Which also changes the background color to yellow for some reason. And then the &quot;night mode&quot; is.. what is that, a lantern? Jeez.

Ah, so you can. I tried that but the particles don&#x27;t disappear immediately so I thought it was just toggling the colour scheme.

True, but the site owner clearly despises their prospective readers. I found it more prudent to close the tab and flag the submission.

Wow, it turns off the snowflakes, but the ones already falling will stay there and keep falling. I thought it only changed the background color to yellow, so assumed it doesn&#x27;t actually turn off the snowflakes, wanted to come here and comment how ridiculous that is on an article talking about bad icons, then I saw in the comments that it turns off the snow effect... eventually (like a 10s delay).It&#x27;s hilarious that it&#x27;s a great article about clutter, and yet, the post is on a theme that is so badly cluttered it would have been funny... if I could have read the article...

True, but you can turn it off with the snowflake icon at the top.

lol, I really liked this article.But yeah, maybe it helps that I have the scripting turned off.

I thought the article was great, but nearing the end I noticed my phone was incredibly hot and realized it must be the snow effect.

It&#x27;s also `position: fixed` which breaks all scroll optimizations and makes scrolling feel terrible.

Nobody loves to be that guy more than the guy that hates to be that guy.

If you hate to be that guy, why did you decide to be that guy?

Nah, the irony is that you think that this was not done on purpose. E.g. look at the hamburger menu on the top right.

I hate to be that guy, but there&#x27;s some irony in putting a full screen animated snow effect over an article about unnecessary, distracting clutter.

I like the article content but it&#x27;s ironic that I needed to switch to Safari reader-mode to be able to comfortably read it.

At least he didn’t use the trick to make the background HDR bright.

Sure, if you don&#x27;t mind having your eyeballs seared by the brightest orange on record.

It&#x27;s not a &quot;reminder&quot; for people who&#x27;ve never been to the site before.  Especially not when the icon isn&#x27;t even visible on some devices, like my phone in portrait.

It&#x27;s a fun little winter feature. People need to give it a break.fwiw I went through the whole article with the snow effect on and found it just fine too.

No you can&#x27;t, it just turns the background yellow.EDIT: the snow stops _but after a few seconds_. I toggled it to find out if it would turn off the snow, and the immediate feedback was that it doesn&#x27;t. That&#x27;s really _really_ bad UX.

Reminder, you can turn off the animated snow effect with the snowflake icon at the top

That reminds me of this classic: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.angelfire.com&#x2F;super&#x2F;badwebs&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.angelfire.com&#x2F;super&#x2F;badwebs&#x2F;</a>

FWIW, while I&#x27;m complaining about this site I&#x27;m actually adding a nice easy-on-the eyes particle system in the background of a point-and-click online game. You don&#x27;t put it in front of the content or behind text people are supposed to read.This is such a common failure mode with coders who do their own design. Just because you can do something doesn&#x27;t mean you should.

Yes can people stop doing this, it was cute 20 years ago now it’s just annoying and obnoxious.

I tried that then discarded it, because it doesn&#x27;t immediately hide the snowflakes that are already on screen.The article is good but the choice of distracting snowflakes or radioactive piss burning your retina is not a welcome one.

I literally didn&#x27;t notice that the snowflake icon turned it off:<pre><code> 1. I scrolled through the article getting more and more frustrated with the snow
 2. I scrolled all the way back to the top and saw the snowflake icon
 3. I clicked the snowflake, saw the hideous yellow, said WTF and clicked again to go back to blue
 4. **I never noticed** that the snowflake *does* stop the snow, but *only* stops *new* snow, so the existing snow continues to fall across the screen
 5. I clicked several other things, then came here to complain and saw this thread</code></pre>

<pre><code> &gt; although then you get a yellow background
</code></pre>
Yes, and this is arguably worse. I ended up using Immersive Reader mode in Edge.

The snowflake icon that disappears off-screen the instant you scroll down past the obnoxiously large header image to read the actual content?

It takes over 10 seconds to turn off fully. I had to go back and try it after your comment, because I thought that button just turned the page yellow, which was worse than the blue.I ended up using reader mode to read the page. The whole site design undermined the point being made. One of the first things mentioned is not to be distracting. Yet they went out of their way to make their own site distracting. &quot;Do as I say, not as I do.&quot;

It&#x27;s very annoying, but you can turn it off (snowflake icon, although then you get a yellow background), and IMO the article content is worth reading.

ah this is why I heard my coolers spin up

The animation isn&#x27;t even in the background...

Once you try the dark mode, you&#x27;ll realize the irony is done on purpose.Edit: I&#x27;m not implying it&#x27;s a good thing.It&#x27;s a joke that did not drop. Given the audience is trying to read text. And he&#x27;s making it annoying to read text.It&#x27;s like a stand-up comedian telling a joke, in a wild accent; where the audience cannot discern what he&#x27;s saying.

Yeah, on an article ranting about clutter in the macOS UI, this is a mindboggling design choice.

The site has also an amazing night mode. Everyone should try it!

Well, I guess you haven&#x27;t tried its &quot;dark mode&quot; yet

it is an interesting thought: run a vanity fluid sim on your website to filter out everyone without discrete GPUs...

A hint to the site developer: add an option to purchase the Weather Control Pack Platinum Pro+ to get to choose your site weather any way you like. It would fity nicely next to that &#x27;Personal Information&#x27; section. Who knows, someone might even &#x27;purchase&#x27; it since that seems to the thing to do in the Cult of the Fruit.

