Liquid glass should be taught in design school as an example of what not to do when you design UX. And also in business school as a case of how middle management can fudge up something that is working normally in the illusion of progress.

(Rather interestingly, menus still have icons if a menu option will simply launch another app, a specific folder that has an icon, or will perform a specific action like a window resize or category sort change that already has an icon you could click elsewhere.)

They also have cleaned up the mess of differently rounded borders (not complete yet but progress is being made). The OS also feels a lot less sluggish. I had gone back to Sequoia simply because performance was so bad.

I hope Apple learned a lesson from what happened with Alan Dye and that Ternus doesn't let something like that happen again under his leadership.

Flyouts, dropdowns, and other text menus make sense to me, but I could see how they might be alien and uncomfortable to someone that has only ever experienced mobile interfaces.

The reverse is true for sure, nowhere do I feel more frustrated and old-brained then trying to make sense of a new mobile app that everyone else seems to think is great.

I know little about Apple, but have quite a bit of experience with how software products get "designed". Goofy and offensive things happen when corporations decide not to pay attention to customers.

The decision to ignore customer and focus on market wow is not the software design team. It is a systemic and structural thing.

I was unaware Apple still maintained such a document? There was a time when TOG's HIG [1] was the Bible for the Mac interface. UI nerds at Apple (and likely elsewhere) would enjoy debating/interpreting them for some project or another. (I don't recall anyone being burned at the stake but there were definitely discussions that could reach a heretical pitch.)

The HIG preached a kind of nuance and balance—when it allowed for somewhat less "staid" UI elements it would advise moderation.

This came about in an era when the graphical user interface was a fairly new thing to the public and inconsistency (Do What Thou Wilt) would only have destabilized the gentle adoption Apple was treading.

It was a marketable advantage for Apple as well. Consistency on the DOS side, as far as I know, came about only as companies tried to adopt familiar patterns from popular apps of the day. (Related: I talked to an engineer at Adobe about the hideous UI (my opinion) of Adobe Acrobat on the Mac and was told they wanted it to look like it belonged alongside the suite of Microsoft Office apps. le sigh.)

From 1992, see Page 72 for menu widgets: [1] https://vintageapple.org/inside_r/pdf/Human_Interface_Guidel...

https://bwiggs.com/notebook/queens-duck/

Bad customer experience for a company like Apple.

I'm not sure that's even OK. I find icons disruptive to reading the menu, but at least Apple still has text to read. Microsoft Word doesn't even have "Save" as text for saving your file, never mind that the icon isn't even in the file menu these days.

It’s a knife’s edge.

I can't say the following for sure, but there's evidence of it: One of Apple's real strengths and differentiators is that it listens to customer feedback to the point that it will say: "Hey, this was dumb. Customer feedback proves it. Let's just get rid of it like it never happened."

Other examples include getting rid of the earlier getting rid of Magsafe.

I don't know whether it's something taught in Apple School, but in the absence of not doing dumb things in the first place, which seems to be unavoidable in the real world with real people, it's probably the next best thing. And it may be enough better than the norm from tech companies that it's a real cultural differentiator.

Visual consistency like this is bad because it removes distinct features (like the presence or lack of an icon) that make it easier to find things.

Google's icons are visually consistent: https://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/jie6b7/for_opening_...

Outsourcing their UX design to the internet badly...

As usual for Gruber, this is fanboy cope. Dye may be a convenient scapegoat, but he was not a lone wolf, he was operating with the full assent of executive leadership, which is to say, the same leadership that appointed his successor.

Removal of skeuomorphism, removal of essential ports, making MacBooks so thin that they wouldn’t work without overheating to name a few.

I am so glad he is gone now, it’s not all bells and whistles for Apple now, but at least it’s way more pleasing to own Apple devices any more.

I installed VLC on my phone, and I couldn't figure anything out, because it was covered in vague post-skeuomorphic icons without text.

> This updated advice in the HIG is perfect.

> Use an icon to highlight the most common actions and key features of your app

Saving a document is the one of the most common actions in your average app, but I * never* need an icon there in the menu, there is no benefit in focusing my attention on an action I always do with a shortcut!

The perfect advice would be easy and powerful user customization, so that, for example, I could right click on the app's File>Save menu and select an option to hide the icon, reformat the rich text field and have this change propagate in all the other apps. Or click on a web link from someone who has already done it better and add the theme. Then I wouldn't even care about the back and forth design changes between major OS releases.

And that could also fix another sin in the screenshot - the text is not vertically aligned! "visual consistency" misunderstood