10 ms·

macOS 26 Tahoe's Dead Canary Utility App Icons

• wk_end 1y ago
  I don't follow him closely, but I'd always thought that John Gruber - while often a very good writer - got a little too much exposure to the Reality Distortion Field. So I'm a little surprised to see him come down so hard on this. Was I wrong about Gruber or is this a proverbial canary in the coal mine?
  • bluedino 1y ago
    I find his takes all over the place, but I agree that the new icons are terrible and he makes some very good points. I'll add that the blue one doesn't even look like a wrench. I know that the old icons are dated and need to go, but the new ones are just bad.
  • ghqst 1y ago
    Gruber seemed like an Apple sycophant for a while because his values and tastes aligned very closely with Apple's (though he still criticized them from time to time). Now, Apple is drifting away from those values and tastes and so Gruber and others in that sphere of Apple blogs are coming down harder on Apple, especially after Alan Dye made such a mess with "Liquid Glass".
    • nozzlegear 1y ago
      > especially after Alan Dye made such a mess with "Liquid Glass". Your comment makes it seem like Gruber is a big critic of Liquid Glass like many commenters on HN are, but that's not the case. He's certainly critical of some of the execution details like icons or translucency that can hinder reading, but his stance on it is pretty nuanced leaning toward cautiously optimistic. https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/06/09/apple-intro-liquid-glass https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/06/09/apple-intro-liq...
      • jdelman 1y ago
        Listen to the episode of The Talk Show with Louie Mantia. They really rip on Alan Dye and Liquid Glass. Not so much the _idea_ of Liquid Glass, which I think they appreciate, but its execution, which is shoddy, inconsistent, and reveals a dearth of holistic thinking about UI design.
        • TheOtherHobbes 1y ago
          This is revealingly cringe and shows an almost complete absence of self awareness. https://www.printmag.com/podcasts/2025/design-matters-craig-federighi-and-alan-dye/ https://www.printmag.com/podcasts/2025/design-matters-craig-... I suppose life is very different inside the citadel. You get curated and triaged feedback from users, Tim Cook doesn't really have opinions about usability and design choices, so there's no one in charge of the classroom. The reality is in spite of nice touches like call filtering, software quality and usability are both clearly going down. And Apple's moat, which is a combination of ecosystem lock-in and graphic design, is threatened from one side by AI and from the other by whatever Liquid Glass is supposed to be.
    • nickm12 1y ago
      This is the answer. Gruber has and will continue to criticize Apple, but there has generally been very little room for daylight between his values and those of the company (either as expressed in their products or by their leadership). Also, while he doesn't say it, but I suspect that there has long been a feedback loop where his articles defending the company line are well-received internally and have helped him get press access to executives (for his WWDC live show) and preview hardware. All that said, there has been a marked change since John's "Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino". Reading between the lines, it's pretty clear that Apple leadership did not like this article and snubbed him for his liveshow. Since then, there have been many more articles critical of Apple on daringfireball.net.
  • stmpjmpr 1y ago
    I follow him, and despite being an Apple commentator, he can be very critical of Apple. You might have missed this from earlier this year: https://daringfireball.net/2025/03/something_is_rotten_in_the_state_of_cupertino https://daringfireball.net/2025/03/something_is_rotten_in_th...
    • coolandsmartrr 1y ago
      I feel that he became critical of Apple only post-Jobs.
      • aculver 1y ago
        I don't remember how common it was, but there are definitely examples of him being critical before, e.g. https://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/05/11/facetime-standard https://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/05/11/facetime-standa...
      • LoganDark 1y ago
        Steve Jobs was a huge part of Apple. They're just not the same anymore.
        • code_biologist 1y ago
          I recently got a newer iPhone and moved to iOS 18 with the hardware change. I had to watch some youtube tutorials explaining navigation and swipe locations. Over and over I've had the thought "this never would have flown under Steve."
        • pjmlp 1y ago
          Being a 70's child, thus having lived through most Apple consumer history, I would say it slowly feels like the Apple of old, when Steve Jobs was busy with NeXT and Pixar, the main difference is that now they have enough money to burn and make dumb decisions.
        • zarzavat 1y ago
          Cook makes shareholders happy but he's not much of a leader. Jobs was a leader. The butterfly keyboard catastrophe whereby Apple sold broken laptops for 4 years just because they didn't want to waste money retooling, would never have happened under Jobs. Jobs had the courage to say fuck the shareholders when necessary, Cook does not and it's a recurring theme of his leadership.
  • rgovostes 1y ago
    Apple enthusiasts like John Gruber believe in an ideal Apple. (See his reference to the Founder's "backs of the cabinets" quote.) The real company is distinct from this ideal. Believers support the company's actions so long as they can be plausibly squared with the ideal. But when the company strays—by phoning in design, or being stingy (iCloud's 5 GB free tier)—they respond with equally vocal criticism.
    • coolandsmartrr 1y ago
      This comment reminds of me of these such philosophical dualisms: - Form (Formal Blueprint of Ideas) vs Appearances (Actual Manifestation of Ideas) (Plato) - Noumenal (how things are in themselves) vs Phenomenal (how things appear) (Immanuel Kant) Gruber has been an idealistic and longtime Apple observer. This is probably why he seems to invoke the Idea of Apple to compare and critique the current Appearance of Apple. Fascinated to see a remark on HN that reminds me of this concept in philosophy.
    • heresie-dabord 1y ago
      From TFA, to illustrate: "These are the not the work of carpenters who care about the backs of the cabinets they’re building. These icons are so bad, they look like the work of untrained “How hard can it be?” dilettante carpenters who only last a few days on the job before sawing off one of their own fingers. The whole collection looks like the work from someone with no artistic ability nor an eye for detail. From Apple, of all companies."
  • happytoexplain 1y ago
    I think it's more the case that Apple is just one of those companies where people tend to leap to the "sycophant" accusation to describe anybody who likes Apple more than a little, because of the (perhaps historical) visibility of their super-fans. To be frank, Apple earns (earned?) the majority of its applause.
  • JohnBooty 1y ago
    One thing nobody can take away from him is that he explains his opinions very thoroughly. For that reason, even if one thought he agreed with Apple too often at least one always knew why.
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  • apple4ever 1y ago
    Yes this is a proverbial canary in the coal mine. Gruber has criticized Apple, but never to this extent.
• _fzslm 1y ago
  OK, a couple bad icons here. But am I the only one who thinks the wrench metaphor actually looks good?
  • xattt 1y ago
    Also forms a U for utility.
  • refactor_master 1y ago
    Well, I’ve been stethoscoped more than I’ve fixed any computer with a wrench of all tools, so not really.
  • postalcoder 1y ago
    The metaphor is fine for me, but the arbitrary inversions of lightness are not acceptable. They make the icons look like the same icon that have been inverted for light/dark mode.
  • LeoPanthera 1y ago
    Yeah they look fine to me. They're not icons you're going to put on your dock and look at every day.
    • relaxing 1y ago
      I have Disk Utility in my dock, and I hate the icon (the old one with the tiny stethoscope and spinning HDD.)
  • dkga 1y ago
    I actually agree with all of the comments. I strongly disliked those new icons. In a way, to my sense of aesthetics, they are worse then when I saw the icons in Windows XP compared to previous Windows versions.
  • b_e_n_t_o_n 1y ago
    Yeah I liked it overall. Guess you can't please everyone :)
  • 1y ago
• riffic 1y ago
  the 37 signal guy is building a linux distro so that might be another canary to consider. you know what'd be rad though? an Eames Office of computing. You'd need figures like Charles and Ray though.
• ianred 1y ago
  The wrench is proportionally and esthetically all wrong. Where do they get their designs and designers from.
• postalcoder 1y ago
  One thing about the AppleScript icon that you don’t notice until you pay attention is that that the paper curls to form an “S”. The rotation and the reduced emphasis on the paper's edge in the update breaks that imagery. It's not a nit that has to be picked, but it does dim Apple's "whoa, they thought that through?" aura. Edit: So, upon doing some more inspection, it looks like Apple's Script Editor already does use this fallen-over paper. So that should challenge our assumptions about what the rotation may or may not mean as a portent for Apple's design competency. https://help.apple.com/assets/65DFB44F6D920677C90E20C9/65DFB45064D27BC6B80D5BC3/en_US/c77d7a227a5fd365df2de28d731eebb6.png https://help.apple.com/assets/65DFB44F6D920677C90E20C9/65DFB...
  • wpm 1y ago
    It looks bad in that icon too, which is from the Big Sur era of "mostly squircles but not squircle jail yet".
  • leidenfrost 1y ago
    Liquid glass looks like some freeware teenager icon pack from gnome-look.org And we would have laughed at it.
    • crinkly 1y ago
      That made me laugh because that’s exactly what it is.
