It's still a bit jarring to me to see how far Apple embraced form over function with iOS and subsequently macOS. I remember reading the Human Interface Guidelines from the late Mac OS 9/early Mac OS X days and being taken aback by the level of detail and thought that went into those interfaces. Don't get me wrong, some things made no sense (brushed metal was... a choice) but there was a certain level of polish that I don't think exists anymore.
NOnok22kon3 小时前
it's market changed
it started as a computer for professionals
now its for people who want to look cool. so form is much more important than function, it's literally what you buy
WPwpm2 小时前
Haha yeah! Mac users just buy them to look cool while they write their whatever in the coffee shop! This is definitely not a preposterous and outdated observation/joke!
DSdsego46 分钟前
Wasn't there a trend where kids were just wearing dead apple watches as accessories? It's just a status symbol, like gold bracelets.
ANandrepd45 分钟前
Sounds like it hit a nerve to be honest
QUQuothling1 小时前
I challenge you to find a laptop that can do what my macbook air m1 with 8gb of ram does at the $899 it was through the education store. No fan, awesome battery life, good trackpad and keyboard, the ability to not get hot while using it.
I'm a senior platform engineer who at the time I bought it was a senior software developer, who can still use it for my daily tasks despite it having 8gb of ram. Until very recently the 32gb T14 I had ad work was frankly worse performant than the little air, while having a battery life of around 45 minutes a fan sounding like a jetengine and a keyboard so hot it made the sun jealous. My new model is way faster than my macbook air though, but the old model was technically newer than the air. Obviously the comparisson isn't completely fair since we run a lot of corporate enterprise stuff on our laptops, but still.
I'd really like a Linux laptop, but a Framework laptop is expensive (and it has loud fans and runs hot). A tuxedo is even more expensive and has fans where you'd place it on your legs for whatever reason, and runs hot. Looking at the laptop market now, I can't see what you'd buy. A week ago I would've said the Neo (if the 8gb of ram holds up as well on the mobile chip as it does on the m1), but today I'm guessing a refurbished air with 16gb would be the only real option for someone who want's a cool low noise machine with decent battery time.
Whether you run OS/X or Asahi, I really can't see what you'd buy other than these. At least if you actually use it on your lap and don't just have it sit in a dock on a table.
Then again, I'm the sort of person who would buy the pink neo because it would fuck with the perception people have of my mid 40 Scandinavian conservativeish dad look. So maybe it is just about the message?
2121asdffdsa1225 分钟前
Are there any laptops where the cooling is handled by the screen backside?
RErefactor_master2 小时前
Is that why their laptops routinely beat the competition year after year in reviews and reliability surveys? Because they “look cool”? I’m going to need some more numbers on that one.
FIFireBeyond2 小时前
All my devices are Apple: laptop, Studio, display, phone, iPad, watch...
I will say that Apple has solidified on the design and reliability "recently". But let's not pretend that the MBP line, to pick on one, didn't go through some rough rough days. I've had laptops that had the delaminating screen, the 'single grain of sand can ruin it' butterfly keyboard, hell, I've had two models that had recalled logic boards. Early Magsafe connectors (fantastic invention) where the rubber would routinely fail even without tension (I had two that failed, exposing bare wire, even though they spent the entirety of their life on a desk, routed through a cable organizer, far away from any UV sunlight hitting them directly.
But now? Things are much, much more solid.
HAhappymellon1 小时前
You missed the late Intel MBPs which I remember heating up hotter than the sun and exhausting it out the back which made the touch bar uncomfortable to touch!
TYTylerE1 小时前
Even the worst MBP is light years better than the plasticky crap on the Windows side.
ALal_borland8 小时前
While I wholeheartedly agree, I suspect the required backgrounds are to create a uniform format between system, where VisionOS requires round icons for more reliable eye tracking.
It seems like every OS got a little harder to use in order to better vibe with VisionOS, the least popular platform they have.
While I applaud the commitment to building a new platform, I don’t like that’s is coming at the expense of the others.
CMcmovq1 小时前
I understand this logic, but at some point it makes sense to design the system for the millions of people on macs rather than make compromises for the sake of dozens of Vision Pro users.
BUBugsJustFindMe8 小时前
> VisionOS requires round icons for more reliable eye tracking
I'm confused here. What do you think is the relationship between round icons and eye tracking?
ALal_borland7 小时前
They found having round icons made people look at the center, rather than the edges and corners. Since the UX relies entirely on where the user is looking, this made it more reliable.
I remember reading it in the HIG when VisionOS came out and everyone was complaining about the shape. I went looking to see if there was a reason, and there was.
BUBugsJustFindMe7 小时前
That's interesting, but I think this is solvable in better ways. If the VisionOS icon grid doesn't have a voronoi hit map, then IMO they're doing a stupid. There's a _lot_ of space between icons in the grid. It should be plenty of distance to reliably determine that you're looking nearer to the center of a particular one.
ALal_borland6 小时前
Here is what they say:
> In general, give an interactive item a rounded shape. People’s eyes tend to be drawn toward the corners in a shape, making it difficult to keep looking at the shape’s center. The more rounded an item’s shape, the easier it is for people to use their eyes to target it.
The page also talks about leaving enough visual space between elements as well as many other considerations for this type of interface.
https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...
