As we near the end of Tahoe’s incubation period, and Apple’s engineers code its last fixes and tweaks ready for its launch in just a few weeks, I’d like to reflect on what macOS 26 has to offer beyond its marketing headlines.
While there are several worthwhile new features such as the Phone app, Magnifier, and live translation, there’s nothing to compare with the fundamental changes in recent versions of macOS that brought the SSV, Shortcuts, System Settings and Apple Intelligence. Instead Tahoe is overwhelmingly about its human interface.
Every new design of the Mac’s operating systems that I can recall has elicited outcry from many. Understandably, the majority almost invariably want constancy, the same Finder and app icons that we’ve become so familiar with. It’s only human. It’s also a sure route to what others will condemn as stale, as it hasn’t been refreshed for so many years.
Personally, I don’t like to see a design on my Mac. If I notice it, then it’s a distraction. I’d much prefer to have an interface as clean as the whistles of the late Classic Mac OS period: lean, purposeful and lacking in visual trickery or frippery. But I accept that, without all the adornments and animations, many today would wonder why their Mac needed a GPU. I confess that I was never a fan of the original Aqua interface either. Given that its declared goal was to “incorporate colour, depth, translucence, and complex textures into a visually appealing interface”, I wonder whether much the same could be said of Tahoe.
Perhaps the most striking feature of this redesign is its lack of contrast between elements and tools in window controls and their contents, whether its appearance is set to light or dark mode, or one of its new in-between variants. You can see this clearly in most screenshots of Tahoe, such as those posted by Apple, and as far as I can see it hasn’t improved during beta-testing. This is also universal, and isn’t confined to apps using the more novel SwiftUI, although I have to keep pinching my thigh to remind myself that SwiftUI is now six years old, only two years younger than APFS. The contrast in stability and maturity between the two couldn’t be greater.
You can of course ‘improve’ contrast by enabling Reduce Transparency in Accessibility settings, but in doing so you lose most if not all of Tahoe’s Liquid Glass effects, as they depend on the transparency you’ve just turned off.
Transparency is a good example of design being given priority over readability or content. Because the appearance of the upper layer containing controls or content depends on what is underneath, it’s down to chance whether the greyed text you’re struggling to read happens to be over a background that further reduces its contrast. In the worst case, you could find yourself having to move a window so you can read part of it clearly, not a sign of a good human interface.
My other major concern with Tahoe’s new look is that it seems not to recognise the differences between Macs, iPads and iPhones, in terms of displays, input controls, and apps. Rather than sameness, I’d much rather have consistency that recognises the difference between manipulating Xcode’s compound windows containing dense structured text on a 27-inch display, and checking a family photo filling the 6.1-inch display of an iPhone.
One of my favourite controls in macOS is the Combo Box, a versatile and elegant hybrid of the popup/dropdown/pulldown menu/button and a text entry box. I can’t recall seeing one used in iOS, as it would be clumsy and inappropriate. It’s well supported for macOS in AppKit but hasn’t yet been implemented in SwiftUI. If controls are going to be common across all Apple’s operating systems, then macOS is about to lose one of its best.
It seemed only appropriate that, in the weeks before Apple releases OS 26 across Macs and devices, Tim Cook should go to the White House to pay its corporate tribute in a block of materialised Liquid Glass mounted on pure bling. But the image that I keep thinking of in fear, is that of Elon Musk demonstrating the resilience of his Cybertruck’s window by throwing a metal ball at it, in November 2019. I just hope Tahoe’s Liquid Glass doesn’t go the same way.
In addition to its rounded corners and Liquid Glass, macOS 26 Tahoe brings substantial change in app icons. These follow the move to squares with rounded corners brought in macOS 11 Big Sur, and now enforce that outline on all apps, including Apple’s. The result is that icons of irregular shape, such as those used by SilentKnight and the rest of my apps, will be intentionally shamed by reduction in size and placement in a sin bin of a grey square with rounded corners. Although some developers are busy implementing workarounds, Apple has made it clear that it expects conformity with this new style.
While app designers and developers have to work within those stricter constraints, Tahoe opens up new user options in the display of app icons, extending the light and dark appearances that have been standard since macOS Mojave seven years ago. System Settings now provide a choice of four rendering modes for the display of icons and widgets, in dark, clear, tinted and default, with a further option for tinting colour.
To accommodate these changes, Tahoe has a new app aimed at those designing and implementing app icons, Icon Composer, free for anyone to download from here, and compatible with macOS Sequoia and later. Although not intended for customising icons within existing apps, it provides insight into these new design constraints and rendering modes.
In the past, app icons have been able to distinguish themselves by their form, colour and internal details, with the first two becoming dominant as their size is reduced in a heavily loaded Dock. By enforcing a uniform outline, Apple’s new interface style makes this task harder. I already have difficulty distinguishing Messages, FaceTime, even Numbers and Archive Utility, which in turn forces me to separate them in the Dock, and I still occasionally open the wrong app as a result. Other confusions have become common: Xcode, Developer and several third-party app icons are also hard to distinguish when at small size. Apple clearly hasn’t listened to criticism from users and developers, and has only made this worse in Tahoe.
