Hard agree! Not only is it less fun and less visually appealing to me, I think forcing the uniform squircle everywhere makes it harder (than it used to be) to distinguish one app from another by icon alone.
boxed · 2026-06-29 22:46:34 UTC
In fact the HIG used to explicitly say so with clear examples proving it.
1over137 · 2026-06-29 23:44:51 UTC
and which was backed by scientific evidence from controlled trials and human factors and psychology.
altern8 · 2026-06-29 22:07:16 UTC
Tahoe was such a huge mess, but I'm hopeful that the new CEO will turn things around and bring things back to normal.
If they do, I'll consider upgrading both OS and laptop, but right now I'm holding on to Sequoia
schappim · 2026-06-29 22:21:37 UTC
It really was Mac OS X's Vista moment.
Edit: It'll always be Mac OS X to me, not macOS.
felixding · 2026-06-30 00:28:02 UTC
Yes! You are not alone. The name Mac OS X has always felt special to me.
zapzupnz · 2026-06-30 02:46:40 UTC
Mac OS X 27.
10.27?
But that means there were two each of 10.11, 10.12, 10.13, 10.14, and 10.15 :-)
vikingcat · 2026-06-29 22:24:56 UTC
Apple CEOs always seem to want to make a splash via hardware (especially since the guy worked in hardware engineering) but it would be nice if an engineer brings more focus on the software as well.
saagarjha · 2026-06-29 22:33:44 UTC
Golden Gate is better but it hasn't fixed your icons unfortunately
WillAdams · 2026-06-30 02:36:50 UTC
The thing which kills me, is that with entirety of the State of California's Gazetteer to pull from, Apple didn't pull a page from Android and use an alphabetically ordered naming scheme so that folks could determine ordering of versions.
toyg · 2026-06-30 11:57:00 UTC
Codenames are meant to tickle the pride of this or that manager, not be useful to customers.
WillAdams · 2026-06-30 13:03:32 UTC
They also need to function as workable identifiers, and their being confusing works against folks.
VladVladikoff · 2026-06-29 23:26:32 UTC
They have a new head designer too IIRC, but probably is going to take some time for him to slowly move away from the mess he inherited.
hbn · 2026-06-30 01:04:48 UTC
Alan Dye was brought in during the Jony Ive era when they were launching the first Apple Watch because he came from a fashion/print background. Before Apple really figured out what the Watch was going to be (a health/fitness accessory for your phone) they were going for the "luxury fashion" angle.
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.
troupo · 2026-06-30 04:43:00 UTC
> Now Stephen Lemay is in charge, who's been at Apple for many years and actually knows stuff about software design
And who was Dye's second in command, and who was integral in coming up with Liquid Glass, designing it, and forcing it down everyone's throat.
wmanley · 2026-06-30 08:43:04 UTC
> seemingly because Zuck isn't aware of how untalented the guy is.
Maybe Zuck just wanted his laptop to get better.
troupo · 2026-06-30 04:41:48 UTC
> slowly move away from the mess he inherited.
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.
toyg · 2026-06-30 11:55:21 UTC
Because he's now a Traitor, an Un-person, so every sin can be safely attributed to him without losing faith in the glorious Party.
Such is the world of Apple fans.
neonmagenta · 2026-06-30 12:22:13 UTC
Same. Apple and Adobe seem to constantly have updates that feel one step forward, two steps back in a lot of places.
colesantiago · 2026-06-29 22:09:41 UTC
It might be better to make Linux have these gorgeous icons now that Apple locked them up.