NRnrightnour8 小时前
Are you sure visionOS requires it? Having an icon be a few px smaller so a microphone can stick out, doesn't seem like a big deal for tracking.
ALal_borland7 小时前
The thing sticking outside of the icon draws the eye to it, which means your focus is at the edge instead of the center, which makes for a more error prone experience.
Since the eyes are the cursor, this is a problem. Desktop and mobile don’t have this issue.
WIWillAdams5 小时前
Obvious solution, two different icons, round one for Vision OS, more shapely one for everyone else.
MRmrkstu4 小时前
Or squirqle jail just on vision OS
UNunknown2 小时前
[deleted]
RYryukoposting3 小时前
> The thing sticking outside of the icon draws the eye to it, which means your focus is at the edge instead of the center, which makes for a more error prone experience.
And Apple decided this was a problem with icons, rather than a problem with the way they implemented their vision tracking? Believable, and laughable.
JAjay_kyburz2 小时前
Where you are looking should not be the cursor, that is obviously dumb. Should be where your nose is pointing.
MOmoron4hire7 小时前
Regardless, you don't need to make the hitboxes one-to-one with the graphics. Indeed, doing so tends to make for unreliable hitboxes, so most picking systems have two different, idealized enter and exit hitboxes for each icon.
MBMBCook5 小时前
So what? Thats not MacOS.
I think things are fine on iOS. I don’t mind the rectangles, they fit the grid. That’s how it’s always been.
I don’t care about VisionOS. Circles are odd, whatever.
But the Mac shouldn’t be forced to lose great design because iOS was under different constraints almost 20 years ago. That’s just dumb.
ALal_borland4 小时前
They were trying to make a unified design language across all their operating systems. If iOS and VisionOS both have their icons sitting on uniformly shaped tiles, macOS would break the convention.
I don't like it, but I believe that's the reason why.
MBMBCook4 小时前
Oh I’m sure that’s why they did it. It’s not a good reason. It’s like saying all the food you eat should be beige.
Sure it’s more consistent, but at what cost? You lose all the benefits. It’s like Chesterton’s Fence, except it has a big sign on it saying “beware of bull” and there is a guy nearby saying “you don’t want to let that bull out dude, it’s vicious”.
But you want to take down the fence because it’s not the same style as the one on the pen for the chickens.
TOtomaskafka1 小时前
Also imo touchscreen Mac tap targets. Sigh.
JPjpease6 小时前
Seeing all those old icons makes me realize how much I miss them.
Superficial, perhaps, but they were one of the things I loved about OS X when I made the switch back in 2005 or 2006.
MBMBCook4 小时前
No they were better. Whether someone likes the style better or not (I do) they were FAR more visually distinct from each other which made it much easier to find the program you wanted to use.
Right now my dock is a soup of squircles. I have to scan multiple times to find icons even though I know roughly where they should be.
They aren’t distinct. They don’t stand out.
That was never a problem until last year. 40 years of Mac was fine. Then that.
JOjosho4 小时前
I don't think it's superficial at all.
I genuinely find my apps harder to navigate now than I used to. Part of that is that I have far more apps installed today, but the uniform white borders also contribute. They make every icon look about 20% more similar, which adds just enough friction that scanning for the app I want takes a little longer.
Poorly executed icon shapes were distracting, but when they were done well they provided subtle visual cues that made the interface easier to navigate. I miss that more than I expected.
HBhbn7 小时前
> the much-celebrated Liquid Glass opacity slider
The Liquid Glass slider is an embarrassing outright admission of failure. Apple built its brand as a tastemaker, so to put out this new, controversial design language, and after a year of tweaking, finally throw their hands up and say "we don't know what looks good, you decide" is so disappointing.
That said, all the changes in iOS 27 are such a massive improvement from 26. The first design turnout with Alan Dye gone is making me feel very optimistic of their direction.
WPwpm2 小时前
I'll take an admission of failure over slavishly refusing to and trying to pretend it's fine.
There were plenty of people saying Liquid Glass was fundamentally an utterly flawed, bad design, that even if you subjectively liked the way it looked, that its design philosophy was wrong, and led to logically consistent but unusable and ugly interfaces, all to solve a problem no one had.
I'm cautiously optimistic now that the bozo cardboard box designer dope with the ugly glasses is gone we'll see a quiet but rapid change of direction. I'll take "mea culpa". I'll take "whelp, this shit does actually just suck, here's a slider while we work on something better".
LOlopis1 小时前
To me the cherry on top was that they started modifying how third party icons look to match the Liquid Glass. People started complaining to us that our app icon looked blurry because of it.
ZAzapzupnz4 小时前
> outright admission of failure
Right!? Who's out there going "oh no, translucent is too translucent; opaque is too opaque; but now that I can have 72.93% glass, my life is complete"?
UNuncircle4 小时前
Apple designers
CRcrazygringo7 小时前
I've got to disagree.
I really disliked previously, when icon prominence could be wildly different because one icon takes up the full area with a big square, while another is a circle that necessarily has a significantly smaller area within the same extent. Icons from Apple were all nicely balanced in size, but third-party apps could be anything.
Giving equal visual weight to each icon is an improvement. iOS was a step forward in this direction, and now they finally brought the same standard to Mac.