  • jacobolus 1y ago
    The Script Editor logo used to be a physical paper with the AppleScript logo printed on it correctly, but seen at an angle in perspective (so the AppleScript logo was tilted as a result), with a pen on top. When they switched from the original physical-looking icons, whichever designer drew the new one wasn't paying attention and apparently didn't understand the physical context of the previous logo and they screwed up the revision by keeping the (now-nonsensical) tilt. https://web.archive.org/web/20101207035423if_/http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/9e/AppleScript_Editor_Logo.png https://web.archive.org/web/20101207035423if_/http://upload....
• steve_adams_86 1y ago
  > The problem isn’t that one little bird has died. The problem is that the bird might be dead because the whole mine is filling with deadly carbon monoxide or highly flammable methane gas This is where I'm at with Apple at the moment. I know this sounds crazy or stupid, and people on reddit made sure to tell me as much, but the recent iOS, macOS, and watchOS betas have actually caused me to abandon the Apple ecosystem. As far as I'm concerned, there isn't one bird dead, but a whole bunch of birds. I suppose I'm a little more sensitive than Gruber. I find the design language (or lack thereof?) in Apple's recent work to be largely void of life, inspiration, purpose, craft, or anything else I'd come to expect over the last 25 years of using their platform. The quality in terms of performance, efficiency, bugs, intuitive user interfaces, and so on has been dropping for years now. The last OS revision is exemplary of this decline in a deeply concerning way. I've been so disheartened by things like this, and I'm confident it represents the end of an era so to speak, that I've already come to terms with it and started moving off of Apple's ecosystem. For me, the move is a matter of pursuing systems which allow me a bit more freedom. Apple has restricted me in ways that I permitted for decades now, but I permitted it because the compromise was worth it. I don't see it being worth it in 5 or 10 years, so I'm starting the transition now. I sold my watch, gave away my iPhone, and started shopping for a ThinkPad. It's hard to give up macOS and Apple hardware (the value prop has become kind of insane, really), but seeing their recent OS work takes the sting away. I'd love to see them recognize their mistakes and correct course, but... I don't think I'm their target customer anymore, frankly. The people who think I'm an idiot on reddit are their target market, I suppose. That's fine. I'll learn to love Linux and Windows for different reasons and regain some privacy and control over my machines. My family will certainly stay on Apple's ecosystem.
  • strange_quark 1y ago
    I agree that a lot of Apple stuff has gotten worse recently, both in terms of objective quality in the number of bugs, incomplete features that don't work properly when shipped, and in terms of the company trying to coerce even more control over its platforms and simultaneously enshittifiying them. It's ridiculous that they region lock OS-level stuff like 3rd party app stores and alternative browser engines. But from where I'm sitting, everyone else is doing what Apple's doing times 100. The latest Windows releases are aesthetically groetesque, both Google and Microsoft are trying to jam chatbots into everything, both Windows and Android are jammed full of ads and nagging "suggestions" to try some useless feature. Now Google is cracking down on Android sideloading. Desktop Linux I guess? I don't have time for that, and the hardware is so much worse than a MacBook. There's simply no winning, unfortunately.
• lh7777 1y ago
  Personally, I'm more dismayed by this change: > Apps that haven’t been updated with Tahoe-compliant everything-fits-in-a-squircle icons are put in “squircle jail” — their non-Tahoe-compliant icons are shrunk and placed atop a drab gray Tahoe squircle background, to force them into squircle compliance. I've been replacing some app icons with their older, non-square versions for years (Firefox is probably my favorite). Will be disappointing to lose that option -- I've never understood why Apple feels the need to standardize app icons like this.
  • pasquinelli 1y ago
    that is unfortunate. icons having a variety of silhouettes makes it easier to identify them and gives things a little personality.
    • silvestrov 1y ago
      Adobe app icons are really the poster child for icons that are difficult to identify: https://as1.ftcdn.net/jpg/03/75/14/18/1000_F_375141824_Urr3GNPmomuA1sDGHKi5zSBjRTWZ3FrN.jpg https://as1.ftcdn.net/jpg/03/75/14/18/1000_F_375141824_Urr3G... Icons were not meant to be text to read.
      • kridsdale1 1y ago
        Take a look at the icons for Google’s mobile apps.
        • glitchdout 1y ago
          Oh, that redesign was ludicrous https://nathanboomsma.medium.com/why-googles-new-logos-suck-and-how-i-fixed-it-5c9c8fcff5d6 https://nathanboomsma.medium.com/why-googles-new-logos-suck-...
  • LoganDark 1y ago
    I am in general quite dismayed with macOS becoming more and more iOS-like. There is a reason the two operating systems were different, and it was quite nice, to be honest. Not to say that I don't like sharing the liquid glass design language, but stuff like this this forced squircle is really sad to me, too.
