If they really want to improve MacOS they should add synonym based search in Settings. I should not be forced to know by heart the arcane speech their marketing department chose to replace consecrated terms. Just today it took me 5 minutes to unearth the Speech Rate settings.
It feels like using Siri and not knowing the magic words. Come on Apple, synonym matching is easy. Just use a LLM to generate synonyms to all things a user might query in settings! Use a small embedding model if you feel daring, it works fast enough.
Oh, this reminds me that Azure, GCP and AWS also need AI assistants that actually know their way around instead of declining to help for anything above looking up some docs. Why can't I ask Azure in what region the still have A100 GPUs? That's what the assistant should be good at - integration with live data and ability to solve cloud problems.
I filed a bug report about a specific setting, "Screen Time" that stopped showing up in Finder, and a couple-few weeks later, it returned to being findable once more.
Filing bug reports about specific instances might be a useful way to help fix this?
In the age of X ditching Twitter and Tweets, I think brand continuity and identity is underrated. The friendly finder logo is such an essential part of MacOS that it's bizarre (at least to me) that they've changed the color symmetry of the face.
Why would you do that? It's as iconic as the Apple silhouette for Apple users.
If you've ever used MacOS, you've had that face stare back at you. It's a kind face. A friendly face. An old face. An old friend. Let's keep it that way.
edit - on further thought, was this change user tested? I'm fairly certain that even the most middle-of-the-road, suburban dad on his 10th layover will notice something is different when they look at it. It's a strange change.
It's not different enough to force recognition as a new symbol. It's just different enough to be weird.
The overwhelming majority of people I know in real life haven't actually been on the platform for years, if they ever were, and some of those have used X by default in the rare case in comes up. It's slowly changing, but was quickly dying before Trump and Elon got their hands on it. Mileage may vary, but I imagine there's an association between Twitter still being the old place where tired millennials shout about nothing to bots all day
it's creepy not friendly (especially now, as I somehow never consciously noticed that it's a dead forever smiling face), the new one simply looks amateurish and bad.
TBH, it's better if this new generation of Apple's UI designers waste their energy on such trivialities instead of trying to "improve" Finder features (not that Finder is all that great to begin with though).
Let them tinker with icons, fonts, colors and "evoking emotions" all day long, at least then they don't break any actually important stuff.
The entire UI redesign of "liquid glass" looks horrible in its current state. Right now the readability factor on iOS is at an all time low. It feels like a change just for the sake of change. How is it better?
Maybe it's a subtle way to punish non-native apps that recreate UI elements, but do not use SwiftUI. The user gets used to the native way of UI elements and everything else will look odd after a while, forcing developers to ditch everything that isn't truly native.
Sorry to burst your bubble but users literally do not care "how native it looks" other than the vocal minority online. Never ever heard any non-technical user complain that Spotify does not fit in.
One doesn't need to use SwiftUI for the look. Things like the tab bar, navigation bar are available in Swift too. (for those unfamiliar, Swift is different and older than SwiftUI).
The color change doesn't bother me nearly as much as the change in proportions. Insetting the face on the right and removing its curvature makes the smile look super weird and less "human" to me. I'm sure I'll get used to it, but it feels a little off.
The swapping of the colors is pretty bad in and of itself, but I find the change to the right face's chin even more grating.
To the many people ITT who seem to be puzzled by this kind of complaint, the issue is that it suggests someone at some point said "what if we flipped the Finder icon?", for which no valid answer appears to exist, making it unwarranted and unsatisfying. It also suggests their priorities are off.
The new icon looks weird not just because it's a change, but because if you think of the face as being 3D and illuminated by a light source, the new icon doesn't scan as easily as the old one. You'd have to assume the face is turning away from you but the light is slightly backlighting them and putting the closer part in shadow. Anyways it's a small change but I do think it indicates people internally aren't thinking about whether the design makes sense.
About the swap, I can see how it happened with the new design code, make layers, put the transparent one below, and they didn't want to have the left side higher than the right one for reasons?
To me the bigger issue is by not having it go to the edge, it really breaks the one face/two face original design.