Make the icons be Free on Free OSes like Linux.
geraldcombs · 2026-06-29 22:25:24 UTC
What's been keeping Linux from having gorgeous icons up to this point?
dylan604 · 2026-06-29 22:27:10 UTC
a question as old as Linux itself
edoceo · 2026-06-29 22:33:10 UTC
Someone with 5000 hours design experience needs to make a common icon theme for a few 100 GTK and QT libraries and standard-names. It feels like it's 1000s of hours of work. And then you have to make them available in a few formats, HDPI, maybe a build system, etc. there are a number of themes but the ones I try seem to be missing one or more of the icons from the set. Just need the right volunteers to build them, and also get a bunch of app-builders to adopt them, and figure out what colour the bike-shed should be (blue).
r3trohack3r · 2026-06-29 22:59:21 UTC
Why volunteer? Why not find a way to pay someone for the value of their time at market rate and release the product of their labor under a permissive license?
Teever · 2026-06-29 23:03:04 UTC
Yeah what if these open source developers just got jobs and then they paid someone to do what they used to do for free?
r3trohack3r · 2026-06-29 23:07:50 UTC
Yeah, it’s amazing what you can accomplish when you find a way to pay people a livable wage for the things you want.
edoceo · 2026-06-29 23:59:46 UTC
For the last 25+ years I've been hearing folks say: "why not find a way". But then not suggest anything more than that obvious answer.
Please suggest an actual path forward, an actual plan that is more than just "figure it out". And the plan needs to address at least 1/2 of the points I made above.
It's a "Hard Problem". The answer needs lots of time, likely money and at least two humans with strong drive to fix the problem.
akerl_ · 2026-06-30 01:47:19 UTC
We've managed to make the entire corpus of open source software but the thing that's a "Hard Problem" that nobody can find a way to do is making the icons look good?
It's almost like it's not a technical challenge, it's that getting good looking icons would require a unified userbase, and Apple has that but Linux does not.
troupo · 2026-06-30 04:50:06 UTC
Linux these days is almost exclusively developed by companies with combined value exceeding Apple's several-fold.
Finding money and designers is not really a hard problem.
observationist · 2026-06-29 22:47:37 UTC
They have other, arguably more important, yaks to shave.
aylmao · 2026-06-29 23:07:45 UTC
I think illustration isn't something too much in the mindshare of open source, so overall support for it isn't great. IMO this has contributed to it. The industry standard tools are all closed, with closed formats, so it just sounds like much more of a hassle vs contributing code/text.
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.
Gualdrapo · 2026-06-29 23:14:33 UTC
As a bit of a shameless plug, I did some in the past[0] and am working sporadically on a "fork" of those[1] but it's a whole full-time work. There are hundreds of icons to do for apps alone. Each one needs to be done in 16x16, 22x22, 32x32, 64x64, 128x128 and 256x256 so if say you have 150 icons to do for apps, you actually will need to do 900 icons. And add to that that you'll need to cover categories, places, filetypes, actions...
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.
These are very nice (especially the Betelgeuse set), but -- unless this is just chance from the ones displayed -- don't they mostly all have the same silhouette, a rounded rectangle? While the Betelgeuse ones have more flair and are more differentiable from each other, an excellent thing, locking them in a box is the same kind of jail that this article is about.
I would love to encourage you to free your own icons from the round-rect jail. You have some fantastic designs there.
lern_too_spel · 2026-06-29 23:31:37 UTC
It'll take just a few prompts to customize all your icons the way you like.
There are plenty of Icon packs suitable to all aesthetic preferences. Just nobody is going to write a blog post ragging a some Icon Pack b/c if you don't like it then it's trivial to change to a "better" one (that said I still think the arguments in the blog post are interesting and worth considering)
To the blog's point - many KDE Icon Packs have non-uniform shapes (ex: I'm currently using Newaita)
sublinear · 2026-06-29 23:11:05 UTC
I agree, but I'm surprised there was no mention of contrast or proposal to restrict colors.
Their first good example bumped up the color contrast. The orange examples in their set of "gorgeous app icons" are just as bad as the slack vs photos example.
I would love if the OS had an option to automatically convert every app icon to greyscale and required a minimum color contrast ratio for the original. Then, the user can pick their own overlay colors (similar to the color tags in finder).
mortenjorck · 2026-06-29 23:11:40 UTC
The great thing about the new multi-layer icon format in Golden Gate is that it finally separates an icon's foreground from the background.
