky.me/blog/centering/
|
| He has a knack for putting words to the vague frustrations I feel
| but can't quite articulate. How does he find so many perfect
| examples that nail exactly what's wrong?
| zythyx wrote:
| Are they really trying to tell me how bad the icons on a Mac are
| while presenting the website with a constant snow animation,
| which when turned off turns into a horrible bright yellow colour,
| and the dark mode toggle is a joke turning the website into a
| pitch black nothing where your mouse becomes a torch...
| dbgrman wrote:
| I miss the time of Expose and Mission Control, 3 finger drag,
| touch-to-tap, force click, even natural scrolling, Macbook Air,
| Magnetic magsafe.
|
| Then something changed.
|
| Touch bar was a miss. LaunchPad was a miss. I don't see a use of
| "Stage manager". iPad has gone to shit. Widgets came back, on
| mac... for no reason.
|
| In Tahoe, the new spotlight search is one of the better features
| of Tahoe but i am fine with Alfred. But by and large, there are
| more annoyances in Tahoe than improvements.
|
| For the iPhone and liquid glass, I am convinced that it was done
| to force people to upgrade to a new device. There *has* to be a
| reason to upgrade, and when hardware and software feature
| plateau, then we even the planned obsolescence era.
| reaperducer wrote:
| The irony is that Tahoe ships with a new screen saver that
| celebrates the simplicity and elegance of the original Mac's user
| interface design.
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| I think the first graphic is a bit misleading because it omits
| the shortcuts in the more legible left hand side. I love menus
| that reveal shortcuts. I agree with the main thrust of the
| article though.
| travisvn wrote:
| Does anyone have a good method for avoiding accidentally
| accepting an "upgrade" notification from Sequoia to Tahoe?
|
| With the potential to set off the installation flow with the
| wrong click (when its being shown over-and-over again), it makes
| me anxious and feel like I'm not even in control of my own
| computer anymore.
|
| For the time being, I've installed a management profile to defer
| updates, disabled the Settings options for automatic updates, and
| used "Quiet You!" to try and keep the notifications at bay.
|
| But the maximum deferral time for profiles is 90 days, so if
| anyone knows of a better solution or work-around, please let me
| know
| dblitt wrote:
| Make sure to keep a backup of your Sequoia install
| tonymet wrote:
| The 90s marketplace was very different. Most of Apple's customers
| were English speaking with a high reading level. Even in the US
| market, that is no longer the case.
|
| I agree the icons look cluttered, but they are likely addressing
| the fact that most users may not comprehend the meaning of those
| actions.
| jojobas wrote:
| It's hard to justify caring about one company's cosmetic design
| decisions.
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