8 ms·

Free the Icons

• hoistbypetard 3mo ago
  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.
  • boxed 3mo ago
    In fact the HIG used to explicitly say so with clear examples proving it.
    • 1over137 3mo ago
      and which was backed by scientific evidence from controlled trials and human factors and psychology.
• altern8 3mo ago
  Tahoe was such a huge mess, but I'm hopeful that the new CEO will turn things around and bring things back to normal. If they do, I'll consider upgrading both OS and laptop, but right now I'm holding on to Sequoia
  • schappim 3mo ago
    It really was Mac OS X's Vista moment. Edit: It'll always be Mac OS X to me, not macOS.
    • felixding 3mo ago
      Yes! You are not alone. The name Mac OS X has always felt special to me.
    • zapzupnz 3mo ago
      Mac OS X 27. 10.27? But that means there were two each of 10.11, 10.12, 10.13, 10.14, and 10.15 :-)
    • mghackerlady 3mo ago
      OS X? Surely you mean Rhapsody
    • lunar_rover 3mo ago
      Windows Vista primarily suffers from technical issues. Aero is virtually unchanged in 7.
  • vikingcat 3mo ago
    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.
  • saagarjha 3mo ago
    Golden Gate is better but it hasn't fixed your icons unfortunately
    • WillAdams 3mo ago
      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.
      • deleted 3mo ago
        [deleted]
      • toyg 3mo ago
        Codenames are meant to tickle the pride of this or that manager, not be useful to customers.
        • WillAdams 3mo ago
          They also need to function as workable identifiers, and their being confusing works against folks.
      • coldpie 3mo ago
        You know, someone should invent an infinite sequence of ordinal symbols which we could use to place things in a sequence. It could start with a simple vertical line, something like "1". Maybe someone more clever than me can come up with the next symbol.
        • WillAdams 3mo ago
          Unfortunately, I lost track of how Mac OS X was numbered after 10.7.whatever the last iteration was. Doesn't much matter, since 10.6.8 was the last version I truly enjoyed using.
  • VladVladikoff 3mo ago
    They have a new head designer too IIRC, but probably is going to take some time for him to slowly move away from the mess he inherited.
    • hbn 3mo ago
      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.
      • saagarjha 3mo ago
        [flagged]
        • hbn 3mo ago
          The bit about internal rumblings at Apple I definitely read from him but the rest is just things we saw play out publicly over the past decade.
          • saagarjha 3mo ago
            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.
  • neonmagenta 3mo ago
    Same. Apple and Adobe seem to constantly have updates that feel one step forward, two steps back in a lot of places.
• colesantiago 3mo ago
  It might be better to make Linux have these gorgeous icons now that Apple locked them up. Make the icons be Free on Free OSes like Linux.
  • geraldcombs 3mo ago
    What's been keeping Linux from having gorgeous icons up to this point?
    • dylan604 3mo ago
      a question as old as Linux itself
    • edoceo 3mo 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).
      • r3trohack3r 3mo ago
        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?
        • Teever 3mo ago
          Yeah what if these open source developers just got jobs and then they paid someone to do what they used to do for free?
          • r3trohack3r 3mo ago
• sublinear 3mo ago
  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).
• mortenjorck 3mo ago
  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.
• etchalon 3mo ago
  I think this is a battle they won't win, though I applaud the effort.
• al_borland 3mo ago
  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.
  • nrightnour 3mo ago
    Are you sure visionOS requires it? Having an icon be a few px smaller so a microphone can stick out, doesn't seem like a big deal for tracking.
    • moron4hire 3mo ago
      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.
    • al_borland 3mo ago
      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.
      • WillAdams 3mo ago
        Obvious solution, two different icons, round one for Vision OS, more shapely one for everyone else.
        • mrkstu 3mo ago
          Or squirqle jail just on vision OS
• bze12 3mo ago
  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.
  • bze12 3mo ago
    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 https://www.benedelste.in/post/__001
  • ryandrake 3mo ago
    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.
  • tambourine_man 3mo ago
    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.
• nixpulvis 3mo ago
  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.
• SpyCoder77 3mo ago
  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.
  • dpark 3mo ago
    The real question isn’t whether LIQUID should be BLURRY but whether intentionally choosing a BLURRY user interface design is STUPID. Apple spent millions convincing everyone they needed Retina displays and then churned out an update that made them all blurry.
    • SpyCoder77 3mo ago
      I agree Liquid Glass is bad a lot of the time (some parts have grown on me)
• BugsJustFindMe 3mo ago
  > 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.