So in theory, it opens the door to returning shape-differentiated icons to MacOS if a future display theme (a successor to the poorly-conceived Clear and Tinted themes) allows the background to be minimized while the foreground is emphasized.
What I would love to see, and should now be possible, is a revision of the Clear theme where the squircle is transparent/refractive and the foreground retains its native color.
etchalon · 2026-06-29 23:26:49 UTC
I think this is a battle they won't win, though I applaud the effort.
al_borland · 2026-06-29 23:39:28 UTC
While I wholeheartedly agree, I suspect the required backgrounds are to create a uniform format between system, where VisionOS requires round icons for more reliable eye tracking.
It seems like every OS got a little harder to use in order to better vibe with VisionOS, the least popular platform they have.
While I applaud the commitment to building a new platform, I don’t like that’s is coming at the expense of the others.
nrightnour · 2026-06-30 00:06:46 UTC
Are you sure visionOS requires it? Having an icon be a few px smaller so a microphone can stick out, doesn't seem like a big deal for tracking.
moron4hire · 2026-06-30 00:32:23 UTC
Regardless, you don't need to make the hitboxes one-to-one with the graphics. Indeed, doing so tends to make for unreliable hitboxes, so most picking systems have two different, idealized enter and exit hitboxes for each icon.
al_borland · 2026-06-30 01:03:37 UTC
The thing sticking outside of the icon draws the eye to it, which means your focus is at the edge instead of the center, which makes for a more error prone experience.
Since the eyes are the cursor, this is a problem. Desktop and mobile don’t have this issue.
WillAdams · 2026-06-30 02:34:21 UTC
Obvious solution, two different icons, round one for Vision OS, more shapely one for everyone else.
mrkstu · 2026-06-30 03:36:33 UTC
Or squirqle jail just on vision OS
pitched · 2026-06-30 05:23:48 UTC
Or squirgle jail on a transparent background instead of a grey one? Why would cursor collision with an image stop working because a new input method?
WillAdams · 2026-06-30 11:09:39 UTC
Maybe an animation which focuses the eye on the center of the icon?
ryukoposting · 2026-06-30 04:53:14 UTC
> The thing sticking outside of the icon draws the eye to it, which means your focus is at the edge instead of the center, which makes for a more error prone experience.
And Apple decided this was a problem with icons, rather than a problem with the way they implemented their vision tracking? Believable, and laughable.
paradox460 · 2026-06-30 08:50:06 UTC
"You're looking at it wrong"
al_borland · 2026-06-30 12:27:50 UTC
It seems like the opposite of this. They tried to adapt the system to the way the eyes naturally work, rather than trying to tell people they needed to overcome their biology to use the system.
jay_kyburz · 2026-06-30 05:48:07 UTC
Where you are looking should not be the cursor, that is obviously dumb. Should be where your nose is pointing.
BugsJustFindMe · 2026-06-30 00:11:27 UTC
> VisionOS requires round icons for more reliable eye tracking
I'm confused here. What do you think is the relationship between round icons and eye tracking?
al_borland · 2026-06-30 01:01:33 UTC
They found having round icons made people look at the center, rather than the edges and corners. Since the UX relies entirely on where the user is looking, this made it more reliable.
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.
BugsJustFindMe · 2026-06-30 01:21:03 UTC
That's interesting, but I think this is solvable in better ways. If the VisionOS icon grid doesn't have a voronoi hit map, then IMO they're doing a stupid. There's a _lot_ of space between icons in the grid. It should be plenty of distance to reliably determine that you're looking nearer to the center of a particular one.
al_borland · 2026-06-30 01:33:44 UTC
Here is what they say:
> In general, give an interactive item a rounded shape. People’s eyes tend to be drawn toward the corners in a shape, making it difficult to keep looking at the shape’s center. The more rounded an item’s shape, the easier it is for people to use their eyes to target it.
