Sweet Jeebus, macOS 27 Golden Gate Removes the Dumb Icons from Menu Items

librasteve

good - I have resorted to a config setting to suppress these bad icons on Tahoe

hegelguy

Meh - these icons were bad, but I don't see the disaster

triyambakam

This is also what's annoying with most model generated artifacts. They want every bullet point with an emoji. Even worse is an HTML artifact will be littered with chips/pill style "informative" boxes. So much useless distraction. I need something fine tuned by Tufte

rsynnott

Aw. I may have been the only one, but I kind of liked those.

dlcarrier

You'd think they'd go the other direction and remove the text. I installed VLC on my phone, and I couldn't figure anything out, because it was covered in vague post-skeuomorphic icons without text.

adriand

I’m still on Sequoia because of all the Tahoe complaints. Not so much the rounded corners, but I heard performance was poor. Have updates to Tahoe improved things?

nsbk

"But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough can you see the stars"

michelb

A good correction. But think about the months of work that has been wasted on creating those icon iterations. What a waste!

eviks

No good reason to be excited about the old garbage UI returning after the new garbage had been trashed. > This updated advice in the HIG is perfect. > Use an icon to highlight the most common actions and key features of your app Saving a document is the one of the most common actions in your average app, but I * never* need an icon there in the menu, there is no benefit in focusing my attention on an action I always do with a shortcut! The perfect advice would be easy and powerful user customization, so that, for example, I could right click on the app's File>Save menu and select an option to hide the icon, reformat the rich text field and have this change propagate in all the other apps. Or click on a web link from someone who has already done it better and add the theme. Then I wouldn't even care about the back and forth design changes between major OS releases. And that could also fix another sin in the screenshot - the text is not vertically aligned! "visual consistency" misunderstood

talkingtab

"it’s proof that the rot has been rooted out of Apple’s software design team" I know little about Apple, but have quite a bit of experience with how software products get "designed". Goofy and offensive things happen when corporations decide not to pay attention to customers. The decision to ignore customer and focus on market wow is not the software design team. It is a systemic and structural thing.

garyrob

The icons in menu items is one of the reasons I'm still on Sequoia. This settles it; I'll just stay on Sequoia until Golden Gate is released. I can't say the following for sure, but there's evidence of it: One of Apple's real strengths and differentiators is that it listens to customer feedback to the point that it will say: "Hey, this was dumb. Customer feedback proves it. Let's just get rid of it like it never happened." Other examples include getting rid of the earlier getting rid of Magsafe. I don't know whether it's something taught in Apple School, but in the absence of not doing dumb things in the first place, which seems to be unavoidable in the real world with real people, it's probably the next best thing. And it may be enough better than the norm from tech companies that it's a real cultural differentiator.

randallsquared

TIL about the proliferation of menu item icons in Tahoe. Perhaps I missed the outcry when Tahoe came out, but I got around to upgrading to it only a couple months ago, and this was not a change that stood out.

foo12bar

Sometimes who can't be bothered to make the text on their website not extremely tiny when viewing on mobile shouldn't be writing multi-page rants on the other people's UI.

JSR_FDED

This is great news. Apple never reverses course this quickly, so this is a clear signal that Stephen Lemay is making his presence felt.

randusername

Glad for the change, but a lot of the criticism overlooks that at some point we won't be the target audience of UI/UX anymore. Flyouts, dropdowns, and other text menus make sense to me, but I could see how they might be alien and uncomfortable to someone that has only ever experienced mobile interfaces. The reverse is true for sure, nowhere do I feel more frustrated and old-brained then trying to make sense of a new mobile app that everyone else seems to think is great.

projektfu

Is this a case of "removing the duck"? https://bwiggs.com/notebook/queens-duck/

reddalo

I'm just sad that Intel MacBooks will be stuck with Tahoe, which is essentialy a botched beta for Golden Gate. Bad customer experience for a company like Apple.

nalekberov

Probably no one caused more damage than John Ive to Apple (post-Jobs period). Removal of skeuomorphism, removal of essential ports, making MacBooks so thin that they wouldn’t work without overheating to name a few. I am so glad he is gone now, it’s not all bells and whistles for Apple now, but at least it’s way more pleasing to own Apple devices any more.

whicks

For those that haven’t seen this very well done write up about Tahoe’s use of icons, I would definitely recommend it: https://tonsky.me/blog/tahoe-icons/

JKCalhoun

I'm happy to see the HIG (Human Interface Guidelines) referenced in the post. I was unaware Apple still maintained such a document? There was a time when TOG's HIG [1] was the Bible for the Mac interface. UI nerds at Apple (and likely elsewhere) would enjoy debating/interpreting them for some project or another. (I don't recall anyone being burned at the stake but there were definitely discussions that could reach a heretical pitch.) The HIG preached a kind of nuance and balance—when it allowed for somewhat less "staid" UI elements it would advise moderation. This came about in an era when the graphical user interface was a fairly new thing to the public and inconsistency ( Do What Thou Wilt ) would only have destabilized the gentle adoption Apple was treading. It was a marketable advantage for Apple as well. Consistency on the DOS side, as far as I know, came about only as companies tried to adopt familiar patterns from popular apps of the day. (Related: I talked to an engineer at Adobe about the hideous UI (my opinion) of Adobe Acrobat on the Mac and was told they wanted it to look like it belonged alongside the suite of Microsoft Office apps. le sigh.) From 1992, see Page 72 for menu widgets: [1] https://vintageapple.org/inside_r/pdf/Human_Interface_Guidel...