Squircles aren't ugly, they're functional. "Shape" hasn't disappeared as a distinct visual cue, as the area within the squircle is made of, well... different shapes.
And let's not forget the fact that Macs still effectively use icon masks. A smaller icon is harder to click, because clicking on a transparent area... doesn't click at all. I remember icons like a skinny letter "S" that you had to click just right or you couldn't at all.
BUBugsJustFindMe7 小时前
> Giving equal visual weight to each icon is an improvement.
Equal visual weight is another way of saying less differentiated.
> "Shape" hasn't disappeared as a distinct visual cue, as the area within the squircle is made of, well... different shapes.
Shape refers to a boundary outline, not interior patterning. A square with polkadots is still shaped like a square.
> A smaller icon is harder to click, because clicking on a transparent area... doesn't click at all.
That problem is only tangential to what shape they allow your icon to be within an enclosing NxN hitbox. Assume an implied framework where clicking on them isn't broken.
SOsoulofmischief6 小时前
Some differentiation between elements must be sacrificed in order to build shared UX patterns between them. I think we can definitely go too far in either direction.
An example of a nice compromise would be the macOS menu bar. Most status icons are monotone, which allows the ones with meaningful color differentiation to shine through without being drowned in the noise or increasing user fatigue.
3D3dGrabber49 分钟前
> user fatigue
Citation needed.
What is user fatigue? Can it be empirically measured? Fatigued by what? Too much color? Lack of shape? Too much contrast? Lack of contrast?
When is the last time you were "fatigued" by icons?
Without hard facts the expression is just a wishy-washy way to promote a personal taste.
MAmaterialpoint4 小时前
You seem to conflate different facts that have nothing to do with each other to arrive at a conclusion: There is nothing preventing Apple from not using said click masks while icons retain their distinct shapes. iOS is for mobile, its lessons don't transfer to desktop, and this was proven by Windows 8.
That "squircles aren't ugly because they are functional" - how on Earth can those be mutually exclusive even in recognition? Functional very often is at the cost of making things ugly, the history lesson is that Apple more often than others managed to be both functional and beautiful.
You also conflate convex pixel area with visual weight, but that is false too.
ETetrautmann7 小时前
I’m not a designer but I disagree. I want to be able to easily distinguish apps without much focus or concentration or searching. Making them visually distinct with shape and color is superior. Uniformity is a problem not a target.
UNunknown4 小时前
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VOvoidUpdate1 小时前
Maybe it's just me, but I never really liked the detailed older mac icons, like the examples at the bottom of the page. I've always enjoyed more minimalist, simple user interfaces. And I can understand what Apple are trying to do by standardising their icons on the squircle (even if the execution is a bit iffy sometimes, the big grey border doesn't look great). Though, judging by everyone else's writings, I'm probably in the minority
HOhoistbypetard10 小时前
Hard agree! Not only is it less fun and less visually appealing to me, I think forcing the uniform squircle everywhere makes it harder (than it used to be) to distinguish one app from another by icon alone.
BOboxed9 小时前
In fact the HIG used to explicitly say so with clear examples proving it.
1O1over1378 小时前
and which was backed by scientific evidence from controlled trials and human factors and psychology.
MAmatzie2 小时前
I'm on Tahoe and when i built an app using neutralino js the png icon was way bigger than the other icons, i needed to add padding to make the squircle look normal. So honestly i dont think this is a software thing, its more of designers designing it this way or only using their icon composer software which creates imaginary limitations.
BZbze128 小时前
They've gone too far on enforcing uniformity of icons and abusing liquid glass, but I disagree that arbitrary shapes were better. All the random icon shapes looked cool in isolation, but were harder to scan at a glance. The uniform squircle is a useful constraint.
I wouldn't mind if they allowed something similar to that audio hijack icon, where you require the rounded rect as the guiding frame but are allowed to have some elements protruding out of it. But completely arbitrary shapes are too jarring imo.
TAtambourine_man6 小时前
Early on, when UI/UX was emerging as a discipline, user reaction times and accuracy were measured across a large number of participants. There are many stories during the development of the Lisa and Mac of unexpected user behavior and results.
We shouldn’t be guessing if uniformity helps distinguish between apps or not. We could very easily test it.
But UI/UX has long distanced itself from science, for whatever reason. Maybe because users are so proficient these days that almost anything works. We used to required training on how to use a mouse, menus and windows.
It’s been probably a decade since I’ve heard anyone mention Fitt’s law, for instance, and Liquid Glass atrocities are direct a consequence of disregarding all that was learned in this field.
WPwpm2 小时前
I'm pretty sure Nielsen already tested it, if I had to guess they probably found that different icon shapes are broadly better but that gets ignored because "it's cheaper to use some shitty vector squiggle in a round rect", just like the research that found "icons are better when there is text" is widely ignored too because internationalization costs money.
BZbze128 小时前
I mostly lament the simplification of app icons as an artistic loss, not as a usability loss. Shameless plug, but I made a project based on the idea of icons as pure art with no utility https://www.benedelste.in/post/__001
RYryandrake8 小时前
I can see both sides. Artistic constraints can suck, but on the other hand, for every app with a truly beautiful icon design, like the ones listed in the "It Doesn’t Have to Be Like This" section, how many apps have truly awful icon designs? The dock is prime visual real estate, and as a user, I'd like some kind of constraint that makes it less likely some crazy art style is going to be imposed on my desktop just because I need an app there.
