No more icons in every menu by default
blog.jim-nielsen.com
blog.jim-nielsen.com
The lack of transfer I don't think is out of unwillingness from the old guard, but rather due to the greenhorns throwing everything that came before their time out without questioning the reasoning behind any of it (Chesterton’s Fence) and assuming that whatever they came up with was superior and better fit for the modern era ("those old principles can't possibly hold, we have touch screens now!").
It's also been made worse by UI design roles having been taken by those with backgrounds in unrelated design disciplines, as well as sites like Dribbble which reward pretty mockups over working products. This leads to overemphasis on the visual aspect of the UI and not enough on its functional and usability aspects.
It wouldn’t surprise me if Apple’s UI/UX teams are staffed with people who have never heard of Don Norman, Bruce Tognazzini, Bill Atkinson, Andy Hertzfeld, Susan Kare, Larry Tesler, and other pioneering figures who contributed to Apple’s legendary 1980s and 1990s software.
It’s a lack of onboarding and knowledge transfer, combined with an Eternal September of thousands new CS grads being constantly produced annually, who are sadly not being taught enough history of computing at their universities.
My dream as a CS professor is to help rectify this, at least amongst my students.
This isn’t even to knock either: UI artists are essential to making a UI understandable and enjoyable. But people think the skill sets are the same, and they aren’t.
Disclaimer: am a UX Designer.
The real title for this discipline is “interaction designer”, as that stems from HCI research, which itself was an extension of systems design. There is a clear lineage. Also: user experience absolutely is an aesthetic field, but again because the title is vague in practice so is its education. The thinking is that “UX” designers have a set of skills about design that are scientific, but there’s virtually nothing about human interaction that’s scientifically provable. Like you don’t do A/B testing and move a button’s position from a delta result based off of Fitt’s law or Gestalt theory (I don’t think I’ve ever met a UX designer who knows about gestalt theory). You just observe results and move the goalposts accordingly. And again apropos aesthetics: user testing just never works with wireframes, the closer you are to the final result the better the feedback.
The need to science-wash this ultimately volatile process comes from the need to assure clients that their investment in an emerging market (digital platforms from the 80s onwards) has provably positive results.
It was a bit of "let's not forget this element of application development".
In my software development career I've always specialized on the UX, accessibility and platform convention side of the UI. I can't design any actual "pretty" UIs for the life of me :Dd
Inserted edit: Ok, totally forgot to mention that I am a full-stack dev, but definitely focus more on the abstract side of UI than the actual pixels on the screen.
Aside/relevant: Did you know that click-and-dragging a dropdown/select element to use/select/activate an action is an ancient cross-platorm pattern that was almost lost to time, because almost none of the modern web component frameworks forgot to implement it? Even more emphasizes the pop-cultureness aspect mentioned above :)
Please tell your fellow designers to stop injecting their lifestyle into their UI/UX design. Even in the OP, a simple monday-sunday list of days, the designer has inserted their lifestyle. Friday is popcorn, Saturday is a party popper, and Sunday is for sleeping off the hangover. That might seem innocuous but is a tiny microaggression felt by all those who do not work 9-5 M-F jobs. Or those who have places to be on Sundays other than in bed. Better yet, just avoid all UI/UX designs that reflect a particular schedule or lifestyle.
Are sun and moon icons for dark and light themes a lifestyle thing too then? Maybe I want dark theme when the sun is out or light theme in the middle of the night?
In all seriousness, as a person with non-24 sleep-wake rhythm disorder[1] it's not terribly uncommon for me to be going to sleep mid-day, but I don't think designing with pragmatic assumptions about lifestyle in mind is unreasonable (as long as it doesn't create accessibility barriers)
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-24-hour_Sleep-Wake_Rhythm_...
[img] img.bildhost.com/file/bildhostcom/2026/10/22/Rastergrafik_26.png
But thanks that you made it a topic, thought it was about the .php and the (spoken in german) "Klirr!" everybody noticed the sound, but nerds-term about the webpage he was building ment "CLEAR" ...crowded room, everyones laughing around...so OT to ask one of those "elderly computerpeople"...CSS... never mind... (-:
- Steve Jobs
In decades past, books and journals served as the primary mechanism for capturing and transferring CS and Software Engineering knowledge. Older knowledge was curated and remained easily accessible.
When I studied CS and engineering in the early 2000s, I learned a lot about the history and evolution of the field simply by browsing old books on the shelves of the university library. Thousands of them. I read back to the 60s and 70s, and I felt it really helped me have a broader perspective and evolution of the field.
That same university library has now transitioned to mostly online materials. The physical collection has been drastically pruned based on what is currently relevant and in demand.
The online collections don't have the same historical depth. And websites and online repositories come and go - think of the vast troves of knowledge that once existed on Usenet that have been lost to obscurity.
I also think the joy of browsing through topics you didn't know existed as given way to search-driven retrieval.
In our efforts to use computers to document what we know about computers, we have lost all that was good about not using computers for information management.
But also, it’s hard to convey the full experience of actually using old software as a tool (or toy)—trying to maintain your company records in Lotus 1-2-3 or looking up something in Microsoft Encarta knowing that if you couldn’t answer your question you’d need to go to the library, or even trying to solve a puzzle in a game with no reference materials.
I’m sure this is true of other technology: You can learn to ride a horse or read about how telephones and telegrams worked, but can you really capture the experience of riding from NYC to Philadelphia in 1840 or trying to convey an urgent business message the same way in 1920?
I don’t know if this means I am jaded, burnt out, overly cynical or what, but the thought of working at Apple, Google, Facebook or any other big tech company is anathema to me.
Steve Lemay worked with a bunch of us, including a very curmudgeonly Don Norman, but just look at what happened to Apple UX while he was there. Yes, he is now running the team and the small improvements may be a direct influence of his, but he sure was steam rolled by others the last twenty years.
Alan Kay (of Alan Kay fame)
Are they being taught any of significance? In school I only remember a blurb about Newton here or a blurb about Pascal there. Briefest of mentions about Unix at the start of a C class.
All the rest I had to dig up myself, from the Mythical Man Month to Edwin Black's book. Believe it was the Joel on Software blog who got me interested in those type of books, never knew they existed in school.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8841428
Alan Kay also said this about his famous "Point of View is worth 80 IQ points" aphorism, which I think poignantly explains why React costs a net of 160 IQ points compared to Svelte:
>I have been keeping to "80" IQ points in the saying (thus avoiding inflation). However very few people have noticed there is no sign bit in the aphorism, and that it works just as well for "poor perspectives being worth negative 80 IQ points" (and I think we could claim inflation of stupidity in many bad directions these days ...).
On 16 Oct 2026, Don Hopkins wrote to Owen Densmore, David Rosenthal, and Alan Kay:
Somebody took your filesystem-as-objects patent idea to the logical extreme!
https://danieltemkin.com/esolangs/folders
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50114342
-Don
On 16 Oct 2026, Alan Kay wrote:
There's a patent for this idea?