&gt; including the way snow doesn&#x27;t just immediately turn off but stops falling slowly. I love it.Funny, i disliked this exact detail. I thought turning it off hadn&#x27;t worked for a few seconds and i retoggled it on and off a bunch of times before i got it

Can people actually read it with the snowflakes? The motion draws my eyes and makes it extremely unpleasant trying to read the underlying text. Very poorly thought out decoration.And yes, I did think &quot;this is terrible, there must be a way to change it&quot;, clicking the snowflake icon. The colour changed to a new colour but otherwise it didn&#x27;t seem to change, so I just clicked back.Because, as you noted, the snowflakes slowly end, which I didn&#x27;t realize until seeing your comment.It&#x27;s fun. Looks neat. It&#x27;s an extremely poor idea for a site trying to convey textual information.

:-) and while doing this, the background turns yellow — why? how annoying it would be if something like this existed in real life - turning off the fan switches on the lights, and turning off the lights switches on the fan.

The detail on the animations is, as usual, top notch, including the way snow doesn&#x27;t just immediately turn off but stops falling slowly. I love it.

It felt quite ironic reading a complaint about icons and UI consistency through a hail of snowflakes that made it hard to even see the icons.

Came here to say the same.  Not only is it redundant and distracting, destroying the reading experience, it even makes the fucking fan turn on and make noise because apparently it’s a lot of work for the video card.  A presentation of valid arguments destroyed by something completely superfluous and ironically the same kind of stupidity that’s the target of the criticism made.

It seems like the author went out of their way to prove they can make an even worse UI than Apple.  I suspect they succeeded.

&gt;Ok, you can click on the sun icon to fix it by switching to night mode, but then... aaaaargh!TBF, I felt so perfectly trolled with this one I couldn&#x27;t help but chuckle... :)

The dark mode action got an audible chuckle out of me.

&gt; Sometimes you need an animation to turn your site into a special snowflake of a site, and what better way to do that than to use a snowflake animation?&lt;blink&gt;

I genuinely went looking for an &quot;off&quot; button, and was very confused when the snowflake icon changed the background color instead. I didn&#x27;t even notice that the snow stops being generated until I read your comment and tried again. I&#x27;m both impressed and annoyed.

Sometimes you need an animation to turn your site into a special snowflake of a site, and what better way to do that than to use a snowflake animation? TBF, you can turn it off by clicking on the snowflake icon in the top right corner. But then the background turns from blue into an annoying shade of yellow. Ok, you can click on the sun icon to fix it by switching to night mode. But then... aaaaargh!

It&#x27;s an annoying website, but luckily you can just enable reader view and all problems are fixed.

Yeah. I immediately went to the snowflake icon at the top of the page thinking it would turn the animation off. Instead, it changed the background color :-(I can&#x27;t stand animations while I&#x27;m trying to read something, and this one is particularly egregious.

In my opinion, I can be a worst UX expert in the world, and I still reserve the right to criticize bad UX elsewhere: the fact that you are a bad &quot;creator&quot; does not mean that you are a stupid &quot;user&quot;.Yes, it is a bit hypocritical, but you can look at the content of the message and judge it without judging the presentation of the message, even if it talks about usability of interfaces in computer software.

A personal blog is not the same as the UI of an operating system. More expressiveness is to be expected in a personal blog. That said it’s so easy to turn off that I was distracted for less than 5 seconds. How easy is it to turn off icons in the menu bar in Tahoe?

It is a personal blog. I would not apply the same kind of criticism to a personal blog, even though it does sound ironic. Moreover, turning off JS was an easy solution. There is no solution right now for apple&#x27;s UI mess (except not updating).

I agreed at first, but that the blog has bad UX doesn&#x27;t make the message it conveys wrong though.

The audacity to critique Apple&#x27;s use of icons (which is objectively justified critique, IMO) while having animated snowflakes falling over the text and images on the site is something on an entirely different level.Thank goodness for Firefox reader mode. That animation is so incredibly distracting.

Confusingly, because it stops the &quot;particle spawning&quot; but not the animation! At first I thought it just changed the background to orange.

At least there’s a button to turn it off. But yes, I agree.

tonsky.me is a troll site that should be banned from being posted on HN

The rage bait on HN works like clockwork. Usually it&#x27;s the &quot;dark mode&quot; feature of that website that triggers this comment.

Cute AND annoying. Like a racoon. Please don&#x27;t fling racoons at people, not even for christmas.

It&#x27;s easy to justify: it&#x27;s cute. Just like the other options up at the top. If you click the sun it turns out the lights and turns your cursor into a flashlight. And it has an actual hamburger as the icon for the menu.

Needs some Alanis Morissette background music.

The animation is not only on the linked article so no, it&#x27;s not about the irony.

Design is about how it works (my phone went 100% —&gt; 84% while reading this, almost certainly thanks to the snow)

I couldn&#x27;t tell if the author was being ironic or just breathtakingly hypocritical.

Well, it is kinda cool in my room, so i guess the extra warmth from my mobile was helpful.And it got noticeably warm.

It&#x27;s Christmas, lighten up. I think the animation adds a glorious bit of irony: &quot;look, here&#x27;s a horribly distracting effect that is almost designed to make it difficult to read the article, and it&#x27;s still not as egregious as Apple&#x27;s Tahoe design!&quot;

I found this kinda funny. The content of the page is something I strongly agree with. But then the page itself was just so distracting.  I saw the snow flake icon so I tapped it but it just turned my snow into the dreaded yellow snow.

I was wondering why my phone was turning hot in my hand...

The irony of an article about design being on such a badly designed page is not lost on me.

I was starting to wonder why my iPhone got crazy hot. I’m using reader mode and it appears to continue running the web page and animation in the background… crazy.

