Menu icons, information architecture failures

Jason Snell returns to the show to discuss the 2025 Six Colors Apple Report Card, MacOS 26 Tahoe, Apple Creator Studio, along with what we expect/hope for in next week’s Apple product announcements.

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Transcripts: Unofficial but surprisingly good.

Links:

• Apple in 2025: The Six Colors Report Card.
• Kieran Healy, in a post at Six Colors published after we recorded the show: “Charting the Vibes in the 2025 Apple Report Card”.
• Kieran Healy’s homepage/weblog.
• My 2025 Apple Report Card.
• Upgrade: “The Shifting Sands of Liquid Glass”, wherein Jason and Myke discuss this year’s report card, and Jason makes rascally comments supporting MacOS 26 Tahoe. (And Myke isn’t much better.)
• Apple’s July 2025 announcement of the Apple Manufacturing Academy in Detroit.
• Derek Sivers, in 2005: “Ideas Are Just a Multiplier of Execution”.
• ChangeTheHeaders — a Safari extension I convinced Jeff Johnson to build, which, among other things, allows me never to be served WebP images in lieu of PNG or JPEG.
  • StopTheMadness — the older sibling, companion Safari Extension to ChangeTheHeaders that gives you explicit control over all sorts of web features, on a per-website basis. (I conflated the two during the show.)
• WebP.
• Mac Launchers:
  • LaunchBar (my favorite, and until Tahoe, Jason’s too).
  • Alfred.
  • Raycast.
  • Tuna.
  • Quicksilver.
• Incomplete list of what’s wrong with MacOS 26 Tahoe:
  • Terrible app icons.
  • The terrible idea to include inscrutable, inconsistent icons next to just about every menu item in every app, as documented by Jim Nielsen and Nikita Prokopov, and linked to by yours truly here and here, respectively.
  • Norbert Heger: “The Struggle of Resizing Windows on macOS Tahoe” — and a follow-up.
  • Daring Fireball: “Why It’s Difficult to Resize Windows on MacOS 26 Dyehoe”.
  • Daring Fireball: “Bad Dye Job”.
• Stephen Hackett’s MacOS Screenshot Library at 512 Pixels.
• Steve Krug’s classic book, “Don’t Make Me Think”.
• The Appearance Manager and the themes that never actually shipped for classic Mac OS.
• Comparing Alan Dye’s horseshitty introduction of Liquid Glass at WWDC 2025 to Steve Jobs’s introduction of Aqua back in 2000.
• Manu Cornet’s 2011 classic: “Organizational Charts In Major Tech”.

This episode of The Talk Show was edited by Caleb Sexton.