I fear there is some really old prior art for several parts of it.
Best cheers
Alan
On 16 Oct 2026, Don Hopkins wrote:
Yes, it's Sun's US 5,187,786: "Method and apparatus for implementing a class hierarchy of objects in a hierarchical file system." Owen and David filed it in 1991, it was granted in 1993, and it expired in 2011, so anyone can use it now, including people writing esolangs about folders.
https://patents.google.com/patent/US5187786A/en
You're right about the prior art, and the idea came straight from your side of the family tree. Tom Stambaugh helped Owen work out how to adapt Smalltalk patterns to it, scribbling on napkins at a poolside table at the old Hyatt Palo Alto. In the patent, directories are classes and instances, PATH files encode the inheritance chain, and you send a message from the shell with something like "SEND aF001 methodA args".
It's the same trick Owen used for the NeWS object system in PostScript. Classes were dictionaries, and sending a message pushed the object's class chain onto the dictionary stack, so ordinary PostScript name lookup did the method lookup for free. NeWS 1.0 had single inheritance through a parent dictionary. TNT added ordered parent lists and multiple inheritance. The patent does the same thing with the shell path playing the dictionary stack: walk the directories, and the first match wins.
Owen's 1986 Monterey paper on object-oriented PostScript:
https://donhopkins.com/home/monterey86.pdf
The NeWS Book, chapter 6:
https://donhopkins.com/home/The_NeWS_Book_1989.pdf
I've been running with it in MOOLLM, which leans more toward Self than Smalltalk. A directory is an object, its files are slots, and a "parents:" list delegates to other directories, in order, first match wins. It's prototypes rather than classes, and the LLM does the message dispatch by reading the directory. The filesystem is the object graph, so it's inspectable, diffable, and versioned in git for free:
https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/kernel/DIRECTO...
https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/skills/file-sy...
The lineage from Smalltalk and Self through NeWS, TNT, the patent, HyperLook, and The Sims to MOOLLM is written up here:
https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/designs/object...
https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/designs/postsc...
Owen and David can correct my history, since they're on the thread.
-Don
On 16 Oct 2026, Alan Kay wrote:
Hi Don
I should have said "prior art before Smalltalk" ...
Best cheers
Alan
On 16 Oct 2026, Don Hopkins wrote:
In a way, the patent is just pure prior art, plus perspective, which is worth a certain number of IQ points I've been told. ;)
Which pre-Smalltalk ancestors were you thinking of? Sketchpad's masters and instances, Simula's classes, and Multics search rules walking a hierarchy of directories all seem like pieces of it.
-Don
On 16 Oct 2026, Alan Kay wrote:
Hi Don
I have been keeping to "80" IQ points in the saying (thus avoiding inflation). However very few people have noticed there is no sign bit in the aphorism, and that it works just as well for "poor perspectives being worth negative 80 IQ points" (and I think we could claim inflation of stupidity in many bad directions these days ...).
I don't like to claim priority for any ideas (including my own). Bob Barton liked a great saying of Goethe's: "We should all share in the excitement of Discovery without vain attempts to claim Priority" and I imprinted on that in grad school.
So, without claiming priority, I would point to Engelbart's NLS for unifying the structure of the file system with the basic hierarchical structuring of their content (and this included how code was represented, written, and read). A few years later I used a different kind of unification in the FLEX machine that Ed Cheadle and I did in the mid-60s to have "every large thing" be an instantiable process, including things that were more "file-like".
This is just FYI, partly because of the above Goethe quote, partly because the FLEX project was done within the aerospace conglomerate LTV, and was proprietary. My thesis advisor Dave Evans had to go to considerable work to get permission for me to do my degree write ups on a tiny subset. The later Smalltalk was a "cold restart" on these ideas (and LTG was not a problem by then).
And -- for Smalltalk -- the notion to make "everything large and small" an object was a quick way to get going on the comparatively speedy Alto, and Dan Ingalls (and his Smalltalk group) were able to do most of the SW engineering to make Smalltalk act semantically as though everything was an object.
Best cheers
Alan
I have been trying to kindly forward what I have learnt and experienced over these years to new people we start to work with, and I have been called a wrinkly boomer who doesn't understand modern times more than enough times.
Of course they have come full-circle on some of the things they were disagreeing, but sometimes people have to crash and burn before understanding something.
I have no hard feelings for these people, but kindness goes a long way even if you don't agree on everything.
(1) Clickable elements no longer visually signifying that they're clickable. Words aren't underlined or written in a special font, sometimes the profile avatar is the clickable link to the profile but sometimes the name is, etc.
(2) No more clean, compact directory trees. We used to have high-contrast compact UI design to look through nested ontologies. Now it's rounded-edges card-based, often without trace lines, and barely ever compact. RIP
Even plain old tables with sortable rearrangeable columns, a staple of all of the traditional desktop UI frameworks, are increasingly falling by the wayside in favor of mobile-style single-column lists with cells consisting of stacks of labels.
Hell your average developer probably doesn't either anymore
I want to search, in a search bar, for the next video. This should not take three interactions.
YouTube is fine designing a UX where I am one click away from pulling up an AI-generated list of questions I may have about the video, though.
Why did the label on my Fig Newtons get redesigned? It's not because it lacked in usability. It's because the company knows that customers respond to visual updates. If something looks the same year after year, lots of people will see it as old and tired. A redesign makes it feel modern and fresh. At least to enough people that it matters.
I had the same experience on a recent trip to The UPS Store. The color scheme was all different from the previous time I shipped a package. I commented to the clerk that they'd redecorated. He said they do it pretty often.
Software has a visual aspect to it, and the same forces are in effect. Part of a UI designer's job is to be on that treadmill. That's probably not what the job should be, but the people who pay their salary want it to be.
Tantacrul is my favourite (and, actually, only) example of this. His work with MuseScore, with Audacity, his videos about them, and his takedowns of Sybellius etc. all opened my eyes to the world of designers who do things with hard-nosed analytical thinking, user studies, good principles, and make something useful. Even his little digressions about Paint3D and Ubuntu's Mobile OS are illustrative.
No idea why UPS keeps redesigning other than signal "we still up to date with trends", its not like its rebranding going to make me want to ship anything that I don't already need to (and will ship with USPS unless its overnight in which case I will go with FedEx).
Interfaces get redesigned, in opinion, either because: a) just because (bad) b) certain things worked the way it worked only because it had to fit existing design and eventually old design just couldn't fit new feature(s) (can be good or bad, depending on execution)
It's no help at all that people expect Apple to be fashionable, like if you read a review of an "operating system" in Arstechnica you'd think it's all about little details on the scrollbar, not about filesystems and microkernels and namespaces and stuff.
you mean "actually methodically studying users is boring and requires competence"
these people only care about making pretty pictures, they dont care about the actual effort to deliver a good product.
i remember the studies used to design windows 95
nothing modern ux amateurs do can compare to the oldschool HCI professionals
With a maximized or suitably positioned window, pushing the mouse all the way to the right of the screen activates the scroll bar. To the top right activates the close button.