It also immediately eats 5% of the raw compute on my RTX 4080 Super, which is more than a dozen tabs in chrome and 3 active youtube videos running, run in each of Chrome, Firefox, Edge-- all combined, which was 3% before loading this page (which is 5% on its own) up to 9% total.That explains my other comment, which speculated the snow as the cause for my iPhone instantly overheating, followed by screen-dimming throttling.Also: this is not a plea to stop putting snow&#x2F;etc on pages. I miss the days of such things in earlier internet. I&#x27;d trade back janky plugins and Flash player crashes for the humanizing &amp; personalized touch many sites had back then.

Why? Its just a silly personal websiteDo you not realize that the stakes are different between that and a whole OS?

It&#x27;d be fine if it didn&#x27;t lag horribly

A very distracting one that masks text as well. But to be fair, there&#x27;s a very explicit icon in the header to deactivate them

Hot take: The snowflakes are fun and when blogs integrate fun things they make me feel joy like when I was throwing marquee elements all over my geocities site in grade school. In an era where most of the content I read is written by AI, the more personal a blog feels to me, the better.

i thought it was very funny :) - try the dark mode

lost 4% battery while reading the blog post

I decided to believe it was parody. Snowstorm ruining your visibility. Article on bad UX hamming up the bad UX.That snowflakes were the author’s preference? That’s too much madness for one day.

It&#x27;s hard to justify snowflake animations on your website...

KPI and corp revenue I guess. There was a time I heard that Apple had an only fix bugs release.

Fixing bugs isn&#x27;t going to give you a promotion.

It&#x27;s been 16 years since Snow Leopard. I think we&#x27;re ready for another one.

&gt; Apple could release a new system with zero UI updates and tons of internal improvements and people would call it &#x27;old&#x27; and &#x27;dated&#x27; and &#x27;lack of innovation&#x27;.Apple has released incremental upgrades to macOS for years, and I&#x27;ve never heard this criticism of them. On the contrary, I ofter hear people missing Leopard design, and when UI has changed I&#x27;ve heard pushback (ie, when System Settings was renamed and redesigned). On macOS people care about the apps and interactions, not wether the buttons got a new look.&gt; There&#x27;s been reports that new emojis are one of the drivers for getting people to upgrade. No one cares about a zero day security flaw, but that new kiss emoji everyone wants.I agree with this. New emojis are new functionality; you can now express something you couldn&#x27;t. A zero day security flaw brings no new functionality. Equally, updates to to apps and interactions bring new functionality. A re-skin of the OS doesn&#x27;t.

It&#x27;s a damned if you don&#x27;t, damned if you do. Apple could release a new system with zero UI updates and tons of internal improvements and people would call it &#x27;old&#x27; and &#x27;dated&#x27; and &#x27;lack of innovation&#x27;.It&#x27;s a bit like adding new emojis in an OS release. There&#x27;s been reports that new emojis are one of the drivers for getting people to upgrade. No one cares about a zero day security flaw, but that new kiss emoji everyone wants.

What makes you think they don&#x27;t use macs? What else would they use?

The bosses who are actually in charge likely don’t even use their Macs (and when they do, they only use the web browser) and only care about how the OS is going to look in the demo, not how it works.

&gt; constantly tweaking with their UI so thoroughly every couple yearsBetween any of the big 3 companies putting out major OSes (Apple, Microsoft, Google), Apple is the best for sticking to tried and true designs. It&#x27;s certainly gotten worse the past couple of years (like the Photos app redesign they immediately changed again in iOS 26) and I hope with their new design lead he can pull things back to somewhere sensible, but compared to Android or Windows it&#x27;s not even close. I used Android for the better part of a decade and every year they&#x27;d completely redesign the notification shade, the settings app, they&#x27;d switch the SMS app out for Hangouts, then put you back on Messages, then rename it, then change the logo&#x2F;branding, then redesign it again, etc. Everything was endless changes for no reason, felt like a constant beta.If you look at the basic iPhone apps - Messages, Settings, Notes - prior to Liquid Glass it&#x27;s been pretty much exactly as it was when Jobs showed it off at the iPhone reveal 19 years ago.

Is there a reason Apple can’t focus on system improvements instead of constantly tweaking with their UI so thoroughly every couple years? I don’t disagree the OS UI needs to be revamped periodically, but it seems they do it too often.

Technology moved from being a tool to an ad delivery vehicle.Tools&#x27; success metric is how much they make your task easier&#x2F;faster. Ad delivery machines&#x27; success metric is how much of your time they waste.Shitty UI making you spend more time in front of the screen is considered a good thing according to those &quot;designers&quot;&#x27; performance metrics.

Computers became a necessity. You have no choice but to own a computer, so there&#x27;s no evolutionary pressure to prevent their enshittification.

Web technologies took off, web giants emerged, and the desktop monopoly maintaining rough standardization and being forced into steady ease of use improvements was hobbled.Microsoft’s desktop dominance was challenged by Google Docs and Facebook apps in parallel, Microsoft had to jump to web tech late, and the last few decades have been them reconciling their stack to the fact they missed the web and mobile despite pioneering key user-facing tech for both. Then they entered catchup-mode for client and search tech, only to later realize maybe they don’t care because the cloud catchup efforts blossoming into MS-consultant orthodoxy for every-darned-thing made their cloud offerings the most profitable bit… Ads and desktop stagnation pulled Windows into a weird OSX-at-home territory everyone kinda hates. And then LLMania took off, entrenching MS cloud and AI strategies into all of it, all the time. Pushing so hard that they’re gonna spend billions distancing their semi-Enterprise office brand from the term‘Microslop’.TLDR: the rush to the web&#x2F;mobile moved the focus off thick clients and desktop affordances, the money is elsewhere, a universal GUI toolkit isn’t obvious for anyone, and SaaS feels better online

&gt; What the hell have we been doing for the past 25 years?For the last ~20 years: designing software for mobile devices

And modern desktops do not even documentation, there are all sorts of shortcuts and small features in Windows, for example, that seem to be passed around between people like computer game cheats instead of being documented somewhere :-P

Check out this actual book that used to come with a computer about how to use the desktop: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.oracle.com&#x2F;cd&#x2F;E19253-01&#x2F;806-4743&#x2F;806-4743.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.oracle.com&#x2F;cd&#x2F;E19253-01&#x2F;806-4743&#x2F;806-4743.pdf</a>

UI OS for ordinary people peaked with Windows NT (1993).