The page also talks about leaving enough visual space between elements as well as many other considerations for this type of interface.
I think things are fine on iOS. I don’t mind the rectangles, they fit the grid. That’s how it’s always been.
I don’t care about VisionOS. Circles are odd, whatever.
But the Mac shouldn’t be forced to lose great design because iOS was under different constraints almost 20 years ago. That’s just dumb.
al_borland · 2026-06-30 03:46:26 UTC
They were trying to make a unified design language across all their operating systems. If iOS and VisionOS both have their icons sitting on uniformly shaped tiles, macOS would break the convention.
I don't like it, but I believe that's the reason why.
MBCook · 2026-06-30 04:19:29 UTC
Oh I’m sure that’s why they did it. It’s not a good reason. It’s like saying all the food you eat should be beige.
Sure it’s more consistent, but at what cost? You lose all the benefits. It’s like Chesterton’s Fence, except it has a big sign on it saying “beware of bull” and there is a guy nearby saying “you don’t want to let that bull out dude, it’s vicious”.
But you want to take down the fence because it’s not the same style as the one on the pen for the chickens.
tomaskafka · 2026-06-30 06:23:06 UTC
Also imo touchscreen Mac tap targets. Sigh.
cmovq · 2026-06-30 07:21:43 UTC
I understand this logic, but at some point it makes sense to design the system for the millions of people on macs rather than make compromises for the sake of dozens of Vision Pro users.
jorisw · 2026-06-30 12:26:14 UTC
For this reason I doubt this was actually why Apple did it.
A lot of confident guesswork is done at HN regarding companies' motivations.
fg137 · 2026-06-30 10:46:54 UTC
VisionOS, at least as it stands today, will be dead before you know it. If you don't understand what I mean, look up the rumor about the future of Vision Pro.
What a waste of resource to invent the whole Tahoe "design language" only for nothing.
al_borland · 2026-06-30 12:43:10 UTC
One thing I tend to give Apple a lot of credit for is having a longer term vision (no pun intended). When they release something they tend to stick with it, where others (Microsoft in particular) will kill products pretty fast if it doesn’t look like they are instant hits.
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.
bze12 · 2026-06-30 00:01:17 UTC
They've gone too far on enforcing uniformity of icons and abusing liquid glass, but I disagree that arbitrary shapes were better. All the random icon shapes looked cool in isolation, but were harder to scan at a glance. The uniform squircle is a useful constraint.
I wouldn't mind if they allowed something similar to that audio hijack icon, where you require the rounded rect as the guiding frame but are allowed to have some elements protruding out of it. But completely arbitrary shapes are too jarring imo.
bze12 · 2026-06-30 00:06:50 UTC
I mostly lament the simplification of app icons as an artistic loss, not as a usability loss. Shameless plug, but I made a project based on the idea of icons as pure art with no utility https://www.benedelste.in/post/__001
ryandrake · 2026-06-30 00:15:32 UTC
I can see both sides. Artistic constraints can suck, but on the other hand, for every app with a truly beautiful icon design, like the ones listed in the "It Doesn’t Have to Be Like This" section, how many apps have truly awful icon designs? The dock is prime visual real estate, and as a user, I'd like some kind of constraint that makes it less likely some crazy art style is going to be imposed on my desktop just because I need an app there.
tambourine_man · 2026-06-30 02:18:51 UTC
Early on, when UI/UX was emerging as a discipline, user reaction times and accuracy were measured across a large number of participants. There are many stories during the development of the Lisa and Mac of unexpected user behavior and results.
We shouldn’t be guessing if uniformity helps distinguish between apps or not. We could very easily test it.
But UI/UX has long distanced itself from science, for whatever reason. Maybe because users are so proficient these days that almost anything works. We used to required training on how to use a mouse, menus and windows.
