Tahoe's Elephant(eclecticlight.co)
eclecticlight.co
Tahoe's Elephant
https://eclecticlight.co/2025/10/12/last-week-on-my-mac-tahoes-elephant/
52 comments
> Ever since GUIs became (flat) UXs everything has gone to shit. Not that GUIs didn't also suck, but I could at least distinguish controls from labels.
One of the nice things about Tahoe is that liquid glass does a better job of distinguishing controls from other elements, at least most of the time. But they need to do a better job refining some of the transparency effects to make it more consistent. For example in Safari, with a medium grey background on a page, the controls have contrast from the toolbar surface and the borders and glass effect give them a nice depth. But with a dark grey background all the contrast between the controls and the toolbar almost disappear, and only the borders give any real distinction. Its even worse on light or white backgrounds, where since the borders in the liquid glass elements tend to be light/white colored in the first place, even they disappear. The transparency effects can be nice, but someone else's choices for a site background shouldn't be having such a dramatic impact on the actual UI of the computer.
One of the nice things about Tahoe is that liquid glass does a better job of distinguishing controls from other elements, at least most of the time. But they need to do a better job refining some of the transparency effects to make it more consistent. For example in Safari, with a medium grey background on a page, the controls have contrast from the toolbar surface and the borders and glass effect give them a nice depth. But with a dark grey background all the contrast between the controls and the toolbar almost disappear, and only the borders give any real distinction. Its even worse on light or white backgrounds, where since the borders in the liquid glass elements tend to be light/white colored in the first place, even they disappear. The transparency effects can be nice, but someone else's choices for a site background shouldn't be having such a dramatic impact on the actual UI of the computer.
>The transparency effects can be nice, but someone else's choices for a site background shouldn't be having such a dramatic impact on the actual UI of the computer.
Isn't this just the principle of transparency itself?
I'm convinced what Apple is doing here has exactly one purpose: Force developers to prepare their apps for the yet to be released iGlasses so that the Apple Vision Pro situation doesn't repeat itself - a device for which no one can be bothered to make apps.
The idea is clearly that covering things with animated light-grey sludge will make transparency bearable on both computer screens and iGlasses.
They are probably right that people will get used to it, but I very much doubt that any UI designer (at Apple or elsewhere) ever thought that this design is an optimal choice for traditional computer screens.
Isn't this just the principle of transparency itself?
I'm convinced what Apple is doing here has exactly one purpose: Force developers to prepare their apps for the yet to be released iGlasses so that the Apple Vision Pro situation doesn't repeat itself - a device for which no one can be bothered to make apps.
The idea is clearly that covering things with animated light-grey sludge will make transparency bearable on both computer screens and iGlasses.
They are probably right that people will get used to it, but I very much doubt that any UI designer (at Apple or elsewhere) ever thought that this design is an optimal choice for traditional computer screens.
> Isn't this just the principle of transparency itself?
For pure transparency, sure, but most of the liquid glass effects aren't pure transparency and there's a lot of different ways you can modulate the effect. Perhaps the simplest example of something like this is the mouse cursor. You probably don't think about it, but that cursor in macos has a thin white single pixel border around the whole cursor. On light backgrounds, it effectively disappears, but on dark and black backgrounds it allows you to easily see and follow your cursor around the screen. The cursor itself isn't changing, but the chosen design allows a single "black" cursor to work across all backgrounds.
Or the menu bar which has had a transparency effect for a version or two now auto switches between black and white text depending on the background coloring (for what its worth, so does Safari's new control bar). But in neither of these cases (the mouse or the menu bar) is the UI changing dramatically. Unlike the safari controls, when the mouse pointer loses its border, it doesn't lose depth or become harder to make out. When the text in the menu bar changes color, it doesn't switch from "popping out" to "flat on the bar". The style and overall look remains the same even as the colors adjust for the environment.
What I'm saying is that Apple needs to spend some time shoring up those sort of little touches that can and do make the UI fee thought out instead of just slapped together.
For pure transparency, sure, but most of the liquid glass effects aren't pure transparency and there's a lot of different ways you can modulate the effect. Perhaps the simplest example of something like this is the mouse cursor. You probably don't think about it, but that cursor in macos has a thin white single pixel border around the whole cursor. On light backgrounds, it effectively disappears, but on dark and black backgrounds it allows you to easily see and follow your cursor around the screen. The cursor itself isn't changing, but the chosen design allows a single "black" cursor to work across all backgrounds.
