Free the Icons

https://weblog.rogueamoeba.com/2026/06/26/free-the-icons/

by zdw • 25 days ago

690 244 25 days ago

weblog.rogueamoeba.com

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• 23 days ago

In fact the HIG used to explicitly say so with clear examples proving it.

1over137• 23 days ago

and which was backed by scientific evidence from controlled trials and human factors and psychology.

altern84• 23 days ago

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• 23 days ago

It really was Mac OS X's Vista moment.

Edit: It'll always be Mac OS X to me, not macOS.

felixding• 23 days ago

Yes! You are not alone. The name Mac OS X has always felt special to me.

zapzupnz2• 23 days ago

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 :-)

mghackerlady4• 22 days ago

OS X? Surely you mean Rhapsody

lunar_rover2• 22 days ago

Windows Vista primarily suffers from technical issues. Aero is virtually unchanged in 7.

vikingcat• 23 days ago

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• 23 days ago

Golden Gate is better but it hasn't fixed your icons unfortunately

WillAdams5• 23 days ago

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.

VladVladikoff• 23 days ago

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.

hbn4• 23 days ago

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.

troupo3• 23 days ago

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.

neonmagenta• 23 days ago

Same. Apple and Adobe seem to constantly have updates that feel one step forward, two steps back in a lot of places.

colesantiago• 23 days ago

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• 23 days ago

What's been keeping Linux from having gorgeous icons up to this point?

dylan604• 23 days ago

a question as old as Linux itself

edoceo2• 23 days ago

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).

observationist• 23 days ago

They have other, arguably more important, yaks to shave.

aylmao• 23 days ago

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• 23 days ago

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.

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

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

lern_too_spel• 23 days ago

It'll take just a few prompts to customize all your icons the way you like.

Georgelemental• 23 days ago

GNOME simplified its icons primarily to make life easier for app developers: http://jimmac.musichall.cz/blog/2019-01-23-the-big-app-icon-...

(They still have different shapes, though)

geokon• 23 days ago

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)

lunar_rover2• 22 days ago

It's part of "What's been keeping Linux from having good UX up to this point?"

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.

sublinear• 23 days ago

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• 23 days ago

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• 23 days ago

I think this is a battle they won't win, though I applaud the effort.

al_borland13• 23 days ago

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• 23 days ago

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• 23 days ago

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_borland13• 23 days ago

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.

BugsJustFindMe4• 23 days ago

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_borland13• 23 days ago

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.

MBCook5• 23 days ago

So what? Thats not MacOS.

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_borland13• 23 days ago

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.

tomaskafka• 23 days ago

Also imo touchscreen Mac tap targets. Sigh.

cmovq• 23 days ago

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.

jorisw2• 23 days ago

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• 23 days ago

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_borland13• 23 days ago

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.

mghackerlady4• 22 days ago

the Vision Pro is the modern day pippin. An ambitious idea that could have done well if not for the terrible execution

bze122• 23 days ago

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.

bze122• 23 days ago

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• 23 days ago

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• 23 days ago

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.

wpm4• 23 days ago

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• 23 days ago

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.

SpyCoder772• 23 days ago

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• 23 days ago

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.

SpyCoder772• 22 days ago

I agree Liquid Glass is bad a lot of the time (some parts have grown on me)

BugsJustFindMe4• 23 days ago

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• 23 days ago

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.

BugsJustFindMe4• 23 days ago

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.

soulofmischief2• 23 days ago

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.

etrautmann• 23 days ago

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• 23 days ago

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.

throwwwll• 23 days ago

[flagged]

dang• 22 days ago

We've banned this account for breaking the site guidelines. Please don't create accounts to do that with.

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

ktosobcy2• 22 days ago

Hard disagree. For me quircles make finding the desired app way more difficult…

overgard• 23 days ago

I find the squircle jail just creates a lot of confusion for me, having distinct shapes helps a lot at a glance.

hbn4• 23 days ago

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.

zapzupnz2• 23 days ago

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• 23 days ago

Apple designers

wpm4• 23 days ago

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• 23 days ago

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.

knollimar2• 23 days ago

It's prideful too since just undoing it would be an actual admission of failure. This is a hollow apology and compromise

mft_• 23 days ago

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• 23 days ago

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.

hbn4• 23 days ago

That's not the "it's not just X—it's Y" AI tell that I assume you've seen other people call out.

It's legitimately a useful sentence to assist the point the author is making.

stevebmark• 23 days ago

It is always great to see more people be vocal about the poison of flat design

rglover• 23 days ago

I honestly forgot icons used to be a lot of different shapes. Used Panic Coda way back in the day and that leaf icon from this post is unmistakable.