If you would like to spend some time in awe, you might fondly regard the screenshots in the GUIdebook gallery: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;guidebookgallery.org&#x2F;screenshots" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;guidebookgallery.org&#x2F;screenshots</a>It&#x27;s chock full of old screenshots from a variety of old desktops.

It&#x27;s pretty wild how the best screenshot of a usable menu is from, like, Office 2000. What the hell have we been doing for the past 25 years?

They can do whatever they like with their blog, and that&#x27;s great! But why would I give any weight to the design arguments of someone who designed that thing? It&#x27;s like if someone comes up to you in a clown costume and starts giving you fashion advice.

I find the snowflakes equally irritating, but believe there is a huge distinction. This is an individual&#x27;s blog page, their own corner of the internet, where they can share their opinion and present them in any way they&#x27;d like, whereas Apple is designing an Operating System for premium devices used by millions of people that depend on its usability.

&gt; What purpose is served by any of the gizmos on this site?It&#x27;s a personal website, it&#x27;s fun. Comparing someones personal website - where the &#x27;fun&#x27; things can be turned off - to a $tn company with hundreds of millions of users who rely on the usability their products is not a great basis for disagreeing with a pretty great write-up with many salient points.

Making HN readers angry is its own reward.I wonder if JWZ still has the red carpet for HN users. Let’s test: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.jwz.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2026&#x2F;01&#x2F;dali-clock-in-the-wild&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.jwz.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2026&#x2F;01&#x2F;dali-clock-in-the-wild&#x2F;</a>EDIT: Yep, still works!

It&#x27;s ironic if it&#x27;s unintentional. If the grotesque design was intended as sarcasm, I guess it went over my head.

It is called &quot;making fun of&quot; not &quot;irony&quot;.

Sorry, even though I agree with your piece, the incredible irony of writing about bad design decisions while having fucking snow flying past the text I&#x27;m trying to read is just too much...[edit] I just discovered the snow icon, which does turn off the snow but turns the background into bright yellow. Oh and the other icon which turns your cursor into a ...spotlight? On an otherwise black page? Do I have that right? Which one of those things was a design decision that enhanced usability, or readability, or... anything at all? These choices can best be described as sophomoric. You can disagree with menu icons, but they at least in theory serve a purpose. What purpose is served by any of the gizmos on this site?

Related: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=46196688">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=46196688</a>

I suppose I wouldn&#x27;t mind much either way, apart from the misaligned text maybe now that you brought my attention to it.I agree that colors could help.Don&#x27;t hesitate to give KDE&#x2F;Qt a try, it apparently happens to get all these things right according to this article from a quick glance: everything is correctly aligned, even when in the same menu some items both have an icon and a checkbox, and some don&#x27;t have anything; icons are mostly meaningful, some icons are colored (most are monochrome though, there&#x27;s a move to this), and not all items have icons.I guess it&#x27;s the kind of things that are hard to get right for a hobby OS like macOS that lacks professional UX designers. :-)

Win XP was excellent, as was Win 7 I thought. However, since then KDE has in my opinion, gone even further and become even better. So, the peak is not gone, it has just moved to KDe.

Classic Mac OS&#x27; Platinum is also a contender for pre-2000 peaks. I actually never grew up with a Mac, my first one ran Tiger when I was in high school. But over the years I have collected rare or interesting Macs of yore, from before my time and come to adore Platinum and the classic Finder.

It is incredible just how widely held the view is that Win2k (or XP in classic mode) was close to peak desktop UI. (Contenders also being Tiger to Snow Leopard and Windows 7).A key problem is that big US corps have always had a product design mentality that can produce monstrosities like your average cable TV remote and think it is in any way a good solution. That was clearly already an influence on things like XP.

I was somewhat buying the article until I got to the monstrosity that is the “Special mention”, at which point I flipped to completely agreeing. That really is atrocious.

Importantly, that philosophy relies on the result having merit, and working cohesively on its own terms, even if it&#x27;s not your preference. Like, if I go to a restaurant that refuses me sugar for my tea, it better be darn good tea.

How is that different with other companies? Like with Windows? Do you have a choice of UI when loading the OS? Are there ways to remove the taskbar and replace it with a third-party one? Can you change all the core OS shortcuts?The fact Apple makes and sells the only hardware to run macOS does not mean the software is fundamentally different from the rest of the industry. Apple has deprioritized backwards compatibility, not user choice.

I thought that was supposed to be Apple’s thing. “We decide how to make it and you decide to buy it or not.”It makes it seem like they’re designing for you until they’re not.

if they&#x27;re going to just crap on their software, I&#x27;d be far happier with just neglect.They did desperately need a distraction from the complete bedshitting mess they&#x27;ve made of AI though. Regardless of whether you think AI is good or wildly overpromised, getting on stage and lying through your teeth about what your AI does is what C-tier companies do, not Apple. Except they do now.

XWayland runs on top of Wayland, and is a way for X11-only applications to still work. It does not run inside a native X11 session.

I&#x27;ve used Mint for a long time. Extremely solid, stable and simple. In the last three months I&#x27;ve been on Arch (through Omarchy) and it&#x27;s also very stable and so powerful. Everything just works. I have a pretty beefy computer and even my favorite game of all times (Path of Exile 1) runs fantastically on it.

what distro are you running at home?ive had the most success with fedora x11 &#x2F; xwayland but lately wayland has been pretty solid

I don&#x27;t understand why this comment is downvoted, it is undeniably true.

