5 ms·

Tahoe's Elephant

86 points by GavinAnderegg 1y ago

sillywalk 1y ago
Tahoe is the first macos (and ios) upgrade I'm avoiding. I'd already had to enable a bunch of macos accessibility features (increase contrast, reduce transparency) for years just to make it less crappy. Every release gets less usable for the sake of looking fancy. Ever since GUIs became (flat) UXs everything has gone to shit. Not that GUIs didn't also suck, but I could at least distinguish controls from labels. I remember reading John Siracusa's long Mac OS X reviews, and their details of how the GUI changed, often for the worse - i.e. less usable. One of the first notes I remember was when colour labels in Finder switched from highlighting the entire file ( easily visible ) to becoming just a little coloured dot which is easy to miss while scrolling. Don't even get me started on Apple Music, which is one of top 3 worst designed apps I've ever used.
- treetalker 1y ago
  > colour labels in Finder switched from highlighting the entire file One of the reasons I continue to subscribe (sigh) to the Path Finder (Finder replacement) app, which offers whole-line highlighting (coloring) of tagged files. (It also has a great function to batch-rename files — including with regex find and replace, and including the ability to save and load renaming algorithms.) Not affiliated, just a very happy user (apart from the subscription licensing model, that is).
  - LeoPanthera 1y ago
    I really want to like Path Finder. It looks like it might be nearly perfect for me. But I am intensely opposed to a file manager that requires internet access to activate in order for your subscription to be validated. It's such an offensive model.
- egypturnash 1y ago
  The advantage of the colored dot is that it's easy to show that a file has multiple tags by putting several dots next to each other. IIRC the old way only let you have one tag on a file? Multiple tags are super useful for me, I tag all my art files as some combination of in progress/done/commissions/paid, and use saved searches to decide what I'm gonna work on today.
  - brailsafe 1y ago
    I didn't know you could do that, maybe I'll give it a shot. For one tag I'd definitely still prefer a whole line, but it would be nice if that was configurable.
  - eviks 1y ago
    It's not an advantage since you can trivially show multiple colors in a bigger area of the file name, it's even easier than dots And you could even reduce readability by using gradients to make it fancier!
  - hirvi74 1y ago
    Do you use this feature a lot? I have used macOS for over 15 years straight, and I do not think I have ever tagged a file once. What purpose does it even serve? You get some color code, but what does that truly accomplish? I assume most people that use such a feature have some kind of mental map?
    - NegativeLatency 1y ago
      I use it when I have to process some files manually, maybe involving multiple steps (blue is started, green is done, or whatever) In a world where “normal” people are calling files “v2_final_final” it’s nice to have a way to encode more information than just a file name. Other people also use them for organization and workflows and stuff
    - carlosjobim 1y ago
      If you're doing work on many files within different folders in a project folder, and this work takes several days. You finish the files in one folder and tag it with a color as "done", then move on to the next folder, etc.
- tpmoney 1y ago
  > Ever since GUIs became (flat) UXs everything has gone to shit. Not that GUIs didn't also suck, but I could at least distinguish controls from labels. One of the nice things about Tahoe is that liquid glass does a better job of distinguishing controls from other elements, at least most of the time. But they need to do a better job refining some of the transparency effects to make it more consistent. For example in Safari, with a medium grey background on a page, the controls have contrast from the toolbar surface and the borders and glass effect give them a nice depth. But with a dark grey background all the contrast between the controls and the toolbar almost disappear, and only the borders give any real distinction. Its even worse on light or white backgrounds, where since the borders in the liquid glass elements tend to be light/white colored in the first place, even they disappear. The transparency effects can be nice, but someone else's choices for a site background shouldn't be having such a dramatic impact on the actual UI of the computer.
  - tonyedgecombe 1y ago
    The first setting I changed was "Show colour in tab bar". I want the web page to appear to be the isolated artefact it is rather than bleeding out into Safari.
  - fauigerzigerk 1y ago
