YHK - yet another hacker news clone

No More Icons in Every Menu by Default

118 points riffraff 1 day ago 85 comments

netsharc 2 hours ago | parent

The conclusion is too forgiving...

> 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...

happytoexplain 2 hours ago | parent

In any other context I would agree with you, but in software, the point the author is making is quite true.

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.

readthenotes1 2 hours ago | parent

When you say carefully considered, you're going with the the Aristotelian process that led him to argue that feathers fall slower than rock.

It would have been a very easy thing to test the people outside there bubble.

GMoromisato 1 hour ago | parent

Microsoft has (and had) some amazing designers. They came up with Metro, which was the forerunner of the flat design that everyone loves/hates now.

Wowfunhappy 1 hour ago | parent

Apple's own design guidelines originally said not to do the thing they did (and which they are now once again saying not to do).

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?

OnlineTux 17 minutes ago | parent

Why do you assume they didn't talk to those people?

Decisions should be revisited when it makes sense to do so.

sssilver 1 hour ago | parent

> 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...

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?

ludwigschubert 56 minutes ago | parent

Your “today” does a lot of work. Many frustrated people are comparing 2020s Apple with 2010 Apple, thus the complaints.

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.

quibono 2 hours ago | parent

1. Read the post

2. Click on the hamburger menu in the top right

3. ???

tkdb 2 hours ago | parent

Honest mistake.

Those, those are ~thoughtful~ icons and not at all default.

doginasuit 27 minutes ago | parent

The author isn't against icons in menus, they are against icons in every menu by default.

Icons can genuinely help convey meaning/understanding. They can also be clutter. It comes down to how you use them.

OnlineTux 11 minutes ago | parent

My inbox folders/labels used to be just text, and I'd have to read them to find the one I wanted to look at. I started adding emoji to the label names and suddenly I could scan the list far quicker to get to what I was looking for.

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.

Kuraj 2 hours ago | parent

I love KDE but they could take some notes from this!

cosmic_cheese 1 hour ago | parent

Yeah I appreciate their approach which optimizes for information density a lot more than competing desktops, but it could certainly feel cleaner while doing so.

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.

freecodeio 1 hour ago | parent

I use KDE and you made me right click everywhere and I can't find a menu without icons lol

Kuraj 1 hour ago | parent

Yeah with KDE it's all or nothing, either every menu item has an icon or you can turn off all of them.

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

freecodeio 1 hour ago | parent

where do you disable them?

Kuraj 1 hour ago | parent

System Settings > Application Style > Configure Icons and Toolbars

devilsdata 43 minutes ago | parent

Yeah I'd love to prefer KDE, but GNOME is closer to what I'm used to (Mac OS). Pity it's not that good and written in JS.

I've been hoping Cosmic DE improves enough to be usable.

cromka 10 minutes ago | parent

It doesn't matter that it's JS, they have their own, performant interpreter for it and it's a limited subset of JS. And that's just one layer, the rest is actual compiled code, increasingly Rust.

I was skeptical, too, but it allows for some serious visual tweaking beyond what KDE allows without rewriting code.

paxy 2 hours ago | parent

This Apple devotion is really something else..

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.

happytoexplain 2 hours ago | parent

This is the opposite of logical. Missteps and corrections are a sign of conscientiousness, not "making it up".

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.

bitpush 1 hour ago | parent

I think you're trying to find meaning when there's no meaning what so ever.

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.

bunderbunder 1 hour ago | parent

This reads like the corporate edition of the goomba fallacy.

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.

OnlineTux 25 minutes ago | parent

> Installing apps from the internet is scary because viruses, yet Macs let you do that no questions asked.

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.

readthenotes1 2 hours ago | parent

By recent, you mean since just after the iPhone 3s?

The iPhone 4 was such a letdown...

pornel 1 hour ago | parent

4 still shipped with buttons my mum could recognise.

Apple's design never recovered from the flattening of iOS 7.

yreg 1 hour ago | parent

*3GS

glimshe 2 hours ago | parent

And on every misstep and their correction, the same people will be defending them. Like "icons on every option is so much more intuitive", just to argue the exact opposite a couple of years later.

happytoexplain 1 hour ago | parent

Criticisms of the format, "the same people", are virtually always irrational/tribalistic, and based on the "invented enemy" internet trope that happens when interpreting groups of people as being one person. I'd like to leave such common tropes outside of HN.

colejohnson66 1 hour ago | parent

It’s the goomba fallacy: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Goomba_fallacy

cwillu 1 hour ago | parent

In other circumstances, I'd be the first to agree, but you'll find people arguing for both sides in the same comment in this very comment section.

angiolillo 29 minutes ago | parent

> And on every misstep and their correction, the same people will be defending them.

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.

bunderbunder 1 hour ago | parent

I think it might be somewhat generational. There was a time when Apple famously put a lot of effort into HCI research and experimentation, and prioritized it above so many other concerns. When Apple chose to do UI differently from everyone else, it was a strong indication that they made the decision based on empirical research and not just making it up as they go along like everyone else. A single menu bar at the top of the screen, for example, was chosen because they found that users could locate and click on them much faster than they could menus at the top of the window. I can’t remember exactly how much but I think it was something like 1/3 - 1/2 as much time.

