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.
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 This is definitely not a preposterous and outdated observation/joke!
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?
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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"?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I have no real love for Alan Dye but you should probably understand that Gruber feels it is a personal affront that someone might work for a company that is not Apple.
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.
How do you think thay worked? Alan Dye alome came up with, designed and somehow forced Liquid Glass into every platform? Lemay, who was his second in command had nothing to do with it? It was Alan Dye single-handedly doing it?
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.
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.
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.
I was originally excited by the flat design revolution because it appealed to my affinity with uniformity and consistency. But I believe now that I was ignorant and lazy. Bad design still exists within flat style rules, and it has an even worse and cheap feel to it. Meanwhile we've lost whole dimensions of expression.
Ever since the android debacle with icons having shadows going in different directions or length I've been thinking that icons should be 3D models (with restrictions to make them fast to render and/or fast to bake into flat images).
That would be a marvelous way to make icons unified and a differentiating move for Apple.
Android started mandating all icons to have the same shape like 9 years ago. In 2026 there are still some apps on my phone that haven't updated their icons yet.
Oh yes, I hate this. OneUI has that as well. It makes searching for an app so much more conscious and bothersome. I don't want my app drawer to look as neat as possible, I want it to work with the least amount of attention that I can possibly get away with.
Apple will never care about what users want, they only do what Apple want. If you want to free anything, don't use Apple. It's an obvious lesson that should have been learned a long time ago.
Someone with 5000 hours design experience needs to make a common icon theme for a few 100 GTK and QT libraries and standard-names. It feels like it's 1000s of hours of work. And then you have to make them available in a few formats, HDPI, maybe a build system, etc. there are a number of themes but the ones I try seem to be missing one or more of the icons from the set. Just need the right volunteers to build them, and also get a bunch of app-builders to adopt them, and figure out what colour the bike-shed should be (blue).
Why volunteer? Why not find a way to pay someone for the value of their time at market rate and release the product of their labor under a permissive license?
For the last 25+ years I've been hearing folks say: "why not find a way". But then not suggest anything more than that obvious answer.
Please suggest an actual path forward, an actual plan that is more than just "figure it out". And the plan needs to address at least 1/2 of the points I made above.
It's a "Hard Problem". The answer needs lots of time, likely money and at least two humans with strong drive to fix the problem.
We've managed to make the entire corpus of open source software but the thing that's a "Hard Problem" that nobody can find a way to do is making the icons look good?
It's almost like it's not a technical challenge, it's that getting good looking icons would require a unified userbase, and Apple has that but Linux does not.
As a bit of a shameless plug, I did some in the past[0] and am working sporadically on a "fork" of those[1] but it's a whole full-time work. There are hundreds of icons to do for apps alone. Each one needs to be done in 16x16, 22x22, 32x32, 64x64, 128x128 and 256x256 so if say you have 150 icons to do for apps, you actually will need to do 900 icons. And add to that that you'll need to cover categories, places, filetypes, actions...
Granted, you can do a 256x256 and scale it down to 128x128, for example, but if you care for quality some details will be lost anyway. So that's why nowadays you'll see most icon themes are just a bunch of logos plastered over a shaped background.
And what irked me the most was that a few weeks after that I released that first set via deviantart and opendesktop.org there were websites that included them in their sets and made them available for download in their websites, not even a redirect to my deviantart or opendesktop pages or something. And found out after that that some people were using them in commercial projects and stuff so I had to chase them asking to not use them since they were cc-by-nc'ed.
Never got a single cent of any of that. I love making icons, at some point I was even working for the icons that would eventually become the Breeze set for KDE5 with their VDG, but it happens that I also need money to buy the beans.
I think illustration isn't something too much in the mindshare of open source, so overall support for it isn't great. IMO this has contributed to it. The industry standard tools are all closed, with closed formats, so it just sounds like much more of a hassle vs contributing code/text.
I mean this throughout the whole process. The only standard illustration file format I can think of is SVG, but it's largely a format to export to, not one industry-standard software uses as it's main persistence format.
So for starters, contributors tend to need access to speciality software they probably don't have installed to view and edit the source of truth. This also means you're handling at least two files in your VCS, the closed format acting effectively as a blob, no diffs, etc. and an export file (usually more, for different scales) to actually interface with the rest of the ecosystem; this is the file everyone can open, inspect and compare, the one your build consumes, etc.
