Sequoia on Melabit

macOS Tahoe: let's free the icons!

Mon, 24 Nov 2025 18:00:00 +0000

It is not just a matter of disk icons. As soon as I saw what Tahoe had done to the icons of many applications installed on my Mac, I decided I had to do something to restore the original look of the icons.

I tried several times, using Apple’s home‑automation tools, Automator and Shortcuts, but nothing worked and there was always some function missing. Or maybe I’m just not very good at using them.

Then I discovered fileicon, a library available on Homebrew that lets you programmatically modify file and folder icons. With that, the problem was practically solved.

– Source: Hennie Stander on Unsplash.

The squircle jail

With Tahoe Apple introduced a new icon format that now has to conform to the default shape of a squircle, a cross between a square and a circle (or a superellipse, for those who enjoy mathematics).

Apple redesigned its application icons to fit the new format and the aesthetic standards of Liquid Glass, although the final effect is often quite debatable. Even John Gruber doesn’t spare criticism of this aspect, going so far as to call the designer of the Automator icon a hack who never should have even gotten a job working at Apple (and how can one say he’s wrong?).

The problem, however, isn’t just that many Apple application icons lost meaning or are outright ugly, but also that many third‑party application icons don’t fit properly into the jail represented by the squircle.

It happens with all those applications that have beatifully-crafted icons, such as Audio Hijack, BBEdit, Alfred, Amphetamine, VLC, NValt, Gemini 2, HandBrake, Keyboard Maestro and so on.

These are all well-known applications built by medium-to-large teams. Yet overe these months they haven’t deemed it necessary (or useful) to adapt their gorgeous icons to the new standard imposed by Tahoe.

And imagine if the smaller developers, or those building cross‑platform applications where a unique, recognizable look is essential, have done it either.

What happens in those cases? Tahoe automatically shrinks the icons of these applications and encloses them within the squircle. Moreover, almost as if to remind developers to hurry up and comply with Cupertino’s dictates, it places these icons on a gray background which calling ugly would be an understatement.

In the first beta of Tahoe the final result was simply hawful, as you can see in the images from my first article on Tahoe. Moreover, this brutal treatment made some icons almost invisible (Tunnelblick, QGIS, OpenMV IDE, Thonny).

In the public version of Tahoe, released in September, and in the subsequent updates, Apple toned down some of the transparency excesses of Liquid Glass and also lightened the gray background of the icons that refused to fit within the squircle.

The final effect is undoubtedly better.¹ However, the gray‑bordered icons are still ugly and much smaller than they could (and should) be.

Can we do something to bring back the look they had before the Tahoe treatment?

Let’s Free the Icons

Obviously the answer is yes, otherwise I wouldn’t have written this post.

The manual method is described very well here and requires right‑clicking the application icon, selecting Get Info and replacing the icon thumbnail with the one that lives inside the application bundle itself.

To find it, right‑click the application icon again, choose Show Package Contents, click on the Contents folder, then on Resources and look for the file with the .icns extension (keeping in mind that some applications may contain more than one such file) and drag it onto the thumbnail in the Get Info window.

It sounds complicated but, with a bit of practice, it becomes fairly quick. This manual method works fine if you only have a few applications to fix. But if, as in my case, there are more than 20 applications, it quickly becomes tedious and error-prone. And, as if that weren’t enough, you’ll probably have to repeat the process every time the application is updated.

Better to let your Mac do everything automatically. And that’s where IconLib comes in.

IconLib

IconLib is a simple Bash script that automates the whole process, relying on the fileicon library to actually perform the icon modification. All you have to do is provide it with a file containing the list of applications to update – and sometimes the name of the .icns file too, because, darn it!, many developers use icon filenames that have nothing to do with the application name and often bundle multiple .icns files inside the application bundle – and it does the rest.

If you’re not happy with the result, you can run the script again with the -u switch (for undo), restoring the Tahoe icons.

You can also run IconLib on a list of applications, and then later edit the list to restore the icons for only the selected applications, leaving the others in their pre-Tahoe state.

All the details are in the README file of the GitHub repository and I won’t repeat them here. Instead I’ll just show how the icons look after fixing them with IconLib.

Even though the old icons don’t follow the stylistic dictates of the squircle, the richer, less constrained look and the absence of the gray background make me prefer them, at least until developers roll out new icons better suited for Tahoe.

Bare Bones Software just did it for BBEdit. The fact that such a major software house took so long indicates it’s no easy task, or that developers hoped (in vain) for months that Apple would backtrack. And if BBEdit took that long, it’s hard to imagine other cross‑platform or niche applications adapting quickly.

Conclusions

IconLib is not a must‑have program at all and it serves an admittedly narrow audience.

First of all, it is useful for people like me, who have many programs installed on their Macs, often produced by indie developers or by specialist teams that lack the time, desire, or expertise to deal with subtle graphics issues (think, for example, of Tunnelblick, for managing VPNs, Thonny, a must‑have for those who program microcontrollers in Python, or JASP, one of the best statistical programs for those who know little about statistics).

It also helps anyone who is dissatisfied with the jail that Tahoe enforces around the formerly magnificent icons of many applications.

Finally, it assists those who think Apple is overdoing this trend in macOS, which increasingly feels like an offshoot of iOS rather than a standalone system deserving its own life.

And lastly, it serves those who think Apple is going too far with this drift in macOS, which increasingly seems more like a by-product of iOS than an operating system worth its own independent existence.

While they were at it, couldn’t they have used a white background? ↩︎

macOS Tahoe, again

Mon, 10 Nov 2025 18:00:00 +0000

After less than two months since the official release, Tahoe seems poised to become another one of those macOS versions to be forgotten, like Lion, Mavericks, Sierra, Catalina, or Ventura.