Small things, but they become annoyances when they are missing.
Bad Dye Job:
In their defense, it's not like good UI has ever dominated very many spaces. It is very hard to come up with a concept of good UI concepts from a natural meandering through the shattered landscape of UI paradigms anyone computer literate ends up subjected to. And then it's even harder to convince a manager that it's worth so much as a moment's thought about such things. Not impossible. But not easy.
Accessibility has been left in the dustbin as well. You go to all these sites extolling these beautiful, innovative sites and they're completely useless with a keyboard or screen reader.
Also, holy hell, this obsession with huge swathes of negative space is a disaster for anyone who needs to zoom the page for readability. I'm here to see content, not an homage to the backrooms.
When I was getting my design degree, a large majority of what you learned was how to give and take a critique. It was central to everything you did. You were also taught things like "It's not your idea, it's an idea" that allowed you to critically think about solutions to problems without falling in love with your own designs.
This was fostered at the companies I worked for in the late 90's/early 2000's. We would have intense debates about designs, play devil's advocate (sometimes against our own designs!) in order to leave the room with the best ideas and solutions to problems. It was collaborative, energetic, peer reviewed, and we produced great designs for users.
This is not taught anymore. Critiques aren't given in school so as not to offend anyone. Much of UX Design has also transitioned to boot camps vs college design degrees which focus on pumping out students who can manipulate Figma, not students who understand the process and techniques of real design.
As such, professionally it's very hard to have real debates about design without someone getting offended or fighting for solutions that are sub par because it's "their" idea they can't let go of. The critical thinking and detail that used to go into design has been replaced with vibes.
And don't get me started on the fact that many students coming into the workforce simply don't have the design chops in the first place.
It's funny (depressing) to me that there is now "web app" design language and a "native app" design language, and most new desktop apps are following the web because they are built in html and CSS.
The move toward fullstack developers, too. When everybody is a jack of all trades, nobody is a master of anything. Least of all UI design, which isn't worth thinking too much about because it's the least likely potential subject of pushback during code review.
Windows 95 significantly overhauled the desktop GUI metaphor, in a way that is still the skeletal structure of desktops today.
Its U/I design since Windows 3.11 came about because of agile, not in spite of it. https://socket3.wordpress.com/2018/02/03/designing-windows-9...
> We recognized that we needed much more opportunity to create a design, try it out with users (perhaps comparing it to other designs), make changes, and gather more user feedback. Our desire to abandon the waterfall model and opt for iterative design fortunately followed similar efforts in other areas of the company, so we had concrete examples of its benefits and feasibility.
You're right that you can't go start to finish on a design in a single 2-week sprint. But that's why you have a repeating series of sprints, you're not supposed to go from start to finish in a single sprint.
The Windows 95 team always had a shippable OS to demo internally to devs, QA, beta testers and users invited by the UX designers for usability testing. Just because you demo something to the product owner does not require that you then release the result immediately to end users. Decouple development from deployment and from release and you'll find agile methods can work just fine.
The difference between agile and Agile might just be that the latter values processes and tools over individuals and interactions.
Agile manifesto coined a term for things that already existed. It didn’t create it from scratch, nor did it claim to. But W95 did employ methods we would call agile methods today.
That’s not the part I intended to criticize; it was the modern tendency to discard iterative design and instead just treat sprints a series of immutable milestones with fixed deadlines, except the scope is fixed in a just-in-time manner. But it’s on me for not stating that more clearly.
This goes against the pattern that's most often observed in the past decade of every product hand-rolling its UI from scratch, though.
Not just limited to UI decisions; many tech decisions were made the same way. I've said more than once, WRT to npm, that there were no adults in the room when they "designed" it, and npm is not the only tech stack that I look at and have the same thought.
We came from CLI with white text on black. Now dark mode is all the rage for the last couple of years.
I know OLED and all but interfaces feel just like fashion now, to hell with affordances and improving how things actually work let's just make things pretty for that micro dopamine drip and change it up just for the sake of it because jazz hands looks new makes $$
For Apple, and specific to Apple, when they fired Scott Forstall, there is no one to protect the software UI guys. The 2012 reshuffle in the name of "collaboration" by Tim Cook saw Design team taking over everything design, including Software. 2013 saw iOS 7 and then they spend 3 years to walk back a lot of iOS 7 UI changes. In 2016 many of their old UI leads "retired". Having no old guards to defend their turf, giving Alan Dye more rooms for power grab.
Since then, if not earlier, despite the whole UI becoming more android and cluster mess, there have been little to zero major UI changes other than new skin.
And like Apple's software, that is 10 years of resume driven development where they just want to ship features after features.
I’ve spent countless hours facilitating usability tests and then building the software in response to them.
I 100% agree with the “dribblization” of usability engineering.
More so, I think the term “design” has become overloaded. A graphic designer who wants to actually get paid and eat goes into UX. But where does their joy come from? From the visual, not the usability.
This year I got hired at Nielsen Norman Group, helping train designers to understand the theories of the human mind and applying them to UI.
I am finding the range of knowledge and background amongst designers is massive, precisely because of the imprecision of the word “designer”.
If we called it “applied cognitive and behavioral psychology” we would get closer to the results we want and perhaps a smidge more respect for its necessity in the age of slop UI.
Yup, I have a psychology degree and we had courses in HCI. I ended up skipping them because the lecturer (who was great, and his notes were phenomenal) was just telling project management war stories, and I'd spent the few years previous in construction listening to the same stories in a different domain.
Now, 20 years later, I'm the one telling those stories.
Around the time Facebook figured out what it's business model was platforms suppressed virality and people got used to the idea that you have to pay for traffic. You'd think that people would think "I'm paying $40 to acquire a customer, losing that customer to bad UI comes right out of my shareholder's pocketbook..." and somebody probably does, but a lot of people don't. Like zero interest rates and some people are just made of money and some people in business are lazy and, if their business is profitable, won't pursue cost reductions unless competition makes it life or death. Or something.
So I am appalled at so much bad software marketing that makes me think "is there anyone left who's had to tune up a marketing funnel?"
Like you see 200+ bug reports on Adobe's tracker about how Acrobat displays a total of 8 distracting UI elements to promote AI summaries the instant you open a document. And you can't clear them. And that's enough to make people see red.
But if you actually click on one of these stupid links you see a series of ads for things that are not AI features and that they don't make a serious effort to explain or sell. Then finally there's an ad for Acrobat Pro which maybe has the AI Summary but do I want to find out? I heard somebody somewhere did manage to try the AI Summary and of course it didn't work.
Like I could be annoyed by rapacious behavior but at least understand that people are motivated to make money for their shareholders. But to annoy everybody when they have Adobe CC subscriptions to lose and no clear path to convert? Where's the profit in that?