It’s been probably a decade since I’ve heard anyone mention Fitt’s law, for instance, and Liquid Glass atrocities are direct a consequence of disregarding all that was learned in this field.
wpm · 2026-06-30 06:21:37 UTC
I'm pretty sure Nielsen already tested it, if I had to guess they probably found that different icon shapes are broadly better but that gets ignored because "it's cheaper to use some shitty vector squiggle in a round rect", just like the research that found "icons are better when there is text" is widely ignored too because internationalization costs money.
nixpulvis · 2026-06-30 00:07:59 UTC
I was originally excited by the flat design revolution because it appealed to my affinity with uniformity and consistency. But I believe now that I was ignorant and lazy. Bad design still exists within flat style rules, and it has an even worse and cheap feel to it. Meanwhile we've lost whole dimensions of expression.
SpyCoder77 · 2026-06-30 00:10:43 UTC
I honestly disagree with the author when they say that the Golden Gate icons are better than Tahoes. There are more lines, which is literally removing the point of LIQUID glass. It is supposed to be BLURRY, like LIQUID. I get that it is more readable, but are icons meant to be read? There is no text in them, other than Apple TV which is very distinctive. It seems like they just boosted the sharpness of the icons and pushed to production (or I guess it is technically production-beta?) However I do agree with the point of the article. Icons having things outside of the squircle were unique, fun, and interesting.
dpark · 2026-06-30 00:55:35 UTC
The real question isn’t whether LIQUID should be BLURRY but whether intentionally choosing a BLURRY user interface design is STUPID.
Apple spent millions convincing everyone they needed Retina displays and then churned out an update that made them all blurry.
BugsJustFindMe · 2026-06-30 00:18:31 UTC
> This time, however, the changes are genuine improvements. Here’s the refined Automator icon, for example
Uh, maybe. Parts of it are certainly slightly sharper in an unimportant way when viewed at normal icon size and not zoomed way in. I'm not sure that it's any better. And if that Automator icon is the exemplar, then any improvement is extremely marginal. My god it's just such a bad icon. Whoever is managing icon design should be extremely ashamed of themselves.
Show anyone the pre-Tahoe Automator icon and ask them what it depicts and why that fits and they'll be able to tell you that it looks like a robot and robots are used in automation and therefore every time they see the little robot they'll think Automator. Ask them what the post-Tahoe icon depicts and why that fits and they'll be able to tell you fuck all because what the fuck even is that supposed to be if you don't already know.
crazygringo · 2026-06-30 00:32:19 UTC
I've got to disagree.
I really disliked previously, when icon prominence could be wildly different because one icon takes up the full area with a big square, while another is a circle that necessarily has a significantly smaller area within the same extent. Icons from Apple were all nicely balanced in size, but third-party apps could be anything.
Giving equal visual weight to each icon is an improvement. iOS was a step forward in this direction, and now they finally brought the same standard to Mac.
Squircles aren't ugly, they're functional. "Shape" hasn't disappeared as a distinct visual cue, as the area within the squircle is made of, well... different shapes.
And let's not forget the fact that Macs still effectively use icon masks. A smaller icon is harder to click, because clicking on a transparent area... doesn't click at all. I remember icons like a skinny letter "S" that you had to click just right or you couldn't at all.
BugsJustFindMe · 2026-06-30 00:38:23 UTC
> Giving equal visual weight to each icon is an improvement.
Equal visual weight is another way of saying less differentiated.
> "Shape" hasn't disappeared as a distinct visual cue, as the area within the squircle is made of, well... different shapes.
Shape refers to a boundary outline, not interior patterning. A square with polkadots is still shaped like a square.
> A smaller icon is harder to click, because clicking on a transparent area... doesn't click at all.
That problem is only tangential to what shape they allow your icon to be within an enclosing NxN hitbox. Assume an implied framework where clicking on them isn't broken.
soulofmischief · 2026-06-30 01:48:58 UTC
Some differentiation between elements must be sacrificed in order to build shared UX patterns between them. I think we can definitely go too far in either direction.
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.
3dGrabber · 2026-06-30 07:32:12 UTC
> user fatigue
Citation needed.
