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Tahoe's Terrible Icons
- Thread starter turbineseaplane
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what 'majority' is that? the nerds (am including myself) on a macrumors forum? and are ppl out in the 'real world' worrying about icon changes, and liquid glass? or are they just using their macs, as always. 🤔
the obvious implication is, one does not need to spend an inordinate amount of time staring at an icon.
really, once you know what an icon is, it will remain that (until, of course, apple changes it up again 🤣). meanwhile, the name of the app does pop up in the dock, doesn't it? not complicated...
Yes, it was a pedantic reply to a silly comment. You don’t have to spend an inordinate time looking at icons to see they’re ugly.
And you might have to spend an inordinate amount of time looking at icons when so many of them are a single shade with vague blobs on top of them. Even worse, look at the utilities icons which are only differentiated by a small badge
But hey, if you only need the text why don’t we just make them all look exactly the same? Just make them all different colored squares. That would be no issue, right?
On phone and tablet it makes sense to have square icons because the layouts all snap to grid and the screen is too small to fully enjoy awesome icons.
On a desktop having icons constrained to a square with curved corners kills creative design. It’s very limiting and ruins some of the fun that icon designers traditionally had.
Look at the classic Toast icon with the CD popping half way out. Or the OpenEmu icon with the Quickshot Pro joystick. All these and more are being lost in time…like tears in rain.
On a desktop having icons constrained to a square with curved corners kills creative design. It’s very limiting and ruins some of the fun that icon designers traditionally had.
Look at the classic Toast icon with the CD popping half way out. Or the OpenEmu icon with the Quickshot Pro joystick. All these and more are being lost in time…like tears in rain.
Do you re-arrange your dock every month? Ever heard of the concept called muscle memory?
I think he meant he doesn't spend time examining the icons, he just uses them.
My experience is exactly the same. As I have said earlier, if I launch an app by clicking on an icon, it means it is on my dock.
I have only a dozen of icons on my dock, it doesn't matter what they look like: once I learn that the strange multicolor flower is Photos, I find it quickly. In fact, after a while I don't even need to locate it on the dock, because I know where I put it, by muscle memory. If I have a doubt, there's the tooltip which names the app when I hover it with my mouse.
If every time I launch an app I had to consciously look at every icon and interpret its meaning, it would take me ages.
Any other app which I use less often, is best found with Spotlight, which finds what I need with an hint word, by association with a file, so I don't even need to remember its precise name.
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I don't know what you mean. I just took a screenshot from my (admittedly not supersharp) secondary screen. The point was to demonstrate that icon posted in another message as an example of loss of information is not the icon used by Tahoe (or iOS 26).
I don't hate most of the Tahoe icons, but I take an aversion to this one in particular:
(Photo Booth)
(Photo Booth)
I don't find all these icons terrible per se (and sometimes the old icons are not exactly great either), but I am bothered by the general blurriness and the lack of contrast that seems inherent to the Liquid Glass design approach. Not only because it doesn't match my aesthetic preferences, but also because it makes the system harder to use for me.
More generally, a good icon IMO has a metaphor that matches the application and is easy to recognize and tell apart from other icons. And if we put aside the concerns about the specific execution, IMO the contacts icon is not so bad (but yes, a fourth tab would have been nice), and I also don't have major concerns about the font book icon (I do think the older one is better at conveying that the application deals with multiple fonts, though).
But I do find the calendar design lacking, and disk utility and migration assistant also seem pretty bad. So all in all, it does seem like the icon design as a whole would have benefited greatly from a few more iterations and more attention to detail.
More generally, a good icon IMO has a metaphor that matches the application and is easy to recognize and tell apart from other icons. And if we put aside the concerns about the specific execution, IMO the contacts icon is not so bad (but yes, a fourth tab would have been nice), and I also don't have major concerns about the font book icon (I do think the older one is better at conveying that the application deals with multiple fonts, though).
But I do find the calendar design lacking, and disk utility and migration assistant also seem pretty bad. So all in all, it does seem like the icon design as a whole would have benefited greatly from a few more iterations and more attention to detail.
I’d love to take advantage of some of the new features like the Journaling app and Shortcut automations but I think it’s safe to say I’ll be staying on Sequoia for the time being.
because of... icons? rounded window corners?
i've said this (here, too many times 🤪), but i use an OS for it's capabilities, stability, speed... how it works with my apps; i don't worry about icons and window corners (and besides, i like the new GUI).
but do what works for you, always 👍
I completely agree.
The Mac was straight up so much "fun" visually with such creativity and care and crafting on display, particularly from indie devs.
They are just strip mining the personality and fun out of everything.
It's so depressing.
not everyone feels that. enough ppl like the changes, the 'moving forward' of mac OS. and apple is paying attention to the nay-sayers, and offering some options, that may get better over time (or not).
i don't need 'fun' icons, i prefer a more-artistic aesthetic. either way, as has been pointed out endlessly (i'm certainly guilty of this), we adapt. or we don't. or we rant endlessly on an internet forum like this one.
100%.
DTP, advertising, fonts, logo design and icon design was one of the major reasons that kept the Mac alive during hard times until present, so don’t let anyone gaslight you that users don’t care about fun and creativity. It’s what set the Mac platform apart from Windows. Steve Jobs was obsessed with embedding personality and friendliness in software and hardware design. That’s Apple’s bedrock.
'fun and creativity' is what i do, not what i want to look at. altho... LG is 'fun and creative'. and it certainly has 'personality and friendliness'.
so much of this is subjective (i know at least 5 people on this forum who refuse to agree with that). so it goes
Fair point, but yeah, it just looks so wrong.
I'll leave this here:
Tahoe’s Terrible Icons
Link to: https://onefoottsunami.com/2025/11/05/tahoes-terrible-icons/
daringfireball.net
Unfortunately Tahoe is not as stable or speedy as the previous OS.
I’m experiencing lots of UI bugs and the OS feels more sluggish.
Having weird icons on top of that is annoying.