And that's totally ordinary. Like Meta solved so many tough problems to create the Meta Quest 3 and supposedly they are leaders in social software but they get the easy things wrong: they keep changing the interface that I'd use to "friend" people in games and make the process so terrible (at least the spammers who try to follow me on Instagram stole pictures of blonde women but nobody has a profile pic or the slightest bit of information to help decide "why would you follow me?") Supposedly Zuck wants to succeed at VR so bad... or is it just "we're #1 why try harder?"
Yeah, this is insane. When I worked in marketing analytics I would point this out, and the most common response was that retention was a different team so we don't care about it.
That being said, this is an extremely common problem across basically every industry, and perhaps it's inherent to how companies are currently run.
Aesthetics aside, some of the specific guidance from the past is simply not as crucial as it used to be when most users were very new to smartphones or personal computers.
Further, it's arguably become worse with touch screens in cars where, while you're driving, you get to discover a designer has moved a widget somewhere else and now your distracted. Self driving cars might solve that but even just walking around using your phone, every UI change is another distraction that might have consequences.
Not sure about that, given that John Gruber specifically lays the blame for a slew of recent shitty Apple design decisions on Alan Dye (cough liquid glass cough), and also the reversal of these shitty design decisions on changes made when Dye jumped ship for Meta. Gruber also says the Apple design team is much happier after Dye's departure.
Dye must be over 50, so I don't count him as a "younger replacement".
Apple knew this was bad 20 years ago. They just don't bother to read their own documentation:
Apple Human Interface Guidelines (2008) [1] p. 170:
> If you do include icons in your menus, include them only for menu items for which they add significant value; don’t include them for every menu item. A menu that includes too many icons (or poorly designed ones) can appear cluttered and be hard to read.
Though the cog for settings is, like the three-dots commonly used to represent a menu itself, is only recognised as such because it has often been used that way. The first time(s) it was used it would not have been obvious to people. So the rule isn't that a good icon should be obvious. A good icon is either immediately obvious or consistently used.
The common save icon is a good example of this in both cases: to those of us who have been around a while it is obvious because it looks like a floppy disk, to those who never used floppy disks it is obvious because that is what save icons (almost) always are.
This isn't really a case of someone overlooking previous guidance, but a symptom of an org where platform consistency is being prioritized over tradition. This means changes now cater to the lowest common denominator (iOS). Lots of recent updates this, like the new app icons, the macOS 26 implementation of liquid glass, etc. The priority is making macOS easier to adopt for people who's first devices were iPads.
It's unfortunate. Although what I find strange are some of the very obtuse patterns they refuse to change. It took them forever to add window snapping to macOS and Finder still doesn't have a cut command.
Looking at all their design missteps and corrections in recent releases my only takeaway is that they are making it up as they go along just like the rest of us.
But that was in a different millennium.
Exactly. There may have been a reason for the single menu bar back in 1984 when the Mac had a 9-inch screen. But it doesn't work very well on my 43-inch screen where the menu bar may be a few feet away from a small window in the lower right hand corner.
That isn’t obvious. With a mouse/trackpad with a good acceleration curve, chances are you can move faster to that menu at the top than to a menu a few cm away because you don’t have to decelerate when approaching the menu bar at the top of the screen.
Follow Apple's logic, reductio ad absurdum, and you'd have to put every single GUI element in the corners of the screen, because how else could you manage to quickly select them with a mouse? That OK button in the dialogue? Top right corner of the screen. Cancel? Top left. Quick, easy, and nobody could ever press the wrong button. It'll make it faster!
Resizing windows already requires moving the mouse with single-pixel precision. In comparison, hitting the menu bar is very easy.
Also, these menus are very consistent in appearance, functionality, shortcuts, etc; moreso than my experience with Windows applications.
I've seen this in webpages too. You load a page and think there's an error but the "login" button is surrounded by so much white space that it doesn't show up in the browser until you scroll down.
https://milos.fyi/blog/fitts-law-why-the-menu-bar-is-at-the-...
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~bam/uicourse/05440inter2019/Bill-Atk...
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~bam/uicourse/05440inter2019/Bill-Atk...
At 1:02:26, a student asked Bill Atkinson what was his biggest joy when making Macintosh, and he replied:
Bill> I was pretty excited when I moved the menus to the top of the screen, and suddenly it just clicked. Like, ok, we have the full width, the full height, there is this kinesthetic reaching over for this place. The pull down menus moving to the top of the screen, I though, yeah, this is doing to work!
Then at 1:03:10, a student asked:
Student> I have a question about HyperCard. What was the impetus for that [Bill smiled and chuckled], and like, how did, or what you build the um, motivation to like do that, because it was a kind of odd thing at the time...
[Bill beams and reaches off screen to find some papers]
Bill> How many of you guys have done a psychedellic?
[Class laughs, Bill grins] [Brad: no hands!]
Bill> In 1985 I swallowed a teenie fleck of gelatin containing a medium dose of LSD, and I spent most of the night sitting on a concrete workbench outside my home in Los Gatos, California. I gazed up at a hundred billion galaxies, each with a hundred billion stars, and each star a giant thermonuclear fusion reaction as powerful as our sun.
And for the first time in my life I knew deep down inside that we're not alone. I knew that life on Planet Earth is not the only pocket of consciousness in the universe, and likely not the most advanced, but we still have a role to play in the unfolding drama of creation.
It seemed to me that the universe is in a process of coming alive. Consciousness is blossoming and propogating to colonize the universe. And life on Earth is one of many bright spots in the cosmic birth of consciousness.
But the stars are separated by enormous distances of darkness and vacuum, which may hinder communication between them. I lowered my gaze and saw the street lamps below, glowing brightly, each casting a pool of light, but surrounded by darkness before the next lamp. As above, so below.
The street lamps reminded me of bodies of knowledge, gems of discovery and understanding, but separated from each other by distance, and different languages.
Poets, artists, musicians, physicists, chemists, biologists, mathemetitions, and economists, all have separate pools of knowledge that are hindered from sharing and finding the deeper connections.
My vision distorted by thick eyeglasses, I witnessed the curvature of the Earth's horizon, and I felt the pull of gravity towards its center, such that every one of us is standing at the very apex.
Each of us stands at the top of planet Earth, and each of us is a leader or captain of the Blue Marble team.
How could I help? By focusing on the weak link. If I were captain of a soccer team, I'd look for the weak link, and work on it. If the goalie was letting too many through, I would spend extra practice time with him, and the whole team would prosper.
It occurred to me that the weak link for the Blue Marble team is wisdom. Humanity has achieved sufficient technological power to change the course of life and the entire global ecosystem. But we seem to lack the perspective to choose wisely between alternative futures.
But I was young, without much life experience or wisdom myself. Knowledge it seemed to me consists of the "how" connections between pieces of information. The cause and effect relationships. How does this action bring about that result?