What is user fatigue? Can it be empirically measured? Fatigued by what? Too much color? Lack of shape? Too much contrast? Lack of contrast?
When is the last time you were "fatigued" by icons?
Without hard facts the expression is just a wishy-washy way to promote a personal taste.
c0n5pir4cy · 2026-06-30 08:56:37 UTC
User fatigue is UX concept and can be measured.
I'd be surprised if squircles reduced user fatigue though - I think a good adjacent example is Googles new icons with the colours that all look similar. Users were complaining immediately that they had to look harder to find the correct app.
Another thing we use everyday - fonts - have differentiated visual spacing and shapes make them easier/quicker to read. So it would make sense for this to apply to icons that serve a similar purpose on a smaller scale.
albedoa · 2026-06-30 12:48:14 UTC
> Without hard facts the expression is just a wishy-washy way to promote a personal taste.
For a moment there, you almost had us thinking that you were interested in learning something.
soulofmischief · 2026-06-30 13:18:12 UTC
I'm speaking in the capacity of a professional designer and developer, using industry terminology that any other professional will recognize. Please let the adults talk.
etrautmann · 2026-06-30 00:50:31 UTC
I’m not a designer but I disagree. I want to be able to easily distinguish apps without much focus or concentration or searching. Making them visually distinct with shape and color is superior. Uniformity is a problem not a target.
materialpoint · 2026-06-30 03:36:30 UTC
You seem to conflate different facts that have nothing to do with each other to arrive at a conclusion: There is nothing preventing Apple from not using said click masks while icons retain their distinct shapes. iOS is for mobile, its lessons don't transfer to desktop, and this was proven by Windows 8.
That "squircles aren't ugly because they are functional" - how on Earth can those be mutually exclusive even in recognition? Functional very often is at the cost of making things ugly, the history lesson is that Apple more often than others managed to be both functional and beautiful.
You also conflate convex pixel area with visual weight, but that is false too.
overgard · 2026-06-30 00:38:43 UTC
I find the squircle jail just creates a lot of confusion for me, having distinct shapes helps a lot at a glance.
hbn · 2026-06-30 00:56:13 UTC
> the much-celebrated Liquid Glass opacity slider
The Liquid Glass slider is an embarrassing outright admission of failure. Apple built its brand as a tastemaker, so to put out this new, controversial design language, and after a year of tweaking, finally throw their hands up and say "we don't know what looks good, you decide" is so disappointing.
That said, all the changes in iOS 27 are such a massive improvement from 26. The first design turnout with Alan Dye gone is making me feel very optimistic of their direction.
zapzupnz · 2026-06-30 03:32:17 UTC
> outright admission of failure
Right!? Who's out there going "oh no, translucent is too translucent; opaque is too opaque; but now that I can have 72.93% glass, my life is complete"?
uncircle · 2026-06-30 03:48:14 UTC
Apple designers
wpm · 2026-06-30 06:16:36 UTC
I'll take an admission of failure over slavishly refusing to and trying to pretend it's fine.
There were plenty of people saying Liquid Glass was fundamentally an utterly flawed, bad design, that even if you subjectively liked the way it looked, that its design philosophy was wrong, and led to logically consistent but unusable and ugly interfaces, all to solve a problem no one had.
I'm cautiously optimistic now that the bozo cardboard box designer dope with the ugly glasses is gone we'll see a quiet but rapid change of direction. I'll take "mea culpa". I'll take "whelp, this shit does actually just suck, here's a slider while we work on something better".
lopis · 2026-06-30 06:36:01 UTC
To me the cherry on top was that they started modifying how third party icons look to match the Liquid Glass. People started complaining to us that our app icon looked blurry because of it.
knollimar · 2026-06-30 10:03:22 UTC
It's prideful too since just undoing it would be an actual admission of failure. This is a hollow apology and compromise
mft_ · 2026-06-30 12:02:51 UTC
You're totally right. :)
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.
ceroxylon · 2026-06-30 01:11:57 UTC
>Apple didn’t just mess with their own icons. They also dictated the shape of every third-party app icon
We will never know if this was AI generated or not, but I have started to flinch at this sentence structure.
