Tahoe is the first macos (and ios) upgrade I'm avoiding.
I'd already had to enable a bunch of macos accessibility features (increase contrast, reduce transparency) for years just to make it less crappy. Every release gets less usable for the sake of looking fancy.
Ever since GUIs became (flat) UXs everything has gone to shit. Not that GUIs didn't also suck, but I could at least distinguish controls from labels.
I remember reading John Siracusa's long Mac OS X reviews, and their details of how the GUI changed, often for the worse - i.e. less usable. One of the first notes I remember was when colour labels in Finder switched from highlighting the entire file ( easily visible ) to becoming just a little coloured dot which is easy to miss while scrolling.
Don't even get me started on Apple Music, which is one of top 3 worst designed apps I've ever used.
> colour labels in Finder switched from highlighting the entire file
One of the reasons I continue to subscribe (sigh) to the Path Finder (Finder replacement) app, which offers whole-line highlighting (coloring) of tagged files.
(It also has a great function to batch-rename files — including with regex find and replace, and including the ability to save and load renaming algorithms.)
Not affiliated, just a very happy user (apart from the subscription licensing model, that is).
I really want to like Path Finder. It looks like it might be nearly perfect for me. But I am intensely opposed to a file manager that requires internet access to activate in order for your subscription to be validated. It's such an offensive model.
The advantage of the colored dot is that it's easy to show that a file has multiple tags by putting several dots next to each other. IIRC the old way only let you have one tag on a file? Multiple tags are super useful for me, I tag all my art files as some combination of in progress/done/commissions/paid, and use saved searches to decide what I'm gonna work on today.
> Ever since GUIs became (flat) UXs everything has gone to shit. Not that GUIs didn't also suck, but I could at least distinguish controls from labels.
One of the nice things about Tahoe is that liquid glass does a better job of distinguishing controls from other elements, at least most of the time. But they need to do a better job refining some of the transparency effects to make it more consistent. For example in Safari, with a medium grey background on a page, the controls have contrast from the toolbar surface and the borders and glass effect give them a nice depth. But with a dark grey background all the contrast between the controls and the toolbar almost disappear, and only the borders give any real distinction. Its even worse on light or white backgrounds, where since the borders in the liquid glass elements tend to be light/white colored in the first place, even they disappear. The transparency effects can be nice, but someone else's choices for a site background shouldn't be having such a dramatic impact on the actual UI of the computer.
Supply chain attacks means I can no longer do dev work without a container. On a Mac this means running linux containers which need a base linux VM. I've stared using Podman. It does the job.
On linux this means the same (except the VM isn't required), which gives a more elastic experience for mem/cpu/gpu.
MacOS 26 crosses the line. My next machine with be linux.
macOS Tahoe is the second time that I have felt this kind of frustration with an operating system since I jumped from the Microsoft ship during Windows 8 and their "Metro" iPad-envy crap.
Did some Apple CxO let their brother-in-law's cousin's nephew have a go at managing all the teams? It's not like "oh, these kinds of bugs are easy to overlook, and a low priority, they'll be fixed soon" and they do. But rather, Tahoe is full of moments like "HOW the hell could the richest company on Earth not have seen this for a whole YEAR?? and HOW did none of the beta testers complain about it??!"
It's unbelievable: Some basic UI is LITERALLY (not an exaggeration) unreadable on the dumbass "glass" implementation. There are blatant rendering bugs and placeholders still in the shipped version (just look at the Contacts app).
DRM slowdowns have crippled the Music and TV apps so much that I literally cancelled my subscription and went to just pirating the content.
I'll never go back to Windows and I'll still buy MacBooks, but maybe I'll start exploring Linux a bit more. Things like Omarchy etc. seem genuinely tempting.
Just Apple being Apple. They finally invented the innovative groundbreaking software UI paradigm, previously implemented in competing products 10-15 years ago.
To all Apple fans: it'll pass. You just have to wait it out. The good part, in 10-15 years Apple will catch up in ergonomics with today's KDE (that's from where they copy, it seems).
I encountered an interesting snag with the new UI while scrolling through Slack. Suddenly the glass Huddle button was glowing with a golden-yellow hue which drew my eye, but I wasn't sure why, it didn't seem like anyone had started a call...
It turned out I had scrolled the content such that a yellow smiley emoji was positioned directly underneath the Huddle button, and the glass effect dispersed the color to the edges of the control.
There is a long-established convention that Mac OS visually distinguishes "default" buttons from others to guide the user toward a certain action. A button that changes colors depending on nearby content subverts that expectation.
Although I should say I've been using Tahoe for a month and so far that has only happened to me once, it's also the only time in my entire lifetime of using Mac OS. Generally the UI is fine but it's definitely not the best-looking release. (Why does a random subset of menu items have icons now, exactly?)
That's fascinating!
Maybe the reason for "odd" macOS view is that the designers are not from the European cultural circle, and what we took as a good design is only our bias?
Bravo. I did a bunch of color science study over a couple years while at Google, the work turned into Material You. A large motivation of it was the intellectual poverty of monochrome and how software design sort of died, in my humble opinion, post iOS 7.
I used to call iOS "Yves Klein" (i.e. blue everywhere) but the black and white x 0 understanding of transparency x science of contrast is the real offense, especially post Liquid Glass
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[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 37.8 ms ] threadI'd already had to enable a bunch of macos accessibility features (increase contrast, reduce transparency) for years just to make it less crappy. Every release gets less usable for the sake of looking fancy.
Ever since GUIs became (flat) UXs everything has gone to shit. Not that GUIs didn't also suck, but I could at least distinguish controls from labels.
I remember reading John Siracusa's long Mac OS X reviews, and their details of how the GUI changed, often for the worse - i.e. less usable. One of the first notes I remember was when colour labels in Finder switched from highlighting the entire file ( easily visible ) to becoming just a little coloured dot which is easy to miss while scrolling.
Don't even get me started on Apple Music, which is one of top 3 worst designed apps I've ever used.
One of the reasons I continue to subscribe (sigh) to the Path Finder (Finder replacement) app, which offers whole-line highlighting (coloring) of tagged files.
(It also has a great function to batch-rename files — including with regex find and replace, and including the ability to save and load renaming algorithms.)
Not affiliated, just a very happy user (apart from the subscription licensing model, that is).
One of the nice things about Tahoe is that liquid glass does a better job of distinguishing controls from other elements, at least most of the time. But they need to do a better job refining some of the transparency effects to make it more consistent. For example in Safari, with a medium grey background on a page, the controls have contrast from the toolbar surface and the borders and glass effect give them a nice depth. But with a dark grey background all the contrast between the controls and the toolbar almost disappear, and only the borders give any real distinction. Its even worse on light or white backgrounds, where since the borders in the liquid glass elements tend to be light/white colored in the first place, even they disappear. The transparency effects can be nice, but someone else's choices for a site background shouldn't be having such a dramatic impact on the actual UI of the computer.
On linux this means the same (except the VM isn't required), which gives a more elastic experience for mem/cpu/gpu.
MacOS 26 crosses the line. My next machine with be linux.
macOS Tahoe is the second time that I have felt this kind of frustration with an operating system since I jumped from the Microsoft ship during Windows 8 and their "Metro" iPad-envy crap.
Did some Apple CxO let their brother-in-law's cousin's nephew have a go at managing all the teams? It's not like "oh, these kinds of bugs are easy to overlook, and a low priority, they'll be fixed soon" and they do. But rather, Tahoe is full of moments like "HOW the hell could the richest company on Earth not have seen this for a whole YEAR?? and HOW did none of the beta testers complain about it??!"
It's unbelievable: Some basic UI is LITERALLY (not an exaggeration) unreadable on the dumbass "glass" implementation. There are blatant rendering bugs and placeholders still in the shipped version (just look at the Contacts app).
DRM slowdowns have crippled the Music and TV apps so much that I literally cancelled my subscription and went to just pirating the content.
I'll never go back to Windows and I'll still buy MacBooks, but maybe I'll start exploring Linux a bit more. Things like Omarchy etc. seem genuinely tempting.
Seriously, what was wrong with brushed aluminum and leather and wood?
To all Apple fans: it'll pass. You just have to wait it out. The good part, in 10-15 years Apple will catch up in ergonomics with today's KDE (that's from where they copy, it seems).
It turned out I had scrolled the content such that a yellow smiley emoji was positioned directly underneath the Huddle button, and the glass effect dispersed the color to the edges of the control.
There is a long-established convention that Mac OS visually distinguishes "default" buttons from others to guide the user toward a certain action. A button that changes colors depending on nearby content subverts that expectation.
Although I should say I've been using Tahoe for a month and so far that has only happened to me once, it's also the only time in my entire lifetime of using Mac OS. Generally the UI is fine but it's definitely not the best-looking release. (Why does a random subset of menu items have icons now, exactly?)
"Liquid Glass" well all out on that, starting from the stupid name.
None of the justifications in Apple's PR were based on classic UI design guidelines or HCI best practices.
I used to call iOS "Yves Klein" (i.e. blue everywhere) but the black and white x 0 understanding of transparency x science of contrast is the real offense, especially post Liquid Glass
https://support.apple.com/guide/voiceover/welcome/mac