Science is a systematic attempt to discover the "how" connections. Wisdom, it seemed to me, was a step further removed. The bigger perspective of the "why" connections between pieces of knowledge. Why, for reasons ethical and aesthetic, should we choose one future over another.
i thought that if we could encourage sharing of ideas, between different areas of knowledge, perhaps more of the bigger picture would emerge, and eventually, more wisdom might develop. Sort of a trickle-up theory of information, leading to knowledge, leading to wisdom.
This was the underlying inspiration for HyperCard: a multimedia authoring environment that empowered non-programmers to share ideas, using new interactive media called HyperCard Stacks.
Each card in a HyperCard stack included graphics, text, interactive buttons, and links that took you to another card or stack. Built-in painting tools, drag-and-drop authoring with a library of pre-fab buttons and fields, and simple event based scripting, made HyperCard flexible and easy to use.
It took a lot of hard work and a dedicated team to complete this mission. Apple shipped HyperCard in August, 1987, and included it free with every Mac, so any user could create and share HyperCard stacks.
Many creative people expressed their ideas and passions, and several million interactive HyperCard stacks were created.
HyperCard was a precursor to the first web browser, except chained to a hard drive before the World Wide Web. Six years later, Mosaic was introduced, influenced by some of the ideas in HyperCard, and indirectly by an inspiring LSD experience.
[Class laughs]
So that's, honest, that's where the idea for HyperCard came from. And uh, and I, I'm not, like, advocating that every software designer should go out and take LSD, but it worked for me.
----
That was a tough act to follow, but the next week I gave a presentation about pie menus and Fitts' Law to Brad's UI class on February 11, 2019:
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~bam/uicourse/05440inter2019/Don-Hopk...
At 5:20 I mentioned Wiseman's 1969 PIXIE paper, the earliest known implementation of radial menus that ran on a PDP-7 with a 340 vector graphics display and light pen. Since then I've unearthed the paper, two films, and 128 pages of PDP-7 assembly language source code written by Heinz Lemke, which I've since reincarneted with a PDP-7 emulator:
PIXIE SIMELEC (1972) on PDP-7 and 340 Display emulator:
https://hyperties.org/cabinet/symelec/
Flight of the PIXIE - Yuja Wang:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDrqR9XssJI
PIXIE and FORTH on PDP-7 Cabinet Emulator with Type 340 Vector Graphics Display:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lo8kdY-5i6c
As an homage to Bill's HyperCard story, at 37:11 I trolled Brad and his recently-shocked students by asking the class:
Don> One thing I wanted to ask the class: Have any of you ever used ...[dramatic pregnant pause]... HyperCard?
Then I told my own story of how in 1987 HyperCard blew my mind and changed my world.
More on the "Mile High Menu Bar":
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44125835
Certain designers may have hated Nielsen, but their users hated them, and they have more users hating them than Nielsen has designers hating him, and users matter much more than designers, so I think he came out way ahead.
Bruce Tognazzini is the OG GUI Guru of 80's user interface design!
https://asktog.com/atc/about-bruce-tognazzini/
Tog not just invented and implemented, but also deeply rationalized and documented a lot of great user interface techniques, like the "mile high menu bar", which partially exploits Fitts' Law (in the "up" direction), but made more sense on the original single small Mac screens. (While pie menus more fully exploit Fitts' law (in "all" directions") and they work great on large screens, giving you even more "leverage".)
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/27/designing-for-peop...
>When the Macintosh was new, Bruce “Tog” Tognazzini wrote a column in Apple’s developer magazine on UI. In his column, people wrote in with lots of interesting UI design problems, which he discussed. These columns continue to this day on his web site. They’ve also been collected and embellished in a couple of great books, like Tog on Software Design, which is a lot of fun and a great introduction to UI design. (Tog on Interface was even better, but it’s out of print.)
>Tog invented the concept of the mile high menu bar to explain why the menu bar on the Macintosh, which is always glued to the top of the physical screen, is so much easier to use than menu bars on Windows, which appear inside each application window. When you want to point to the File menu on Windows, you have a target about half an inch wide and a quarter of an inch high to acquire. You must move and position the mouse fairly precisely in both the vertical and the horizontal dimensions.
>But on a Macintosh, you can slam the mouse up to the top of the screen, without regard to how high you slam it, and it will stop at the physical edge of the screen – the correct vertical position for using the menu. So, effectively, you have a target that is still half an inch wide, but a mile high. Now you only need to worry about positioning the cursor horizontally, not vertically, so the task of clicking on a menu item is that much easier.
>Based on this principle, Tog has a pop quiz: what are the five spots on the screen that are easiest to acquire (point to) with the mouse? The answer: all four corners of the screen (where you can literally slam the mouse over there in one fell swoop without any pointing at all), plus, the current position of the mouse, because it’s already there.
>The principle of the mile-high menu bar is fairly well known, but it must not be entirely obvious, because the Windows 95 team missed the point completely with the Start push button, sitting almost in the bottom left corner of the screen, but not exactly. In fact, it’s about 2 pixels away from the bottom and 2 pixels from the left of the screen. So, for the sake of a couple of pixels, Microsoft literally “snatches defeat from the jaws of victory”, Tog writes, and makes it that much harder to acquire the start button. It could have been a mile square, absolutely trivial to hit with the mouse. For the sake of something, I don’t know what, it’s not. God help us.
Another great technique he documented in the original Apple Human Interface Guidelines was the "drag delay" of popping up "pull right" submenus, to mitigate a problem that linear menus have, but pie menus don't. People keep forgetting and re-inventing it in sometimes better, sometimes worse ways, but he invented and implemented it for the original Mac, then most importantly documented it in the first edition of the Apple's 1987 Human Interface Guidelines, and the Mac UI still supports it. It's the kind of thing nobody notices if it works well, that's invisibly built into the toolkit, that nobody appreciates how much thought and nuance went into it, that deserves a lot of user testing and iteration to get right. (Or you could just use pie menus and not have that problem! ;)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39210672
[...]
One of the most effective menu implementations ever for me was Altsys Virtuoso on NeXTstep's right-click (to pop-up the main menu at the mouse cursor), drag-down to Modify, then drag right to "Punch" or "Union" (whichever was the top command) --- it was a command I did a lot and it was almost gestural, kind of lke a well-done pie menu.
FWIW, the current Windows Start menu at lower-left, while not drawn to the corner now allows one to click the corner to open it, lower-right is "Show Desktop" and upper right closes the current maximized window --- only upper left is at the mercy of whatever app is currently running.
One criticism I have of HyperCard is that it wasn't "HyperCard All The Way Down", in that not all the rest of its dialogs and user interfaces and menus were made out of HyperCard stacks. It wasn't "metacircular", defined in terms of itself.
That's totally forgivable given that HyperCard was the first original iteration, and "merely" getting it finished in time to ship on every Mac desktop was a spectacular achievement. But it doesn't excuse anything that came after it, and it doesn't excuse Apple for dropping it instead of evolving it.