This already would be a good amount of friction for someone familiar with the tools, but designers are not necessarily familiar with git, the PR process, etc. Add to it that icons are more subjective than code, which overall should follow certain rules and either works or doesn't, and it overall seems not worth it for a casual contributor.
I agree, but I'm surprised there was no mention of contrast or proposal to restrict colors.
Their first good example bumped up the color contrast. The orange examples in their set of "gorgeous app icons" are just as bad as the slack vs photos example.
I would love if the OS had an option to automatically convert every app icon to greyscale and required a minimum color contrast ratio for the original. Then, the user can pick their own overlay colors (similar to the color tags in finder).
I honestly disagree with the author when they say that the Golden Gate icons are better than Tahoes. There are more lines, which is literally removing the point of LIQUID glass. It is supposed to be BLURRY, like LIQUID. I get that it is more readable, but are icons meant to be read? There is no text in them, other than Apple TV which is very distinctive. It seems like they just boosted the sharpness of the icons and pushed to production (or I guess it is technically production-beta?) However I do agree with the point of the article. Icons having things outside of the squircle were unique, fun, and interesting.
If one is this passionate about icons, why not just install (or even make) a custom icon pack? The default icons for Google Apps on Android are awful, but I haven't seen them in years aside from setting up a new device.
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
I'm a senior platform engineer who at the time I bought it was a senior software developer, who can still use it for my daily tasks despite it having 8gb of ram. Until very recently the 32gb T14 I had ad work was frankly worse performant than the little air, while having a battery life of around 45 minutes a fan sounding like a jetengine and a keyboard so hot it made the sun jealous. My new model is way faster than my macbook air though, but the old model was technically newer than the air. Obviously the comparisson isn't completely fair since we run a lot of corporate enterprise stuff on our laptops, but still.
I'd really like a Linux laptop, but a Framework laptop is expensive (and it has loud fans and runs hot). A tuxedo is even more expensive and has fans where you'd place it on your legs for whatever reason, and runs hot. Looking at the laptop market now, I can't see what you'd buy. A week ago I would've said the Neo (if the 8gb of ram holds up as well on the mobile chip as it does on the m1), but today I'm guessing a refurbished air with 16gb would be the only real option for someone who want's a cool low noise machine with decent battery time.
Whether you run OS/X or Asahi, I really can't see what you'd buy other than these. At least if you actually use it on your lap and don't just have it sit in a dock on a table.
Then again, I'm the sort of person who would buy the pink neo because it would fuck with the perception people have of my mid 40 Scandinavian conservativeish dad look. So maybe it is just about the message?
I 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.
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.
It seems like every OS got a little harder to use in order to better vibe with VisionOS, the least popular platform they have.
While I applaud the commitment to building a new platform, I don’t like that’s is coming at the expense of the others.
I'm confused here. What do you think is the relationship between round icons and eye tracking?
I remember reading it in the HIG when VisionOS came out and everyone was complaining about the shape. I went looking to see if there was a reason, and there was.
> In general, give an interactive item a rounded shape. People’s eyes tend to be drawn toward the corners in a shape, making it difficult to keep looking at the shape’s center. The more rounded an item’s shape, the easier it is for people to use their eyes to target it.
The page also talks about leaving enough visual space between elements as well as many other considerations for this type of interface.
https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...
Since the eyes are the cursor, this is a problem. Desktop and mobile don’t have this issue.
And Apple decided this was a problem with icons, rather than a problem with the way they implemented their vision tracking? Believable, and laughable.
I think things are fine on iOS. I don’t mind the rectangles, they fit the grid. That’s how it’s always been.
I don’t care about VisionOS. Circles are odd, whatever.
But the Mac shouldn’t be forced to lose great design because iOS was under different constraints almost 20 years ago. That’s just dumb.
I don't like it, but I believe that's the reason why.
Sure it’s more consistent, but at what cost? You lose all the benefits. It’s like Chesterton’s Fence, except it has a big sign on it saying “beware of bull” and there is a guy nearby saying “you don’t want to let that bull out dude, it’s vicious”.
But you want to take down the fence because it’s not the same style as the one on the pen for the chickens.
Superficial, perhaps, but they were one of the things I loved about OS X when I made the switch back in 2005 or 2006.
Right now my dock is a soup of squircles. I have to scan multiple times to find icons even though I know roughly where they should be.