Or the menu bar which has had a transparency effect for a version or two now auto switches between black and white text depending on the background coloring (for what its worth, so does Safari's new control bar). But in neither of these cases (the mouse or the menu bar) is the UI changing dramatically. Unlike the safari controls, when the mouse pointer loses its border, it doesn't lose depth or become harder to make out. When the text in the menu bar changes color, it doesn't switch from "popping out" to "flat on the bar". The style and overall look remains the same even as the colors adjust for the environment.
What I'm saying is that Apple needs to spend some time shoring up those sort of little touches that can and do make the UI fee thought out instead of just slapped together.
> I'm convinced what Apple is doing here has exactly one purpose: Force developers to prepare their apps for the yet to be released iGlasses so that the Apple Vision Pro situation doesn't repeat itself - a device for which no one can be bothered to make apps.
I suspect that you have got it in one, here.
I suspect that you have got it in one, here.
The first setting I changed was "Show colour in tab bar". I want the web page to appear to be the isolated artefact it is rather than bleeding out into Safari.
>But they need to do a better job refining some of the transparency effects
They need to stop all transparency, and design with matte clearly visible widgets in mind.
Mid/late 90s interfaces were trully peak UI from that perspective.
They need to stop all transparency, and design with matte clearly visible widgets in mind.
Mid/late 90s interfaces were trully peak UI from that perspective.
The advantage of the colored dot is that it's easy to show that a file has multiple tags by putting several dots next to each other. IIRC the old way only let you have one tag on a file? Multiple tags are super useful for me, I tag all my art files as some combination of in progress/done/commissions/paid, and use saved searches to decide what I'm gonna work on today.
Do you use this feature a lot? I have used macOS for over 15 years straight, and I do not think I have ever tagged a file once. What purpose does it even serve? You get some color code, but what does that truly accomplish? I assume most people that use such a feature have some kind of mental map?
If you're doing work on many files within different folders in a project folder, and this work takes several days. You finish the files in one folder and tag it with a color as "done", then move on to the next folder, etc.
I use it extensively to keep track of the status of my work. I draw comics, and each page is a separate file; while I'm generally working on one of the highest-numbered pages in the folder, it's real nice to instantly know by their visible tag colors that, say, pages 1-78, 80, and 82 are complete, while 79, 81, and 83-85 are in progress.
You can see an example of that here: https://egypt.urnash.com/blog/2019/01/06/how-i-work-file-org... - it's got a screenshot of the folder of pages for a comic I was doing that had two parallel narratives, so scrolling down to the bottom of the alphabetized list wouldn't even necessarily show all the in-progress files. (Yes, I could sort by other criteria, but stuff like 'last modified date' can bring in a lot of false positives.)
I have a saved search for files marked as "in progress". And another one for files marked as both "commissions" and "in progress". All of these files might be scattered throughout my file system in various places - comics have their own folder, personal work goes in a folder named with the year, commissions sometimes end up in the yearly folder, sometimes in their own subfolder - and these saved searches let me completely disregard that and quickly ask myself "what do I feel like spending time on today".
I also have a lot of files tagged as "experiments", all saved in the yearly folder. A lot of these are the result of me sitting there on the Illustrator subreddit and answering "how do I make Illustrator do something that looks like this" questions, and packaging them up in an easy-to-reuse way; I can just look in the Experiments tag when I want to find one of them and not bother keeping a special place for them.
I don't think there's any kind of mental map going on here, the whole usefulness of tags is that I can skip navigating my folder hierarchy. Different tags very clearly mark some files as different. You can make new tags and assign them names, but you're annoyingly restricted to seven colors, so there's really not much mental mapping to do.
You can see an example of that here: https://egypt.urnash.com/blog/2019/01/06/how-i-work-file-org... - it's got a screenshot of the folder of pages for a comic I was doing that had two parallel narratives, so scrolling down to the bottom of the alphabetized list wouldn't even necessarily show all the in-progress files. (Yes, I could sort by other criteria, but stuff like 'last modified date' can bring in a lot of false positives.)
I have a saved search for files marked as "in progress". And another one for files marked as both "commissions" and "in progress". All of these files might be scattered throughout my file system in various places - comics have their own folder, personal work goes in a folder named with the year, commissions sometimes end up in the yearly folder, sometimes in their own subfolder - and these saved searches let me completely disregard that and quickly ask myself "what do I feel like spending time on today".