• crazygringo 3mo ago
  I've got to disagree. I really disliked previously, when icon prominence could be wildly different because one icon takes up the full area with a big square, while another is a circle that necessarily has a significantly smaller area within the same extent. Icons from Apple were all nicely balanced in size, but third-party apps could be anything. Giving equal visual weight to each icon is an improvement. iOS was a step forward in this direction, and now they finally brought the same standard to Mac. Squircles aren't ugly, they're functional. "Shape" hasn't disappeared as a distinct visual cue, as the area within the squircle is made of, well... different shapes. And let's not forget the fact that Macs still effectively use icon masks. A smaller icon is harder to click, because clicking on a transparent area... doesn't click at all. I remember icons like a skinny letter "S" that you had to click just right or you couldn't at all.
  • BugsJustFindMe 3mo ago
    > 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.
    • soulofmischief 3mo ago
      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.
      • 3dGrabber 3mo ago
• itomato 3mo ago
  [dead]
• overgard 3mo ago
  I find the squircle jail just creates a lot of confusion for me, having distinct shapes helps a lot at a glance.
• hbn 3mo ago
  > the much-celebrated Liquid Glass opacity slider The Liquid Glass slider is an embarrassing outright admission of failure. Apple built its brand as a tastemaker, so to put out this new, controversial design language, and after a year of tweaking, finally throw their hands up and say "we don't know what looks good, you decide" is so disappointing. That said, all the changes in iOS 27 are such a massive improvement from 26. The first design turnout with Alan Dye gone is making me feel very optimistic of their direction.
  • zapzupnz 3mo ago
    > outright admission of failure Right!? Who's out there going "oh no, translucent is too translucent; opaque is too opaque; but now that I can have 72.93% glass, my life is complete"?
    • uncircle 3mo ago
      Apple designers
  • wpm 3mo ago
    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".
    • lopis 3mo ago
      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.
• ceroxylon 3mo ago
  >Apple didn’t just mess with their own icons. They also dictated the shape of every third-party app icon We will never know if this was AI generated or not, but I have started to flinch at this sentence structure.
  • hbn 3mo ago
    That's not the "it's not just X—it's Y" AI tell that I assume you've seen other people call out. It's legitimately a useful sentence to assist the point the author is making.
• stevebmark 3mo ago
  It is always great to see more people be vocal about the poison of flat design
• rglover 3mo ago
  I honestly forgot icons used to be a lot of different shapes. Used Panic Coda way back in the day and that leaf icon from this post is unmistakable.
• OuterVale 3mo ago
  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.
• _0xdd 3mo ago
  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.
  • nok22kon 3mo ago
    it's market changed it started as a computer for professionals now its for people who want to look cool. so form is much more important than function, it's literally what you buy
    • refactor_master 3mo ago
      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.
      • FireBeyond 3mo ago
        All my devices are Apple: laptop, Studio, display, phone, iPad, watch... I will say that Apple has solidified on the design and reliability "recently". But let's not pretend that the MBP line, to pick on one, didn't go through some rough rough days. I've had laptops that had the delaminating screen, the 'single grain of sand can ruin it' butterfly keyboard, hell, I've had two models that had recalled logic boards. Early Magsafe connectors (fantastic invention) where the rubber would routinely fail even without tension (I had two that failed, exposing bare wire, even though they spent the entirety of their life on a desk, routed through a cable organizer, far away from any UV sunlight hitting them directly. But now? Things are much, much more solid.
        • TylerE 3mo ago
          Even the worst MBP is light years better than the plasticky crap on the Windows side.
• jpease 3mo ago
  Seeing all those old icons makes me realize how much I miss them. Superficial, perhaps, but they were one of the things I loved about OS X when I made the switch back in 2005 or 2006.
  • MBCook 3mo ago
    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.
    • eloisant 3mo ago
      I remember getting interested in an app because of the icon looked nice. Also couldn't use apps if the icon was too ugly and spoiled my beautiful dock.
    • jmuguy 3mo ago
      There must be someone senior at Apple that still thinks the squircles look good, I dunno how we're still stuck with them. I haven't made a change to my dock in years and I have to hunt for apps nearly every time I open it. It doesn't help that a lot of newer apps seeming don't actually have a logo and are just happy with some random circular shaped blob.
      • MBCook 3mo ago
        Same people who thought text on translucent glass over text looked good. Who thought that and lots of floating buttons was “getting out of the way of my content”. Who thought sidebars should look like windows with mirrored content under them was smart. Who thought long horizontal scrolling lists were easy to use. Who never gave more than one window open at once. Who are apparently illiterate and need icons everywhere and text nowhere. They’ve lost the plot and I don’t care what they think. My machine is drastically harder to use than it was just two years ago all to make it “prettier“ even though personally I don’t think it is.
• healsdata 3mo ago
  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.
