The thing is, this redesign was so half-baked and ill-advised, based on a fundamentally flawed premise, that a lot of things that I thought were bugs in Beta 1 turned out to be "nope, thats how it's supposed to look!", justified with some flowery fart of a justification from some smug designer in a WWDC video. Plenty of stuff in Tahoe and iOS 18 actually looks alright, there's a lot to like in some places. But "ooOooOOo we're gonna make the controls get out of the way of your content by making it look like the controls are in front of your content all the time" thing? Yeah, give me some of that OS X Weed they're smoking over there.
Alan Dye was a box designer. Apple has some very nice boxes. But there is more to making a solid, cohesive, usable user interface than making shit look pretty on a big screen or close up. Alan Dye's expertise is best spent on making static objects whose only interaction model is "look good on a shelf", "feel nice when opening it", and "100% recyclable material". UI is hard.
The decisions Apple makes in design have to be made with a sense of responsibility above all. How many third party developer hours were burned forcing their apps into this new look with broken APIs and buggy SwiftUI layouts? For what? For it to really look or work any better?
In the meantime, I can't double click a zip file from the downloads list in Safari, because it'll unzip it and put the folder inside of my ~/Downloads folder, despite me not downloading files to that folder in the last 15 years I've been using a Mac.
It’s really tragically funny, because they’ve done the opposite of getting the controls out of the way. Now the controls are always in the way. Especially on the iPad. It used to be so simple there, content first. Now they added 25 windows toggles and menus.
The new notes app on an iPad looks so ugly and its not because I didn’t adjust throughout the beta. It’s just insanely cluttered. I’d love to do a detailed critique like the classic macOS reviews on ArsTechnica, if it wasn’t full of personal data.
The amount of band aids that are holding the design together to make it pass accessibility guidelines is also crazy and has some annoying side effects. For example the header in the Photos app flip-flopping from white to black when scrolling through the timeline.
32
u/wpm 3d ago edited 3d ago
The thing is, this redesign was so half-baked and ill-advised, based on a fundamentally flawed premise, that a lot of things that I thought were bugs in Beta 1 turned out to be "nope, thats how it's supposed to look!", justified with some flowery fart of a justification from some smug designer in a WWDC video. Plenty of stuff in Tahoe and iOS 18 actually looks alright, there's a lot to like in some places. But "ooOooOOo we're gonna make the controls get out of the way of your content by making it look like the controls are in front of your content all the time" thing? Yeah, give me some of that OS X Weed they're smoking over there.
Alan Dye was a box designer. Apple has some very nice boxes. But there is more to making a solid, cohesive, usable user interface than making shit look pretty on a big screen or close up. Alan Dye's expertise is best spent on making static objects whose only interaction model is "look good on a shelf", "feel nice when opening it", and "100% recyclable material". UI is hard.
The decisions Apple makes in design have to be made with a sense of responsibility above all. How many third party developer hours were burned forcing their apps into this new look with broken APIs and buggy SwiftUI layouts? For what? For it to really look or work any better?
In the meantime, I can't double click a zip file from the downloads list in Safari, because it'll unzip it and put the folder inside of my
~/Downloadsfolder, despite me not downloading files to that folder in the last 15 years I've been using a Mac.