Category: Design

I’ve been running iOS 26 for a while now, and there’s something that has been bugging me. The Messages app in CarPlay is a disaster:

I took some time to edit my friends and family out of this screenshot, but the layout and conversation names are exactly as they appear in real life.

Here are some of my issues:

• It’s great that CarPlay’s Messages app now respects pinned conversations, but displaying them in anything but the 3-across grid from iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, and macOS breaks muscle memory in the one context where muscle memory is the most important.
• Truncated names look terrible. I understand it on the Apple Watch, but even on the 7-inch screen in my Tacoma, there should be room to see first and last names. Making the favorites larger — and preserving their order — would help fix this.¹
• The unread badges should be in a consistent location. CarPlay shows badges for favorites to the upper-right of the image, whereas conversations in the list below have them on the left. This is something done only in CarPlay; every other Messages app shows unread dots to the left of the conversation name.
• The “Messages” label at the top of the screen is off-centered.

All of this adds up to an interface that feels mostly forgotten. Messages should be consistent across platforms, and I hope Apple takes some time to readdress this before shipping iOS 26 this fall. Right now it looks like an Android phone app that got installed on a tablet.

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Juli Clover at MacRumors spotted the change:

The existing icon still resembled a hard disk drive, but the new icon looks like a modern solid state drive. Apple’s Macs stopped using hard disk drives starting more than a decade ago. The low-cost 21.5-inch iMac was the last Mac that had a hard drive component, as it used Apple’s SSD + HDD Fusion Drive. All current Macs use SSDs.

I will miss the old icon, but as Clover points out, spinning drives are long gone for most Mac users. The new icon feels more modern and fits in much better with the rest of Tahoe’s icons:

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I have a new favorite Mastodon account to follow.

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Another fun old Apple video to kick off the week:

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Tom Warren has the details:

The Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) has held strong in Windows for nearly 40 years, but that’s about to change. Microsoft revealed earlier this year that it was overhauling its BSOD error message in Windows 11, and the company has now confirmed that it will soon be known as the Black Screen of Death. The new design drops the traditional blue color, frowning face, and QR code in favor of a simplified black screen.

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John Gruber, responding to my article celebrating Tahoe Beta 2’s new Finder icon:

I’m going to strongly disagree here. The Tahoe beta 2 Finder icon is slightly better, but seeing it this way makes it obvious that the problem with the Tahoe Finder icon isn’t whether it’s dark/light or light/dark from left to right. It’s that with this Tahoe design it’s not 50/50. It’s the appliqué — the right side (the face in profile) looks like something stuck on top of a blue face tile. That’s not the Finder logo.

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In the wake of Apple’s Liquid Glass announcements at WWDC, I took some time and rewatched the Macworld San Francisco Keynote from 2000, when Steve Jobs introduced the world to the Aqua user interface:

Here’s how Apple PR wrote about it at the time:

“Mac OS X will delight consumers with its simplicity and amaze professionals with its power,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s iCEO. “Apple’s innovation is leading the way in personal computer operating systems once again.”

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If you missed my previous post on the topic, the first version of Tahoe had the dark blue on the right side of the Finder icon, which was criminal.

Our 14-day national nightmare is over. As of Developer Beta 2, the Finder icon in macOS Tahoe has been updated to reflect 30 years of tradition:

Now, the background material is blue, with the face on the right side of the icon using a white glassy material. I think this looks pretty good:

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David Smith:

I was fortunate enough to get one of the Design Labs late last week, which meant that I spent Friday morning frantically doing as many first-pass updates to the new design as I could. I then was able to discuss many of them during the lab and learned a bunch.

Like David, I was thinking that Liquid Glass should be applied in a bunch of places, but as he writes, that’s not quite the case:

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D. Griffin Jones:

I would like to present, in response to the widely criticized Finder icon in macOS Tahoe Developer Beta 1, the icon I created in literally fifteen minutes with Pixelmator Pro and Apple’s own Icon Composer. Apple could very easily keep the icon’s historical appearance without compromising the Liquid Glass aesthetic by just… flipping the color palette.

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Looks like Finder isn’t the only Mac application to see big icon changes in macOS Tahoe. Poor Otto had his arms, legs, and pipe taken away:

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Something jumped out at me in the macOS Tahoe segment of the WWDC keynote today: the Finder icon is reversed.

You can see that in the image below. On the left is macOS Sequoia, and on the right is macOS Tahoe:

I know I am going to sound old and fussy, but Apple needs to roll this back.

Some History

The Finder logo has changed over the years, but the dark side has been on the left forever. Here it is on the boot screen on System 7.5.3, which shipped in 1996, an early version of the logo in color:

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