OuterVale• 23 days ago

My personal take is that icons should conform to the squircle, but have a permitted amount of break out from the core shape. For example, Audio Hijack’s icon as presented in the article should be allowed to have the microphone extend past the border slightly. The squircle should be mandated as the core shape, but with just tad bit of flexibility and shape definition.

This keeps grids feeling proper, organised, and aligned, without feeling like the icons of Android Honeycomb.

_0xdd• 23 days ago

It's still a bit jarring to me to see how far Apple embraced form over function with iOS and subsequently macOS. I remember reading the Human Interface Guidelines from the late Mac OS 9/early Mac OS X days and being taken aback by the level of detail and thought that went into those interfaces. Don't get me wrong, some things made no sense (brushed metal was... a choice) but there was a certain level of polish that I don't think exists anymore.

nok22kon• 23 days ago

it's market changed

it started as a computer for professionals

now its for people who want to look cool. so form is much more important than function, it's literally what you buy

refactor_master• 23 days ago

Is that why their laptops routinely beat the competition year after year in reviews and reliability surveys? Because they “look cool”? I’m going to need some more numbers on that one.

wpm4• 23 days ago

Haha yeah! Mac users just buy them to look cool while they write their whatever in the coffee shop! This is definitely not a preposterous and outdated observation/joke!

Quothling• 23 days ago

I challenge you to find a laptop that can do what my macbook air m1 with 8gb of ram does at the $899 it was through the education store. No fan, awesome battery life, good trackpad and keyboard, the ability to not get hot while using 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?

mfru• 23 days ago

MacBooks have the best value/money ratio at the moment. The combination of battery life, processing power and touch pad UX are unmatched

ChrisMarshallNY3• 23 days ago

it started as a computer for professionals

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.

pndy• 22 days ago

I dare to say that this market change works both ways. Software is now created by people who have little idea about UI concepts, or even who don't want to bother themselves with these. Because the dominant type of a device is no longer a desktop computer. This isn't about strictly Apple as other companies also create, or allow to exist "awful" interfaces with no substance.

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.

matsemann3• 23 days ago

Yeah, for a decade now it's been a UX disaster. It "works", because so many people are used to it, but look at a new user trying to navigate iOS, it's bonkers. Swiping from random directions achieves different things (and how would you even know you can?). The home button has like 11 different functions depending on how you press it and when.

altern84• 23 days ago

That's what made me switch to Android.

At least you can have 3-button navigation

KPGv23• 23 days ago

Swiping from random directions achieves different things (and how would you even know you can?)

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

spragl2• 23 days ago

Im an iPhone user. I want it to take as little space as possible physically and mentally, and try to use it as little as possible. My experience has been that it was easy learning to use it by just bumbling around.

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.

jaffa27• 23 days ago

1. Ive been using apple iphone since 2010 and i jave an iphone air right now. I still dont know how/why/when i seem to accidentally call the AI thing where the side of my acreen go all all funny. Ive never done it intentionally and i dont know how but every so often i trigger it.

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

hecifato• 23 days ago

Something that I ended up loving about iOS was the relative simplicity it had compared to Android at the time I started using the iPhone in 2017. iOS 10 and 11 were great. People complained about things like all apps needing to be on the homescreen or not being able to place apps arbitrarily, but at the same time that "lack" of function is part of what made iOS easy to use and understand.

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.

al_borland13• 22 days ago

Swiping from random directions achieves different things

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.

busymom0• 22 days ago

For me, the swipe to go to home gesture on iOS very often conflicts with my swipe to go to all tabs in Safari.

jaapz• 22 days ago

I have an ipad that I mainly use to open YouTube... If I had q nickel for every time some random gesture accidentally triggered some weird feature, I'd certainly have a few nickels.

_jackdk_• 23 days ago

It's such a shame because back then even Windows was motivated by actual human user research and had thorough guidelines. https://ics.uci.edu/~kobsa/courses/ICS104/course-notes/Micro... (HN discussion from a few years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22475521 .)

https://movq.de/blog/postings/2026-06-16/0/POSTING-en.html was an interesting look at Win2K's UI controls and how much clearer they are compared to modern UIs.

ivorius• 22 days ago

The past 10 years have been a sad, slow decline for Apple's UIs. I'm really hoping for them to reclaim some of their former UI glory. At least, in Golden Gate, they reverted their own HIG violation of excessive icons back to factory: https://www.macrumors.com/2026/06/11/macos-27-golden-gate-me...

kridsdale1• 22 days ago

The time span and visible effect are both fully attributable to Alan Dye being head of design. It (what we have today) was his style. He made this world.