And it looks worse somehow in dark mode (but to be fair, everything is worse in dark mode right now in beta1, but Safari is the one that needs discussing) : https://ibb.co/CLhJ4XM
I don't mind the change of colors or materials. But that padding in the icon just breaks the whole thing.
This obession of Apple with leaving space is absurd.
In Sequoia they added a window management system which (by default) leaves spaces between windows. What was the point of getting more display real state in laptops to waste it like this?
Without reading the text, it took me a solid three minutes to realize the difference in the comparison screenshot. Honestly I'm more upset by the non-centered window title.
I'm surprised he didn't call out Picasso paintings as inspiration for the icon. You can look at the Finder smiley either as a face or as 90º profile, at least the right side. Given that dynamic, the new icon does look quite bad as the effect is lost or at least mangled.
There is a whole lot of pearl clutching happening in this thread over an icon. It’s a tale as old as time. Apple makes “brave” design decision, Internet in uproar.
In the interest of being more constructive and adding to the discourse however, I will mention that the UX of things should increase as design frameworks should age. Are there quantifiable UX metrics that can be used (even if somewhat qualitative in nature) to judge whether a new design is a regression or not? Is it just AB testing?
This is the kind of thing actual users do not care one bit about. And neither will the nerds after a few months with it either. Apple should spend time improving the design in meaningful ways (there is a lot of work they still need to do before shipping this) rather than wasting time on a minor change to the Finder icon.
I installed the beta immediately yesterday and didn't notice until this post. I've been using Macs for 20 years.
It's less evocative of Picasso, which is the whole point of the logo. Evoking Picasso as inspiration is (or, was) part of Apple's brand identity since the 90s because it suggests:
* Brilliant artists use Apple.
* Apple computers help you see from multiple perspectives.
But now that Apple is more in the business of selling bling to strippers and drug dealers, and less in the business of selling gear to creative professionals, sticking to its aesthetic identity is way less important. Not when there are concerns like "blowing up on TikTok" to worry about.
The new one still is distinctly recognizable as Finder. I don't think it's a true issue and this is a case of people panicking over every redesign before getting used to it.
All this fuss about which side the blue is on has made me think about the Finder icon for the first time ever, and I've decided I hate it, it's stupid. It doesn't convey the use of the Finder app at all, and worst of all, it's smugly smiling at me like it knows its app is going to annoy the hell out of me today.
I think the article kind of tramples on its own point by showing a very long history of the changes to the Finder’s icon over the years, but I think what it’s trying to say is that it has been mostly unchanged for many years so it shouldn’t change now. It now has a gray box all the way around instead of two blue faces that go all the way to the edge. However, it simultaneously showed that it has been redesigned several times to match the aesthetic of the OS and while this is a larger change than most is still within the same design space.
The actual problem as explained in the first two paragraphs of TFA and shown in the first picture, is that the light and dark blue sides of the Finder icon have swapped sides. For the first time in its existence of many decades, the dark side is now on the right instead of the left. This is the problem.
This is simply gatekeeping. I understand writing an article about it but filing a radar?
The only thing the author wants to do here is a fandom flex.
Ironically, his pictures prove that the icons have changed a lot! What’s the canonical face anyway? You can look at the prior icon and argue they broke canon there removing the black center stroke and clipping the overflowing line.
Darker on the left, lighter on the right. Flush with the surrounding box. Evokes the feeling of two people: one looking straight at you, and one profile face.
Even the profile face is broken in the new redesign.
I always took it as a Cubist portrait of a face where the perspective is simultaneously from the side and the front. My issue isn't the color swap as much as it being inset, it doesn't invoke the same feeling in me anymore.
It feels like using Siri and not knowing the magic words. Come on Apple, synonym matching is easy. Just use a LLM to generate synonyms to all things a user might query in settings! Use a small embedding model if you feel daring, it works fast enough.
Oh, this reminds me that Azure, GCP and AWS also need AI assistants that actually know their way around instead of declining to help for anything above looking up some docs. Why can't I ask Azure in what region the still have A100 GPUs? That's what the assistant should be good at - integration with live data and ability to solve cloud problems.
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