This is also what's annoying with most model generated artifacts. They want every bullet point with an emoji. Even worse is an HTML artifact will be littered with chips/pill style "informative" boxes. So much useless distraction. I need something fine tuned by Tufte
I’m still on Sequoia because of all the Tahoe complaints. Not so much the rounded corners, but I heard performance was poor. Have updates to Tahoe improved things?
No good reason to be excited about the old garbage UI returning after the new garbage had been trashed.
> This updated advice in the HIG is perfect.
> Use an icon to highlight the most common actions and key features of your app
Saving a document is the one of the most common actions in your average app, but I * never* need an icon there in the menu, there is no benefit in focusing my attention on an action I always do with a shortcut!
The perfect advice would be easy and powerful user customization, so that, for example, I could right click on the app's File>Save menu and select an option to hide the icon, reformat the rich text field and have this change propagate in all the other apps.
Or click on a web link from someone who has already done it better and add the theme.
Then I wouldn't even care about the back and forth design changes between major OS releases.
And that could also fix another sin in the screenshot - the text is not vertically aligned! "visual consistency" misunderstood
"it’s proof that the rot has been rooted out of Apple’s software design team"
I know little about Apple, but have quite a bit of experience with how software products get "designed". Goofy and offensive things happen when corporations decide not to pay attention to customers.
The decision to ignore customer and focus on market wow is not the software design team. It is a systemic and structural thing.
The icons in menu items is one of the reasons I'm still on Sequoia. This settles it; I'll just stay on Sequoia until Golden Gate is released.
I can't say the following for sure, but there's evidence of it: One of Apple's real strengths and differentiators is that it listens to customer feedback to the point that it will say: "Hey, this was dumb. Customer feedback proves it. Let's just get rid of it like it never happened."
Other examples include getting rid of the earlier getting rid of Magsafe.
I don't know whether it's something taught in Apple School, but in the absence of not doing dumb things in the first place, which seems to be unavoidable in the real world with real people, it's probably the next best thing. And it may be enough better than the norm from tech companies that it's a real cultural differentiator.
TIL about the proliferation of menu item icons in Tahoe. Perhaps I missed the outcry when Tahoe came out, but I got around to upgrading to it only a couple months ago, and this was not a change that stood out.
Sometimes who can't be bothered to make the text on their website not extremely tiny when viewing on mobile shouldn't be writing multi-page rants on the other people's UI.
On the sites I visit often I use uBlock Origin to make fonts large enough for me to read (damn you, presbyopia!). Otherwise I use Ctrl-+ to increase the font size (Daring Fireball, for example).
Glad for the change, but a lot of the criticism overlooks that at some point we won't be the target audience of UI/UX anymore.
Flyouts, dropdowns, and other text menus make sense to me, but I could see how they might be alien and uncomfortable to someone that has only ever experienced mobile interfaces.
The reverse is true for sure, nowhere do I feel more frustrated and old-brained then trying to make sense of a new mobile app that everyone else seems to think is great.
I would be far more sad at the battery life of any Intel Mac anymore! Having been on Apple Silicon for some five years now, I can't imagine going back.
My buddy runs an independent video production company and bought a specced out Mac Pro for $12,000 in 2019. Probably still quite capable and battery life doesn't matter on that.
But I also understand it being deprecated and for Apple it's only gonna simplify platform improvements going forward to drop a second supported architecture. And at any point in computing history, 6 years was a decent lifespan for a machine.
I strongly dislike Ive's influence overall, but skeuomorphism made it incredibly difficult and cost-prohibitive for a single indie developer to make an app that felt like a polished first-party experience for iOS. I'm glad it's gone. You're still welcome to do it if you want and you have the whimsy and artistic talent (or design team) for it.
For those that haven’t seen this very well done write up about Tahoe’s use of icons, I would definitely recommend it: https://tonsky.me/blog/tahoe-icons/
I'm happy to see the HIG (Human Interface Guidelines) referenced in the post.
