There have been loads of complaints about Liquid Glass on macOS Tahoe, drawing comparisons to the much-maligned Home windows Vista. There’s additionally the problem of the app icons, which are actually uninteresting and characterless. However there’s a brand new motive to hate macOS Tahoe, one that you just in all probability haven’t even observed: It has too many rattling menu icons.
Whereas most individuals in all probability gloss over them, designer Jim Nielsen and software program engineer Niki Tonsky level out that Apple determined that Tahoe wanted extra menu icons. You’ll discover them throughout Apple’s app menus, tiny pictograms which might be seemingly meant to information you to the choice you want. The issue is, the corporate went overboard, and now Tahoe’s menus are a cluttered mess, and the icons’ effectiveness is diminished.
Right here’s an instance of the File menu within the Finder. The one on the left is earlier than Tahoe, the correct picture is identical menu in Tahoe.
Foundry
Nielson and Tonsky each level out that Apple’s new method is a change from the corporate’s personal Human Interface Pointers from 1992, 2005, and 2020. The 2020 pointers state:
Reduce using icons. Use icons in menus solely after they add important worth. A menu that features too many icons might seem cluttered and be troublesome to learn.
Human Interface Pointers, Apple (2020)
Earlier than Tahoe, Apple sparingly used icons in its menus, and it was efficient, drawing your eyes to key, often-used features. The brand new method eliminates that impact. Typically, as Nielsen and Tonsky level out, the icons don’t actually make a lot sense and fail to convey the operate they characterize. Typically Apple even makes use of the identical icons for various features (see New Tab and Duplicate, above), making the iconography ineffective.
Why the change? Apple hasn’t provided an evidence. As Nielsen states, different corporations, similar to Google, additionally overuse menu icons. Maybe Apple determined to do the identical to make these customers extra snug, engaging them to make use of extra Macs. Or maybe the man accountable for all of this wished that macOS menus had been extra like Google’s.
Regardless of the motive, it’s a disgrace as a result of Apple used to take satisfaction in providing clear, constant, and considerate design. The corporate has clearly deserted these beliefs. However now that the man accountable for all of that is leaving, maybe Apple can get again on monitor and turn out to be a design chief once more.