Cyberdog for OpenDoc was another interesting approach to a web browser, built out of components you could embed in documents, but Apple dropped that along with OpenDoc too:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberdog
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDoc
WWDC 1996 Cyberdog demo:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UhiUncy5qW0
Looking back 30 years, that demo is unintentionally hilarious, and it makes me wonder what HyperCard would have been like if Apple had continued to develop it as much as it deserved.
>You always want to end a report with some pizzazz, and these days, nothing is more pizzazz than Java. So over here I have a Java applet, and I want to put it into Claris Works. [...]
>It's actually a little bit different than that. Rather than just being FreeHand it's actually Shockwave for FreeHand, and what we're running here is the Shockwave for FreeHand Netscape Plugin running inside of an OpenDoc Part that can run any Netscape Plugin. So because it's -- [applause] -- it's a little complicated...
Bottlenecking every event and pixel through the Stone Age nascent NPAPI to see Duke waving at three frames a second was not the flex they thought it was.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NPAPI
I know because I was writing NPAPI plug-ins at Kaleida Labs at the time, and wrote up the problems I found with the NetScape 2.0b3 Plug-in SDK:
https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/netscape/Netscape-Plugin...
>The event handler never gets mouse motion or mouse up events, so I had to track the mouse motion and button release manually by checking the button status in the idle callback.
More about NPAPI's history:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44661955
At least Sun's HotJava modular extensible web browser picked a lane, and didn't put that many layers between you and your Calvins.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HotJava
Steve Jobs explained both eloquently and dramatically why he murdered OpenDoc:
“Focusing is about saying no.” -Steve Jobs, WWDC ‘97
As sad as it was, Steve Jobs was right to “put a bullet in OpenDoc’s head”.
https://donhopkins.medium.com/focusing-is-about-saying-no-st...
HyperLook, which was written in PostScript for the NeWS Window System, was deeply inspired by HyperCard, and addressed the "All The Way Down" problem, as well as Atkinson's admitted limitation of being chained to a hard drive instead of networked.
All of HyperLook's property sheets, dialogs, popups, help windows, menus, etc, were defined in terms of itself, editable and replaceable.
The PostScript graphics editor was a component you could use in your own stacks to edit graphics, like a clock's face and hands, and you could copy ("capture") any user interface as editable structured graphics, which made it easy to illustrate the documentation:
https://donhopkins.com/home/ties/scans/HyperLookManual.pdf
https://donhopkins.com/home/HyperLookSimCityManual.pdf
Even the user interface editor itself was a replaceable component, so you could plug in different kinds of user interface editors, or remove it completely to deliver a non-editable runtime system (like SimCity).
The other thing that HyperLook added was another layer in the event delegation system: Button => Card => Background => Stack => Client. The client being what we would call a "web server" or "distributed application" now, implementing what we call the "AJAX" architecture now.
HyperLook (nee HyperNews (nee GoodNews)):
https://donhopkins.medium.com/hyperlook-nee-hypernews-nee-go...
I developed SimCity and HyperLook together, each one a forcing function for the other, and I'm taking the same approach now with reincarnating HyperTIES, Ben Shneiderman's pioneering hypertext system from the University of Maryland:
https://github.com/SimHacker/Hyperties/blob/main/docs/README...
I recently wrote this about cloning Photoshop, quoting Alan Kay about old ideas that hang on, and Bill Buxton about unworthy design objectives.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50052665
Cloning Photoshop is such an underwhelmingly unoriginal and unambitious design goal, like photocopying a Roy Lichtenstein painting, or cloning MS-DOS.
Treating Photoshop's interface as the destination squanders the opportunity to rethink how people create images.
"Things seem to hang on in computing just because they work a little bit." -Alan Kay
From a personal email about MVC and Morphic, published here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8841428
"It is an unworthy design objective to aim for anything less than trying to do to the Macintosh what the Macintosh did to the previous state of the art." -Bill Buxton
The "Natural" Language of Interaction: A Perspective on Non-Verbal Dialogues, INFOR: Canadian Journal of Operations Research and Information Processing, 26(4), 1988, pp. 428–438.
https://www.billbuxton.com/natural.html
>THE MACINTOSH AS VICTIM
>Before going too much further, it is probably worth making a few comments about my approach and my examples. As will become pretty evident, the Apple Macintosh takes a bit of a beating in what follows. Some readers may view this as evidence of contempt for its design. From my perspective, it is evidence of respect. Let me explain.
>User interface design today is plagued by an unhealthy degree of complacency. We live in a world of copy-cat unimaginative interface products, where major manufacturers put out double-paged colour spreads in Business Week announcing "... our system's user interface is as easy to use as the most easy to use microcomputer [i.e., the Mac]" (or words to that effect). In what other industry can you get away with stating that you're as good as the competition, rather than better? Especially when the competition's product is over 4 years old!
>The best ideas are the most dangerous, since they take hold and are the hardest to change. Hence, the Macintosh is dangerous to the progress of user interfaces precisely because it was so well done! Designers seem to be viewing it as a measure of success rather than as a point of departure. Consequently, it runs the risk of becoming the Cobol of the 90's.
>I criticize the Macintosh precisely because it is held in such high regard. It is one of the few worthy targets. If I can make the point that there are other design options, and that these options appear to have a lot of potential, then I may help wake people up to the fact that it is an unworthy design objective to aim for anything less than trying to do to the Macintosh what the Macintosh did to the previous state-of-the-art.
>Enough of the sermon. Let's leave the pulpit for some concrete examples.
I remember wasting a couple of hours trying to find where a certain setting had gone.
Of course the setting in question was literally the most important one, and of course it was hidden at the bottom of the page, outside of my non-designer-too-small-screen, after things like picking which colour and which emoji you wanted to use.
"Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that are no smarter than you. And you can change it. And you can change it. You can influence it. You can build your own things that other people can use." —Steve Jobs
Full clip slightly longer, worth watching.
Easier said than done so it's not surprising they have atrophied in their former genius but im curious.
It's not perfect here but having an ergonomic design and replacing it with a substantially worse one is rather unheard of in this world.
If somebody always gets everything right in your opinion, you should be suspicious of your own values, not of the people who don't achieve constant perfection.
Large phones were a bad idea because you cant use it with one finger, until iPhone Pro Maxes came out.
Installing apps from the internet is scary because viruses, yet Macs let you do that no questions asked.
Ads are bad and dangerous, until it shows up on Apple Maps.
Apple is just a simple company, existing to make as much money as possible. They make beautiful devices though - but no reason to put them on a pedestal.
Even before Gatekeeper, macOS/OSX File Quarantine prompted you when you went to open a .dmg or .zip you downloaded. These days anything not singed by an Apple Developer certificate refuses to open unless you remove the file attribute.
> Apple is just a simple company, existing to make as much money as possible. They make beautiful devices though - but no reason to put them on a pedestal.
