Comment by al_borland
19 hours ago
While I wholeheartedly agree, I suspect the required backgrounds are to create a uniform format between system, where VisionOS requires round icons for more reliable eye tracking.
It seems like every OS got a little harder to use in order to better vibe with VisionOS, the least popular platform they have.
While I applaud the commitment to building a new platform, I don’t like that’s is coming at the expense of the others.
I understand this logic, but at some point it makes sense to design the system for the millions of people on macs rather than make compromises for the sake of dozens of Vision Pro users.
For this reason I doubt this was actually why Apple did it.
A lot of confident guesswork is done at HN regarding companies' motivations.
> VisionOS requires round icons for more reliable eye tracking
I'm confused here. What do you think is the relationship between round icons and eye tracking?
They found having round icons made people look at the center, rather than the edges and corners. Since the UX relies entirely on where the user is looking, this made it more reliable.
I remember reading it in the HIG when VisionOS came out and everyone was complaining about the shape. I went looking to see if there was a reason, and there was.
That's interesting, but I think this is solvable in better ways. If the VisionOS icon grid doesn't have a voronoi hit map, then IMO they're doing a stupid. There's a _lot_ of space between icons in the grid. It should be plenty of distance to reliably determine that you're looking nearer to the center of a particular one.
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So what? Thats not MacOS.
I think things are fine on iOS. I don’t mind the rectangles, they fit the grid. That’s how it’s always been.
I don’t care about VisionOS. Circles are odd, whatever.
But the Mac shouldn’t be forced to lose great design because iOS was under different constraints almost 20 years ago. That’s just dumb.
They were trying to make a unified design language across all their operating systems. If iOS and VisionOS both have their icons sitting on uniformly shaped tiles, macOS would break the convention.
I don't like it, but I believe that's the reason why.
Oh I’m sure that’s why they did it. It’s not a good reason. It’s like saying all the food you eat should be beige.
Sure it’s more consistent, but at what cost? You lose all the benefits. It’s like Chesterton’s Fence, except it has a big sign on it saying “beware of bull” and there is a guy nearby saying “you don’t want to let that bull out dude, it’s vicious”.
But you want to take down the fence because it’s not the same style as the one on the pen for the chickens.
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Are you sure visionOS requires it? Having an icon be a few px smaller so a microphone can stick out, doesn't seem like a big deal for tracking.
The thing sticking outside of the icon draws the eye to it, which means your focus is at the edge instead of the center, which makes for a more error prone experience.
Since the eyes are the cursor, this is a problem. Desktop and mobile don’t have this issue.
Obvious solution, two different icons, round one for Vision OS, more shapely one for everyone else.
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> The thing sticking outside of the icon draws the eye to it, which means your focus is at the edge instead of the center, which makes for a more error prone experience.
And Apple decided this was a problem with icons, rather than a problem with the way they implemented their vision tracking? Believable, and laughable.
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Where you are looking should not be the cursor, that is obviously dumb. Should be where your nose is pointing.
Regardless, you don't need to make the hitboxes one-to-one with the graphics. Indeed, doing so tends to make for unreliable hitboxes, so most picking systems have two different, idealized enter and exit hitboxes for each icon.
VisionOS, at least as it stands today, will be dead before you know it. If you don't understand what I mean, look up the rumor about the future of Vision Pro.
What a waste of resource to invent the whole Tahoe "design language" only for nothing.
One thing I tend to give Apple a lot of credit for is having a longer term vision (no pun intended). When they release something they tend to stick with it, where others (Microsoft in particular) will kill products pretty fast if it doesn’t look like they are instant hits.
When trying to create a new category, customers need to have some faith it’s going to stick around and they won’t be abandoned. So it’s important to have that long term vision and conviction that the decisions made were the right ones.
That said, I bought the M5 Vision Pro and returned it after a week. It doesn’t feel like a product yet. Vision Pro as a future product might be questionable, but will they abandon spacial computing all together or switch to more of a true AR setup? I think real AR would be much better.
I think now that Cook is stepping down, we could see more change. Cooked seemed a little desperate to make sure Apple looked like an innovative company, when he clearly wasn’t a product guy. I don’t think a a full computer is needed on the face, that was the first mistake, they need a more purpose built device for the few things that make sense in the context of a HUD.
the Vision Pro is the modern day pippin. An ambitious idea that could have done well if not for the terrible execution
Also imo touchscreen Mac tap targets. Sigh.