I was unaware Apple still maintained such a document? There was a time when TOG's HIG [1] was the Bible for the Mac interface. UI nerds at Apple (and likely elsewhere) would enjoy debating/interpreting them for some project or another. (I don't recall anyone being burned at the stake but there were definitely discussions that could reach a heretical pitch.)
The HIG preached a kind of nuance and balance—when it allowed for somewhat less "staid" UI elements it would advise moderation.
This came about in an era when the graphical user interface was a fairly new thing to the public and inconsistency (Do What Thou Wilt) would only have destabilized the gentle adoption Apple was treading.
It was a marketable advantage for Apple as well. Consistency on the DOS side, as far as I know, came about only as companies tried to adopt familiar patterns from popular apps of the day. (Related: I talked to an engineer at Adobe about the hideous UI (my opinion) of Adobe Acrobat on the Mac and was told they wanted it to look like it belonged alongside the suite of Microsoft Office apps. le sigh.)
Random icons for the days of the week don’t even make much sense. If they at least iconified the moon, Tyr, Woden, etc., it would at least have a leg to stand on, but here it’s like the randomized avatars so many services assign user accounts.
MacOS 27 Beta seems to actually fix a lot of my complaints with Tahoe. I had cynically been believing Apple was simply going to let macOS rot and not fix these major annoyances.
(Rather interestingly, menus still have icons if a menu option will simply launch another app, a specific folder that has an icon, or will perform a specific action like a window resize or category sort change that already has an icon you could click elsewhere.)
They also have cleaned up the mess of differently rounded borders (not complete yet but progress is being made). The OS also feels a lot less sluggish. I had gone back to Sequoia simply because performance was so bad.
The poor quality of macOS Tahoe is by design as it is a "transition" release - a transition OS release is often like a beta quality release (of some feature) and often features a "break" (like loss of hardware support or EOL etc.). It is meant to frustrate the user, so that the "next" OS release (which fixes all the bugs of the "beta" features is more "appealing" and hyped (just read all the comments praising the new release here and elsewhere :). Apparently Tahoe is going to be the last macOS that supports Intel macs - that means it will continue to frustrate Intel Mac users and force them to consider buying the Apple ARM models if they want to use the newer macOS. A similar thing happened with Catalina too after it dropped support for 32-bit apps - many people chose to remain in the previous version (Mojave) because it was less "buggy" / appealing than Catalina. Followed by the "hype" of how the next version (Big Sur) was "so much better". Microsoft also does this with Windows OS - e.g. Windows Vista and Windows 8 both can be considered "transition" releases that are infamous due to their "beta" quality features and / or frustrating UI features. (This tactic of boring and / or frustrating the viewers is more common in many popular TV series, where one or more episodes is often deliberately made that way - by focusing on something mundane and meaningless that doesn't really move the story forward, so that it makes the following and often climax episodes more exciting, fulfilling and enjoyable. E.g. Breaking Bad s03e10 - The Fly - the most boring episode of season 3).
Intel Macs are ancient and there isn’t a compelling reason to really even need to run Tahoe or Golden Gate on them. I still use a 2020 iMac, which is getting a little sluggish for some tasks, runs Sequoia mostly (main use is a GitLab runner for macOS based pipelines like testing iOS and macOS apps), or occasionally booting into Catalina for some ancient software I need to use a few times a year that doesn’t run on anything newer.
55 comments
[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 38.5 ms ] threadI installed VLC on my phone, and I couldn't figure anything out, because it was covered in vague post-skeuomorphic icons without text.
> This updated advice in the HIG is perfect.
> Use an icon to highlight the most common actions and key features of your app
Saving a document is the one of the most common actions in your average app, but I * never* need an icon there in the menu, there is no benefit in focusing my attention on an action I always do with a shortcut!