Apple certainly exists to make money, but I don't think they exist solely to do that. They have long had a culture of enabling their users to do things that were previously the purview of big business or specialised fields. They don't sell you just hardware, they give you a whole office suite, audio production tools, development tools etc. all on top of high quality hardware.
With a MacBook and iPhone you can be a filmmaker, take and edit professional-quality photographs, record and produce your own music out of the box.
Maybe they used to be better at it than they are today, but Apple tends to spend more time putting their customers first than their competitors do.
Adobe happened to be a shitty company but "enabling their users to do things that were previously purview of big business" isn't unique to Apple at all.
Infact, Apple is the biggest of the biggest companies of them all. Bigger than "professional" companies like Canon, Nikon, RED etc.
Apples advantage is stuff just works, which is more harder than it seems.
The individual at Apple who decided to try and keep phones small, for example is probably not the person who decided to make them big. I feel confident saying this because the person who was supposedly the driving force behind keeping them small died in 2011, and they didn't start releasing phones that are too large for comfortable one-handed use until 2014.
Or they just skipped the testing and focus groups that should have highlighted that before release.
The iPhone 4 was such a letdown...
Apple's design never recovered from the flattening of iOS 7.
Hypocrisy would require commending Apple for icons everywhere and then celebrating their removal. That is not what happened. If anything has the homogeneity of hypocrisy, it’s this attitude that any commendation must be fanboying (while ignoring said commenters’ past criticism).
Your assumptions only work until they don't. It's not like we live in a static situation. What didn't work yesterday might work today
That doesn't match my experience. Personally I've found Apple fans (not just Gruber and Nielsen but regular Apple users) to be the most vocally critical of their design missteps.
You don’t have to make it up, it was only one year ago. All their blog posts are still visible.
One of the worst trends in icons is this insatiable desire to put different icons into uniform shapes.
For example, this trend resulted in tragic replacement of beautiful varied and distinct Android icons that were introduced in Android 5 to the uglicity we have now.
On iOS, beautiful SFSymbol icons that floated beautifully on flat surfaces since iOS 7.0 were encased in absolutely similar circular 'liquid Glass' blobs. Sad.
Things are different today though, considering how many pieces of software an average person used in 2001 vs how many today. It's no longer just word and excel, updated once in a few years, so you can learn stuff by heart and not even care what icons they put on what
I think I stumbled upon it while reading that era's GNOME HIG, that had some very similar thoughts about icons..
A company 1/100th the size used to design beautiful icons that clearly represented what they meant, and that company was Apple. Now I get SVG slop. SF Symbols can bite me.
But hey, tastes differ.
> They designed it, shipped it, lived with it for a year, then publicly changed their guidance on it. To me, that’s a lot more persuasive than simply saying, “Apple doesn’t do this.”
> Choosing not to do something you’ve never done is one thing.
> Choosing not to do something you’ve done is experience.
A more persuasive sales pitch for me to consider Apple products would be if the company had judgement not to ship such a hot mess of a sloppy product in the first place...
MS would include superfluous icons because they observe it in other software and can't think for themselves, or they would omit superfluous icons because it never occurred to them in the first place.
Everything Apple does is carefully considered, good and bad.
I take the latter every time, because I understand how bad things are in software. I know it's unrealistic to be as choosy as I want to be.
Couldn't Apple have just, like, talked to the people who originally wrote the guidelines? Why do they need to re-invent the wheel? Will Apple forget again in another 15 years and need to re-run the experiment, taking us all along as test subjects?
Decisions should be revisited when it makes sense to do so.
No evidence this is true. It's basically PR / urban legend. It's not like the people at Apple are magic angels. They're the same people that worked at Meta or Google or MS last year or the year before that
Or is that how you meant it?
It was Microsoft who had the courage (and, admittedly, need) to come up with a bold new design language. They said, you know what, most people are digital natives these days, let's not infantalise them with fake paper notepads and fake leather textures for their digital calendar. Instead, let's make text itself the highlight, the star, and strip out all the rest.
They had a User Story thingy where their ideal users were busy people wanting to exist in the real world. MS wanted that the ideal user takes the phone out of his pocket, glances at it and instantly recives the information he seeks, and quickly puts it back in his pocket to move on with his life.
Hence Live Tiles. Hence the first widgets. Hence their lovely and ill-fated People app where you could go to one place and handle your Facebook feed and your LinkedIn feed etc. Hence the discarding of endless unicorn rainbow vomit of icons. Nah. Here's a simple text interface in black background for AMOLED battery life. The phone is not an extension of personality. It is a tool. Use it. Put it away.
Lumia phones ran amazingly well on nothing specs because they didn't try to be too complicated with graphical stuff. Battery life was always god-tier. And, though I've never been able to confirm it, around the time of Lumia 710, the MS touch keyboard actually let you type letters in the wrong order and would correct them for you. For example: "atcually". I remember at that time that Android wouldn't. It would only handle near-misses: "axtually".
I fucking loved Windows Phone. Rest in peace.
However they lost it when they tried to port that same design to Windows 8, resulting in an unpleasant collision of multiple inconsistent design paradigms.
Windows 8 Metro, on the other hand, was almost universally hated and with very good reason. And Apple has been doing the same exact mistake for awhile, slowly porting designs meant for a phone (and far worse designs than Metro at that, iOS 7 was terrible as was everything since) to laptops/desktops.
It would have been a very easy thing to test the people outside there bubble.
> > Choosing not to do something you’ve never done is one thing.
> > Choosing not to do something you’ve done is experience.
Gods, this sounds so LLM :(
But start paying attention to how you talk and write and you’ll realize you’re using those same cliches all the time. Heck I just did the “it’s not foo, it’s bar” cliche in the previous paragraph because it’s a useful language construct and it appears often in writing. An LLM writes like a budding author that learned “never use ‘blank said’” as a writing rule and goes to tortuous lengths to come up with more “clever” ways to say someone said something. But those clever ways are used all the time by very good writers too because they’re effective phrases. LLMs and hyper vigilance for their writing just means we’re more aware of the cliches we use
TFA was an unusually extreme example, to the point where I do wonder if an LLM was involved in the writing thereof.
When I read a sentence like this, I have to remind myself that this is Apple products we're talking about.
What other company do you feel surpasses Apple in terms of "judgement not to ship such a hot mess of a sloppy product in the first place"?
Is there any consumer electronics company today that ships products that are in any way less of a slop than Apple?
Alan Dye really did a number on that company and set back UI design by one or two decades, favoring graphic design over human interface design.
I grew up in the 80s with DOS software, when dropdown menus were new and our IBM PC didn't even have a mouse. Since the design idea emerged of using an icon in a menu, which I'd probably locate to the Apple menu on the 128k Mac, my whole life I've seen this push/pull between phases of design and various fads that have emphasized either information density or some kind of simplified graphic/hieroglyphic gloss of the language and intent.
The gloss that works, imho, isn't precisely what has iconic meaning, as the OP postulates. It's what the user becomes familiar with. There's a subtle difference there. An arbitrary icon can be made to mean something over time. But that has to be an intentional process, and it should be tied to a larger theory of the branding and iconography of the company. Otherwise, it's probably worse than useless, even if it does literally signify the action.