  • MBCook 3mo ago
    You can’t. “Squircle jail” is a real thing. If your icon isn’t the right shape Apple puts it inside one for you.
• Jyaif 3mo ago
  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.
  • DarkUranium 3mo ago
    That gives me an idea for an icon pack. TL;DR path-traced voxel art, isometric render. Alas, I'm no designer.
• bleakenthusiasm 3mo ago
  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.
• shmerl 3mo ago
  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.
• nanapipirara 3mo ago
  Someone posted an old MacOS screenshot on Reddit and it was immediately obvious that the icons without a silhouette were the worst out of all of them. Like iTunes / Books / App Store. And that's basically what they went with eventually... Dashboard and Launcher are fine, but they have a reason to be a circle. (Well Launcher less so maybe) Chrome is terrible, it represents nothing. But I guess it's just a brand. I wish we could go back to this instead of squircles... https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/s/9MZsGioCG6 https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/s/9MZsGioCG6
• pitched 3mo ago
  The only reason to run MacOS over Linux is the hardware. Arm MacBooks are unreasonably good but don’t support Linux (Asahi is still a bit WIP). They sell hardware, not software, so the state of things makes sense. It is so disappointing though.
• anal_reactor 3mo ago
  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.
• matzie 3mo ago
  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.
• brador 3mo ago
  Design is a cost center now at Apple. Must be reduced and minmaxed.
• voidUpdate 3mo ago
  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
• 21asdffdsa12 3mo ago
  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.
• Cockbrand 3mo ago
  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.
• klntsky 3mo ago
  Any linux kid with a slightest experience with desktop ricing would tell them that uniformly customized icons are a nightmare for visual recognition. Why didn't they run some internal tests, it's so obvious
• sunaookami 3mo ago
  Same for Android. Hate adaptive icons...
• mrweasel 3mo ago
  There's so little joy and happiness left in computing. Reverting to the older style of icons, plus perhaps a few UI tweaks, certainly help bring a bit of whimsical back into the macOS platform. That's something many of us would love.
  • vintagedave 3mo ago
    > There's so little joy and happiness left in computing Preach it! https://daveon.design/creating-joy-in-the-user-experience.html https://daveon.design/creating-joy-in-the-user-experience.ht...
    • mrweasel 3mo ago
      That's a lovely little article. Thank you.
    • ChrisMarshallNY 3mo ago
      Great article -but the image has issues with Safari (invisible drag corner), and iOS (a mess). I have found that we need to be very, very careful, when making the UI more "fun." Things like rounded affordances, short transition animations, easy-to-understand elements, etc., are good. They remove the "friction." However, cute icons, unprompted animations, and overuse of whitespace for the sake of design aesthetics, can cause the UI to be too prominent. UI needs to be approachable, useful, and unobtrusive. i.e. "forgettable." Many designers absolutely can't stand the idea of designing stuff that no one pays attention to; but that's actually exactly what most UI needs to be. The metaphor that I use, is that most waitstaff at restaurants, wear black. The reason is, is because people don't go to a restaurant to pay attention to the staff (with a couple of ahem exceptions <owl emoji/>). They go for the food, and the ease of having it provided without the need to cook and wash up. I feel that UI needs to be the same. I am currently working on a version 2 of a pretty popular app that has been out for a couple of years. The original was almost entirely designed by a professional graphic designer, and he did a great job -for the most part. It looks great, and people like it. But I am constantly encountering people that have no idea about some of its most important features, mainly because the affordances were deprecated in service to visual aesthetic. The new version uses a distinct "accent color" for elements that can be manipulated, as well as simpler, clearer design. It's working well. Another example is my "Spinner" UI element[0]. This was a UIKit element that I designed, to provide an interactive "prize wheel" spinner feature for iOS. It works nicely. But I have never been able to justify actually using it for any of my projects. It's too "in your face." [0] https://github.com/RiftValleySoftware/RVS_Spinner https://github.com/RiftValleySoftware/RVS_Spinner
• DStiego 3mo ago
  Great design is more about consistency than uniformity. Just imagine how hard it would be to read a text if all the words had a similar shape! You want them to look very distinct while the predictability of the layout helps you read (which is consistency).
• pjerem 3mo ago
  > With color now so critical to tell icons apart, it should be no surprise that the new “Clear” and “Tinted” icon styles added in Tahoe are seeing so little uptake. As Adam Engst noted, “[I]t’s nearly impossible to identify a particular app when they’re all clear or tinted squircles, as you can see below. My brain just shuts down when it sees them.” Also, that's true for a lot of normal application icons. Any Google application, including of course Chrome, but also Slack, Apple Photos, etc ... they all decided to use a "abstract red green yellow blue" logo on a white background. Of course, Google is the main culprit here. IntelliJ icons are another variant but still a pain to recognize and they add so much fun when they are mixed with Google ones. And that's for the multicolor icons. Less problematic but still are "one color abstract on white background", like how am I supposed to distinguish Jira from Confluence ? Also my personal bonus is that I have slimmed down high reflective glasses which creates chromatic aberrations so all those multicolor icons are dismantled when they are in my peripheral vision.