They aren’t distinct. They don’t stand out.
That was never a problem until last year. 40 years of Mac was fine. Then that.
I genuinely find my apps harder to navigate now than I used to. Part of that is that I have far more apps installed today, but the uniform white borders also contribute. They make every icon look about 20% more similar, which adds just enough friction that scanning for the app I want takes a little longer.
Poorly executed icon shapes were distracting, but when they were done well they provided subtle visual cues that made the interface easier to navigate. I miss that more than I expected.
The Liquid Glass slider is an embarrassing outright admission of failure. Apple built its brand as a tastemaker, so to put out this new, controversial design language, and after a year of tweaking, finally throw their hands up and say "we don't know what looks good, you decide" is so disappointing.
That said, all the changes in iOS 27 are such a massive improvement from 26. The first design turnout with Alan Dye gone is making me feel very optimistic of their direction.
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".
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"?
I really disliked previously, when icon prominence could be wildly different because one icon takes up the full area with a big square, while another is a circle that necessarily has a significantly smaller area within the same extent. Icons from Apple were all nicely balanced in size, but third-party apps could be anything.
Giving equal visual weight to each icon is an improvement. iOS was a step forward in this direction, and now they finally brought the same standard to Mac.
Squircles aren't ugly, they're functional. "Shape" hasn't disappeared as a distinct visual cue, as the area within the squircle is made of, well... different shapes.
And let's not forget the fact that Macs still effectively use icon masks. A smaller icon is harder to click, because clicking on a transparent area... doesn't click at all. I remember icons like a skinny letter "S" that you had to click just right or you couldn't at all.
Equal visual weight is another way of saying less differentiated.
> "Shape" hasn't disappeared as a distinct visual cue, as the area within the squircle is made of, well... different shapes.
Shape refers to a boundary outline, not interior patterning. A square with polkadots is still shaped like a square.
> A smaller icon is harder to click, because clicking on a transparent area... doesn't click at all.
That problem is only tangential to what shape they allow your icon to be within an enclosing NxN hitbox. Assume an implied framework where clicking on them isn't broken.
An example of a nice compromise would be the macOS menu bar. Most status icons are monotone, which allows the ones with meaningful color differentiation to shine through without being drowned in the noise or increasing user fatigue.
I wouldn't mind if they allowed something similar to that audio hijack icon, where you require the rounded rect as the guiding frame but are allowed to have some elements protruding out of it. But completely arbitrary shapes are too jarring imo.
We shouldn’t be guessing if uniformity helps distinguish between apps or not. We could very easily test it.
But UI/UX has long distanced itself from science, for whatever reason. Maybe because users are so proficient these days that almost anything works. We used to required training on how to use a mouse, menus and windows.
It’s been probably a decade since I’ve heard anyone mention Fitt’s law, for instance, and Liquid Glass atrocities are direct a consequence of disregarding all that was learned in this field.
If they do, I'll consider upgrading both OS and laptop, but right now I'm holding on to Sequoia
Edit: It'll always be Mac OS X to me, not macOS.
10.27?
But that means there were two each of 10.11, 10.12, 10.13, 10.14, and 10.15 :-)
Somehow when Ive left, Dye got put in charge of design even though he had zero experience in software design that anyone seems to be aware of. He was criticized for the years following for a lot of bizarre design regressions that were happening across all of Apple's OSes. Then a few months after Dye himself announced Liquid Glass at WWDC last year, he blindsided Apple by accepting a poaching offer from Meta, seemingly because Zuck isn't aware of how untalented the guy is.
Now Stephen Lemay is in charge, who's been at Apple for many years and actually knows stuff about software design. It's said that within the walls of Apple, a lot of people were very happy about the change, and the first showing of design changes we got since then are looking very good for Apple.
And who was Dye's second in command, and who was integral in coming up with Liquid Glass, designing it, and forcing it down everyone's throat.
We all disliked Dye before he left. People were taking potshots at Apple's design direction under him for 10 years.
When you’re using a tool for 40 years and someone who really has no clue gets in charge, starts breaking basic functionality for no good reason and affecting your day to day work, it’s not hard to get infuriated.
The mess he actively implemented and was an integral part of?
Why do people keep thinking that Alan Dye was the only person (apparently with God-like powers) who somehow forced and designed Liquid Glass alone, in isolation, and somehow sneaked it in to every Apple platform.