    >The transparency effects can be nice, but someone else's choices for a site background shouldn't be having such a dramatic impact on the actual UI of the computer. Isn't this just the principle of transparency itself? I'm convinced what Apple is doing here has exactly one purpose: Force developers to prepare their apps for the yet to be released iGlasses so that the Apple Vision Pro situation doesn't repeat itself - a device for which no one can be bothered to make apps. The idea is clearly that covering things with animated light-grey sludge will make transparency bearable on both computer screens and iGlasses. They are probably right that people will get used to it, but I very much doubt that any UI designer (at Apple or elsewhere) ever thought that this design is an optimal choice for traditional computer screens.
    - ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
balder1991 1y ago
Ironically, I don’t think the comments on this website have a good contrast, as explained in this old critique: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/low-contrast/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/low-contrast/
- refulgentis 1y ago
  They have good-ish contrast - ironically, a lot of the black and white base color thinking mentioned in the article comes from these reactions, in my experience. People end up in a tarpit of "black and white = best contrast, but surely that's too much, let me fuck with transparency..."... and then you end up with the clusterfuck that was Cupertino trying to ship Liquid Glass. The transparency would vary wildly between releases.
jhancock 1y ago
Supply chain attacks means I can no longer do dev work without a container. On a Mac this means running linux containers which need a base linux VM. I've stared using Podman. It does the job. On linux this means the same (except the VM isn't required), which gives a more elastic experience for mem/cpu/gpu. MacOS 26 crosses the line. My next machine with be linux.
- fauigerzigerk 1y ago
  I feel an urge to do the same after ~15 years on Mac. If only I could forget the weeks I spent last time on trying to stop my Linux laptop from draining the battery three times as fast as any MacBook, all the while harassing me with heat and noise.
- coldtea 1y ago
  The last part doesn't follow from the previous two paragraphs though
- matthew-wegner 1y ago
  Tahoe can also: https://github.com/apple/container https://github.com/apple/container
  - js2 1y ago
    These run inside a Linux VM, as jhancock stated.
Razengan 1y ago
Paraphrasing a previous comment: macOS Tahoe is the second time that I have felt this kind of frustration with an operating system since I jumped from the Microsoft ship during Windows 8 and their "Metro" iPad-envy crap. Did some Apple CxO let their brother-in-law's cousin's nephew have a go at managing all the teams? It's not like "oh, these kinds of bugs are easy to overlook, and a low priority, they'll be fixed soon" and they do. But rather, Tahoe is full of moments like "HOW the hell could the richest company on Earth not have seen this for a whole YEAR?? and HOW did none of the beta testers complain about it??!" It's unbelievable: Some basic UI is LITERALLY (not an exaggeration) unreadable on the dumbass "glass" implementation. There are blatant rendering bugs and placeholders still in the shipped version (just look at the Contacts app). DRM slowdowns have crippled the Music and TV apps so much that I literally cancelled my subscription and went to just pirating the content. I'll never go back to Windows and I'll still buy MacBooks, but maybe I'll start exploring Linux a bit more. Things like Omarchy etc. seem genuinely tempting.
- Y-bar 1y ago
  It’s Alan Dye at Apple, he has always been a graphics-trumps-usability guy. The problem is that he has nobody to moderate him and tell him that certain things will not work in the real world.
  - IlikeMadison 1y ago
    I will go even further. It's Alan Dye and below him an army of H1Bs from South Asia, as seen in the promotional videos.
JSR_FDED 1y ago
I miss the skeuomorphic UI we used to have. Seriously, what was wrong with brushed aluminum and leather and wood?
- ngcazz 1y ago
  Agree. OS X Tiger remains unmoved as the visual high watermark for Macs.
- m463 1y ago
  I think ios 7 is what broke everything. controls don't look like controls, but they hide anyway and you have to tap around to discover and uncover them. And low contrast, and less legible fonts, and... and other companies, like tesla picked up all these design influences and brought them into the "critical controls used while driving"...
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- barnabee 1y ago
