All of us rely on tone (brightness, lightness) to interpret what we see. Visual artists have gone to great lengths in tonal modelling, but macOS Tahoe offers only bleached-out white or blacked-out black.
human interface
Appearance modes and the effects of Accessibility settings exhibit different behaviours in Tahoe, compared with Sequoia. Illustrated in a simple app.
Tahoe is overwhelmingly about its human interface. It still has problems in providing reliable contrast between elements and tools in controls and windows contents, and sameness across platforms.
How to stop yourself mistakenly pressing the keyboard shortcut to quit an app (Command-Q) when all you want to do is close a window (Command-W).
To avoid your app’s icon going into the sin bin, replace it with one generated by Icon Composer. But that in turn requires overhauling some windows, and there’s a catch in NSLog waiting to get you.
Since 2007, Quick Look has provided us with faithful thumbnails and previews of images. Then in 2020 their corners were cropped, and that’s not getting any better with macOS 26 Tahoe.
The aspect ratio of my iPhone’s display is under half, and it’s pressed to display more than 5 words in each line of text. Yet Macs now use similar vertical alerts as those in iOS.
Originally alert boxes, these have brought us information, warnings and errors in different formats. Although they should be rare, macOS has used them increasingly, sometimes uninformatively.
Displaying rows containing text fields of widely varying length and content type is a challenge. SwiftUI List View can be an excellent solution as shown here.
The magic of Mac was how you could double-click a document and it opened in the right app. Now that works differently with LaunchServices, it offers me 70 apps to edit any text document. Can we return to magic please?
The Eclectic Light Company 