But that was in a different millennium.

efortis 1 hour ago | parent

IIRC Bill Atkinson said that it is at the top because it was easier to code. at any rate, it’s true that screen edges and corners are easy to click because their hit region becomes infinite in one or two directions

WillAdams 33 minutes ago | parent

It was tried out per window, but changed:

https://milos.fyi/blog/fitts-law-why-the-menu-bar-is-at-the-...

herpdyderp 1 hour ago | parent

There are a lot of us that aren't making it up as we go. There is plenty of knowledge and experience on how to do these things and Apple used to be the king of it. For some reason they started throwing it all away with Liquid Glass.

kibwen 27 minutes ago | parent

Decades before Liquid Glass. They had begun throwing it all away by the time they got rid of scrollbars (and the rest of the industry followed like gormless lemmings).

LtWorf 18 minutes ago | parent

Ah yes, I experienced a designer who hid scrollbars, and also decided that the title was NOT part of the page so a scroll action there would not scroll anything.

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.

youniverse 1 hour ago | parent

Apple is/was regarded as the gods of design and ux. Does anyone know what it takes to get hired there as a designer now? Are the original designers with actual vision still there? I imagine they would need to really be conscious of not hiring average designers who just have a resume of top companies they have worked at but need the type of people steve jobs would have hired himself.

Easier said than done so it's not surprising they have atrophied in their former genius but im curious.

amelius 1 hour ago | parent

It's the Reality Distortion Field.

Best known from The Bible, Steve Jobs, Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler.

andai 1 hour ago | parent

> they are making it up as they go along just like the rest of us.

"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.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=kYfNvmF0Bqw

cromka 15 minutes ago | parent

The serious downgrade of how dismissing popups worked is what drive me back to Linux (GNOME).

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.

cosmic_cheese 1 hour ago | parent

I think this and many other questionable UI decisions across the industry in recent years is the fallout of the old guard of UI designers having rotated out for younger replacements in the past decade with little transfer of knowledge occurring.

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.

quacked 1 hour ago | parent

The two things that pain me the most are:

(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

cosmic_cheese 1 hour ago | parent

> No more clean, compact directory trees

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.

quacked 49 minutes ago | parent

It's incredible. And the labels are all turned into pills or chips. Then they don't allow pivoted views of their lists, or if they do allowed pivots it's a visual nightmare.

crooked-v 1 hour ago | parent

This is exhausting with web stuff. Every designer wants flat everything, not even so much as underlining links, let alone enough design to actually make it obvious what's a clickable button.

quacked 51 minutes ago | parent

I think it's this cargo cult attempt to tap into what Apple had pre-2010 on the iPod and first iPhone. They're missing that the design leadership and attention to detail was unparalleled at Apple in that era, so they just flatten everything for a streamlined look and miss every signifier Apple put in its UIs in those days

calvinmorrison 1 hour ago | parent

How about on windows, no visible borders just overlapping off-white

quacked 51 minutes ago | parent

Drives me nuts. It makes everything feel like working on a poorly organized desk.

burningChrome 1 hour ago | parent

>> This leads to overemphasis on the visual aspect of the UI and not enough on its functional and usability aspects.

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.

bunderbunder 1 hour ago | parent

Or if you have any sort of non-correctable visual impairment. I'm sighted but recently I had actually been thinking of learning better how to use a screen reader because I genuinely struggle to visually parse a lot of modern UI design. The big move toward flat designs, but with everyone choosing their own idiosyncratic special snowflake way of doing it, leaves very little visual redundancy for people to use as a fallback. Sad to hear that it might not be the solution either.

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.

bigbuppo 1 hour ago | parent

We let the wrong sort of designers do the design. The designers that simultaneously made changes under the guise of "UX" just sort of made it up as they went along without any basis in reality. That's how we got stuck with the hamburger menu.

DoneWithAllThat 1 hour ago | parent

FYI it’s Chesterton’s Fence, named after writer G. K. Chesterton.

cosmic_cheese 1 hour ago | parent

Fixed, thanks!

bunderbunder 1 hour ago | parent

We can also lay some blame at Agile's feet. I've seen UX and UI designers genuinely struggle to fit their work into the sprint treadmill. 2 weeks' notice is not enough time to do any sort of serious usability design study.

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.

mpyne 1 hour ago | parent

> We can also lay some blame at Agile's feet. I've seen UX and UI designers genuinely struggle to fit their work into the sprint treadmill. 2 weeks' notice is not enough time to do any sort of serious usability design study.

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.

bunderbunder 55 minutes ago | parent

Perhaps instead of Agile I should have said "What Agile became in the 21st century." I know how Scrum is supposed to work. I just haven't seen anyone actually do it that way since about 2013.