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

mghackerlady4• 22 days ago

I think OS 9 (and that entire era of computer graphics design) had the perfect mix of form and function. I won't comment on it aesthetically as that is entirely subjective, but its use of shape and depth made things very human friendly. Buttons looked distinctly buttonable. The icon design was also great, they were skeuomorphic enough that you generally got the idea of what you were clicking but also flat enough that they weren't distracting

graypegg• 22 days ago

brushed metal was... a choice

Man... I stand by it being an interesting idea that they fumbled by not following their own HIG.

Even if it is a bit of a silly line of reasoning, there was (at least originally) a purpose to the brushed metal UI. Anything that was capable of external IO (quicktime for ingesting firewire feed from camera, itunes for syncing with an iPod, finder for disks) was supposed to have a brushed metal interface. There's a world where 2 different classes of windows stuck around (one for things INSIDE the computer, one for things OUTSIDE of the computer) and I bet we would've gotten a lot more afforadances for real-life devices. Maybe a predictable device status UI in those sorts of windows or something. Maybe they'd just be those white panes with fancy animated product shots that show up when you get an Apple-blessed bluetooth device near an iPhone. There's at least some reasoning to treat external IO windows as sharing some sort of common UX. (Answering pretty common gadget questions like: is it connected, is it charging, is it lost, etc etc etc)

But then the waters get muddied with the calculator being brushed metal because it's trying to look like a calculator. And safari... because I guess the network is external but...?

I think a little after John wrote this blog post I'm using to jog my memory, all pinstripe windows were gone except maybe the preferences panes... so it was definitely arbitrary form over function at that point.

(Jogging my memory from: https://daringfireball.net/2004/10/brushed-metal)

dillondoyle• 21 days ago

The abandonment of their own guidelines is sad. Great post below visually outlines how they've totally funked macos drop downs.

Too many icons you can't focus, inconsistent color, icons are unclear, repeated, or have 10 versions of an icon to 'add new folder' or other actions across their own apps.

at least iOS has great features. Surfacing them though.. I regularly learn new ones from tiktok. For instance i just learned about the motion sickness dots.

https://tonsky.me/blog/tahoe-icons/

jpease• 23 days ago

Seeing all those old icons makes me realize how much I miss them.

Superficial, perhaps, but they were one of the things I loved about OS X when I made the switch back in 2005 or 2006.

MBCook5• 23 days ago

No they were better. Whether someone likes the style better or not (I do) they were FAR more visually distinct from each other which made it much easier to find the program you wanted to use.

Right now my dock is a soup of squircles. I have to scan multiple times to find icons even though I know roughly where they should be.

They aren’t distinct. They don’t stand out.

That was never a problem until last year. 40 years of Mac was fine. Then that.

eloisant• 23 days ago

I remember getting interested in an app because of the icon looked nice. Also couldn't use apps if the icon was too ugly and spoiled my beautiful dock.

jmuguy• 22 days ago

There must be someone senior at Apple that still thinks the squircles look good, I dunno how we're still stuck with them. I haven't made a change to my dock in years and I have to hunt for apps nearly every time I open it. It doesn't help that a lot of newer apps seeming don't actually have a logo and are just happy with some random circular shaped blob.

josho• 23 days ago

I don't think it's superficial at all.

I genuinely find my apps harder to navigate now than I used to. Part of that is that I have far more apps installed today, but the uniform white borders also contribute. They make every icon look about 20% more similar, which adds just enough friction that scanning for the app I want takes a little longer.

Poorly executed icon shapes were distracting, but when they were done well they provided subtle visual cues that made the interface easier to navigate. I miss that more than I expected.

jorisw2• 23 days ago

Yeah the article really drives the point home ending with those icons

healsdata• 23 days ago

If one is this passionate about icons, why not just install (or even make) a custom icon pack? The default icons for Google Apps on Android are awful, but I haven't seen them in years aside from setting up a new device.

MBCook5• 23 days ago

You can’t. “Squircle jail” is a real thing. If your icon isn’t the right shape Apple puts it inside one for you.

Jyaif• 23 days ago

Ever since the android debacle with icons having shadows going in different directions or length I've been thinking that icons should be 3D models (with restrictions to make them fast to render and/or fast to bake into flat images).

That would be a marvelous way to make icons unified and a differentiating move for Apple.

DarkUranium• 22 days ago

That gives me an idea for an icon pack. TL;DR path-traced voxel art, isometric render.