• micromacrofoot 1y ago
  the wrench is uncanny, weird if you regularly see wrenches in real life... they likely did this to make the bolt larger, but it ruins the concept might have been better off simply going with the bolt metaphor, sans wrench, even though it's less apparent... though the squircle also kind of fights with other shapes as containers the old stethoscope on a disk icon is super cheesy, but at least it means something
  • RShackleford 1y ago
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• RShackleford 1y ago
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• bapak 1y ago
  To me it's insane to pick on these 4 icons when it's obvious that they were just bolted on together in the previous version as well. Now suddenly a whole Mac Pro laid on top of 2 tools is supposed to be a "great icon by Apple"? Get outta here.
  • lapcat 1y ago
    > Now suddenly a whole Mac Pro laid on top of 2 tools is supposed to be a "great icon by Apple"? No, Gruber said, "I don’t think the old icons for these apps from MacOS 15 were particularly good"
    • bapak 1y ago
      Correct, then why suddenly the replacements are "dead canary"? The post doesn't make sense. To me they're an improvement, even if a bit flat (flatness we've seen 12 years ago in iOS 7 already) To me this post sounds like a typical "Steve Jobs wouldn't do this" nonsense.
      • dijit 1y ago
        "This was not great, but this is worse: clearly nobody is paying attention" is, actually, valid criticism.
        • bapak 1y ago
          Call me when macOS Tahoe is out of beta. Nobody is paying attention because the post is judging a beta product that literally has not completed the QA cycle. By all means there are plenty of things to judge in macOS and there have been for a very long time. These for icons today are not it. The canary has left a very long time ago.
          • wpm 1y ago
            Tahoe will be out of beta in like 4 weeks. Do you really think there are going to be significant UI design changes in that time? Beta 8 came out today and Beta 9 will probably be or be close to the RC.
• keepamovin 1y ago
  I cried a little inside seeing this. Apple without its icons look cool game isn’t Apple
• keepamovin 1y ago
  [flagged]
  • jzig 1y ago
    [flagged]
  • tomhow 1y ago
    We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45021041 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45021041 and marked it off topic.
    • keepamovin 1y ago
      The path to off topic is sometimes laid with the best intentions
• PlunderBunny 1y ago
  Decades ago when we made a version of our Win32 desktop app for the USA, we changed the icon on our settings button from a wrench to something else (I can't remember what) because we were told that - for Americans - a wrench signified that something was broken and needed to be fixed. I guess it was about as good as all the other advice we got!
  • JohnBooty 1y ago
    Wow. As an American, I didn't know we had special feelings about wrenches!
    • JdeBP 1y ago
      Heh! Your feelings are so strong that you don't even call a spanner a spanner because the word entered mainstream English (during the industrial revolution) after U.S.A. independence. (-:
    • PlunderBunny 1y ago
      Yeah, I didn't believe it at the time - it was just one of those overly broad generalisations people do.
• delta_p_delta_x 1y ago
  Mac OS X and Windows had their best design language from 2007 to 2011. Windows Aero and Mac OS X Aqua during these days were truly beautiful graphical shells. Everything since has been a barren wasteland of boring, overly white flat GUIs. The squircle-ifying (and on Android, circle-ifying) going on is just another step in this path towards the eternal uniformity of the heat death of fun, intuitive UIs. The icons for Leopard-era programs were outstanding. Look at that dark indigo ink jar for Pages, or that wormhole graphic for Time Machine. The comforting smooth grey gradient of window title bars, contrasted with the large, globular traffic light buttons. A typeface that worked well with the lower-resolution displays of the time, and unique icons for everything at every single size. Apple actually had a massive human interface guidelines document, which was promptly binned with Yosemite. On Windows, that dark blue Start orb and the cool dark task bar, signalling a whole new OS experience. The new Welcome Centre. Freshly rewritten programs and new ones like Windows Media Player and Windows Photo Viewer, and the absolute beauty that was the Windows Media Centre. Flip 3D, customising the glass window borders, and the huge, high-resolution 512 × 512 icons of the high-quality, no-ads games shipped with Windows Vista and 7, which still stand up to this day. Happy to die on this hill defending this opinion.
  • m463 1y ago
    ios 7 was when it all went wrong. some low points: - low-contrast low-color shading - thin fonts that are less readable - hidden toolbars requiring multiple taps or drag to expose - links or buttons with no visual clue they are selectable I think the only thing I hate more is "touch anything in ios phone app to immediately place a call, even to a phone spammer" unfortunately all of this got picked up by tesla, where you get all of these "features", but while driving a moving, bouncing car you have to control.