But Linux is getting better each year (seriously, KDE is amazing, Gnome works well if you like it), made by hundreds of independent people, while Mac is getting worse, made by one focused company.I&#x27;ve had no problem whatsoever with 2 laptops regarding power management or audio.Get a major distro and major software if you don&#x27;t want to wander into problems.

Judging from this article, Linux seems to have more consistency between the thousands of applications all built by different people with no guidelines than MacOS right now.At least half of those complaints on the article have standard, close to universally agreed icons.

&gt; there&#x27;s no single desktop metaphorI use both Linux (home) and Mac (work) and I don&#x27;t see one in Mac either. Also over time Linux has been getting more consistent, and Mac less.

CUPS has &quot;just worked&quot; on Ubuntu for me for like, as long as I can remember. If you use only GTK apps and either gnome or cinnamon, things are a lot more consistent than Windows (like, windows itself, not even 3rd party stuff)

Your experiences are not universal. I&#x27;m sorry that happened to you, but I&#x27;ve personally never had a power management, audio, or printing problems with Linux in 17 years of using it.Having no single desktop is a huge bonus. If you don&#x27;t like one distro, you might like another. &quot;Consistency&quot; is a poor way to restate, &quot;Windows or MacOS might be bad, but at least someone can unilaterally make it worse against your will.&quot;I&#x27;d rather choose a drink from a soda fountain than get a more consistent flavor from a urinal. But to each their own.

It looks like an old comment from 5 years ago. I bet you haven&#x27;t tried Linux lately. Yes there are many flavors of this OS, and that&#x27;s alright. Everyone will find what it needs. As for the other crap that doesn&#x27;t work: again, install and use any popular distro. You&#x27;ll see for yourself. Most recent hardware is perfectly supported and things just work™.

Seriously? UX in Linux is awful, there&#x27;s no single desktop metaphor. You have hundreds of distros each with their quirks. There is no &quot;Linux&quot; other than the kernel.There&#x27;s a lot more consistency in the Apple ecosystem.Don&#x27;t get me started on the other crap with Linux distros: power management doesn&#x27;t work, audio barely works, heck even though both Linux and MacOS use CUPS for printing, in MacOS it works way better.

Nowadays AI can help with Linux. For example AI helped setup my bluetooth mouse and set up an action for each of the extra buttons.

Consider yourself lucky to have been on that side of the fence instead of suffering the vagaries of Windows since ME.

I never disliked an OS as much as I dislike what Apple is doing with MacOS (and iOS by extension). I&#x27;ve been with MacOS for 20 years, but I&#x27;ve switched at home to Linux full time 2 years ago and I don&#x27;t regret it. At work I&#x27;m forced to be on MacOS. It&#x27;s concerning how Apple doesn&#x27;t care anymore about user needs, usability, design and consistency. Where it was the best OS in the past for me, it&#x27;s not anymore. Other OSes are better suited for where I&#x27;m at in my life.

Low quality, inconsistent software is a result of a lack of standards, QA, internal communication and rigged corporate processes that are serving the private interests of managers trying to satisfy the board, not the users.This is a symptom of no strong leadership that&#x27;s capable of enforcing standards, Apple downslide as a whole firm where departments and people are fighting each other for resources.

Download your personal data, there&#x27;s a lot of fun messages in there.

<pre><code> &gt; Burger menu
 &gt; User agreement

 &quot;User disagrees with the content of this site.&quot;
</code></pre>
I recommend playing with the top-right buttons, it made me chuckle audibly.

Leadership doesn’t understand and&#x2F;or care anymore.

I thought I was going to disagree with this; on the surface I think the icons are something of an improvement, but the rest of the post is persuasive.This is a bad sign for design at Apple. It suggests a fundamental lack of attention to detail that would have been harder to imagine a few years ago.What&#x27;s driving it?

that part looks to be a parody of bad ui. the burger icon, the dark mode switch, the snow thing all are purposely built to subvert common expectation.

Funny thing is that i didn&#x27;t see that &quot;icon&quot; that disables snow effect.

All the icons look easily center-justified to me!

I&#x27;ll voice the unpopular opinion: As someone who can parse images faster than text, I tend to find what I&#x27;m looking for faster in macOS Tahoe.Still, my primary OS is Linux, but for laptops I prefer macOS, and it&#x27;s still in acceptable shape.However, I&#x27;ll agree that Tahoe has far more papercuts than its predecessors. It needs a &quot;Snow Tahoe&quot; version.

They&#x27;ve got the SF Symbols font, and probably assumed that&#x27;s enough. Everyone has the same set of icons available, technically.It seems that Apple has nobody left who has all three at the same time: taste, attention to detail, and authority to demand fixes. Having lots of people who have max two out of these three gives you designs of Microsoft and Glass Apple.

but being too lazy to even globally coordinate the icons is some deep rot.

&gt; This is what happens when the people issuing the orders (assign an icon for every task) are not the ones doing the task.No, this is what happens when the people in charge of UI design have no clue what they&#x27;re doing.

This is what happens when the people issuing the orders (assign an icon for every task) are not the ones doing the task.And the ones doing it have no say in how it&#x27;s done.Being involved and in the loop is how great software is made. Otherwise you can just outsource and have tickets completed.

I hadn&#x27;t noticed, but I checked. One tiny correction: content can flow under the floating sidebar in Finder.