  • bcraven 3mo ago
    Your last paragraph is why I no longer have my lenses thinned. It's cheaper too!
• brikym 3mo ago
  I never understood this sick decision. I used to use the shapes to identify apps. Most cartoon characters have very distinctive silhouettes and I don't think it's a coincidence. Remember "Who's that Pokemon?"
  • knollimar 3mo ago
    Squircle from above!
• 2d8a875f-39a2-4 3mo ago
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• deleted 3mo ago
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• amelius 3mo ago
  > Let’s return to a world of gorgeous app icons like these: Seriously, they look like pictures you could find in a child's book, and it's a form of occupational deformation when you think of those icons as "gorgeous".
  • mcherm 3mo ago
    I find them gorgeous. Admittedly, the term is unavoidably subjective. But what I like about them is that they are distinct, and that each one has character. Honestly, the fact that they looked like pictures I could find in a child's book is the main part of what I like about them: they have simple ideas ("a bird") and forms so distinctive a child could tell them apart.
    • amelius 3mo ago
      Ok, but how would you feel if the dashboard of your car had images that made it look like a child's toy? Or your watch? You've maybe grown accustomed to it on your smartphone, but it has little to do with great taste (imho).
      • skydhash 3mo ago
        A physical thing has more degree of freedom to differentiate things. Loke distance and form. So much that you can be blind and still be able to use them. A conputer interface does not have those. You need to track the cursor and then decide how you want to move it. There’s no muscle memory. And no tactile perception. What’s left is visual differentiation and it should be slightly exaggerated.
        • amelius 3mo ago
          > and it should be slightly exaggerated The problem is that you can go too far here, and it is in fact reminding me of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war
          • 3mo ago
• shresthjain 3mo ago
  Don't know if this is what you want to do or not, but you can actually change app icons for Applications however you like if you have the alternate that you want it to be. I'll tell you how Applications Folder (in Finder) -> Right-click on the target app -> Get Info -> Drag-and-drop the intended icon file to the top-left corner where the original icon is present. Ik it's just a way to customise and not something official but your Mac looks the way you want it to.
  • draw_down 3mo ago
    [dead]
  • Vuska 3mo ago
    Even Apple has forgotten about this it seems. There are various places in the UI where this change is not respected, e.g. Stage Manager.
  • al_borland 3mo ago
    Interesting... I had used this trick many times in the past, but assumed that with Tahoe it would put the icon in the little squircle jail it puts other default icons in if they don't conform to the new standards. Those end up looking really bad. I just tried it with a non-conforming icon and it seems to work. Time to go icon hunting.
• xbar 3mo ago
  I am sad that I will not have both Rosetta 2 and a tolerable UI for the remainder of my life.
• legacynl 3mo ago
  I don't know if it's a real screenshot at the bottom of OP (the blue on black icons), but that' hilarious if it is.
• aethertron 3mo ago
  "A unique, memorable icon expresses your app’s or game’s purpose and personality and helps people recognize it at a glance." "In iOS, iPadOS, and macOS, icons are square, and the system applies masking to produce rounded corners that precisely match the curvature of other rounded interface elements throughout the system and the bezel of the physical device itself." Source: Apple https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guidelines/app-icons https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline... lol
• jccalhoun 3mo ago
  What happened to being able to use themes and skins? Is it just corporate control? Why can't Windows or Mac has a CSS-style system where users can use custom style sheets? It doesn't have to go as far as classic Winamp but just going back to what we had in Win85 would be nice. (and I know there are things like Stardock's Windowblinds but why isn't it built in?)
• gwbas1c 3mo ago
  Every time I see criticism of MacOS Tahoe, it just makes me suspect that someone without experience went on an ego trip. That being said, should I skip Tahoe and wait for whatever comes next? MacOS keeps nagging me to upgrade to Tahoe, but I've been holding off because HN hates it so much.
• dlev_pika 3mo ago
  looks at Android icons shivvers Please no
• ktosobcy 3mo ago
  What is the most annoyig is that the effin' rest of the world had to follow and embrace this stupid trend :/ Luckily on Android and Linux I can select custom icon sets that can have shapes…
• seanclayton 3mo ago
  Custom, free-shaped icons are too costly. Much more economical to have a square. It will never happen, unfortunately.