  • samoppy 1y ago
    [dead]
  • dijit 1y ago
    I'll die right there with you on that hill. For all it's flaws: Vista was a truly breathtakingly beautiful operating system. I still remember fondly the matte frosted dark tinted hue from the start menu and the strong deep red of the shutdown button. Everything shimmered and refracted, with almost a tactile feel. My first iPhone felt like I was interacting beyond the current dimension, the retina display with the skeumorphic design made it feel like I wasn't just interacting with software, I was interacting with another digital world... and my first Macbook was similar; every application was gorgeously rendered natively: something even Windows couldn't manage despite having the lions share of developers. All this, on LCD panels that were comically abysmal compared to the colour accuracy of the displays we take for granted today, and with less than a quarter of the pixels. The thing is: I think the same issue plagues software also, that when it becomes a place where good money can be made, you attract people who want to make money and, by necessity, push out all the people who were there for the passion. Diminishing quality of art and engineering sort of go hand-in-hand if MBAs need to make room for themselves and set up fiefdoms.
• thepryz 1y ago
  These icons are just another example that Apple's lost its way. Disk Utility, like a lot of the apps, has been progressively getting worse, IME. Even the way OS X mounts an external drive has become unreliable.
• doesnt_know 1y ago
  I feel like when I'm presented with most modern criticism of Apple devices/software I tend to agree, but despite all the mostly valid criticisms I see batted about, who is doing consumer tech better? I've recently (finally) managed to purge the last instance of Windows from my life when I replaced Windows on my gaming desktop with Linux. So I've got Linux on the (gaming) desktop, a Steam Deck and Debian stable on a server, which is great. But I mean, that covers my home office? I still need a phone (iPhone), a smart watch (Apple Watch) and while not critical, certainly adds a lot of value for me. The things that connects to the TV (AppleTV) is the best of all I've tried when compared to any other type of solution (Firestick, Chrome Cast, Home Media Server, Built-in TV Smarts). I've also got an M4 MacBook for dev, which is frankly fantastic when compared to whatever other hardware I could get here in NZ and would involve going back to Windows anyway? So I mean, what are the actual valid options really? Apple still offer great devices and the integrations between them are the best on the market imo. Perhaps in a perfect world Pine64 devices would be rock solid and I could run Linux everywhere, but failing that, what else ya gunna do?
  • LoganDark 1y ago
    The fear is that Apple is losing the expertise and attention to detail that resulted in that best-in-class consumer tech.
    • MBCook 1y ago
      And, to GP’s point, there is no one to replace them. As someone who lived Apple stuff were between a rock and a hard place. What we loved is dissolving away into mediocrity or worse. And we don’t like the competition better. If we did we’d already be over there. Add in that lots of companies like to follow Apple’s design leads, for better or worse, and we’re left with nowhere to go. So we really want the thing we liked to be good again. Or at least to stop getting worse for no good reason.
      • linguae 1y ago
        This is exactly how I feel as someone who enjoyed the Mac during the Jobs era of Mac OS X and has been quite disappointed with the state of personal computing since then. The Apple experience is not the same today as it was during the Snow Leopard days. It seems to me that the old guard at Apple is gone and that the people making the key decisions at Apple in the past decade or so are taking Apple in a different direction than what I would like, as someone who is a big fan of both the classic Macintosh and Jobs-era Mac OS X. What I'd give for a modern OS with an interface designed with the principles of people like Don Norman and Bruce Tognazzini in mind, combined with rock-solid underpinnings taking advantage of the best that OS research had to offer in the past 30 years. In other words, I want an updated Smalltalk/Lisp machine with a classic Mac interface brought up to 2020s standards regarding networking, security, and other concerns. Modern macOS to me is a disappointment compared to Mac OS X Snow Leopard, and don't get me started on the lack of user-upgradeable RAM in modern Macs. However, Windows 10/11 is even more disappointing to me compared to Windows 7, which was a nice OS and is my second favorite version of Windows, my favorite being Windows 2000. Desktop Linux seems to be in an eternal Sisyphean cycle of churn. So, today I begrudgingly use Windows on my personal machines and macOS on my work-issued MacBook Pro, longing for a compelling alternative to appear one day that pushes personal computing forward.
• judge123 1y ago
  I find it fascinating that the flashpoint is utility app icons. Not the OS architecture, not some major new feature... just icons. Are we just in an era of polishing spoons because there's nothing new to build?
