macOS Squircle Icons Are Fine

John Gruber, writing at Daring Fireball:

It’s one thing for Apple to force all of its own app icons into the same identical shape. That would be bad enough, because Apple’s own Mac apps are numerous and popular, and as the platform owner Apple necessarily sets the direction that many third-party apps follow. But it’s just downright spiteful to enforce it platform-wide. Apple decided they’re no longer going to create nice icons with unique, interesting, and most importantly, distinctive shapes — but they no longer allow third-party apps to either. It’s like Apple decided every single one of its own apps must wear a stupid-looking hat, and they put those stupid-looking hats on third-party apps too, whether the developers of those apps want them or not. Scratch that. Not hats but helmets. The mandatory squircle makes identifying apps at a glance harder in the same way that it’s difficult to identify individual people if they’re all wearing same-shaped helmets. Real helmets at least serve an important safety purpose. The squircles are like stupid unnecessary helmets.

To catch you up, in macOS Tahoe, there’s a mandate that all app icons shall be in a squircle (i.e., squarish circle, not rounded square) shape a la iOS. Gruber pulls quotes from longtime Mac developer Rogue Amoeba’s Paul Kafasis, former Ars Technica writer and podcaster John Siracusa, and designer Jim Nielsen who’s been curating icon collections for years. They all dislike Apple’s newish rule.

I’ll take the other side here and agree with Apple’s decision.

I really appreciate the artistry that goes into making icons. I made my first one in 1990, drawing it painstakingly pixel by pixel in ResEdit. Over the years I’ve made a few others for iOS, including one for my app, DesignScene. When I was at LEVEL Studios, it was our team behind the scenes creating many of the HTML5 interactive experiences for Apple.com and designing and rendering app icons for Apple and other developers. Before that I was in the Graphic Design Group within Apple where our production artists in the “Lava Lounge” rendered these app icons for print, often at high-enough resolutions for billboards. I knew exactly the immense amount of care that went into crafting these pieces of art that fit into 128 pixels by 128 pixels (which eventually increased to 1024 x 1024).

Some of my favorite icons over the years have had interesting shapes, like the truck for Transmit, the vise for Compressor, or the cute bird for Twitteriffic.

Old school Mac OS X icons for various apps. Sourced from macOS Icon Gallery by Jim Nielsen.

But I also recall clicking some icons and not being able to select them. Why? Because I was inaccurate in my click and instead my cursor landed in the empty space just outside the shape. Consider these icons for GarageBand, Unison, Wondershare Player, and Keynote. Cool and unique shapes, but their click targets could be problematic, especially that giant hole in the middle of Wondershare.

The user must click within the icon shape to select it. Clicking outside the shape is ignored.

Here is me, playing with Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger on Infinite Mac…

First up is Apple’s Automator icon. I tried to click just outside the robot shape and it didn’t register, despite the fact that when I clicked on the robot’s body, the gray square highlight includes that empty space. Same with the icon for Chess. Interestingly, when clicking inside the counter for the QuickTime icon, it worked. It also worked when I clicked just underneath the magnifying glass in the Sherlock icon.

If I recall correctly, developers could use a different mask for the click target to help users out. But I don’t think many did all the time, including Apple, which you can obviously see in the video above.

So in some sense, Apple is fixing an accessibility issue. It’s not a huge one. Users can invoke Spotlight to find and open apps now. And I certainly never launch apps by double-clicking their icons in the Finder anymore.

Developers and designers are already used to the squircle for iOS. Using the same in macOS seems to make sense to me. I’m fine with the uniform squircle icons for the Mac.