AlexandrB 5 minutes ago | parent

I don't think you can credit Windows 95 to agile when the agile manifesto was first published in 2001 and the whole sprint nonsense didn't start until sometime later. Iterative development goes back to at least the 80s and doesn't require "scrum masters", "sprints", or "t-shirt sizes".

gmueckl 1 hour ago | parent

When the end of a sprint is a hard cutoff point for tasks, agile is done wrong. Just carry unfinished work over - it won't go away, anyway.

cosmic_cheese 59 minutes ago | parent

I think the trick here is to not co-mingle the development of UI toolkits and the software built with them. Agile works fine if the UI framework itself is its own project with its own lifecycle, suitably long sprints, etc.

This goes against the pattern that's most often observed in the past decade of every product hand-rolling its UI from scratch, though.

LtWorf 23 minutes ago | parent

I've worked at companies where to save a few thousands € to not buy a Qt license, they'd basically pay 50x more to have a bad copy of it that was also much slower due to using electron.

ahartmetz 1 hour ago | parent

I think new UI designers might mistakenly think that they are in the fashion industry, when actually they are in the ergonomics engineering industry, or should be.

outofpaper 1 hour ago | parent

There is both ux and and graphic design and they both have their place. Saddly far too often one wins out over another instead of finding balance.

ahartmetz 1 hour ago | parent

Most UX designers seem to come from a graphic design direction, and they generally do a better job than developers - but not as good as the old school people who did research and wrote detailed guides and such.

gleenn 19 minutes ago | parent

The amount of times I absolutely cringe from super lux UI which clearly a lot of time and energy went into prettifying at the absolute expense of usability and affordances. I love Apple TV but flip to any screen with multiple buttons and not being able to tell which button is selected. Or the Russian Roulette of Youtube trying to select any of the overlayed buttons on the actual video frame. I would 1000% trade shiny for more usablility in 99% of apps.

hn_throwaway_99 34 minutes ago | parent

> I think this and many other questionable UI decisions across the industry in recent years is the fallout of the old guard of UI designers having rotated out for younger replacements in the past decade with little transfer of knowledge occurring.

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".

linguae 12 minutes ago | parent

Alan Kay (of Smalltalk fame) has a similar, related explanation: computing is a pop culture with little regard for the past (https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/bbm:978-3-319-90008-7/...). There are thousands, maybe millions, of developers who have little knowledge of the history of our field. I’ve found this true even of graduates from highly-ranked computer science bachelor’s programs. Think of all of the current-day LLM researchers and engineers who have never heard of Minsky, McCarthy, Lisp machines, and other aspects of the history of AI before we learned that attention was all we needed.

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.

dchest 1 hour ago | parent

My favorite thing about this is a checkbox in Xcode's Interface Builder (or whatever it's called now) for menu items image — "Only for macOS 26".

minimaxa 1 hour ago | parent

You first? Lol

Art vs. minimalism in design

Icons are today's form of hieroglyphs for communication?

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ripharamberip 1 hour ago | parent

I don't quite understand. Icons by default obviously is stupid. But meaningful icons for actions such as copy and paste seems like a very good idea to me. Personally I think there are not enough icons in MacOS right click menus for example. For me an icon makes it much easier to find the action I want to hse

calvinmorrison 1 hour ago | parent

Click the triple lines

The what

Next to the floppy

The what

The hamburger!!

Are you high?

itishappy 23 minutes ago | parent

The previous post:

https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2025/icons-in-menus/

A related post linked to by the previous post:

https://tonsky.me/blog/tahoe-icons/

emadabdulrahim 1 hour ago | parent

One of my pet peeves is deleting an item is "Move to Trash". With no trash icon, I want labels to front-load the key word so the menu/list is scannable.

farmin 58 minutes ago | parent

The windows 11 right click menu should revert as well. It’s like a menu over a menu. You need 2 clicks to get to what you need.

__natty__ 47 minutes ago | parent

IMO Windows 7 was peak user experience.

vor_ 40 minutes ago | parent

I can't stand that keyboard shortcuts for menu items are the same color as the disabled menu item color. It's mixing two meanings for the same color in the same UI element. Despite this being the style for years, I still have a split-second interpretation of non-interactivity every time I see it.

kingforaday 29 minutes ago | parent

> "putting an icon in every menu item by default which shipped with macOS Tahoe — but now it’s gone in Golden Gate"

They needed to make room for Siri.

BurningFrog 24 minutes ago | parent

When the Mac UI took over (some of) the world, many thought it was because of the icons, so they put icons all over their UIs.

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.

inventor7777 23 minutes ago | parent

Ironically, I kind of liked the icons in the menus.

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.

insin 20 minutes ago | parent

What are the odds the next version of macOS reverts most of what happened in Tahoe? After having it forced on my work MacBook, I will not willingly install that trash UI on any device I own.

nercht12 14 minutes ago | parent

Does anyone have a list of guidelines for good UI design that they would recommend? As I have to design UI myself, I'd be quite interested. Personally, I do favor a mix in my UI: icons for obvious-or-frequently-used stuff (like Save, Undo, Help, Sort A-Z, etc, all of which usually have standard icons (except for Save now)) and plain text for things that can't be expressed by icon (like "Refactor XYZ").