  I miss UIs that were native to screens and efficiently and effectively deigned to work well on screens. What was wrong with windows and panels that actually filled square viewports, visually distinct separation between different things, use of colour to distinguish controls that are defaults, less common, disabled, etc., compact and easy to scan tables and lists, screens that display and update instantly… It is embarrassing that GUIs have become so bad that well designed TUIs running inside software designed to emulate computers from the 1970s now regularly[0] make better "desktop" applications than modern apps and anything adhering to the braindead design fad of the day. [0] https://github.com/rothgar/awesome-tuis https://github.com/rothgar/awesome-tuis
- viktorcode 1y ago
  Nothing was wrong, it's just the general perception of customers has shifted. The internet was full of comments very similar to what you can read here, lacking specific details and objective critical analysis, all saying how behind the times and inconvenient current Apple UIs were. How bad skeuomorphic approach is in general. How not modern it is. And then it changed with iOS 7. The reaction was exactly what it is now.
lqet 1y ago
Slightly related: https://xkcd.com/2892/ https://xkcd.com/2892/
- rahkiin 1y ago
  Could you elaborate why you think this banana price comic is related?
  - skylurk 1y ago
    At first I thought "banana price" was a new putdown I had not heard. Turns out the comic is actually about the price of bananas.
  - lqet 1y ago
    It isn't, I posted in the wrong comments section, sorry for that!
koiueo 1y ago
Just Apple being Apple. They finally invented the innovative groundbreaking software UI paradigm, previously implemented in competing products 10-15 years ago. To all Apple fans: it'll pass. You just have to wait it out. The good part, in 10-15 years Apple will catch up in ergonomics with today's KDE (that's from where they copy, it seems).
rgovostes 1y ago
I encountered an interesting snag with the new UI while scrolling through Slack. Suddenly the glass Huddle button was glowing with a golden-yellow hue which drew my eye, but I wasn't sure why, it didn't seem like anyone had started a call... It turned out I had scrolled the content such that a yellow smiley emoji was positioned directly underneath the Huddle button, and the glass effect dispersed the color to the edges of the control. There is a long-established convention that Mac OS visually distinguishes "default" buttons from others to guide the user toward a certain action. A button that changes colors depending on nearby content subverts that expectation. Although I should say I've been using Tahoe for a month and so far that has only happened to me once, it's also the only time in my entire lifetime of using Mac OS. Generally the UI is fine but it's definitely not the best-looking release. (Why does a random subset of menu items have icons now, exactly?)
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
postepowanieadm 1y ago
That's fascinating! Maybe the reason for "odd" macOS view is that the designers are not from the European cultural circle, and what we took as a good design is only our bias?
- torben-friis 1y ago
  Alan dye doesn’t seem to have any non European/western background at all.
- coldtea 1y ago
  Nope. All the mainstream UIs, including the good ones from the past, are US made to begin with.
d3w1tt 1y ago
Most of the software I use still looks the same as it did. Until that's no longer the case, I'm okay waiting for improvements in the liquid glass.
coldtea 1y ago
Not an elephant, more like a turkey or a lemon
moi2388 1y ago
Very subjective. I feel the text entry fields are clearly visible and the redesign looks horrible.
coldtea 1y ago
If a UI redesign comes with graphic designer fluff "justifications" using metaphors and artistic language, it's crap. "Liquid Glass" well all out on that, starting from the stupid name. None of the justifications in Apple's PR were based on classic UI design guidelines or HCI best practices.
refulgentis 1y ago
Bravo. I did a bunch of color science study over a couple years while at Google, the work turned into Material You. A large motivation of it was the intellectual poverty of monochrome and how software design sort of died, in my humble opinion, post iOS 7. I used to call iOS "Yves Klein" (i.e. blue everywhere) but the black and white x 0 understanding of transparency x science of contrast is the real offense, especially post Liquid Glass
smoser 1y ago
Tahoe takes a step back in other ways. Like how you can use tabs in Maps.app anymore.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
devinprater 1y ago
Well, if you use VoiceOver, things are the same as they always were. So, time for Mac users to use the screen reader. https://support.apple.com/guide/voiceover/welcome/mac https://support.apple.com/guide/voiceover/welcome/mac

