Tahoe's Elephant
eclecticlight.co
eclecticlight.co
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.
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.
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.
For pure transparency, sure, but most of the liquid glass effects aren't pure transparency and there's a lot of different ways you can modulate the effect. Perhaps the simplest example of something like this is the mouse cursor. You probably don't think about it, but that cursor in macos has a thin white single pixel border around the whole cursor. On light backgrounds, it effectively disappears, but on dark and black backgrounds it allows you to easily see and follow your cursor around the screen. The cursor itself isn't changing, but the chosen design allows a single "black" cursor to work across all backgrounds.
Or the menu bar which has had a transparency effect for a version or two now auto switches between black and white text depending on the background coloring (for what its worth, so does Safari's new control bar). But in neither of these cases (the mouse or the menu bar) is the UI changing dramatically. Unlike the safari controls, when the mouse pointer loses its border, it doesn't lose depth or become harder to make out. When the text in the menu bar changes color, it doesn't switch from "popping out" to "flat on the bar". The style and overall look remains the same even as the colors adjust for the environment.
What I'm saying is that Apple needs to spend some time shoring up those sort of little touches that can and do make the UI fee thought out instead of just slapped together.
I suspect that you have got it in one, here.
They need to stop all transparency, and design with matte clearly visible widgets in mind.
Mid/late 90s interfaces were trully peak UI from that perspective.
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
You can see an example of that here: https://egypt.urnash.com/blog/2019/01/06/how-i-work-file-org... - it's got a screenshot of the folder of pages for a comic I was doing that had two parallel narratives, so scrolling down to the bottom of the alphabetized list wouldn't even necessarily show all the in-progress files. (Yes, I could sort by other criteria, but stuff like 'last modified date' can bring in a lot of false positives.)
I have a saved search for files marked as "in progress". And another one for files marked as both "commissions" and "in progress". All of these files might be scattered throughout my file system in various places - comics have their own folder, personal work goes in a folder named with the year, commissions sometimes end up in the yearly folder, sometimes in their own subfolder - and these saved searches let me completely disregard that and quickly ask myself "what do I feel like spending time on today".
I also have a lot of files tagged as "experiments", all saved in the yearly folder. A lot of these are the result of me sitting there on the Illustrator subreddit and answering "how do I make Illustrator do something that looks like this" questions, and packaging them up in an easy-to-reuse way; I can just look in the Experiments tag when I want to find one of them and not bother keeping a special place for them.
I don't think there's any kind of mental map going on here, the whole usefulness of tags is that I can skip navigating my folder hierarchy. Different tags very clearly mark some files as different. You can make new tags and assign them names, but you're annoyingly restricted to seven colors, so there's really not much mental mapping to do.
And you could even reduce readability by using gradients to make it fancier!
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).
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?)
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.
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.
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.
Seriously, what was wrong with brushed aluminum and leather and wood?
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"...
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.
Not of customers. Of idiotic graphic designers, who always fall for the latest fad.
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.
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).
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
"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.
Turns out the comic is actually about the price of bananas.