Lately, in the last 10 years, I've found myself doing hybrids. I treat icons in selection modes as something like an emoji. If an icon is so universally understandable that no text is necessary, I might prefer it. Otherwise, it would be included only if I need to draw a user's attention to something more than the other items. For example, an extra icon next to a pending issue waiting for approval.
When available too, I'd much rather show a keyboard shortcut than an icon. That's useful information for most users, instead of decoration.
People who don't design for a living often think decoration is design, or vice versa. Decoration is antithetical to good design. And good design is never decorative. If it's not either informational, or what I'd call "aspirationally informational", in that it's training the user to recognize a meaningful design artifact, then it should go. Decorations belong in illustration and background art, to tie the piece together. Not in UI.
I think the main thing is to consider these design choices. Does the icon help someone identify and navigate to something they need to do more quickly? No one is perfectly correct, making that call. It's one of those things where asking the question and thinking about it is 90% of the effort.
2. Click on the hamburger menu in the top right
3. ???
Icons can genuinely help convey meaning/understanding. They can also be clutter. It comes down to how you use them.
Granted, I had done this rather than the vendor deciding what icon fit - so I guess my brain had created neural pathways linking the image and the word.
Personally I think there's probably enough screen real estate to have both an icon and text in a menu entry, but menu search is generally more useful for anything not already an icon on the application's toolbar.
Those, those are ~thoughtful~ icons and not at all default.
You've figured out how to access the Start menu, and figured out where the Power menu is through the icon, but now have a choice between 關機 and 重新開機.
Which one is shut down, which is reboot?
You have one chance, otherwise it requires an embarrassing trip to the server farm.
That specific case led me to make the following table of Windows strings in other languages:
https://peterburk.github.io/i2018n/windowsStringsTable/index...
Although icons in every menu is too cluttered, please don't remove them entirely. At the very least, keep an icon on every menu item that needs to be clicked until the Language setting menu. Oh, and please don't translate the languages in the menu: the user needs to be able to read their own language button.
"Hey our metrics show that menu items with icons are interacted with more often."
"Oh we should put icons on every menu item and get our usage numbers up."
"I agree, bigger numbers are more impressive and will get us promotions or bonuses."
I click close at least once a day and close the window and not the sidebar that popped out. Windows, KDE, and Gnome don't do this.
I think mid-00s commercial OSes are a good target in this regard. OS X 10.2-10.9 and Windows XP-7 had a pretty good level of density while also feeling relatively clean and would be good to take some cues from.
This goes against the original argument which is that icons should only be used for universal idioms that can be recognized by the icon _only_. Otherwise it's just noise
I've been hoping Cosmic DE improves enough to be usable.
I was skeptical, too, but it allows for some serious visual tweaking beyond what KDE allows without rewriting code.
That was of course not at all what made the MacOS so usable. The real principles were explained in detail in Apples UI guidelines. But hardly anyone read those, so the icons have been with us for 30 years.
Except they didn’t admit it. Watch the WWDC keynote, I don’t recall them admitting any wrongness with Tahoe or Golden Gate, instead they said the design is “even more refined” or some bullshit like that.
I meant “Tahoe or Liquid Glass”, of course. Golden Gate was what was being announced.
Icons within menus should IMO be used to highlight special options that are often used or options that users have memorized by the icon as well, e.g. download, share, etc.
In the end the highest art is to group the options in a logical way, have them in the right place and remain readable.
Fifteen years later, I am still waiting for them to undo the damage that was done.
And when people cried what 'oh noes i cant find a needed program in that awful fullscreen start menu uwu' I just show my Vista Start Menu list which took 4 FullHD screen heights on the small font settings.
And as people in the nearby comments say the problem here is what there is a lot of newcomers who just do shit - by mere lack of knowledge or worse by being KPI driven. Just like the last update of Mozilla Firefox which added ellipsised tabs. Like... for what? On the desktop?
The problem wasn't Metro itself -- it was the ham-fisted, halfhearted integration with the rest of Windows that proved irksome. Windows 8 was the version that introduced Settings alongside Control Panel -- 15 years later, the merge is almost complete.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/344729.Designing_Visual_...
and the high water mark of my graphical UI experience was when I used an NCR-3125 running Go Corp.'s PenPoint as a portable/note-taking/sketching device and a NeXT Cube w/ a Wacom ArtZ as my desktop.
Not really, you've just gone from one empty argument to another.
> Choosing not to do something you’ve done is experience.
They already had the experience because they used icons before. They had experience adding icons and not adding them to a bunch of menus.
The way out is to use substantive arguments that don't depend on the shaky grounds of someone's authority
It wasn’t a good change but some folks definitely took it too seriously.
Apple seems to be dropping the ball on UI recently. Their glass UI also felt like a triumph of eye candy over usability.
https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2025/icons-in-menus/
A related post linked to by the previous post:
The what
Next to the floppy
The what
The hamburger!!
Are you high?
You will spend weeks/months (sigh, years) agonising over the six icons you can lay horizontally over a bottom toolbar in a mobile layout, only to sit down and guide a user a user through your UI and realise how monumental stupid and unfriendly your UI is.
I was guiding my boss through some features “ok, just click the view you want in the bottom toolbar”, “um? Which button do I click for a forward view?”. This is someone who knew our product capabilities inside out and helped debug users on a daily basis. I felt even stupider having to geometrically describe the details of the icon, realising how stupid of a UX this was, just to continue with the demo.
I scrapped the entire thing for a textual status toolbar that when you click brings up a drawer with every option in plain English. The only icons were a tickbox next to the currently selected item in a drop down menu. News flash, turns out people can read, and much faster than they can interpret abstract icons.
The next time I did a demo, not only did I feel the immense relief not having to sweat over “describing what icon to click”, didn’t have to worry about flicking through icon catalogs to find the “perfect, vaguely connected icon to the idea I’m trying to convey”.
Turns out VIM was right all along, model UI is king. Don’t get me wrong, 20 years of mobile UI has beaten some visual language into is, but it is no substitute for actual language.
That said, I'm glad the menu item icons are gone too.
The icons were distracting for weekdays, but I like icons in the top-menu usually. IMO the user should be able to decide on these things at all times.
They needed to make room for Siri.
Here's an example from Chrome on macos:
https://i.imgur.com/I3d8YdA.png
This would benefit from icons at least on new tab, mute, pin, search, split etc
There are people with down syndrome as well for whom icons are much easier.
Make it an option, everybody happy
Art vs. minimalism in design
Icons are today's form of hieroglyphs for communication?
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But at the end of the day, it was like Liquid Glass itself - looks sick in presentations, but in real life, it looks pretty awful.
English is not my native language, so i was having a very hard time to learn how to use computer, with icon, my 8 Years old brain can kind of infer what is its meaning.