86 points by GavinAnderegg 1y ago

Tahoe is the first macos (and ios) upgrade I'm avoiding. I'd already had to enable a bunch of macos accessibility features (increase contrast, reduce transparency) for years just to make it less crappy. Every release gets less usable for the sake of looking fancy. Ever since GUIs became (flat) UXs everything has gone to shit. Not that GUIs didn't also suck, but I could at least distinguish controls from labels. I remember reading John Siracusa's long Mac OS X reviews, and their details of how the GUI changed, often for the worse - i.e. less usable. One of the first notes I remember was when colour labels in Finder switched from highlighting the entire file ( easily visible ) to becoming just a little coloured dot which is easy to miss while scrolling. Don't even get me started on Apple Music, which is one of top 3 worst designed apps I've ever used.

treetalker 1y ago
> colour labels in Finder switched from highlighting the entire file One of the reasons I continue to subscribe (sigh) to the Path Finder (Finder replacement) app, which offers whole-line highlighting (coloring) of tagged files. (It also has a great function to batch-rename files — including with regex find and replace, and including the ability to save and load renaming algorithms.) Not affiliated, just a very happy user (apart from the subscription licensing model, that is).
- LeoPanthera 1y ago
  I really want to like Path Finder. It looks like it might be nearly perfect for me. But I am intensely opposed to a file manager that requires internet access to activate in order for your subscription to be validated. It's such an offensive model.
egypturnash 1y ago
The advantage of the colored dot is that it's easy to show that a file has multiple tags by putting several dots next to each other. IIRC the old way only let you have one tag on a file? Multiple tags are super useful for me, I tag all my art files as some combination of in progress/done/commissions/paid, and use saved searches to decide what I'm gonna work on today.
- brailsafe 1y ago
  I didn't know you could do that, maybe I'll give it a shot. For one tag I'd definitely still prefer a whole line, but it would be nice if that was configurable.
- eviks 1y ago
  It's not an advantage since you can trivially show multiple colors in a bigger area of the file name, it's even easier than dots And you could even reduce readability by using gradients to make it fancier!
- hirvi74 1y ago
  Do you use this feature a lot? I have used macOS for over 15 years straight, and I do not think I have ever tagged a file once. What purpose does it even serve? You get some color code, but what does that truly accomplish? I assume most people that use such a feature have some kind of mental map?
  - NegativeLatency 1y ago
    I use it when I have to process some files manually, maybe involving multiple steps (blue is started, green is done, or whatever) In a world where “normal” people are calling files “v2_final_final” it’s nice to have a way to encode more information than just a file name. Other people also use them for organization and workflows and stuff
  - carlosjobim 1y ago
    If you're doing work on many files within different folders in a project folder, and this work takes several days. You finish the files in one folder and tag it with a color as "done", then move on to the next folder, etc.
tpmoney 1y ago
> Ever since GUIs became (flat) UXs everything has gone to shit. Not that GUIs didn't also suck, but I could at least distinguish controls from labels. One of the nice things about Tahoe is that liquid glass does a better job of distinguishing controls from other elements, at least most of the time. But they need to do a better job refining some of the transparency effects to make it more consistent. For example in Safari, with a medium grey background on a page, the controls have contrast from the toolbar surface and the borders and glass effect give them a nice depth. But with a dark grey background all the contrast between the controls and the toolbar almost disappear, and only the borders give any real distinction. Its even worse on light or white backgrounds, where since the borders in the liquid glass elements tend to be light/white colored in the first place, even they disappear. The transparency effects can be nice, but someone else's choices for a site background shouldn't be having such a dramatic impact on the actual UI of the computer.
- tonyedgecombe 1y ago
  The first setting I changed was "Show colour in tab bar". I want the web page to appear to be the isolated artefact it is rather than bleeding out into Safari.
- fauigerzigerk 1y ago
  >The transparency effects can be nice, but someone else's choices for a site background shouldn't be having such a dramatic impact on the actual UI of the computer. Isn't this just the principle of transparency itself? I'm convinced what Apple is doing here has exactly one purpose: Force developers to prepare their apps for the yet to be released iGlasses so that the Apple Vision Pro situation doesn't repeat itself - a device for which no one can be bothered to make apps. The idea is clearly that covering things with animated light-grey sludge will make transparency bearable on both computer screens and iGlasses. They are probably right that people will get used to it, but I very much doubt that any UI designer (at Apple or elsewhere) ever thought that this design is an optimal choice for traditional computer screens.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago

balder1991 1y ago

Ironically, I don’t think the comments on this website have a good contrast, as explained in this old critique: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/low-contrast/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/low-contrast/

refulgentis 1y ago
They have good-ish contrast - ironically, a lot of the black and white base color thinking mentioned in the article comes from these reactions, in my experience. People end up in a tarpit of "black and white = best contrast, but surely that's too much, let me fuck with transparency..."... and then you end up with the clusterfuck that was Cupertino trying to ship Liquid Glass. The transparency would vary wildly between releases.

jhancock 1y ago

Supply chain attacks means I can no longer do dev work without a container. On a Mac this means running linux containers which need a base linux VM. I've stared using Podman. It does the job. On linux this means the same (except the VM isn't required), which gives a more elastic experience for mem/cpu/gpu. MacOS 26 crosses the line. My next machine with be linux.

fauigerzigerk 1y ago
I feel an urge to do the same after ~15 years on Mac. If only I could forget the weeks I spent last time on trying to stop my Linux laptop from draining the battery three times as fast as any MacBook, all the while harassing me with heat and noise.
coldtea 1y ago
The last part doesn't follow from the previous two paragraphs though
matthew-wegner 1y ago
Tahoe can also: https://github.com/apple/container https://github.com/apple/container
- js2 1y ago
  These run inside a Linux VM, as jhancock stated.

Razengan 1y ago

Paraphrasing a previous comment: macOS Tahoe is the second time that I have felt this kind of frustration with an operating system since I jumped from the Microsoft ship during Windows 8 and their "Metro" iPad-envy crap. Did some Apple CxO let their brother-in-law's cousin's nephew have a go at managing all the teams? It's not like "oh, these kinds of bugs are easy to overlook, and a low priority, they'll be fixed soon" and they do. But rather, Tahoe is full of moments like "HOW the hell could the richest company on Earth not have seen this for a whole YEAR?? and HOW did none of the beta testers complain about it??!" It's unbelievable: Some basic UI is LITERALLY (not an exaggeration) unreadable on the dumbass "glass" implementation. There are blatant rendering bugs and placeholders still in the shipped version (just look at the Contacts app). DRM slowdowns have crippled the Music and TV apps so much that I literally cancelled my subscription and went to just pirating the content. I'll never go back to Windows and I'll still buy MacBooks, but maybe I'll start exploring Linux a bit more. Things like Omarchy etc. seem genuinely tempting.

Y-bar 1y ago
It’s Alan Dye at Apple, he has always been a graphics-trumps-usability guy. The problem is that he has nobody to moderate him and tell him that certain things will not work in the real world.
- IlikeMadison 1y ago
  I will go even further. It's Alan Dye and below him an army of H1Bs from South Asia, as seen in the promotional videos.

JSR_FDED 1y ago

I miss the skeuomorphic UI we used to have. Seriously, what was wrong with brushed aluminum and leather and wood?