This isn&#x27;t the only aspect of Tahoe that seems amateurishly designed by someone following &quot;wrong rules&quot;, the wrong rule here being &quot;for consistency, let&#x27;s assign an icon to every action.Another wrong rules I&#x27;ve seen blindly followed is making everything an edge-to-edge canvas, so that the sidebar floats on top. Having a full-window canvas with floating sidebars can make sense for applications where content is expansive and inherently spatial (like say, Figma) or applications where the sidebar is an actual floating element that can be moved around (like Photoshop once was).It doesn&#x27;t make sense in Finder, or Reminders, where the content is ultimately just a list. Forcing the sidebar &quot;to float on top of the content&quot; yields no benefit because the content wont ever scroll under it, and because it can&#x27;t be moved anyway, but it does lead to wasted space, that ugly &quot;double border&quot;, etc.

Thanks, I was thinking I was having a deja vu because I was sure I had read something like this recently.

28 days ago. 334 comments: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=46196688">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=46196688</a>

I wouldn&#x27;t take too much into a book about optimising database storage written for 90s-era hard disks and CPUs.But a file menu is still a file menu, and save is still save. In fact it&#x27;s remarkable how little that has changed since 1983.

Why is it highly implausible on its face other than the fact it makes arguing against him harder?

Humans are definitely not the same as in 1992 when it comes to their everyday knowledge of computer interactions.And even if human cognition itself were unchanged, our understanding of HCI has evolved significantly since then, well beyond what merely “feels right.”Most UX researchers today can back up their claims with empirical data.The article goes on at great length about consistency, yet then insists that text transformations require special treatment, with the HIG example looking outright unreadable.Menu text should remain stable and not mirror or preview what’s happening to the selected text IMHO.Also, some redundancy is not necessarily a bad thing in UI design, and not all users, for various reasons, can read with a vocabulary that covers the full breadth of what a system provides.

The author addresses this. Humans are the same in 2026 as 1992.Besides, that interface designers or even the average computer user understands more than in 1992 is highly implausible on its face.

If you haven’t done so, I’d suggest reading that HIG. It is clear thinking, expressed well, and it stands the test of time.

&gt; most of your points are refuted in the articleSure, we can debate about the general points.Yet, we can&#x27;t refute that my subjective opinion evaluation of the opening image looks better (for me) , reads better (for me) and is easier (for me) to parse. Either I don&#x27;t fit the general guidelines, or the general guidelines need a revision, that&#x27;s my point overall.

most of your points are refuted in the article. but I&#x27;ll pick this one : &quot;Display density has increased dramatically&quot;  Yes, it has, and Tahoe does not take advantage of this, infact the icons are smaller, and harder to read, using fewer pixels than windows icons of 25 years ago.

Interesting.The article starts with this: &gt; Sequoia → Tahoe It’s badAnd I look at the image... And I like it? I agree with the author that it could be better, but most of the icons (new, open recent, close, save, duplicate, print, share etc), do make it easier, faster and more pleasant for my brain to parse the menu vs no icons.Again, I don&#x27;t disagree that you could do it better, I just disagree with the premise that the 1992 manual is &quot;the authority&quot;. Display density has increased dramatically; people use their computers more and have been accustomed to those interfaces, which makes the relationship of the people with the interfaces different. Quoting a 1992 guideline on interfaces in 2026 feels like quoting the greeks on philosophy while ignoring our understandings of the world since then.

I don&#x27;t work or have ever worked at Apple, so I don&#x27;t know the full details, but I heard the new design wasn&#x27;t introduced until very late in the development process, and at a point in time where teams are supposed to focus on polish, not redesigns or introducing new features.So not only did teams have to rush incroporating this new design, they also didn&#x27;t get time to think things through and polish. It sounds like they didn&#x27;t have time to push-back either, and so there was no feedback&#x2F;iteration loop where they could work out with whomever is in charge of wider system design what works and what doesn&#x27;t on what apps.

If there is ever a leaked insider story of how whatever Tahoe is supposed to be got cooked up and released that would be my read of the year.

At this point I&#x27;m just hoping Cook (who bears ultimate responsibility) or Ternus will see the error of his ways, but I&#x27;m not holding my breath. I doubt they understand what&#x27;s wrong with this or that they even know about the HIG.

Those who want to complain about the snowflake animations, wait till you try out the dark mode

It&#x27;s just entropy. It takes a special kind of person to be able to fight it in a big org. Jobs, Musk et. al. are assholes but they do manage to push their vision through. Probably because they are assholes.

&gt; It&#x27;s just enshittification.That’s not what enshittification means.Somehow its usage has quickly devolved from a very specific pattern companies used to squeeze “value” out of their customers over time into just “something getting worse in any way” or even just “something I don’t like now but I did before” which is not at all the point.

It&#x27;s just enshittification.Going to continue to get worse as time goes on.Even the hardware will go at some point I&#x27;m betting.

When a feature reaches maturity, you have to be willing to shrink the team.

&gt;How do they justify their job if they can&#x27;t roll out huge visible changes?This is the core rotting value in so much of big tech. So much of your bonus, performance review, promotion package, etc is hinging on &quot;delivering impact&quot; (ie: doing the flashy stuff). Imagine a world where some internal R&amp;D team took a risk on liquid design but then thought it was okay to not ship it because it didn&#x27;t work out.

Yeah I think this is a well known problem. Humans tend to get a lot of stuff right on the first try, and then it&#x27;s subsequently thrown away in the name of &quot;progress&quot;.

Maybe Apple just got so many things right early on, then the people with experience slowly left and inexperienced people kept showing up and they felt compelled to keep making changes to justify their jobs. How do they justify their job if they can&#x27;t roll out huge visible changes? So they rationalize whatever change they wanna make and keep advocating for it until they get the green light, regardless of whether or not it&#x27;s a good idea. The best part is that cleaning up this mess will probably lead to a whole bunch of promotions, even if just ends up circling back to what they should&#x27;ve already known.I think a lot of key lessons that were studied and learned back in the day weren&#x27;t adequately transferred to the new generation.

