Last Year on My Mac: Look Back in Disbelief

Summary

If someone had told me 12 months ago what was going to happen this past year, I wouldn’t have believed them. Skipping swiftly past all the political, economic and social turmoil, I come to the interface changes brought in macOS Tahoe with Liquid Glass. After three months of strong feedback during beta-testing, I was disappointed when Tahoe was released on 15 September to see how little had been addressed. When 26.1 followed on 3 November it had only regressed, and 26.2 has done nothing. Here I summarise my opinions on where Tahoe’s overhaul has gone wrong. What goes round Almost all the content displayed in windows is best suited to rectangular views. Images, video, webpages and other text crave areas bounded by right angles. Gentle rounding on the corners, as in Sequoia, is fine, but the significantly increased radius enforced in Tahoe is a misfit. This either leads to cropping of contents, or reduction in size of the view and wasted space. Cropping is misleading, as seen in this enlarged view of a thumbnail image in the Finder’s Gallery view, compared to the larger version shown below. The thumbnail misrepresents what’s in the original. Among Apple’s claims for this new look is greater consistency. But two windows in the same app, both created using SwiftUI, can’t even share a common radius, as shown below in Providable running in macOS 26.2. Out of control Tahoe has also increased the size of its controls, without using that to improve their clarity. The best way to see that is in my Mallyshag demo app. This looks good in Sequoia above, but becomes a mess in Tahoe (below) because of its changed control dimensions. Those three buttons are significantly wider, so now overlap one another and are wider than the text box below. The user sees no benefit to this, though, as the text within the controls is identical. Iconoclasm App icons need to be both distinguishable and readily recalled. The first ensures that we can tell one from another, and relies on all the visual...