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Comment by macNchz | Hacker News Reader

It’s funny how trends change but Apple users’ appetite for icons stays the same...10 years ago Apple made the navigation icons in iTunes greyscale instead of color. I wasn’t sold on it so I fired up ResEdit and quickly edited the old icons into the new sprite file inside the app package.

I saw other people complaining online so I posted the updated resource file on my $5/mo shared hosting and put a link on a forum...it was picked up on some blogs but I didn’t realize it had become popular, then I woke up a couple of days later and I’d blown through 10s of gigs of bandwidth and had my hosting account frozen (conveniently the day I’d planned a long roadtrip to test a gps/photo sharing app I’d been working on).

Years later people were still asking if I could help them change their iTunes icons, or even getting mad at me that I hadn’t updated the file to work with newer versions!

https://osxdaily.com/2010/09/03/get-color-icons-back-in-the-...

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It's funny you mentioned this. When I was on iOS, I was never satisfied with the icons (or the UI in general). I always wanted to customize it. The stock colors/design just left me wanted for more. It's an unconscious feeling; there is no concrete thing to pin point and say that the UI is bad.

What's strange is that, since I switched to Android a couple years back, I no longer had the urge to change the icons or customizing the UI. There is something about the design that makes it feel "okay". You don't feel like you're fighting the phone or being left wanted for more.

I just picked up an iphone from family to check it out, and instantly feel the need to customize it. For all the UX experts, is there a theory/phenomenal for this that I can read more?

I don't think it's really that Android design is more "okay." I think it's that the iOS (and moreso macOS) icon design-language has the potential for some really distractingly-beautiful outlier icons — icons that really twig on people's "gathering fresh ripe fruit" reward system. And when there's some of those sitting on your Dock as part of your every-day experience, you start to both:

1. want every icon to be as tantalizing as those icons already are (and so desire to customize the "lesser" icons to achieve that); and

2. feel like something very precious has been lost whenever an icon is made less tantalizing.

I would hazard a guess that the "greyscale makes people less addicted to their phones" research is more true for iOS users than Android users. iOS just has a higher average level of visual addicting-ness in its design. (Which, to be clear, has nothing to do with differing levels of "polish" or anything like that; addicting-ness is its own thing. Some [good] design-aesthetics have it; other [also good] design-aesthetics don't.)

The Photos icon on macOS Catalina and iOS (I haven't taken a look at the Big Sur redesign yet) looks like literal candy—it's a great example of this phenomenon, in my opinion. I love how the colors blend together and overlap with partial transparency.

Not a UX person.

There's a threshold after which something is so good it's worth criticizing?

That's interesting, I experience the exact opposite. I find iOS quite satisfactory after some very light customization (mainly wallpaper), but when using Android something consistently feels missing and although it drives an urge to customize, I'm not sure could be sated through any amount of tweaking.

Are you used to iPhone? Would you try to make it work like the iPhone way?

Do you feel the same with an iPad? I do with my phone but I think it has more to do with your utility of it. The iTunes app may not look proper in your computer. Android may simply suit you better. Do you find yourself trying to make it work like Android?

Nothing like free users when it comes to entitlement. I think this is mostly because they don't realize which companies are large and which are small or even just hobby projects, it is trivial to appear much larger than you are on the web.

> think this is mostly because they don't realize which companies are large and which are small or even just hobby projects

Definitely - it is hard for many to grasp how productive a single engineer can be in putting together a project that looks quite polished and professional.

But also, some people are just mean.

To be fair, part of that (as suggested by "getting mad at me that I hadn't updated the file to work with newer versions"), is that macNchz was providing a service that should have been provided officially by Apple, and many users lack (or decline to exhibit) the perceptiveness to realize that Apple has abrogated its reponsibility to correct defects in products it recieves payment for, and that this is not a official Apple website, but rather a internet rando cleaning up after one small subset of Apple's negligence.

Though, as MiroF points out, some people are just jerks.

A lot of free users also simply have no concept of how much effort something takes since they've never done it themselves, and by extension have no concept of what that effort translates to in zero cost labor. It's something I see a lot in the maker side of the world with things like 3d printable files.

Huge problem in the creative fields.

Almost everyone is super hyped that someone finally likes their work enough that they actually want it, let alone actually want to pay for it. So they undervalue their work and sell it for peanuts. I sometimes see work priced so low that it barely covers the supplies. They might sell a few but don't want to raise their price as they get better. Get a few people doing this and it becomes hard for legitimate creatives to sell their work at higher realistic prices.

Then there's overseas creatives. Some can do phenomenal work but you just can't compete with their prices even if they're pricing realiatically for where they live.

It's sort of the reverse side of The Greater Fool Theory in economics. Not sure if there is a term specifically for this, but it definitely causes a lot of irrational business decisions even outside of creatives.

I used to have a pretty successful business buying products at the monthly USPS lost mail auctions and reselling them online.

But a bunch of bloggers picked up on the opportunity and started hawking it as a get rich quick scheme. So people started showing up and way overpaying for things because there was so much competition. People were paying more for things like Macbooks than you could buy them new at Best Buy.

The first few times I saw it happen, I thought, well, this won't last, these fools will lose their shirts on all this and never come back. And I was right, people rarely came back a second time. But for months and months, new fools would show up and repeat the same exercise and never come back. After more than a year of that, we couldn't afford to keep going regularly. But for years kept checking back periodically and I saw no sign of prices going back to anything reasonable.

Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.

'Race to the bottom' is the term I think you are looking for.

Oh yeah I had family that did something similar. They did that whole thing where you bid on abandoned storage lockers. They actually did quite well considering how you can't rummage through everything prior to bidding. Made a small profit for a few years.

Then the TV shows came out and that put an end to that for them. Bids were too high that it wasn't feasible anymore.

I think this is a problem for android apps as well. People are used to free or 99c, so charging a fair price for the effort put in is a non starter.

This is really it. I just came here from the /r/arduino subreddit where I was shaking my head at the guy who was "lol, someone want to write me some free code" (that would be easily thousands of $$ if it was a project at my day job).

Maybe the problem is that we make things look so easy that no one realizes how difficult and/or time-consuming producing code is.

That was you! Thank you so much! I still use iTunes 10, with the coloured icons.

I just can't move on from the mini player, 18 years of play counts/last played, AppleScript, offline USB sync with an iPhone 4S, and of course your coloured icons. I even had to make my own RSRC edits with Themepark to show the icons correctly on Retina, based on your work. I'm not mad at you; I'm grateful for keeping the best music player (in my opinion) looking beautiful.

Any suggestions for other media management software is welcome, but I don't know if I'll ever be able to leave my beloved iTunes 10.6.3. More likely I'll run a 10.5 emulator just to keep it going through future decades.

That’s awesome–glad it was helpful back in the day! Honestly I totally agree about iTunes 10, I‘ve come to mostly dislike the current iTunes but never thought to try downgrading. I still maintain my iTunes library with play counts and metadata going back to 2003, but find myself reaching for Spotify first these days.

Have you considered putting the website back up and instead adding a purchase link so the hosting costs are worth it for you (assuming people are still bugging you about it).

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