This keeps grids feeling proper, organised, and aligned, without feeling like the icons of Android Honeycomb.
So in theory, it opens the door to returning shape-differentiated icons to MacOS if a future display theme (a successor to the poorly-conceived Clear and Tinted themes) allows the background to be minimized while the foreground is emphasized.
What I would love to see, and should now be possible, is a revision of the Clear theme where the squircle is transparent/refractive and the foreground retains its native color.
Uh, maybe. Parts of it are certainly slightly sharper in an unimportant way when viewed at normal icon size and not zoomed way in. I'm not sure that it's any better. And if that Automator icon is the exemplar, then any improvement is extremely marginal. My god it's just such a bad icon. Whoever is managing icon design should be extremely ashamed of themselves.
Show anyone the pre-Tahoe Automator icon and ask them what it depicts and why that fits and they'll be able to tell you that it looks like a robot and robots are used in automation and therefore every time they see the little robot they'll think Automator. Ask them what the post-Tahoe icon depicts and why that fits and they'll be able to tell you fuck all because what the fuck even is that supposed to be if you don't already know.
Like iTunes / Books / App Store. And that's basically what they went with eventually...
Dashboard and Launcher are fine, but they have a reason to be a circle. (Well Launcher less so maybe)
Chrome is terrible, it represents nothing. But I guess it's just a brand.
I wish we could go back to this instead of squircles...
https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/s/9MZsGioCG6
They sell hardware, not software, so the state of things makes sense. It is so disappointing though.
That would be a marvelous way to make icons unified and a differentiating move for Apple.
Fast fashion.
Also, bring back skeumorphism. Not even joking. Imagine it in OLED. Wood panelling, knobs. Reflections, shimmer, knobs.
Make the icons be Free on Free OSes like Linux.
Please suggest an actual path forward, an actual plan that is more than just "figure it out". And the plan needs to address at least 1/2 of the points I made above.
It's a "Hard Problem". The answer needs lots of time, likely money and at least two humans with strong drive to fix the problem.
It's almost like it's not a technical challenge, it's that getting good looking icons would require a unified userbase, and Apple has that but Linux does not.
Finding money and designers is not really a hard problem.
Granted, you can do a 256x256 and scale it down to 128x128, for example, but if you care for quality some details will be lost anyway. So that's why nowadays you'll see most icon themes are just a bunch of logos plastered over a shaped background.
And what irked me the most was that a few weeks after that I released that first set via deviantart and opendesktop.org there were websites that included them in their sets and made them available for download in their websites, not even a redirect to my deviantart or opendesktop pages or something. And found out after that that some people were using them in commercial projects and stuff so I had to chase them asking to not use them since they were cc-by-nc'ed.
Never got a single cent of any of that. I love making icons, at some point I was even working for the icons that would eventually become the Breeze set for KDE5 with their VDG, but it happens that I also need money to buy the beans.
[0] https://miler.codeberg.page/?prj=rekt
[1] https://miler.codeberg.page/?prj=betelgeuse
(They still have different shapes, though)
I mean this throughout the whole process. The only standard illustration file format I can think of is SVG, but it's largely a format to export to, not one industry-standard software uses as it's main persistence format.
So for starters, contributors tend to need access to speciality software they probably don't have installed to view and edit the source of truth. This also means you're handling at least two files in your VCS, the closed format acting effectively as a blob, no diffs, etc. and an export file (usually more, for different scales) to actually interface with the rest of the ecosystem; this is the file everyone can open, inspect and compare, the one your build consumes, etc.
This already would be a good amount of friction for someone familiar with the tools, but designers are not necessarily familiar with git, the PR process, etc. Add to it that icons are more subjective than code, which overall should follow certain rules and either works or doesn't, and it overall seems not worth it for a casual contributor.
Their first good example bumped up the color contrast. The orange examples in their set of "gorgeous app icons" are just as bad as the slack vs photos example.
I would love if the OS had an option to automatically convert every app icon to greyscale and required a minimum color contrast ratio for the original. Then, the user can pick their own overlay colors (similar to the color tags in finder).
Apple spent millions convincing everyone they needed Retina displays and then churned out an update that made them all blurry.
We will never know if this was AI generated or not, but I have started to flinch at this sentence structure.
It's legitimately a useful sentence to assist the point the author is making.