Free the Icons

That is, until two weeks ago when I got my new iPhone. I had to, the old one couldnt upgrade to the newest iOS.

I feel ashamed to admit, that I had one or two days of extreme frustration just learning to do basic stuff. It was not about the shape of icons, but more along the lines of what you write. Swiping patterns, button press sequences, and the time you should hold down a button. It is ridiculous.

Some of the blame is on me for not being mobile phone savvy, but it is indisputable that the UX has deterioted significantly. I suspect it will just get worse going forward.

I haven't used iOS 27 yet, but from what I've seen it's going to get worse. We already have swiping down from the top left or top right bringing up different things, while swiping down anywhere else in the middle of the screen brings up search... unless you're swiping down at the bottom of the screen, then it's Reachability. From what I understand, iOS 27 will also bring swiping down from the Dynamic Island to trigger Siri. So that's 3 different behaviors from a swipe down from somewhere on the top of a <3" wide screen, with no real way to know what's going on intuitively.

I find nowadays iOS is as complex as the Android I remember. I can navigate it just fine because I'm used to it but even my parents who've been using iPhones longer than me have found themselves getting lost in the OS with iOS 26 in particular.

2. Can apple ‘regress’ the camera app so the it is easy to use. The interface is a disaster of mixed inputs and over loaded widgets. Theres so many modes and sub modes. Swipe to zoom works mostly except when it changes modes. I spend about 10 seconds every tone inise the camera app just making it take a picture because accidentally touching it in the wrong place switches to some other mode.

3. The genrel consistency has went downhill. Its difficult sometimes now to know just how to interact with an app.

4. Search box. If i do another attempt at a web search when i am in mail search box i dunno. Either unify it or make it distinct. Also sometime its at the top sometimes the bottom

Cultural context, the same way you'd know tapping on an icon opens an app.

At least you can have 3-button navigation

I feel as if it was the opposite. It started as a true "home computer," and nowadays, it's used to do work.

The fact that MacOS is probably the worst gaming platform on Earth (and Apple doesn't seem to lose sleep over it -although I think they'd like iPad to be a better gaming platform), is an indicator that people use the computer to get work done; whether at home, or in the office.

But there's a lot of pretty visceral hatred for Apple -especially in tech circles- so I don't expect much reasoned discourse about it.

I'm a senior platform engineer who at the time I bought it was a senior software developer, who can still use it for my daily tasks despite it having 8gb of ram. Until very recently the 32gb T14 I had ad work was frankly worse performant than the little air, while having a battery life of around 45 minutes a fan sounding like a jetengine and a keyboard so hot it made the sun jealous. My new model is way faster than my macbook air though, but the old model was technically newer than the air. Obviously the comparisson isn't completely fair since we run a lot of corporate enterprise stuff on our laptops, but still.

I'd really like a Linux laptop, but a Framework laptop is expensive (and it has loud fans and runs hot). A tuxedo is even more expensive and has fans where you'd place it on your legs for whatever reason, and runs hot. Looking at the laptop market now, I can't see what you'd buy. A week ago I would've said the Neo (if the 8gb of ram holds up as well on the mobile chip as it does on the m1), but today I'm guessing a refurbished air with 16gb would be the only real option for someone who want's a cool low noise machine with decent battery time.

Whether you run OS/X or Asahi, I really can't see what you'd buy other than these. At least if you actually use it on your lap and don't just have it sit in a dock on a table.

Then again, I'm the sort of person who would buy the pink neo because it would fuck with the perception people have of my mid 40 Scandinavian conservativeish dad look. So maybe it is just about the message?

Is it a bad thing? Not necessary. Smartphones revolution made Internet truly accessible to everyone by cost of dumbing down software by features and UI - turning effectively these devices to work like any other home appliance. Software today has to have that captivating appearance so user wouldn't be scared away. But nothing is perfect and there are examples where users are being treated with this nasty infantile approach by literally showing confetti and balloons as the satisfaction derived from interaction.

The peak was flat style which not only introduced maximum simplified interfaces, design but also provided grounds for all sorts of darkpatterns where content is indistinguishable from active element. That let companies manipulate the user's informed choice.

He’s out now. We can start to do something else.

A lot of confident guesswork is done at HN regarding companies' motivations.