  • MBCook 1y ago
    It’s not. We’re all pissed about a TON of what they’re going this year. It’s more “This? You can’t even get this right? You could have left it alone and it would have been better. You have to crap up everything no matter how small with a poorly conceived bad redesign?”
  • kergonath 1y ago
    Did you not read the story? The point is not that the icons are important, it’s that the lack of care is telling. You might think it’s cheesy, but care and details are important, even in the back of a cabinet.
• travisgriggs 1y ago
  > They all look like placeholder icons made by a developer who would be the first to admit that they’re not an artist. Maybe. Some developers get really passionate about their work and try hard. The results can often fail on execution, but often show signs of overthinking things, and wanting to work. I’ve been working with a design studio on a data science domain that isn’t your every day (ag tech analytics) and I find the results really disappointing. They can make things conventionally nice. It’s better than a generative solution, yet it’s still very “conventional” and “safe”. Every time we get to a chance to do some innovative infographic, they give it a half hearted effort and then say “let’s just use words” and get all typography geeky. Point being, my experience is that quality iconographics are not the automatic domain of the gatekeepy designer profression (to be fair, I have worked with some design people that just have a knack).
• LaughingGoat 1y ago
  A crescent wrench is a brand of adjustable wrench. I believe Gruber meant open-end wrench, or, because I’m Canadian a British etc roots, I call it a spanner. Either way, I agree the “artist” who drew this has never used such a device, and may not, in fact, qualify as an artist.
  • bragr 1y ago
    Crescent wrench is more or less a genericized trademark like Kleenex where I'm from.
    • MobiusHorizons 1y ago
      I don’t think anyone is saying it’s a brand of wrench. Just that it is a generic term for a very different kind of wrench with an adjustable jaw. Famous for rounding off the corners of perfectly serviceable nuts, bolts, and all manner of pipe fittings. The wrench in the logo is an open end wrench (typically would have a closed end wrench on the other side)
  • bombcar 1y ago
    A crescent wrench is 1: adjustable, and 2: always the wrong tool. That there is a open-end wrench, or half a combination wrench. (It could be a crow's foot but we'll leave that aside.)
    • Ancapistani 1y ago
      In the rare instance an adjustable wrench is an appropriate tool, I'm partial to the Knipex "pliers wrench".
      • bombcar 1y ago
        Most things that seem to call for a crescent wrench really want a pipe wrench or vice grips.
  • JdeBP 1y ago
    Conversely, I disagree; and assert that it is rather John Gruber who has not used nearly enough open ended spanners. If one has only ever used modern forged steel spanners, then one might think that they aren't this width, and have the jaws at an angle. But try looking at antique tools. There have been a lot of spanners over the past couple of centuries that have looked like the picture. If I saw a spanner like this in real life, I'd be thinking first half 20th century, possibly from a motorcycling kit, and Imperial and useless. (-:
• ideasphere 1y ago
  Who else remembers the term ‘mystery meat navigation’?
• eviks 1y ago
  > The problem isn’t that one little bird has died. The problem is that the bird might be dead because the whole mine is filling with deadly carbon monoxide or highly flammable methane gas. I don't get it, you've already been poisoned by those gases and can hardly breath, why do you need to look at dead birds for any signal?
  • eCa 1y ago
    That’s the thing. The canaries died before the miners realized they were in danger, due to their sensitivity of carbon monoxide and other bad stuff.
    • eviks 1y ago
      But in this case the miners died long before the icons were redesigned?
  • rkomorn 1y ago
    I'm pretty sure the issue with carbon monoxide poisoning is that you don't actually feel it clearly enough and that it doesn't manifest as "can hardly breathe". "Gases such as ammonia and chlorine are ir- ritating to the skin, eyes, and throat and have a very definite smell. CO, however, has no odor or other warning properties." [1] 1- https://www.msha.gov/sites/default/files/Alerts%20and%20Hazards/HH%20Cards/HH-28%20Carbon%20Monoxide%20&%20Mining.pdf https://www.msha.gov/sites/default/files/Alerts%20and%20Haza...
    • eviks 1y ago
      I'm pretty sure your own link is consistent > Medium exposure... will produce ... and breathing difficulties.
      • rkomorn 1y ago
        I think the difference comes down to prolonged exposure to lower levels (eg medium exposure) vs short-term exposure to high levels. The canary is for the latter scenario. If the EPA says it can kill "in minutes" [1], then I'd be inclined to believe them over "you'll feel it if you're exposed to it for hours". 1- https://www.epa.gov/indoor-air-quality-iaq/protect-your-family-and-yourself-carbon-monoxide-poisoning https://www.epa.gov/indoor-air-quality-iaq/protect-your-fami...