ngcazz 1y ago
Agree. OS X Tiger remains unmoved as the visual high watermark for Macs.
m463 1y ago
I think ios 7 is what broke everything. controls don't look like controls, but they hide anyway and you have to tap around to discover and uncover them. And low contrast, and less legible fonts, and... and other companies, like tesla picked up all these design influences and brought them into the "critical controls used while driving"...
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
barnabee 1y ago
I miss UIs that were native to screens and efficiently and effectively deigned to work well on screens. What was wrong with windows and panels that actually filled square viewports, visually distinct separation between different things, use of colour to distinguish controls that are defaults, less common, disabled, etc., compact and easy to scan tables and lists, screens that display and update instantly… It is embarrassing that GUIs have become so bad that well designed TUIs running inside software designed to emulate computers from the 1970s now regularly[0] make better "desktop" applications than modern apps and anything adhering to the braindead design fad of the day. [0] https://github.com/rothgar/awesome-tuis https://github.com/rothgar/awesome-tuis
viktorcode 1y ago
Nothing was wrong, it's just the general perception of customers has shifted. The internet was full of comments very similar to what you can read here, lacking specific details and objective critical analysis, all saying how behind the times and inconvenient current Apple UIs were. How bad skeuomorphic approach is in general. How not modern it is. And then it changed with iOS 7. The reaction was exactly what it is now.

lqet 1y ago

Slightly related: https://xkcd.com/2892/ https://xkcd.com/2892/

rahkiin 1y ago
Could you elaborate why you think this banana price comic is related?
- skylurk 1y ago
  At first I thought "banana price" was a new putdown I had not heard. Turns out the comic is actually about the price of bananas.
- lqet 1y ago
  It isn't, I posted in the wrong comments section, sorry for that!

koiueo 1y ago

Just Apple being Apple. They finally invented the innovative groundbreaking software UI paradigm, previously implemented in competing products 10-15 years ago. To all Apple fans: it'll pass. You just have to wait it out. The good part, in 10-15 years Apple will catch up in ergonomics with today's KDE (that's from where they copy, it seems).

rgovostes 1y ago

I encountered an interesting snag with the new UI while scrolling through Slack. Suddenly the glass Huddle button was glowing with a golden-yellow hue which drew my eye, but I wasn't sure why, it didn't seem like anyone had started a call... It turned out I had scrolled the content such that a yellow smiley emoji was positioned directly underneath the Huddle button, and the glass effect dispersed the color to the edges of the control. There is a long-established convention that Mac OS visually distinguishes "default" buttons from others to guide the user toward a certain action. A button that changes colors depending on nearby content subverts that expectation. Although I should say I've been using Tahoe for a month and so far that has only happened to me once, it's also the only time in my entire lifetime of using Mac OS. Generally the UI is fine but it's definitely not the best-looking release. (Why does a random subset of menu items have icons now, exactly?)

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

postepowanieadm 1y ago

That's fascinating! Maybe the reason for "odd" macOS view is that the designers are not from the European cultural circle, and what we took as a good design is only our bias?

torben-friis 1y ago
Alan dye doesn’t seem to have any non European/western background at all.
coldtea 1y ago
Nope. All the mainstream UIs, including the good ones from the past, are US made to begin with.

d3w1tt 1y ago

Most of the software I use still looks the same as it did. Until that's no longer the case, I'm okay waiting for improvements in the liquid glass.

coldtea 1y ago

Not an elephant, more like a turkey or a lemon

moi2388 1y ago

Very subjective. I feel the text entry fields are clearly visible and the redesign looks horrible.

coldtea 1y ago

If a UI redesign comes with graphic designer fluff "justifications" using metaphors and artistic language, it's crap. "Liquid Glass" well all out on that, starting from the stupid name. None of the justifications in Apple's PR were based on classic UI design guidelines or HCI best practices.

refulgentis 1y ago

Bravo. I did a bunch of color science study over a couple years while at Google, the work turned into Material You. A large motivation of it was the intellectual poverty of monochrome and how software design sort of died, in my humble opinion, post iOS 7. I used to call iOS "Yves Klein" (i.e. blue everywhere) but the black and white x 0 understanding of transparency x science of contrast is the real offense, especially post Liquid Glass

smoser 1y ago

Tahoe takes a step back in other ways. Like how you can use tabs in Maps.app anymore.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

devinprater 1y ago

Well, if you use VoiceOver, things are the same as they always were. So, time for Mac users to use the screen reader. https://support.apple.com/guide/voiceover/welcome/mac https://support.apple.com/guide/voiceover/welcome/mac