I’m avoiding Mac OS Tahoe because of the disgraceful liquid glass debacle, but it looks like the rot goes even deeper. Here’s a detailed look at the sad state of iconography in application menus.
I know that changes in an OS update can take time to get used to, but this isn’t a case of “one step forwards, two steps back”—it’s just a lot of steps back with no forwards.
Marcin has outdone himself this time. Not only has he created an exhaustive history of the settings controls in Apple interfaces, he’s gone and made them all interactive!
While it’s easy to be blown away by the detail of the interactive elements here, it’s also worth taking a moment to appreciate just how good the writing is too.
Bravo!
A stylesheet for when you’re nostalgic for the old Mac OS.
From Xerox PARC to the World Wide Web:
The internet did not use a visual spatial metaphor. Despite being accessed through and often encompassed by the desktop environment, the internet felt well and truly placeless (or perhaps everywhere). Hyperlinks were wormholes through the spatial metaphor, allowing a user to skip laterally across directories stored on disparate servers, as well as horizontally, deep into a file system without having to access the intermediate steps. Multiple windows could be open to the same website at once, shattering the illusion of a “single file” that functioned as a piece of paper that only one person could hold. The icons that a user could arrange on the desktop didn’t have a parallel in online space at all.
¶, &, @, ‽, ☺, #, and ☛.
I love how easy it is to use these icons: you can copy and paste the SVG or even get it encoded as a data URL.
We’ve taught machines to hallucinate so let’s be honest about their hallucinations.
Rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty.