TIL about the proliferation of menu item icons in Tahoe. Perhaps I missed the outcry when Tahoe came out, but I got around to upgrading to it only a couple months ago, and this was not a change that stood out.

"it’s proof that the rot has been rooted out of Apple’s software design team"

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.

A good correction. But think about the months of work that has been wasted on creating those icon iterations. What a waste!

No good reason to be excited about the old garbage UI returning after the new garbage had been trashed.

> 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

The icons in menu items is one of the reasons I'm still on Sequoia. This settles it; I'll just stay on Sequoia until Golden Gate is released.

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.

You'd think they'd go the other direction and remove the text.

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

Aw. I may have been the only one, but I kind of liked those.

I’m still on Sequoia because of all the Tahoe complaints. Not so much the rounded corners, but I heard performance was poor. Have updates to Tahoe improved things?

good - I have resorted to a config setting to suppress these bad icons on Tahoe

"But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough can you see the stars"

This is also what's annoying with most model generated artifacts. They want every bullet point with an emoji. Even worse is an HTML artifact will be littered with chips/pill style "informative" boxes. So much useless distraction. I need something fine tuned by Tufte

Meh - these icons were bad, but I don't see the disaster