Comments
If they do, I'll consider upgrading both OS and laptop, but right now I'm holding on to Sequoia
Edit: It'll always be Mac OS X to me, not macOS.
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.
And who was Dye's second in command, and who was integral in coming up with Liquid Glass, designing it, and forcing it down everyone's throat.
Maybe Zuck just wanted his laptop to get better.
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.
Such is the world of Apple fans.
Make the icons be Free on Free OSes like Linux.
Please suggest an actual path forward, an actual plan that is more than just "figure it out". And the plan needs to address at least 1/2 of the points I made above.
It's a "Hard Problem". The answer needs lots of time, likely money and at least two humans with strong drive to fix the problem.
It's almost like it's not a technical challenge, it's that getting good looking icons would require a unified userbase, and Apple has that but Linux does not.
Finding money and designers is not really a hard problem.
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.
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
I would love to encourage you to free your own icons from the round-rect jail. You have some fantastic designs there.
(They still have different shapes, though)
To the blog's point - many KDE Icon Packs have non-uniform shapes (ex: I'm currently using Newaita)
Their first good example bumped up the color contrast. The orange examples in their set of "gorgeous app icons" are just as bad as the slack vs photos example.
I would love if the OS had an option to automatically convert every app icon to greyscale and required a minimum color contrast ratio for the original. Then, the user can pick their own overlay colors (similar to the color tags in finder).
So in theory, it opens the door to returning shape-differentiated icons to MacOS if a future display theme (a successor to the poorly-conceived Clear and Tinted themes) allows the background to be minimized while the foreground is emphasized.
What I would love to see, and should now be possible, is a revision of the Clear theme where the squircle is transparent/refractive and the foreground retains its native color.
It seems like every OS got a little harder to use in order to better vibe with VisionOS, the least popular platform they have.
While I applaud the commitment to building a new platform, I don’t like that’s is coming at the expense of the others.
Since the eyes are the cursor, this is a problem. Desktop and mobile don’t have this issue.
And Apple decided this was a problem with icons, rather than a problem with the way they implemented their vision tracking? Believable, and laughable.
I'm confused here. What do you think is the relationship between round icons and eye tracking?
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.
> In general, give an interactive item a rounded shape. People’s eyes tend to be drawn toward the corners in a shape, making it difficult to keep looking at the shape’s center. The more rounded an item’s shape, the easier it is for people to use their eyes to target it.
The page also talks about leaving enough visual space between elements as well as many other considerations for this type of interface.
https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...
I think things are fine on iOS. I don’t mind the rectangles, they fit the grid. That’s how it’s always been.
I don’t care about VisionOS. Circles are odd, whatever.
But the Mac shouldn’t be forced to lose great design because iOS was under different constraints almost 20 years ago. That’s just dumb.
I don't like it, but I believe that's the reason why.
Sure it’s more consistent, but at what cost? You lose all the benefits. It’s like Chesterton’s Fence, except it has a big sign on it saying “beware of bull” and there is a guy nearby saying “you don’t want to let that bull out dude, it’s vicious”.
But you want to take down the fence because it’s not the same style as the one on the pen for the chickens.
A lot of confident guesswork is done at HN regarding companies' motivations.
What a waste of resource to invent the whole Tahoe "design language" only for nothing.
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.
I wouldn't mind if they allowed something similar to that audio hijack icon, where you require the rounded rect as the guiding frame but are allowed to have some elements protruding out of it. But completely arbitrary shapes are too jarring imo.
We shouldn’t be guessing if uniformity helps distinguish between apps or not. We could very easily test it.
But UI/UX has long distanced itself from science, for whatever reason. Maybe because users are so proficient these days that almost anything works. We used to required training on how to use a mouse, menus and windows.