I remember reading it in the HIG when VisionOS came out and everyone was complaining about the shape. I went looking to see if there was a reason, and there was.

I don't like it, but I believe that's the reason why.

Since the eyes are the cursor, this is a problem. Desktop and mobile don’t have this issue.

When trying to create a new category, customers need to have some faith it’s going to stick around and they won’t be abandoned. So it’s important to have that long term vision and conviction that the decisions made were the right ones.

That said, I bought the M5 Vision Pro and returned it after a week. It doesn’t feel like a product yet. Vision Pro as a future product might be questionable, but will they abandon spacial computing all together or switch to more of a true AR setup? I think real AR would be much better.

I think now that Cook is stepping down, we could see more change. Cooked seemed a little desperate to make sure Apple looked like an innovative company, when he clearly wasn’t a product guy. I don’t think a a full computer is needed on the face, that was the first mistake, they need a more purpose built device for the few things that make sense in the context of a HUD.

That's just big corporate politics. Ever been involved in a 'lessons learned' exercise? Everything gets politically massaged so as not to upset individuals or functions, so that by the end of it, there are very few meaningful lessons remaining, and those that are still present need background understanding to divine.

This approach just protects the people, the function, and ultimately the corporation.

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.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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

Except that (in my view, which is shared by many others though of course not universal) Liquid Glass is ugly as sin. Even if it worked properly I’d still rather not have it. But there’s also nothing entertaining or beautiful about unreadable overlapping text, flashing UI as you pan, visually cut off scrollbars, excessively rounded corners, or any from a plethora of bad decisions.

Liquid Glass is the worst of both worlds.

macOS used to be both functional and visually entertaining, and they’ve been removing that incompetently and for no apparent reason. One obvious case is removing an app from the Dock: It used to be that it went away in a quick puff of smoke with an appropriate sound; some versions back they removed the puff of smoke but kept the sound.

10.27?

But that means there were two each of 10.11, 10.12, 10.13, 10.14, and 10.15 :-)

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.

The mess he actively implemented and was an integral part of?

Why do people keep thinking that Alan Dye was the only person (apparently with God-like powers) who somehow forced and designed Liquid Glass alone, in isolation, and somehow sneaked it in to every Apple platform.

Granted, you can do a 256x256 and scale it down to 128x128, for example, but if you care for quality some details will be lost anyway. So that's why nowadays you'll see most icon themes are just a bunch of logos plastered over a shaped background.

And what irked me the most was that a few weeks after that I released that first set via deviantart and opendesktop.org there were websites that included them in their sets and made them available for download in their websites, not even a redirect to my deviantart or opendesktop pages or something. And found out after that that some people were using them in commercial projects and stuff so I had to chase them asking to not use them since they were cc-by-nc'ed.

Never got a single cent of any of that. I love making icons, at some point I was even working for the icons that would eventually become the Breeze set for KDE5 with their VDG, but it happens that I also need money to buy the beans.

[0] https://miler.codeberg.page/?prj=rekt

[1] https://miler.codeberg.page/?prj=betelgeuse

To the blog's point - many KDE Icon Packs have non-uniform shapes (ex: I'm currently using Newaita)

(They still have different shapes, though)

I mean this throughout the whole process. The only standard illustration file format I can think of is SVG, but it's largely a format to export to, not one industry-standard software uses as it's main persistence format.

So for starters, contributors tend to need access to speciality software they probably don't have installed to view and edit the source of truth. This also means you're handling at least two files in your VCS, the closed format acting effectively as a blob, no diffs, etc. and an export file (usually more, for different scales) to actually interface with the rest of the ecosystem; this is the file everyone can open, inspect and compare, the one your build consumes, etc.

This already would be a good amount of friction for someone familiar with the tools, but designers are not necessarily familiar with git, the PR process, etc. Add to it that icons are more subjective than code, which overall should follow certain rules and either works or doesn't, and it overall seems not worth it for a casual contributor.

Making good products means lots and lots of drudgery, just for fun volunteers aren't going to touch that, and the stereotypical FOSS contributor is the type that's clueless about UX and puts stability above everything else.

Have fun convincing someone feature x is too overengineered to be usable by anyone who's not an alpha geek and should be simplified to a single switch. Not to mention proper large scale usability testing likely being unaffordable.

So designers stayed far, far away.