Alas, I'm no designer.

bleakenthusiasm• 23 days ago

Oh yes, I hate this. OneUI has that as well. It makes searching for an app so much more conscious and bothersome. I don't want my app drawer to look as neat as possible, I want it to work with the least amount of attention that I can possibly get away with.

shmerl• 23 days ago

Apple will never care about what users want, they only do what Apple want. If you want to free anything, don't use Apple. It's an obvious lesson that should have been learned a long time ago.

nanapipirara• 23 days ago

Someone posted an old MacOS screenshot on Reddit and it was immediately obvious that the icons without a silhouette were the worst out of all of them.

Like iTunes / Books / App Store. And that's basically what they went with eventually...

Dashboard and Launcher are fine, but they have a reason to be a circle. (Well Launcher less so maybe)

Chrome is terrible, it represents nothing. But I guess it's just a brand.

I wish we could go back to this instead of squircles...

https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/s/9MZsGioCG6

pitched2• 23 days ago

The only reason to run MacOS over Linux is the hardware. Arm MacBooks are unreasonably good but don’t support Linux (Asahi is still a bit WIP).

They sell hardware, not software, so the state of things makes sense. It is so disappointing though.

anal_reactor• 23 days ago

Android started mandating all icons to have the same shape like 9 years ago. In 2026 there are still some apps on my phone that haven't updated their icons yet.

matzie• 23 days ago

I'm on Tahoe and when i built an app using neutralino js the png icon was way bigger than the other icons, i needed to add padding to make the squircle look normal. So honestly i dont think this is a software thing, its more of designers designing it this way or only using their icon composer software which creates imaginary limitations.

brador• 23 days ago

Design is a cost center now at Apple. Must be reduced and minmaxed.

voidUpdate• 23 days ago

Maybe it's just me, but I never really liked the detailed older mac icons, like the examples at the bottom of the page. I've always enjoyed more minimalist, simple user interfaces. And I can understand what Apple are trying to do by standardising their icons on the squircle (even if the execution is a bit iffy sometimes, the big grey border doesn't look great). Though, judging by everyone else's writings, I'm probably in the minority

21asdffdsa122• 23 days ago

Tangential related, but i find Icons should have a animated tooltip- when hovered over prolonged, they should tell what the program should do in a cyclical svg-animation.

Cockbrand• 23 days ago

As an aside, Rogue Amoeba are one of an ecosystem of great and greatly passionate indie software houses for the Mac.

All of them create excellent software with polished UIs, provide excellent support and never forget to have fun. This seems to be unique to the Mac, at least at this scale.

klntsky• 23 days ago

Any linux kid with a slightest experience with desktop ricing would tell them that uniformly customized icons are a nightmare for visual recognition. Why didn't they run some internal tests, it's so obvious

sunaookami• 23 days ago

Same for Android. Hate adaptive icons...

mrweasel2• 23 days ago

There's so little joy and happiness left in computing. Reverting to the older style of icons, plus perhaps a few UI tweaks, certainly help bring a bit of whimsical back into the macOS platform. That's something many of us would love.

vintagedave3• 23 days ago

There's so little joy and happiness left in computing

Preach it! https://daveon.design/creating-joy-in-the-user-experience.ht...

mrweasel2• 23 days ago

That's a lovely little article. Thank you.

ChrisMarshallNY3• 23 days ago

Great article -but the image has issues with Safari (invisible drag corner), and iOS (a mess).

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

Gigachad2• 23 days ago

Liquid Glass was a good step in the right direction imo. A choice to make visual entertainment and beauty a priority over pure function.

I feel like what computers really lost was sounds, we used to have so many joyful sounds and background music on computers while now they are all silent. I think it’s a tragedy the Nintendo switch broke the long history of music in the menus and apps.

latexr• 23 days ago

A choice to make visual entertainment and beauty a priority over pure function.

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.

mghackerlady4• 22 days ago

People started hating when their computers made sound around the time smartphones became big. This is because companies can not be trusted with the ability to make attention grabbing sounds. Sounds should be used to mean something important is happening. It just so happens what Zuck' thinks is important isn't really important

al_borland13• 22 days ago

I wonder if the sound reduction is a result of computers moving into more and more spaces, rather than relegated to a single dedicated area. Beeps and boops going off all the time can be really annoying in public spaces.

DStiego• 23 days ago

Great design is more about consistency than uniformity.