It’s been probably a decade since I’ve heard anyone mention Fitt’s law, for instance, and Liquid Glass atrocities are direct a consequence of disregarding all that was learned in this field.
Apple spent millions convincing everyone they needed Retina displays and then churned out an update that made them all blurry.
Uh, maybe. Parts of it are certainly slightly sharper in an unimportant way when viewed at normal icon size and not zoomed way in. I'm not sure that it's any better. And if that Automator icon is the exemplar, then any improvement is extremely marginal. My god it's just such a bad icon. Whoever is managing icon design should be extremely ashamed of themselves.
Show anyone the pre-Tahoe Automator icon and ask them what it depicts and why that fits and they'll be able to tell you that it looks like a robot and robots are used in automation and therefore every time they see the little robot they'll think Automator. Ask them what the post-Tahoe icon depicts and why that fits and they'll be able to tell you fuck all because what the fuck even is that supposed to be if you don't already know.
I really disliked previously, when icon prominence could be wildly different because one icon takes up the full area with a big square, while another is a circle that necessarily has a significantly smaller area within the same extent. Icons from Apple were all nicely balanced in size, but third-party apps could be anything.
Giving equal visual weight to each icon is an improvement. iOS was a step forward in this direction, and now they finally brought the same standard to Mac.
Squircles aren't ugly, they're functional. "Shape" hasn't disappeared as a distinct visual cue, as the area within the squircle is made of, well... different shapes.
And let's not forget the fact that Macs still effectively use icon masks. A smaller icon is harder to click, because clicking on a transparent area... doesn't click at all. I remember icons like a skinny letter "S" that you had to click just right or you couldn't at all.
Equal visual weight is another way of saying less differentiated.
> "Shape" hasn't disappeared as a distinct visual cue, as the area within the squircle is made of, well... different shapes.
Shape refers to a boundary outline, not interior patterning. A square with polkadots is still shaped like a square.
> A smaller icon is harder to click, because clicking on a transparent area... doesn't click at all.
That problem is only tangential to what shape they allow your icon to be within an enclosing NxN hitbox. Assume an implied framework where clicking on them isn't broken.
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.
Citation needed. What is user fatigue? Can it be empirically measured? Fatigued by what? Too much color? Lack of shape? Too much contrast? Lack of contrast?
When is the last time you were "fatigued" by icons?
Without hard facts the expression is just a wishy-washy way to promote a personal taste.
I'd be surprised if squircles reduced user fatigue though - I think a good adjacent example is Googles new icons with the colours that all look similar. Users were complaining immediately that they had to look harder to find the correct app.
Another thing we use everyday - fonts - have differentiated visual spacing and shapes make them easier/quicker to read. So it would make sense for this to apply to icons that serve a similar purpose on a smaller scale.
For a moment there, you almost had us thinking that you were interested in learning something.
The Liquid Glass slider is an embarrassing outright admission of failure. Apple built its brand as a tastemaker, so to put out this new, controversial design language, and after a year of tweaking, finally throw their hands up and say "we don't know what looks good, you decide" is so disappointing.
That said, all the changes in iOS 27 are such a massive improvement from 26. The first design turnout with Alan Dye gone is making me feel very optimistic of their direction.
Right!? Who's out there going "oh no, translucent is too translucent; opaque is too opaque; but now that I can have 72.93% glass, my life is complete"?
There were plenty of people saying Liquid Glass was fundamentally an utterly flawed, bad design, that even if you subjectively liked the way it looked, that its design philosophy was wrong, and led to logically consistent but unusable and ugly interfaces, all to solve a problem no one had.
I'm cautiously optimistic now that the bozo cardboard box designer dope with the ugly glasses is gone we'll see a quiet but rapid change of direction. I'll take "mea culpa". I'll take "whelp, this shit does actually just suck, here's a slider while we work on something better".
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.
We will never know if this was AI generated or not, but I have started to flinch at this sentence structure.