SUsunaookami13 分钟前
Same for Android. Hate adaptive icons...
ALaltern810 小时前
Tahoe was such a huge mess, but I'm hopeful that the new CEO will turn things around and bring things back to normal.
If they do, I'll consider upgrading both OS and laptop, but right now I'm holding on to Sequoia
SCschappim10 小时前
It really was Mac OS X's Vista moment.
Edit: It'll always be Mac OS X to me, not macOS.
FEfelixding7 小时前
Yes! You are not alone. The name Mac OS X has always felt special to me.
ZAzapzupnz5 小时前
Mac OS X 27.
10.27?
But that means there were two each of 10.11, 10.12, 10.13, 10.14, and 10.15 :-)
VLVladVladikoff8 小时前
They have a new head designer too IIRC, but probably is going to take some time for him to slowly move away from the mess he inherited.
HBhbn7 小时前
Alan Dye was brought in during the Jony Ive era when they were launching the first Apple Watch because he came from a fashion/print background. Before Apple really figured out what the Watch was going to be (a health/fitness accessory for your phone) they were going for the "luxury fashion" angle.
Somehow when Ive left, Dye got put in charge of design even though he had zero experience in software design that anyone seems to be aware of. He was criticized for the years following for a lot of bizarre design regressions that were happening across all of Apple's OSes. Then a few months after Dye himself announced Liquid Glass at WWDC last year, he blindsided Apple by accepting a poaching offer from Meta, seemingly because Zuck isn't aware of how untalented the guy is.
Now Stephen Lemay is in charge, who's been at Apple for many years and actually knows stuff about software design. It's said that within the walls of Apple, a lot of people were very happy about the change, and the first showing of design changes we got since then are looking very good for Apple.
TRtroupo3 小时前
> Now Stephen Lemay is in charge, who's been at Apple for many years and actually knows stuff about software design
And who was Dye's second in command, and who was integral in coming up with Liquid Glass, designing it, and forcing it down everyone's throat.
SAsaagarjha6 小时前
[deleted]
HBhbn6 小时前
The bit about internal rumblings at Apple I definitely read from him but the rest is just things we saw play out publicly over the past decade.
TAtambourine_man5 小时前
Gruber does not have a monopoly on disliking Alan Dye’s work. On the contrary, I never met anyone who knew UI design was a thing that liked what he did.
When you’re using a tool for 40 years and someone who really has no clue gets in charge, starts breaking basic functionality for no good reason and affecting your day to day work, it’s not hard to get infuriated.
TRtroupo3 小时前
> slowly move away from the mess he inherited.
The mess he actively implemented and was an integral part of?
Why do people keep thinking that Alan Dye was the only person (apparently with God-like powers) who somehow forced and designed Liquid Glass alone, in isolation, and somehow sneaked it in to every Apple platform.
VIvikingcat9 小时前
Apple CEOs always seem to want to make a splash via hardware (especially since the guy worked in hardware engineering) but it would be nice if an engineer brings more focus on the software as well.
SAsaagarjha9 小时前
Golden Gate is better but it hasn't fixed your icons unfortunately
WIWillAdams5 小时前
The thing which kills me, is that with entirety of the State of California's Gazetteer to pull from, Apple didn't pull a page from Android and use an alphabetically ordered naming scheme so that folks could determine ordering of versions.
UNunknown4 小时前
[deleted]
COCockbrand1 小时前
As an aside, Rogue Amoeba are one of an ecosystem of great and greatly passionate indie software houses for the Mac.
All of them create excellent software with polished UIs, provide excellent support and never forget to have fun. This seems to be unique to the Mac, at least at this scale.
KLklntsky56 分钟前
Any linux kid with a slightest experience with desktop ricing would tell them that uniformly customized icons are a nightmare for visual recognition. Why didn't they run some internal tests, it's so obvious
OUOuterVale6 小时前
My personal take is that icons should conform to the squircle, but have a permitted amount of break out from the core shape. For example, Audio Hijack’s icon as presented in the article should be allowed to have the microphone extend past the border slightly. The squircle should be mandated as the core shape, but with just tad bit of flexibility and shape definition.
This keeps grids feeling proper, organised, and aligned, without feeling like the icons of Android Honeycomb.
MOmortenjorck9 小时前
The great thing about the new multi-layer icon format in Golden Gate is that it finally separates an icon's foreground from the background.
So in theory, it opens the door to returning shape-differentiated icons to MacOS if a future display theme (a successor to the poorly-conceived Clear and Tinted themes) allows the background to be minimized while the foreground is emphasized.
What I would love to see, and should now be possible, is a revision of the Clear theme where the squircle is transparent/refractive and the foreground retains its native color.
BUBugsJustFindMe8 小时前
> This time, however, the changes are genuine improvements. Here’s the refined Automator icon, for example
Uh, maybe. Parts of it are certainly slightly sharper in an unimportant way when viewed at normal icon size and not zoomed way in. I'm not sure that it's any better. And if that Automator icon is the exemplar, then any improvement is extremely marginal. My god it's just such a bad icon. Whoever is managing icon design should be extremely ashamed of themselves.