I&#x27;m hopeful Apple will correct course about all these awful UI decisions but it&#x27;ll take some time.

Yes, we can all look forward to the breathless bots lauding Apple&#x27;s visionary hardware prowess when they remove that damned stupid notch ten years from now, while replacing it with something equally egregious.

Not all reverted. Still waiting for my USB-A ports and the SD card reader, on laptops described as &quot;Pro&quot;. It&#x27;s as if Apple forgot that &quot;Pro&quot; is a shorthand for &quot;professional&quot; instead of a meaningless marketing term.

To be fair, they also made several infamous hardware design choices back in 2016, all of which they’ve later reverted.

Hardware improvements are easier to quantify and progress naturally comes in incremental steps.Software however especially from UX point of view, is more likely to be more or less ready at some point. Any improvements are marginal and subjective. What are the large UX teams at Apple going to do if not redesigns for the sake of redesigning? I wish it would happen, but it’s hard to imagine Apple shipping an annual OS release without noticeable visual changes.

In the early 2000s I helped an engineering from transitioning from the CAD software CATIAv4 to v5.While v4 was pretty much text based in early v5 every item and action had an icon, often only an icon. The manual read something like this:&quot;To do ⌘ you navigate from the ⌙ page to the ⌟, while holding the middle mouse button. The⌇will open and you will see the ⌆.&quot;I think they did that with good intentions. CATIA being a French product sold all over Europe and beyond, localization must have been a significant line item. The result was a nightmare though and they to toned the reliance on symbols down in subsequent versions.

Imagine how usable computers will be once we remove every instance of text!

I&#x27;m feeling they&#x27;re veering towards a &quot;common ui&quot; where every action is an icon like on a phone where every app is an icon.Maybe someday they&#x27;ll completely remove the text to just keep the icons like the Office ribbon did, and I&#x27;m still confused with it.

When company is small and the leader is competent, it&#x27;s easy to weed out incompetent employees. But beyond certain size, or when the leader themselves is incompetent, this becomes impossible, and the whole company starts to rot.

The other issue is the general organizational challenge of ensuring people good at their jobs are stacked into every part of your organization.The default is that it’s not the case, and it requires eternal vigilance to do otherwise. Everything good is a fluke.

It&#x27;s quite simple: Most people who work in software now aren&#x27;t actually very good at their jobs, at least in terms of how that job would have been defined 15 years ago.This is because incentives have changed such that being good at your job in your average mega-corp has very little to do with the outcome: To climb their ladder, you optimise for impact and move before you have to deal with the consequences.

There&#x27;s plenty to criticize them for on the hardware front. Why design round edges on your macbook pro and then put cheese grater vent holes on the sides where you&#x27;re most likely to pick it up? Same goes for the Apple TV remote.

&gt; It seems like Apple&#x27;s hardware design is universally loved with much acclaim, why is their software getting progressively worse?It&#x27;s not so different from the rationale for many consumer electronics products: novelty for marketing&#x27;s sake rather than functionality. Similarly, notice the ridiculous trend of removing most physical buttons from car dashboards, started by Tesla and mindlessly aped by the other carmakers.

&gt; It seems like Apple&#x27;s hardware design is universally loved.To be fair, the bar is really really low in terms of mobile hardware. It’s just really hard (and expensive) for new players to design, build and manufacture hardware with competitive processing power.

It used to be the opposite! From the end of the PowerPC era throughout most of the Intel era, the Mac OS X was the main selling point, while the hardware was slow, overpriced and overheating (they&#x27;ve had some nice touches like MagSafe and &quot;ears&quot; on power supplies for the cable, but that didn&#x27;t make up for everything else).People used to build hackintoshes to get Mac OS X without paying Apple&#x27;s RAM tax or suffer having mid-range laptop GPUs in the top-of-the-line desktops.Apple&#x27;s outstanding success with their ARM chips is more of an exception than the rule.

It seems like Apple&#x27;s hardware design is universally loved with much acclaim, why is their software getting progressively worse?It&#x27;s not Microsoft-add-all-the-bloatware-and-adverts-we-can worse, but it&#x27;s 20-year-old-operating-systems-were-better-designed worse.We&#x27;re getting to a point where I think Linux windowing systems like KDE are better designed. And it seems that all they had to do was not change much over the span of a few decades.Or am I out of touch? It feels like I could use a computer better back when XP was the mainstay.

Rose tinted glasses. Have a look through Jobs era UI again.

&gt;I think the key issue with macOS is that they don&#x27;t seem to have someone who is looking at the whole ecosystem holistically to make sure that there&#x27;s consistency and integration across experiences.That person died in 2011.

They do have a culture of silos and secrecy where employees are not allowed to talk to each other. This is actively enforced to prevent leaks but this also gets you this.

Looking at the old Microsoft menu gave me a pang of nostalgia for what we lost. It was so clear and readable. The icons were clearly colored and so easy to understand.I think the key issue with macOS is that they don&#x27;t seem to have someone who is looking at the whole ecosystem holistically to make sure that there&#x27;s consistency and integration across experiences. You probably have development silos for different applications and they don&#x27;t really integrate with each other. There should really be a role like Integration Emperor that exists outside of the traditional corporate hierarchy who can go to different teams to push for increased consistency.

You can turn the snow off in the toolbar.

Something on this website made my iPhone (16 pro) immediately begin warming up, become hot to the touch, and invoke screen-dimming throttling. I verified by exiting it and reentering, during which the pattern abated and then recurred.The snow? Something else?

I use menus all the time...I much prefer text to inscrutable icons.