I also have a lot of files tagged as "experiments", all saved in the yearly folder. A lot of these are the result of me sitting there on the Illustrator subreddit and answering "how do I make Illustrator do something that looks like this" questions, and packaging them up in an easy-to-reuse way; I can just look in the Experiments tag when I want to find one of them and not bother keeping a special place for them.
I don't think there's any kind of mental map going on here, the whole usefulness of tags is that I can skip navigating my folder hierarchy. Different tags very clearly mark some files as different. You can make new tags and assign them names, but you're annoyingly restricted to seven colors, so there's really not much mental mapping to do.
I use it when I have to process some files manually, maybe involving multiple steps (blue is started, green is done, or whatever)
In a world where “normal” people are calling files “v2_final_final” it’s nice to have a way to encode more information than just a file name.
Other people also use them for organization and workflows and stuff
In a world where “normal” people are calling files “v2_final_final” it’s nice to have a way to encode more information than just a file name.
Other people also use them for organization and workflows and stuff
It's not an advantage since you can trivially show multiple colors in a bigger area of the file name, it's even easier than dots
And you could even reduce readability by using gradients to make it fancier!
And you could even reduce readability by using gradients to make it fancier!
I didn't know you could do that, maybe I'll give it a shot. For one tag I'd definitely still prefer a whole line, but it would be nice if that was configurable.
> colour labels in Finder switched from highlighting the entire file
One of the reasons I continue to subscribe (sigh) to the Path Finder (Finder replacement) app, which offers whole-line highlighting (coloring) of tagged files.
(It also has a great function to batch-rename files — including with regex find and replace, and including the ability to save and load renaming algorithms.)
Not affiliated, just a very happy user (apart from the subscription licensing model, that is).
One of the reasons I continue to subscribe (sigh) to the Path Finder (Finder replacement) app, which offers whole-line highlighting (coloring) of tagged files.
(It also has a great function to batch-rename files — including with regex find and replace, and including the ability to save and load renaming algorithms.)
Not affiliated, just a very happy user (apart from the subscription licensing model, that is).
I really want to like Path Finder. It looks like it might be nearly perfect for me. But I am intensely opposed to a file manager that requires internet access to activate in order for your subscription to be validated. It's such an offensive model.
I encountered an interesting snag with the new UI while scrolling through Slack. Suddenly the glass Huddle button was glowing with a golden-yellow hue which drew my eye, but I wasn't sure why, it didn't seem like anyone had started a call...
It turned out I had scrolled the content such that a yellow smiley emoji was positioned directly underneath the Huddle button, and the glass effect dispersed the color to the edges of the control.
There is a long-established convention that Mac OS visually distinguishes "default" buttons from others to guide the user toward a certain action. A button that changes colors depending on nearby content subverts that expectation.
Although I should say I've been using Tahoe for a month and so far that has only happened to me once, it's also the only time in my entire lifetime of using Mac OS. Generally the UI is fine but it's definitely not the best-looking release. (Why does a random subset of menu items have icons now, exactly?)
It turned out I had scrolled the content such that a yellow smiley emoji was positioned directly underneath the Huddle button, and the glass effect dispersed the color to the edges of the control.
There is a long-established convention that Mac OS visually distinguishes "default" buttons from others to guide the user toward a certain action. A button that changes colors depending on nearby content subverts that expectation.
Although I should say I've been using Tahoe for a month and so far that has only happened to me once, it's also the only time in my entire lifetime of using Mac OS. Generally the UI is fine but it's definitely not the best-looking release. (Why does a random subset of menu items have icons now, exactly?)
Paraphrasing a previous comment:
macOS Tahoe is the second time that I have felt this kind of frustration with an operating system since I jumped from the Microsoft ship during Windows 8 and their "Metro" iPad-envy crap.
Did some Apple CxO let their brother-in-law's cousin's nephew have a go at managing all the teams? It's not like "oh, these kinds of bugs are easy to overlook, and a low priority, they'll be fixed soon" and they do. But rather, Tahoe is full of moments like "HOW the hell could the richest company on Earth not have seen this for a whole YEAR?? and HOW did none of the beta testers complain about it??!"