Show anyone the pre-Tahoe Automator icon and ask them what it depicts and why that fits and they'll be able to tell you that it looks like a robot and robots are used in automation and therefore every time they see the little robot they'll think Automator. Ask them what the post-Tahoe icon depicts and why that fits and they'll be able to tell you fuck all because what the fuck even is that supposed to be if you don't already know.
2121asdffdsa121 小时前
Tangential related, but i find Icons should have a animated tooltip- when hovered over prolonged, they should tell what the program should do in a cyclical svg-animation.
NAnanapipirara3 小时前
Someone posted an old MacOS screenshot on Reddit and it was immediately obvious that the icons without a silhouette were the worst out of all of them.
Like iTunes / Books / App Store. And that's basically what they went with eventually...
Dashboard and Launcher are fine, but they have a reason to be a circle. (Well Launcher less so maybe)
Chrome is terrible, it represents nothing. But I guess it's just a brand.
I wish we could go back to this instead of squircles...
https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/s/9MZsGioCG6
PIpitched3 小时前
The only reason to run MacOS over Linux is the hardware. Arm MacBooks are unreasonably good but don’t support Linux (Asahi is still a bit WIP).
They sell hardware, not software, so the state of things makes sense. It is so disappointing though.
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[delayed]
It's still a bit jarring to me to see how far Apple embraced form over function with iOS and subsequently macOS. I remember reading the Human Interface Guidelines from the late Mac OS 9/early Mac OS X days and being taken aback by the level of detail and thought that went into those interfaces. Don't get me wrong, some things made no sense (brushed metal was... a choice) but there was a certain level of polish that I don't think exists anymore.
it's market changed it started as a computer for professionals now its for people who want to look cool. so form is much more important than function, it's literally what you buy
Haha yeah! Mac users just buy them to look cool while they write their whatever in the coffee shop! This is definitely not a preposterous and outdated observation/joke!
Wasn't there a trend where kids were just wearing dead apple watches as accessories? It's just a status symbol, like gold bracelets.
Sounds like it hit a nerve to be honest
I challenge you to find a laptop that can do what my macbook air m1 with 8gb of ram does at the $899 it was through the education store. No fan, awesome battery life, good trackpad and keyboard, the ability to not get hot while using it. I'm a senior platform engineer who at the time I bought it was a senior software developer, who can still use it for my daily tasks despite it having 8gb of ram. Until very recently the 32gb T14 I had ad work was frankly worse performant than the little air, while having a battery life of around 45 minutes a fan sounding like a jetengine and a keyboard so hot it made the sun jealous. My new model is way faster than my macbook air though, but the old model was technically newer than the air. Obviously the comparisson isn't completely fair since we run a lot of corporate enterprise stuff on our laptops, but still. I'd really like a Linux laptop, but a Framework laptop is expensive (and it has loud fans and runs hot). A tuxedo is even more expensive and has fans where you'd place it on your legs for whatever reason, and runs hot. Looking at the laptop market now, I can't see what you'd buy. A week ago I would've said the Neo (if the 8gb of ram holds up as well on the mobile chip as it does on the m1), but today I'm guessing a refurbished air with 16gb would be the only real option for someone who want's a cool low noise machine with decent battery time. Whether you run OS/X or Asahi, I really can't see what you'd buy other than these. At least if you actually use it on your lap and don't just have it sit in a dock on a table. Then again, I'm the sort of person who would buy the pink neo because it would fuck with the perception people have of my mid 40 Scandinavian conservativeish dad look. So maybe it is just about the message?
Are there any laptops where the cooling is handled by the screen backside?
Is that why their laptops routinely beat the competition year after year in reviews and reliability surveys? Because they “look cool”? I’m going to need some more numbers on that one.
All my devices are Apple: laptop, Studio, display, phone, iPad, watch... I will say that Apple has solidified on the design and reliability "recently". But let's not pretend that the MBP line, to pick on one, didn't go through some rough rough days. I've had laptops that had the delaminating screen, the 'single grain of sand can ruin it' butterfly keyboard, hell, I've had two models that had recalled logic boards. Early Magsafe connectors (fantastic invention) where the rubber would routinely fail even without tension (I had two that failed, exposing bare wire, even though they spent the entirety of their life on a desk, routed through a cable organizer, far away from any UV sunlight hitting them directly. But now? Things are much, much more solid.
You missed the late Intel MBPs which I remember heating up hotter than the sun and exhausting it out the back which made the touch bar uncomfortable to touch!
Even the worst MBP is light years better than the plasticky crap on the Windows side.
While I wholeheartedly agree, I suspect the required backgrounds are to create a uniform format between system, where VisionOS requires round icons for more reliable eye tracking. It seems like every OS got a little harder to use in order to better vibe with VisionOS, the least popular platform they have. While I applaud the commitment to building a new platform, I don’t like that’s is coming at the expense of the others.
I understand this logic, but at some point it makes sense to design the system for the millions of people on macs rather than make compromises for the sake of dozens of Vision Pro users.
> VisionOS requires round icons for more reliable eye tracking I'm confused here. What do you think is the relationship between round icons and eye tracking?