We’re therefore left to make the best we can within these new rules. My recent redesigns for my own apps are an initial attempt to make their icons as distinct as I can, and to remain so in older versions of macOS at the same time.
I’ll start with the new icons for Mints, SilentKnight and SystHist, seen in the Dock in existing macOS in light mode.
and dark mode
Here, with the addition of XProCheck, are four of the many possibilities in Tahoe, first in light mode with default rendering
then in dark mode, again with default rendering
Clear rendering decolourises them into monochrome with valuable contrast
but tinted rendering makes their details even harder to read
As I gain experience in using Icon Composer, and understand better how Liquid Glass may be able to enhance the results, I intend improving on these. For the time being, though, what you see in these updated versions works better across all recent versions of macOS and Tahoe. As with other features of macOS 26, these will take further tuning on my part, and patience on yours. Please bear with me in the coming weeks and months.
Quick Look is one of those unsung heroes that have transformed our Macs and workflows. What used to require a specialist app can now be accomplished in the Finder using a combination of Quick Look and Gallery view to browse collections of images.
This started back in Classic Mac OS, when apps created thumbnail images and attached them as ICN# resources to the original files for display in the Finder. It wasn’t until Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard in 2007 that Apple added Quick Look to perform this automatically using cached thumbnails and previews. Since then our Macs have worked hard to ensure that, wherever we want them, we can see faithful miniatures, at least until macOS 11 Big Sur.
Although the redesign brought by Big Sur in 2020 was generally well received, one feature I complained about at the time was its effect on Quick Look thumbnails and previews, in rounding their corners to conform to its design style. But style triumphed over fidelity, and for the last five years Quick Look has been forced to tell lies in every image thumbnail and preview.
By now you’ll have guessed I’m no fan of Apple’s new-found obsession with rounding every right angle in sight. I have yet to see any objective evidence that this has any purpose beyond aesthetics. If you’ve seen screenshots of the first developer beta-release of macOS 26 Tahoe, then you’ll surely have noticed that, rather than restoring fidelity to Quick Look, this fiction has grown and only become more prominent. I demonstrate this in a series of four screenshots showing the same image that have been rescaled to similar display sizes.
This first is taken from a small, almost thumbnail-size, image in the Finder’s Gallery view. As this has been scaled up, it’s pixellated. I draw your attention to the upper corners, where trees have been cropped at what once would have been right angles.
Seen here is the same image in a larger Gallery view. The extent of the cropping at the upper corners is now apparent, where this contains details that were removed from the smaller image above.
When opened in Preview, the upper corners are no longer rounded, and show the full extent of the image, but the lower corners remain cropped by enforced rounding, apparently to make them ‘concentric’, as is the vogue.
To see the whole image rendered faithfully, I had to resort to a third-party app, here GraphicConverter 12, which has the honesty to display all four corners without cropping.
One of the cornerstones of the Mac from its earliest days is expressed in the principle of WYSIWYG, what you see is what you get. It enabled the ‘desktop publishing revolution’ that convinced so many to pay the premium for Classic Macs, and ever since has guided the development of Mac OS. Without it there would be no purpose to Quick Look in its efforts to render images faithfully.
That doesn’t merit mention in the principles expounded in Apple’s latest revised Human Interface Guidelines. Three are given there, hierarchy, harmony and consistency, but not fidelity. Rounding corners of rectangles is included there under the principle of harmony: “Align with the concentric design of the hardware and software to create harmony between interface elements, system experiences, and devices.”
I can live with concentricity in windows and controls, even with app icons forcibly constrained within rounded rectangles. What I simply can’t accept is a Macintosh, of all computers, cropping every thumbnail and preview for the sake of aesthetics, however harmonious that might seem. For without fidelity, the Mac fails.
我参与 3DFiti 这个艺术项目，旨在通过 3D 扫描和 3D 打印技术，使我们生活的周边环境增加一些趣味性和艺术性。在人类学家项飙（英国牛津大学社会人类学教授，德国马克斯普朗克社会人类学研究所所长）所描述的那个「附近」的概念之中延展出来，一切我可以到达的地方，只要有我感兴趣的公共区域内的「缺损」部分，就有可能成为这个艺术项目的创作对象。
我通过 iPhone 扫描空间或者物体，并对模型进行二次创作，使用 3D 打印技术将其制作成一件真实的物品，即能够与现场的「缺损」相嵌合的物件，使这个「缺损」转化为一处临时的微型艺术场所。
No.001 作品中的 紫竹观音像 3D 模型，是来自 Funes.world 的文件。他们的工作是在人类从原子社会进入到比特社会的过程中，将原本属于原子世界中的建筑、空间、故事，通过 3D 扫描建模的方式，将其保存在数字世界中，建成一座人类文明的数字空间博物馆。
To improve conversion (i.e., get more people to finish your flow), think about everything you request from the user like a cost. Every question is a cost. Every minute is a cost
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