It's unbelievable: Some basic UI is LITERALLY (not an exaggeration) unreadable on the dumbass "glass" implementation. There are blatant rendering bugs and placeholders still in the shipped version (just look at the Contacts app).
DRM slowdowns have crippled the Music and TV apps so much that I literally cancelled my subscription and went to just pirating the content.
I'll never go back to Windows and I'll still buy MacBooks, but maybe I'll start exploring Linux a bit more. Things like Omarchy etc. seem genuinely tempting.
macOS Tahoe is the second time that I have felt this kind of frustration with an operating system since I jumped from the Microsoft ship during Windows 8 and their "Metro" iPad-envy crap.
Did some Apple CxO let their brother-in-law's cousin's nephew have a go at managing all the teams? It's not like "oh, these kinds of bugs are easy to overlook, and a low priority, they'll be fixed soon" and they do. But rather, Tahoe is full of moments like "HOW the hell could the richest company on Earth not have seen this for a whole YEAR?? and HOW did none of the beta testers complain about it??!"
It's unbelievable: Some basic UI is LITERALLY (not an exaggeration) unreadable on the dumbass "glass" implementation. There are blatant rendering bugs and placeholders still in the shipped version (just look at the Contacts app).
DRM slowdowns have crippled the Music and TV apps so much that I literally cancelled my subscription and went to just pirating the content.
I'll never go back to Windows and I'll still buy MacBooks, but maybe I'll start exploring Linux a bit more. Things like Omarchy etc. seem genuinely tempting.
It’s Alan Dye at Apple, he has always been a graphics-trumps-usability guy. The problem is that he has nobody to moderate him and tell him that certain things will not work in the real world.
I will go even further. It's Alan Dye and below him an army of H1Bs from South Asia, as seen in the promotional videos.
Supply chain attacks means I can no longer do dev work without a container. On a Mac this means running linux containers which need a base linux VM. I've stared using Podman. It does the job.
On linux this means the same (except the VM isn't required), which gives a more elastic experience for mem/cpu/gpu.
MacOS 26 crosses the line. My next machine with be linux.
On linux this means the same (except the VM isn't required), which gives a more elastic experience for mem/cpu/gpu.
MacOS 26 crosses the line. My next machine with be linux.
Tahoe can also: https://github.com/apple/container
These run inside a Linux VM, as jhancock stated.
I feel an urge to do the same after ~15 years on Mac.
If only I could forget the weeks I spent last time on trying to stop my Linux laptop from draining the battery three times as fast as any MacBook, all the while harassing me with heat and noise.
If only I could forget the weeks I spent last time on trying to stop my Linux laptop from draining the battery three times as fast as any MacBook, all the while harassing me with heat and noise.
The last part doesn't follow from the previous two paragraphs though
I miss the skeuomorphic UI we used to have.
Seriously, what was wrong with brushed aluminum and leather and wood?
Seriously, what was wrong with brushed aluminum and leather and wood?
I think ios 7 is what broke everything.
controls don't look like controls, but they hide anyway and you have to tap around to discover and uncover them. And low contrast, and less legible fonts, and...
and other companies, like tesla picked up all these design influences and brought them into the "critical controls used while driving"...
controls don't look like controls, but they hide anyway and you have to tap around to discover and uncover them. And low contrast, and less legible fonts, and...
and other companies, like tesla picked up all these design influences and brought them into the "critical controls used while driving"...
Nothing was wrong, it's just the general perception of customers has shifted.
The internet was full of comments very similar to what you can read here, lacking specific details and objective critical analysis, all saying how behind the times and inconvenient current Apple UIs were. How bad skeuomorphic approach is in general. How not modern it is.
And then it changed with iOS 7. The reaction was exactly what it is now.
The internet was full of comments very similar to what you can read here, lacking specific details and objective critical analysis, all saying how behind the times and inconvenient current Apple UIs were. How bad skeuomorphic approach is in general. How not modern it is.
And then it changed with iOS 7. The reaction was exactly what it is now.
>it's just the general perception of customers has shifted
Not of customers. Of idiotic graphic designers, who always fall for the latest fad.
Not of customers. Of idiotic graphic designers, who always fall for the latest fad.
And marketers, who would rather have a worse product because it stands out (which makes it easier for them to sell).
Agree. OS X Tiger remains unmoved as the visual high watermark for Macs.
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I miss UIs that were native to screens and efficiently and effectively deigned to work well on screens.