They found having round icons made people look at the center, rather than the edges and corners. Since the UX relies entirely on where the user is looking, this made it more reliable. I remember reading it in the HIG when VisionOS came out and everyone was complaining about the shape. I went looking to see if there was a reason, and there was.
That's interesting, but I think this is solvable in better ways. If the VisionOS icon grid doesn't have a voronoi hit map, then IMO they're doing a stupid. There's a _lot_ of space between icons in the grid. It should be plenty of distance to reliably determine that you're looking nearer to the center of a particular one.
Here is what they say: > In general, give an interactive item a rounded shape. People’s eyes tend to be drawn toward the corners in a shape, making it difficult to keep looking at the shape’s center. The more rounded an item’s shape, the easier it is for people to use their eyes to target it. The page also talks about leaving enough visual space between elements as well as many other considerations for this type of interface. https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...
Are you sure visionOS requires it? Having an icon be a few px smaller so a microphone can stick out, doesn't seem like a big deal for tracking.
The thing sticking outside of the icon draws the eye to it, which means your focus is at the edge instead of the center, which makes for a more error prone experience. Since the eyes are the cursor, this is a problem. Desktop and mobile don’t have this issue.
Obvious solution, two different icons, round one for Vision OS, more shapely one for everyone else.
Or squirqle jail just on vision OS
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> The thing sticking outside of the icon draws the eye to it, which means your focus is at the edge instead of the center, which makes for a more error prone experience. And Apple decided this was a problem with icons, rather than a problem with the way they implemented their vision tracking? Believable, and laughable.
Where you are looking should not be the cursor, that is obviously dumb. Should be where your nose is pointing.
Regardless, you don't need to make the hitboxes one-to-one with the graphics. Indeed, doing so tends to make for unreliable hitboxes, so most picking systems have two different, idealized enter and exit hitboxes for each icon.
So what? Thats not MacOS. I think things are fine on iOS. I don’t mind the rectangles, they fit the grid. That’s how it’s always been. I don’t care about VisionOS. Circles are odd, whatever. But the Mac shouldn’t be forced to lose great design because iOS was under different constraints almost 20 years ago. That’s just dumb.
They were trying to make a unified design language across all their operating systems. If iOS and VisionOS both have their icons sitting on uniformly shaped tiles, macOS would break the convention. I don't like it, but I believe that's the reason why.
Oh I’m sure that’s why they did it. It’s not a good reason. It’s like saying all the food you eat should be beige. Sure it’s more consistent, but at what cost? You lose all the benefits. It’s like Chesterton’s Fence, except it has a big sign on it saying “beware of bull” and there is a guy nearby saying “you don’t want to let that bull out dude, it’s vicious”. But you want to take down the fence because it’s not the same style as the one on the pen for the chickens.
Also imo touchscreen Mac tap targets. Sigh.
Seeing all those old icons makes me realize how much I miss them. Superficial, perhaps, but they were one of the things I loved about OS X when I made the switch back in 2005 or 2006.
No they were better. Whether someone likes the style better or not (I do) they were FAR more visually distinct from each other which made it much easier to find the program you wanted to use. Right now my dock is a soup of squircles. I have to scan multiple times to find icons even though I know roughly where they should be. They aren’t distinct. They don’t stand out. That was never a problem until last year. 40 years of Mac was fine. Then that.
I don't think it's superficial at all. I genuinely find my apps harder to navigate now than I used to. Part of that is that I have far more apps installed today, but the uniform white borders also contribute. They make every icon look about 20% more similar, which adds just enough friction that scanning for the app I want takes a little longer. Poorly executed icon shapes were distracting, but when they were done well they provided subtle visual cues that made the interface easier to navigate. I miss that more than I expected.
> the much-celebrated Liquid Glass opacity slider The Liquid Glass slider is an embarrassing outright admission of failure. Apple built its brand as a tastemaker, so to put out this new, controversial design language, and after a year of tweaking, finally throw their hands up and say "we don't know what looks good, you decide" is so disappointing. That said, all the changes in iOS 27 are such a massive improvement from 26. The first design turnout with Alan Dye gone is making me feel very optimistic of their direction.
I'll take an admission of failure over slavishly refusing to and trying to pretend it's fine. There were plenty of people saying Liquid Glass was fundamentally an utterly flawed, bad design, that even if you subjectively liked the way it looked, that its design philosophy was wrong, and led to logically consistent but unusable and ugly interfaces, all to solve a problem no one had. I'm cautiously optimistic now that the bozo cardboard box designer dope with the ugly glasses is gone we'll see a quiet but rapid change of direction. I'll take "mea culpa". I'll take "whelp, this shit does actually just suck, here's a slider while we work on something better".
To me the cherry on top was that they started modifying how third party icons look to match the Liquid Glass. People started complaining to us that our app icon looked blurry because of it.
> outright admission of failure Right!? Who's out there going "oh no, translucent is too translucent; opaque is too opaque; but now that I can have 72.93% glass, my life is complete"?