The perfect advice would be easy and powerful user customization, so that, for example, I could right click on the app's File>Save menu and select an option to hide the icon, reformat the rich text field and have this change propagate in all the other apps. Or click on a web link from someone who has already done it better and add the theme. Then I wouldn't even care about the back and forth design changes between major OS releases.
And that could also fix another sin in the screenshot - the text is not vertically aligned! "visual consistency" misunderstood
I know little about Apple, but have quite a bit of experience with how software products get "designed". Goofy and offensive things happen when corporations decide not to pay attention to customers.
The decision to ignore customer and focus on market wow is not the software design team. It is a systemic and structural thing.
I can't say the following for sure, but there's evidence of it: One of Apple's real strengths and differentiators is that it listens to customer feedback to the point that it will say: "Hey, this was dumb. Customer feedback proves it. Let's just get rid of it like it never happened."
Other examples include getting rid of the earlier getting rid of Magsafe.
I don't know whether it's something taught in Apple School, but in the absence of not doing dumb things in the first place, which seems to be unavoidable in the real world with real people, it's probably the next best thing. And it may be enough better than the norm from tech companies that it's a real cultural differentiator.
news.ycombinator.com##:style(font-size: 18pt !important)
myanimelist.net##:style(font-size: 14pt !important)
old.reddit.com##*:style(font-size: 17pt !important)
Flyouts, dropdowns, and other text menus make sense to me, but I could see how they might be alien and uncomfortable to someone that has only ever experienced mobile interfaces.
The reverse is true for sure, nowhere do I feel more frustrated and old-brained then trying to make sense of a new mobile app that everyone else seems to think is great.
https://bwiggs.com/notebook/queens-duck/
Bad customer experience for a company like Apple.
But I also understand it being deprecated and for Apple it's only gonna simplify platform improvements going forward to drop a second supported architecture. And at any point in computing history, 6 years was a decent lifespan for a machine.
Removal of skeuomorphism, removal of essential ports, making MacBooks so thin that they wouldn’t work without overheating to name a few.
I am so glad he is gone now, it’s not all bells and whistles for Apple now, but at least it’s way more pleasing to own Apple devices any more.
Main lesson seems to be, it's good to put icons on the standard, most frequently used actions. And make them colorful. That helps the eye find them.
Edit: also consistency and legibility. So basically "don't design it so it's bad!"
"On the upside: it’s not that hard anymore to design better than Apple!"
Good one to keep in mind.
I was unaware Apple still maintained such a document? There was a time when TOG's HIG [1] was the Bible for the Mac interface. UI nerds at Apple (and likely elsewhere) would enjoy debating/interpreting them for some project or another. (I don't recall anyone being burned at the stake but there were definitely discussions that could reach a heretical pitch.)
The HIG preached a kind of nuance and balance—when it allowed for somewhat less "staid" UI elements it would advise moderation.
This came about in an era when the graphical user interface was a fairly new thing to the public and inconsistency (Do What Thou Wilt) would only have destabilized the gentle adoption Apple was treading.
It was a marketable advantage for Apple as well. Consistency on the DOS side, as far as I know, came about only as companies tried to adopt familiar patterns from popular apps of the day. (Related: I talked to an engineer at Adobe about the hideous UI (my opinion) of Adobe Acrobat on the Mac and was told they wanted it to look like it belonged alongside the suite of Microsoft Office apps. le sigh.)
From 1992, see Page 72 for menu widgets: [1] https://vintageapple.org/inside_r/pdf/Human_Interface_Guidel...
(Rather interestingly, menus still have icons if a menu option will simply launch another app, a specific folder that has an icon, or will perform a specific action like a window resize or category sort change that already has an icon you could click elsewhere.)
They also have cleaned up the mess of differently rounded borders (not complete yet but progress is being made). The OS also feels a lot less sluggish. I had gone back to Sequoia simply because performance was so bad.
Deprecating really old stuff is fine.