• Waterluvian 1y ago
  Does anyone have an example of a design team concluding that the right move is not to change anything? I really think a big chunk of the problem is that it’s very hard for anyone to say to their employer that they shouldn’t be doing work. People like having a job and finding work not to do feels scary.
  • dijit 1y ago
    Selection bias dictates that if this happens you won’t notice it. I can think of a few times people have been waiting for a refresh of something only to be slightly disappointed that not much or nothing changed: even when there was really nothing wrong. Hardware-wise: The Volvo X60 and X90 series of cars. Software wise: Chrome, perhaps, only one major visual change in 15 years.
  • GoblinSlayer 1y ago
    FWIW they can design more controls like tiles, widgets, wallpapers, user icons, toasters, calculator in the same style.
  • flobosg 1y ago
    OS X Snow Leopard
  • kridsdale1 1y ago
    Rolex.
• gizajob 1y ago
  Why would you ever need to take a wrench to a disk? How many of apple’s users have ever actively used or even held a wrench?
• peterkelly 1y ago
  I'm honestly curious why Apple (and other OS vendors like MS and various Linux distributions) still feel the need to tweak their UIs many, many years after having reached maturity. How many iterations does it take before you get it right? I get that there's a certain sense of fashion to it, but so often these changes are either neutral or worse, and it just seems so pointless. I don't see any concrete benefits of this year's UI design over what was already there 10-20 years ago.
  • andrekandre 1y ago
    > I'm honestly curious why Apple (and other OS vendors like MS and various Linux distributions) still feel the need to tweak their UIs many, many years after having reached maturity. its hard to market something like an os to consumers and devs without some large noticeable changes though one then has to wonder, why do we need a new os every year...
  • conception 1y ago
    No one gets a promotion for saying “yep still looks good. “
  • pndy 1y ago
    Operating systems from the biggest companies are rather stable and feature rich beneath for years now but that doesn't make these attractive in long term. Certainly not for the daily consumers. So they introduce all sorts of meaningless "featurettes" and UI/UX changes to pretend they work hard and thoughtfully on their products to create these never-ending "exciting experiences". It's not about polishing to get it right nowadays but rather making a change for sake of changes because that looks good in terms of marketing. As for this particular Apple case with all "26" versions and Liquid Glass: the backlash they got in June puts their actions along Microsoft's with Windows 8/8.1.
• microtonal 1y ago
  Disk Utility — a very important app — has an icon that’s just an Apple logo (inside the bolt that’s inside the wrench that’s inside the squircle). Not a hard drive, not an external drive, not an SD card. Just an Apple logo. He is wrong... It's the glass disk that Tim handed over to Donald in the White House.
  • rekoil 1y ago
    No, the bribe disk was round, this is hexagonal, big difference.
    • kridsdale1 1y ago
      10.3%
      • deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
• nik736 1y ago
  I am probably the only one, but I like those new icons apart from the disk utility one. I think they are better than the old ones and follow more of the design standards of Tahoe (good or bad), so they fit better.
• floppiplopp 1y ago
  In my hobby we have "grognards" - the grumpy old farts that detest everything new and pick on every little change. That opinion piece was written by a full on grognard who cries with bullshit arguments about the collapse of civilization because "corpo changed product" from inarticulate icons to inarticulate icons.
• Angostura 1y ago
  The sad thing is that Apple used to have an excellent and simple way to show the status of an application as a Utility - they were rendered in grey-scale where as regular apps were full-colour
• freetime2 1y ago
  > But the new ones in MacOS 26 Tahoe are objectively terrible. Has the word "objectively" recently taken on the alternative meaning of "subjectively", similar to how "literally" can also mean "figuratively"? I also don't love the new icons, and he does raise a few objective facts to support his argument - but I don't think it's possible for an icon to be "objectively terrible". People also have a tendency to be resistant to design changes at first, but over time as they become more familiar they become less offensive. I find myself running into this with new car designs a lot.
  • andrekandre 1y ago
    > I also don't love the new icons, and he does raise a few objective facts to support his argument - but I don't think it's possible for an icon to be "objectively terrible". measuring cognitive load / time-to-completion when trying to use such an interface could be an objective measure for example, ask a user to find disk utility app in old ui vs new, measure both time and brain activity it takes to find it etc, there are ways, just takes money and time
• thefz 1y ago
  That's for sure a lot of words for something of such low value. But then it's Gruber, what do we expect.