Apple designers
I've got to disagree. I really disliked previously, when icon prominence could be wildly different because one icon takes up the full area with a big square, while another is a circle that necessarily has a significantly smaller area within the same extent. Icons from Apple were all nicely balanced in size, but third-party apps could be anything. Giving equal visual weight to each icon is an improvement. iOS was a step forward in this direction, and now they finally brought the same standard to Mac. Squircles aren't ugly, they're functional. "Shape" hasn't disappeared as a distinct visual cue, as the area within the squircle is made of, well... different shapes. And let's not forget the fact that Macs still effectively use icon masks. A smaller icon is harder to click, because clicking on a transparent area... doesn't click at all. I remember icons like a skinny letter "S" that you had to click just right or you couldn't at all.
> Giving equal visual weight to each icon is an improvement. Equal visual weight is another way of saying less differentiated. > "Shape" hasn't disappeared as a distinct visual cue, as the area within the squircle is made of, well... different shapes. Shape refers to a boundary outline, not interior patterning. A square with polkadots is still shaped like a square. > A smaller icon is harder to click, because clicking on a transparent area... doesn't click at all. That problem is only tangential to what shape they allow your icon to be within an enclosing NxN hitbox. Assume an implied framework where clicking on them isn't broken.
Some differentiation between elements must be sacrificed in order to build shared UX patterns between them. I think we can definitely go too far in either direction. An example of a nice compromise would be the macOS menu bar. Most status icons are monotone, which allows the ones with meaningful color differentiation to shine through without being drowned in the noise or increasing user fatigue.
> user fatigue Citation needed. What is user fatigue? Can it be empirically measured? Fatigued by what? Too much color? Lack of shape? Too much contrast? Lack of contrast? When is the last time you were "fatigued" by icons? Without hard facts the expression is just a wishy-washy way to promote a personal taste.
You seem to conflate different facts that have nothing to do with each other to arrive at a conclusion: There is nothing preventing Apple from not using said click masks while icons retain their distinct shapes. iOS is for mobile, its lessons don't transfer to desktop, and this was proven by Windows 8. That "squircles aren't ugly because they are functional" - how on Earth can those be mutually exclusive even in recognition? Functional very often is at the cost of making things ugly, the history lesson is that Apple more often than others managed to be both functional and beautiful. You also conflate convex pixel area with visual weight, but that is false too.
I’m not a designer but I disagree. I want to be able to easily distinguish apps without much focus or concentration or searching. Making them visually distinct with shape and color is superior. Uniformity is a problem not a target.
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Maybe it's just me, but I never really liked the detailed older mac icons, like the examples at the bottom of the page. I've always enjoyed more minimalist, simple user interfaces. And I can understand what Apple are trying to do by standardising their icons on the squircle (even if the execution is a bit iffy sometimes, the big grey border doesn't look great). Though, judging by everyone else's writings, I'm probably in the minority
Hard agree! Not only is it less fun and less visually appealing to me, I think forcing the uniform squircle everywhere makes it harder (than it used to be) to distinguish one app from another by icon alone.
In fact the HIG used to explicitly say so with clear examples proving it.
and which was backed by scientific evidence from controlled trials and human factors and psychology.
I'm on Tahoe and when i built an app using neutralino js the png icon was way bigger than the other icons, i needed to add padding to make the squircle look normal. So honestly i dont think this is a software thing, its more of designers designing it this way or only using their icon composer software which creates imaginary limitations.
They've gone too far on enforcing uniformity of icons and abusing liquid glass, but I disagree that arbitrary shapes were better. All the random icon shapes looked cool in isolation, but were harder to scan at a glance. The uniform squircle is a useful constraint. I wouldn't mind if they allowed something similar to that audio hijack icon, where you require the rounded rect as the guiding frame but are allowed to have some elements protruding out of it. But completely arbitrary shapes are too jarring imo.
Early on, when UI/UX was emerging as a discipline, user reaction times and accuracy were measured across a large number of participants. There are many stories during the development of the Lisa and Mac of unexpected user behavior and results. We shouldn’t be guessing if uniformity helps distinguish between apps or not. We could very easily test it. But UI/UX has long distanced itself from science, for whatever reason. Maybe because users are so proficient these days that almost anything works. We used to required training on how to use a mouse, menus and windows. It’s been probably a decade since I’ve heard anyone mention Fitt’s law, for instance, and Liquid Glass atrocities are direct a consequence of disregarding all that was learned in this field.
I'm pretty sure Nielsen already tested it, if I had to guess they probably found that different icon shapes are broadly better but that gets ignored because "it's cheaper to use some shitty vector squiggle in a round rect", just like the research that found "icons are better when there is text" is widely ignored too because internationalization costs money.
I mostly lament the simplification of app icons as an artistic loss, not as a usability loss. Shameless plug, but I made a project based on the idea of icons as pure art with no utility https://www.benedelste.in/post/__001
I can see both sides. Artistic constraints can suck, but on the other hand, for every app with a truly beautiful icon design, like the ones listed in the "It Doesn’t Have to Be Like This" section, how many apps have truly awful icon designs? The dock is prime visual real estate, and as a user, I'd like some kind of constraint that makes it less likely some crazy art style is going to be imposed on my desktop just because I need an app there.
Same for Android. Hate adaptive icons...
Tahoe was such a huge mess, but I'm hopeful that the new CEO will turn things around and bring things back to normal. If they do, I'll consider upgrading both OS and laptop, but right now I'm holding on to Sequoia
It really was Mac OS X's Vista moment. Edit: It'll always be Mac OS X to me, not macOS.