Do you have a cite for that? It&#x27;s a hamburger menu, which is by far a more common menu paradigm in the modern world. Do you imagine some kind of &quot;casual user&quot; who... doesn&#x27;t have a phone?I repeat: the menu bar is a dying abstraction, preserved in a consistent form only on the Macintosh (even iOS has no equivalent), because it&#x27;s presence is unavoidable. Users of modern apps don&#x27;t see it used consistently, so it&#x27;s absolutely not surprising that Apple&#x27;s designers aren&#x27;t doing it either.

The top menu is not necessarily for common functions. Nor is it true that no one uses it.Chrome’s unique buried menu breaks user expectations. Casual users have trouble finding it.

Firefox has the option to display the menu bar. I like it.

&gt; fitts lawApplies only to an increasingly obscure input device. No one talks about Fitts&#x27;s Law on phones, because it&#x27;s fundamentally wrong. The &quot;size&quot; of a control assumes you have a mouse or joystick or something trying to find it. Fingers don&#x27;t do that, no one worries about moving to a control.&gt; DiscoverabilityEqually true of a hamburger menu.&gt; I use menus all the timeI do too! Because we&#x27;re dinosaurs.&gt; You say &#x27;no one uses menus&#x27; Not true.It was hyperbole that I genuinely thought was clear from the text. You know exactly what I meant. Menus are secondary devices at this point only seriously used on one platform, so it&#x27;s 100% unsurprising that design paradigms for using them are changing (&quot;decaying&quot;, I suspect you and the other dinosaurs would say) to reflect patterns used elsewhere in the industry.

&gt; &quot;, it&#x27;s the top-bar menus as a whole are a dead paradigm.&quot;clearly apple are doing their best to destroy them.Top menus are good because of infinite size (fitts law)
Discoverability - i can look in a menu add see what options are available to me.
You can tell people either verbally or textually what to do e.g. Choose File Export as PDF instead of something like &#x27;See the small icon that looks like a document with a folded corner, no not that one&#x27; yadda 
Menu are direct I don&#x27;t need to open another menu to get to my menus (hamburger menu)I use menus all the time. I totally agree with the article. You say &#x27;no one uses menus&#x27; Not true.

The irony here isn&#x27;t so much that it&#x27;s the minutiae of the menu design that&#x27;s wrong, it&#x27;s the top-bar menus as a whole are a dead paradigm. Nothing uses them anymore. Leave the mac for a moment and go to your windows device. Pull up Chrome. No menu. The file browser, nope. Not in the terminal either. VSCode still has one![1] But the office suite doesn&#x27;t anymore[2]. And obviously, the proximate cause of that is that most interaction these days is with phones where horizontal text menus are a non-starter.No one uses menus. So why so get so upset over the mac implementation of a dead paradigm? Because ironically the Macintosh bakes a &quot;menu&quot; into the screen space for you, and has since 1984. Giving up menus on a mac requires that you give up one of the things that make a mac a mac. And that&#x27;s hard, for marketers even more so than designers. So it persists and festers.But in the rest of the world, we walked away and never looked back. The icons aren&#x27;t the problem here.[1] &quot;Big&quot; apps for experts still get value out of putting their actions into tightly packed text. Photoshop too, etc... But these are increasingly the exception and not the rule, and even there the next generation of big tools (c.f. Cursor) don&#x27;t have them.[2] Even worse there, because the tab bar it does have actually looks like a menu but isn&#x27;t.

Isn’t this post a bit ironic given all the random snow on the page?!

The huge area of intense yellow (or any highly saturated color actually) is very jarring. The eyes get tired quickly. It&#x27;s really a weird choice coming from a person who is apparently into visual communication.Btw, I&#x27;m using a desktop PC with a large browser window. Maybe on a small mobile screen the problem is less apparent.

It’s not obvious to me how black on yellow is a mistake. It’s quite readable, the contrast is broad enough for clarity but not so broad the background overwhelms the foreground. Yellow’s a recommended “light” background for visually impaired people so the choice has precedance (although I confess that many other examples of it I’ve seen use a softer pastel yellow which is more comfortable).

It is enabled by default so you can enjoy the snowflakes.

This is the second time in just a few weeks I see a post from some UX person complaining about how some major tech company doesn&#x27;t &quot;understand&quot; design while themselves having a design that is absolutely abysmal. What made this person think that having gigantic snowflakes flying down a page serving only text and images would be a good idea?_edit_: I&#x27;d also like to point out that I know it can be disabled, the question(s) I then have are 1) why is it enabled by default 2) black text on yellow background is yet another obvious mistake

Apple&#x27;s UI design started going downhill with the iOS 7 &quot;flat design&quot; release which was very shortly after Steve&#x27;s death, and seemed to correspond to Ive being given a little too much free rein in the leadership vacuum that followed.Jobs had his own flaws, but he was definitely a huge part of why Apple&#x27;s UI design (and product design in general) has historically been as good as it has.

Jony Ive’s elevation was the problem: neither he nor his protege Alan Dye (who worked on the boxes) had UI training or experience and that has shown since iOS 7 where the focus shifted to things which looked nicer on the side of the iPhone box than they are in actual use - stuff like Liquid Glass shipping with an illegible lock screen keyboard is possible because they never put the lock screen in a presentation or product screenshot.As a complete outsider, my impression is that this started slow because they had to politically overpower Apple’s actual UI group. Liquid Glass probably managed that with a unified look across all devices pitch which should’ve weighted the relative impact on the popular platforms much higher than the niche Vision Pro.

Steve Jobs died 14 years ago. If we&#x27;re attributing this to those in charge, Jony Ive&#x27;s departure is much more correlated.

Tahoe and Liquid Glass™ solidified for me the idea that Apple completely dropped the ball when it comes to design. Clearly they needed an a-hole in charge, Jobs would&#x27;ve crucified a few people.It&#x27;s painful to see the decay, update after update, into a more confusing, cluttered, and tacky experience.

It's hard to justify Tahoe icons