Just imagine how hard it would be to read a text if all the words had a similar shape! You want them to look very distinct while the predictability of the layout helps you read (which is consistency).

pjerem• 23 days ago

With color now so critical to tell icons apart, it should be no surprise that the new “Clear” and “Tinted” icon styles added in Tahoe are seeing so little uptake. As Adam Engst noted, “[I]t’s nearly impossible to identify a particular app when they’re all clear or tinted squircles, as you can see below. My brain just shuts down when it sees them.”

Also, that's true for a lot of normal application icons. Any Google application, including of course Chrome, but also Slack, Apple Photos, etc ... they all decided to use a "abstract red green yellow blue" logo on a white background. Of course, Google is the main culprit here. IntelliJ icons are another variant but still a pain to recognize and they add so much fun when they are mixed with Google ones.

And that's for the multicolor icons. Less problematic but still are "one color abstract on white background", like how am I supposed to distinguish Jira from Confluence ?

Also my personal bonus is that I have slimmed down high reflective glasses which creates chromatic aberrations so all those multicolor icons are dismantled when they are in my peripheral vision.

bcraven• 23 days ago

Your last paragraph is why I no longer have my lenses thinned. It's cheaper too!

brikym• 23 days ago

I never understood this sick decision. I used to use the shapes to identify apps.

Most cartoon characters have very distinctive silhouettes and I don't think it's a coincidence. Remember "Who's that Pokemon?"

knollimar2• 23 days ago

Squircle from above!

amelius3• 23 days ago

Let’s return to a world of gorgeous app icons like these:

Seriously, they look like pictures you could find in a child's book, and it's a form of occupational deformation when you think of those icons as "gorgeous".

mcherm• 23 days ago

I find them gorgeous.

Admittedly, the term is unavoidably subjective. But what I like about them is that they are distinct, and that each one has character. Honestly, the fact that they looked like pictures I could find in a child's book is the main part of what I like about them: they have simple ideas ("a bird") and forms so distinctive a child could tell them apart.

amelius3• 23 days ago

Ok, but how would you feel if the dashboard of your car had images that made it look like a child's toy? Or your watch? You've maybe grown accustomed to it on your smartphone, but it has little to do with great taste (imho).

shresthjain• 23 days ago

Don't know if this is what you want to do or not, but you can actually change app icons for Applications however you like if you have the alternate that you want it to be. I'll tell you how

Applications Folder (in Finder) -> Right-click on the target app -> Get Info -> Drag-and-drop the intended icon file to the top-left corner where the original icon is present.

Ik it's just a way to customise and not something official but your Mac looks the way you want it to.

Vuska• 22 days ago

Even Apple has forgotten about this it seems. There are various places in the UI where this change is not respected, e.g. Stage Manager.

al_borland13• 22 days ago

Interesting... I had used this trick many times in the past, but assumed that with Tahoe it would put the icon in the little squircle jail it puts other default icons in if they don't conform to the new standards. Those end up looking really bad. I just tried it with a non-conforming icon and it seems to work.

Time to go icon hunting.

xbar• 22 days ago

I am sad that I will not have both Rosetta 2 and a tolerable UI for the remainder of my life.

legacynl• 22 days ago

I don't know if it's a real screenshot at the bottom of OP (the blue on black icons), but that' hilarious if it is.

aethertron• 22 days ago

"A unique, memorable icon expresses your app’s or game’s purpose and personality and helps people recognize it at a glance."

"In iOS, iPadOS, and macOS, icons are square, and the system applies masking to produce rounded corners that precisely match the curvature of other rounded interface elements throughout the system and the bezel of the physical device itself."

Source: Apple https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...

lol

jccalhoun• 22 days ago

What happened to being able to use themes and skins? Is it just corporate control? Why can't Windows or Mac has a CSS-style system where users can use custom style sheets? It doesn't have to go as far as classic Winamp but just going back to what we had in Win85 would be nice. (and I know there are things like Stardock's Windowblinds but why isn't it built in?)

gwbas1c• 22 days ago

Every time I see criticism of MacOS Tahoe, it just makes me suspect that someone without experience went on an ego trip.

That being said, should I skip Tahoe and wait for whatever comes next? MacOS keeps nagging me to upgrade to Tahoe, but I've been holding off because HN hates it so much.

dlev_pika• 22 days ago

looks at Android icons

shivvers Please no

ktosobcy2• 22 days ago

What is the most annoyig is that the effin' rest of the world had to follow and embrace this stupid trend :/

Luckily on Android and Linux I can select custom icon sets that can have shapes…

seanclayton• 22 days ago

Custom, free-shaped icons are too costly. Much more economical to have a square. It will never happen, unfortunately.

Free the Icons

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