Yes! You are not alone. The name Mac OS X has always felt special to me.
Mac OS X 27. 10.27? But that means there were two each of 10.11, 10.12, 10.13, 10.14, and 10.15 :-)
They have a new head designer too IIRC, but probably is going to take some time for him to slowly move away from the mess he inherited.
Alan Dye was brought in during the Jony Ive era when they were launching the first Apple Watch because he came from a fashion/print background. Before Apple really figured out what the Watch was going to be (a health/fitness accessory for your phone) they were going for the "luxury fashion" angle. Somehow when Ive left, Dye got put in charge of design even though he had zero experience in software design that anyone seems to be aware of. He was criticized for the years following for a lot of bizarre design regressions that were happening across all of Apple's OSes. Then a few months after Dye himself announced Liquid Glass at WWDC last year, he blindsided Apple by accepting a poaching offer from Meta, seemingly because Zuck isn't aware of how untalented the guy is. Now Stephen Lemay is in charge, who's been at Apple for many years and actually knows stuff about software design. It's said that within the walls of Apple, a lot of people were very happy about the change, and the first showing of design changes we got since then are looking very good for Apple.
> Now Stephen Lemay is in charge, who's been at Apple for many years and actually knows stuff about software design And who was Dye's second in command, and who was integral in coming up with Liquid Glass, designing it, and forcing it down everyone's throat.
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The bit about internal rumblings at Apple I definitely read from him but the rest is just things we saw play out publicly over the past decade.
Gruber does not have a monopoly on disliking Alan Dye’s work. On the contrary, I never met anyone who knew UI design was a thing that liked what he did. When you’re using a tool for 40 years and someone who really has no clue gets in charge, starts breaking basic functionality for no good reason and affecting your day to day work, it’s not hard to get infuriated.
> slowly move away from the mess he inherited. The mess he actively implemented and was an integral part of? Why do people keep thinking that Alan Dye was the only person (apparently with God-like powers) who somehow forced and designed Liquid Glass alone, in isolation, and somehow sneaked it in to every Apple platform.
Apple CEOs always seem to want to make a splash via hardware (especially since the guy worked in hardware engineering) but it would be nice if an engineer brings more focus on the software as well.
Golden Gate is better but it hasn't fixed your icons unfortunately
The thing which kills me, is that with entirety of the State of California's Gazetteer to pull from, Apple didn't pull a page from Android and use an alphabetically ordered naming scheme so that folks could determine ordering of versions.
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As an aside, Rogue Amoeba are one of an ecosystem of great and greatly passionate indie software houses for the Mac. All of them create excellent software with polished UIs, provide excellent support and never forget to have fun. This seems to be unique to the Mac, at least at this scale.
Any linux kid with a slightest experience with desktop ricing would tell them that uniformly customized icons are a nightmare for visual recognition. Why didn't they run some internal tests, it's so obvious
My personal take is that icons should conform to the squircle, but have a permitted amount of break out from the core shape. For example, Audio Hijack’s icon as presented in the article should be allowed to have the microphone extend past the border slightly. The squircle should be mandated as the core shape, but with just tad bit of flexibility and shape definition. This keeps grids feeling proper, organised, and aligned, without feeling like the icons of Android Honeycomb.
The great thing about the new multi-layer icon format in Golden Gate is that it finally separates an icon's foreground from the background. So in theory, it opens the door to returning shape-differentiated icons to MacOS if a future display theme (a successor to the poorly-conceived Clear and Tinted themes) allows the background to be minimized while the foreground is emphasized. What I would love to see, and should now be possible, is a revision of the Clear theme where the squircle is transparent/refractive and the foreground retains its native color.
> This time, however, the changes are genuine improvements. Here’s the refined Automator icon, for example Uh, maybe. Parts of it are certainly slightly sharper in an unimportant way when viewed at normal icon size and not zoomed way in. I'm not sure that it's any better. And if that Automator icon is the exemplar, then any improvement is extremely marginal. My god it's just such a bad icon. Whoever is managing icon design should be extremely ashamed of themselves. Show anyone the pre-Tahoe Automator icon and ask them what it depicts and why that fits and they'll be able to tell you that it looks like a robot and robots are used in automation and therefore every time they see the little robot they'll think Automator. Ask them what the post-Tahoe icon depicts and why that fits and they'll be able to tell you fuck all because what the fuck even is that supposed to be if you don't already know.
Tangential related, but i find Icons should have a animated tooltip- when hovered over prolonged, they should tell what the program should do in a cyclical svg-animation.
Someone posted an old MacOS screenshot on Reddit and it was immediately obvious that the icons without a silhouette were the worst out of all of them. Like iTunes / Books / App Store. And that's basically what they went with eventually... Dashboard and Launcher are fine, but they have a reason to be a circle. (Well Launcher less so maybe) Chrome is terrible, it represents nothing. But I guess it's just a brand. I wish we could go back to this instead of squircles... https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/s/9MZsGioCG6
The only reason to run MacOS over Linux is the hardware. Arm MacBooks are unreasonably good but don’t support Linux (Asahi is still a bit WIP). They sell hardware, not software, so the state of things makes sense. It is so disappointing though.