• meindnoch 1y ago
  The NextSTEP people have all retired. The real canary in the coalmine was the release of SwiftUI, which to this day is unusable for real UI work, and yet they keep pushing it. A company that once prided itself on its polished user interfaces, is pushing a fundamentally broken UI framework (they even customized the Swift language itself to make it work!), for no sensible reason, other than to pander to web developers socialized on React. It's a tired trope, but Steve Jobs is rolling in his grave.
  • pjmlp 1y ago
    Both SwiftUI and Jetpack Compose rewrites, despite all their issues, are still miles ahead on WinUI turned out to be after five years, this is how bad Windows desktop development has become.
    • meindnoch 1y ago
      UI on Windows is a lost cause at this point. It's over. Windows UI is in the state the Wehrmacht was on April 29, 1945. Fragmented, beaten, disillusioned, out of fuel.
      • pjmlp 1y ago
        Unfortunely I have to concur. At least, Win32, Forms/WPF and DirectX isn't that bad.
    • hu3 1y ago
      that's a very low bar for whataboutism
      • pjmlp 1y ago
        There is nothing whataboutism on my comment, other than asserting the fact that Apple and Google are currently much better at execution than Microsoft, in what concerns their OSes.
  • kridsdale1 1y ago
• stack_framer 1y ago
  How ironic that Daring Fireball, with its eternally drab background color and microscopic font size, is endeavoring to criticize Apple's icons. No doubt Apple's icons have worsened, but Daring Fireball is throwing rocks from its exceedingly brittle glass house.
  • fnordsensei 1y ago
    Sorry, but what does one have to do with the other? Are you one of those people who think you can’t criticize a movie unless you’re a director yourself?
    • stack_framer 1y ago
      > Sorry, but what does one have to do with the other? Let me spell it out for you: Daring Fireball has a really ugly website. On that really ugly website, they are criticizing Apple's ugly icons. This is ironic. > Are you one of those people who think you can’t criticize a movie unless you’re a director yourself? No.
      • fnordsensei 1y ago
        Alright, then my analogy holds. He can’t criticize Apple unless he first makes a really pretty website. You can’t criticize the movie unless you first direct a better one.
  • lapcat 1y ago
    It's not ironic at all. From the article: "They all look like placeholder icons made by a developer who would be the first to admit that they’re not an artist." I think Gruber would be the first to admit that he's not a designer but rather a writer. His business is one person, himself. In contrast, Apple has over a hundred thousand employees, including quite a few professional full-time designers. You would expect Apple to do vastly better at design than Gruber. What's ironic is if Alan Dye is no better at design than John Gruber.
• bobwaycott 1y ago
  The expansion slot icon looks like a hamburger menu—so I’d expect it to let me customize macOS menus. Pretty bad.
• pasiaj 1y ago
  Past canaries of Apple's software downfall: Scripting and the new Notification Center. The key thing to make macOS feel welcoming to everybody from noobs to the nerdiest of power users: Pretty much all functionality used to be accessible using an easy GUI, and keyboard shortcuts, and scripting and command line interface. At some point Apple Script support started to thin out. I started to worry a bit at this point. Apps that power users care about rely on scripting support. I felt that advanced users have fallen outside the target audience of the product. Then the new Notification Center came out. And suddenly there was no way of reacting to individual notifications from the keyboard. Two interfaces were no out! No keyboard shortcuts. No scriptability. You HAVE to use the mouse! Core functionality was suddenly inaccessible using the PRIMARY input device! How is it possible that the accessibility of such major OS functionality is this poor! At this point I felt that it's not about target audiences, but about indifference. They don't much care. Someone once said that monopolies are often never toppled - instead they just become irrelevant over time. This is what happened to Windows. The OS monopoly still exists, but it's no longer the center of anyone's attention. The same seems to have happened to MacOS. It's as if it has become unimportant inside Apple.
• baxuz 1y ago
  Every time I visit that site I'm appalled at how horribly bad and inaccessible it is.
• Henchman21 1y ago
  Those icons look AI generated to me
• ksec 1y ago
  When even Gruber start criticising Apple. You know it is bad. From Apple invented USB-C, to selling AirPod below cost, and invented big.LITTLE CPU computing. Sometimes still persist to this day before of his story. But if even its die hard fans cant find excuses for the appalling Ads they are putting out, design changes that makes no sense, and App icons etc. May be Apple has really changed. As someone on HN recently stated, in many ways Google Pixel and Android now feels more old school Apple than modern Apple.