HN

Comments (88)

• Menu

  cosmic_cheese
  I think this and many other questionable UI decisions across the industry in recent years is the fallout of the old guard of UI designers having rotated out for younger replacements in the past decade with little transfer of knowledge occurring.The lack of transfer I don't think is out of unwillingness from the old guard, but rather due to the greenhorns throwing everything that came before their time out without questioning the reasoning behind any of it (Chesterton’s Fence) and assuming that whatever they came up with was superior and better fit for the modern era ("those old principles can't possibly hold, we have touch screens now!").It's also been made worse by UI design roles having been taken by those with backgrounds in unrelated design disciplines, as well as sites like Dribbble which reward pretty mockups over working products. This leads to overemphasis on the visual aspect of the UI and not enough on its functional and usability aspects.
• Menu

  Andrew_nenakhov
  Humans are very good at distinguishing shapes and colors. Visually distinct icons of various shapes help build muscle memory and quickly find the needed option.One of the worst trends in icons is this insatiable desire to put different icons into uniform shapes.For example, this trend resulted in tragic replacement of beautiful varied and distinct Android icons that were introduced in Android 5 to the uglicity we have now.On iOS, beautiful SFSymbol icons that floated beautifully on flat surfaces since iOS 7.0 were encased in absolutely similar circular 'liquid Glass' blobs. Sad.
• Menu

  paxy
  This Apple devotion is really something else..Looking at all their design missteps and corrections in recent releases my only takeaway is that they are making it up as they go along just like the rest of us.
• Menu

  netsharc
  The conclusion is too forgiving...> They designed it, shipped it, lived with it for a year, then publicly changed their guidance on it. To me, that’s a lot more persuasive than simply saying, “Apple doesn’t do this.”> Choosing not to do something you’ve never done is one thing.> Choosing not to do something you’ve done is experience.A more persuasive sales pitch for me to consider Apple products would be if the company had judgement not to ship such a hot mess of a sloppy product in the first place...
• nercht12
  Does anyone have a list of guidelines for good UI design that they would recommend? As I have to design UI myself, I'd be quite interested. Personally, I do favor a mix in my UI: icons for obvious-or-frequently-used stuff (like Save, Undo, Help, Sort A-Z, etc, all of which usually have standard icons (except for Save now)) and plain text for things that can't be expressed by icon (like "Refactor XYZ").
• Menu

  quibono
  1. Read the post2. Click on the hamburger menu in the top right3. ???
• insin
  What are the odds the next version of macOS reverts most of what happened in Tahoe? After having it forced on my work MacBook, I will not willingly install that trash UI on any device I own.
• vor_
  I can't stand that keyboard shortcuts for menu items are the same color as the disabled menu item color. It's mixing two meanings for the same color in the same UI element. Despite this being the style for years, I still have a split-second interpretation of non-interactivity every time I see it.
• Menu

  Kuraj
  I love KDE but they could take some notes from this!
• kingforaday
  > "putting an icon in every menu item by default which shipped with macOS Tahoe — but now it’s gone in Golden Gate"They needed to make room for Siri.
• Menu

  ripharamberip
  I don't quite understand. Icons by default obviously is stupid. But meaningful icons for actions such as copy and paste seems like a very good idea to me. Personally I think there are not enough icons in MacOS right click menus for example. For me an icon makes it much easier to find the action I want to hse
• emadabdulrahim
  One of my pet peeves is deleting an item is "Move to Trash". With no trash icon, I want labels to front-load the key word so the menu/list is scannable.
• Menu

  farmin
  The windows 11 right click menu should revert as well. It’s like a menu over a menu. You need 2 clicks to get to what you need.
• dchest
  My favorite thing about this is a checkbox in Xcode's Interface Builder (or whatever it's called now) for menu items image — "Only for macOS 26".
• inventor7777
  Ironically, I kind of liked the icons in the menus.But at the end of the day, it was like Liquid Glass itself - looks sick in presentations, but in real life, it looks pretty awful.
• minimaxa
  You first? LolArt vs. minimalism in designIcons are today's form of hieroglyphs for communication?Home Trending Hacker News Hits Archive Stats Tags Links
• BurningFrog
  When the Mac UI took over (some of) the world, many thought it was because of the icons, so they put icons all over their UIs.That was of course not at all what made the MacOS so usable. The real principles were explained in detail in Apples UI guidelines. But hardly anyone read those, so the icons have been with us for 30 years.
• St-Kiselevskii
  [dead]