What was wrong with windows and panels that actually filled square viewports, visually distinct separation between different things, use of colour to distinguish controls that are defaults, less common, disabled, etc., compact and easy to scan tables and lists, screens that display and update instantly…
It is embarrassing that GUIs have become so bad that well designed TUIs running inside software designed to emulate computers from the 1970s now regularly[0] make better "desktop" applications than modern apps and anything adhering to the braindead design fad of the day.
[0] https://github.com/rothgar/awesome-tuis
What was wrong with windows and panels that actually filled square viewports, visually distinct separation between different things, use of colour to distinguish controls that are defaults, less common, disabled, etc., compact and easy to scan tables and lists, screens that display and update instantly…
It is embarrassing that GUIs have become so bad that well designed TUIs running inside software designed to emulate computers from the 1970s now regularly[0] make better "desktop" applications than modern apps and anything adhering to the braindead design fad of the day.
[0] https://github.com/rothgar/awesome-tuis
Just Apple being Apple. They finally invented the innovative groundbreaking software UI paradigm, previously implemented in competing products 10-15 years ago.
To all Apple fans: it'll pass. You just have to wait it out. The good part, in 10-15 years Apple will catch up in ergonomics with today's KDE (that's from where they copy, it seems).
To all Apple fans: it'll pass. You just have to wait it out. The good part, in 10-15 years Apple will catch up in ergonomics with today's KDE (that's from where they copy, it seems).
Bravo. I did a bunch of color science study over a couple years while at Google, the work turned into Material You. A large motivation of it was the intellectual poverty of monochrome and how software design sort of died, in my humble opinion, post iOS 7.
I used to call iOS "Yves Klein" (i.e. blue everywhere) but the black and white x 0 understanding of transparency x science of contrast is the real offense, especially post Liquid Glass
I used to call iOS "Yves Klein" (i.e. blue everywhere) but the black and white x 0 understanding of transparency x science of contrast is the real offense, especially post Liquid Glass
If a UI redesign comes with graphic designer fluff "justifications" using metaphors and artistic language, it's crap.
"Liquid Glass" well all out on that, starting from the stupid name.
None of the justifications in Apple's PR were based on classic UI design guidelines or HCI best practices.
"Liquid Glass" well all out on that, starting from the stupid name.
None of the justifications in Apple's PR were based on classic UI design guidelines or HCI best practices.
Ironically, I don’t think the comments on this website have a good contrast, as explained in this old critique: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/low-contrast/
They have good-ish contrast - ironically, a lot of the black and white base color thinking mentioned in the article comes from these reactions, in my experience. People end up in a tarpit of "black and white = best contrast, but surely that's too much, let me fuck with transparency..."... and then you end up with the clusterfuck that was Cupertino trying to ship Liquid Glass. The transparency would vary wildly between releases.
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Well, if you use VoiceOver, things are the same as they always were. So, time for Mac users to use the screen reader.
https://support.apple.com/guide/voiceover/welcome/mac
https://support.apple.com/guide/voiceover/welcome/mac
Tahoe takes a step back in other ways. Like how you can use tabs in Maps.app anymore.
That's fascinating!
Maybe the reason for "odd" macOS view is that the designers are not from the European cultural circle, and what we took as a good design is only our bias?
Alan dye doesn’t seem to have any non European/western background at all.
Nope. All the mainstream UIs, including the good ones from the past, are US made to begin with.
Most of the software I use still looks the same as it did. Until that's no longer the case, I'm okay waiting for improvements in the liquid glass.
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Very subjective. I feel the text entry fields are clearly visible and the redesign looks horrible.
Not an elephant, more like a turkey or a lemon
Slightly related: https://xkcd.com/2892/
I'd already had to enable a bunch of macos accessibility features (increase contrast, reduce transparency) for years just to make it less crappy. Every release gets less usable for the sake of looking fancy.
Ever since GUIs became (flat) UXs everything has gone to shit. Not that GUIs didn't also suck, but I could at least distinguish controls from labels.
I remember reading John Siracusa's long Mac OS X reviews, and their details of how the GUI changed, often for the worse - i.e. less usable. One of the first notes I remember was when colour labels in Finder switched from highlighting the entire file ( easily visible ) to becoming just a little coloured dot which is easy to miss while scrolling.
Don't even get me started on Apple Music, which is one of top 3 worst designed apps I've ever used.