Aside from Liquid Glass, which I’ll discuss in a moment, what does Tahoe have that’s memorable? There’s the telephone‑call filter, which actually belongs more to iOS than macOS and still has many limitations, and there are also improvements to Spotlight search. But is it really worth upgrading an operating system just for that?¹

Liquid Glass should be the real novelty of macOS 26 Tahoe, but Macworld first compared it to Vista and then declared it dead in the cradle. If Macworld says so – not PCWorld, not Linux Pro -— there’s definitely something to be concerned about!

Moreover, Liquid Glass went wrong from the very beginning, when some joker thought of inverting the colors of the Finder icon. Without any particular reason, just for sake of change.

The criticism was so destructive that Apple had to backtrack quickly, restoring the historic design of the Finder icon, the one we’ve known for thirty years and that is one of macOS’s distinctive marks.

Haowever, when it came to disk icons Apple managed to do even worse. In the very early betas of Tahoe the disk icons were identical to the ones we’ve been used to for years: the image of a mechanical hard‑disk for internal drives and a rounded orange rectangular prism for external drives. Very skeuomorphic, but also very clear and even pleasant to look at, with all those little screws, colored LEDs, and even a label warning us not to open the disk.

With the fifth beta of Tahoe, Apple throws the old hard‑disk icon into the trash and replaces it with a more stylized image that should represent the SSD installed in all Macs for years.² While it’s at it, it also freshens up the other disk icons (external, network, and removable) and the result is shown below, where the top row displays the disk icons up to Sequoia and the earliest Tahoe betas, while the bottom row shows the updated icons.

– Source: Ars Technica.

Soon after, the internal‑disk icon loses all front elements, that perhaps were meant to represent ventilation slots or activity LEDs, and becomes as minimal as the others.

Admittedly, the new icons are bland, having lost all detail in favour of greater simplicity, just as has happened to the rest of the graphical interface built around Liquid Glass. But so far that’s fine.

What’s incomprehensible is why the icons were redesigned to appear narrower in the front and wider in the back, defying the laws of perspective and how we’ve been accustomed to seeing them up to Sequoia. It’s merely an optical illusion; in reality (I checked) the icons have perfectly parallel sides, but the play of light and shadow makes them look odd and out of place.

The effect worsens when the icons are placed side-by-side, because the differing reflections make the gray internal‑disk icon look more natural and less distorted compared to the external units.

Now, I can understand the need to adopt a homogeneous and well-defined graphic language, but wasn’t it possible to design icons that looked more natural? Susan Kare managed it with just 32×32 pixels, how can we think that today’s Apple designers, who today have immense fields of pixels at their disposal, can’t do the same?

If Cupertino can’t even produce a convincing disk icon, how can we trust that Tahoe and Liquid Glass are serious projects?

The annual macOS update cycle is good for marketing, but from a technical point of view it makes very little sense. Not only because it’s hard to invent truly novel features for each annual release of macOS, but also because this relentless quest for novelty distracts from equally important activities such as fixing bugs in the current version and optimizing system performance. ↩︎
Actually, the new internal‑disk icon has nothing to do with an actual internal SSD image, but we won’t be too pedantic about it. ↩︎

Apple, we fixed some issues: from Sonoma to Sequoia

Tue, 04 Feb 2025 06:00:00 +0000

– Image generated by Microsoft Designer AI.

In the past few months, I have written four posts about macOS Sonoma bugs (a complete list is at the end of this post) because I found it unbelievable that this macOS version was released with such glaring issues in the Finder and in disk management.

In the latest Sonoma versions, some reported bugs – such as the erratic emptying of the Trash, the default file name when virtually printing a web page to PDF, or the failure to display a new file or folder in Snap to Grid mode — have been fixed, but the most annoying ones remained untouched.

A couple of days ago, after testing macOS Sequoia on a spare machine, I decided to upgrade my home Mac Mini M1 to Sequoia 15.3. To my great satisfaction, I can say that all, or almost all, of the major bugs reported in my previous posts have disappeared.¹

Bug #1: If we have a folder full of files and drag icons below the bottom of the window while holding down the CMD (⌘) key, the bottom of the window now correctly expands to show the lower icons without making them look like they have disappeared. The only exception is when the folder does not have an active scrollbar because it contains too few files. In this case, the icons still disappear, just like in Sonoma, but now you can simply click the < icon in the upper left corner of the toolbar and return to the original folder to restore full file visibility.

Bug #2: If we have two overlapping Finder windows in a Space and use the CTRL(⌃)-1, CTRL–2 (and so on) shortcuts to move the top window from one Space to another, upon returning to the original Space the traveling window now appears on top of the one that stayed put, as it should. The same applies when more than two overlapping windows are present.

Bug #3: The flickering issue that was highly visible in Sonoma when dragging a Finder window from one Space to another has now disappeared. Seeing such a thing was simply outrageous, not only because it was happening on machines powered by the powerful Apple Silicon processors, but also because before Sonoma such flickering had never been seen on much, much less powerful machines, like the Intel-based MacBook Air.

Bug #4: Sequoia has also fixed the bug related to the popup window that disappeared faster than a Formula 1 car when connecting a USB stick to a laptop, but I had already written about that.

Bug #5: Finder has finally returned to normal when displaying folders on an external USB drive containing hundreds of files. The sluggishness (to put it mildly) experienced in Sonoma was truly frustrating, and I was fed up with having to wait dozens of seconds every time I accessed a somewhat full external folder.

Bug #6: But the real highlight of Sequoia, the one that earns it a solid B at the end of the first term, is that, for the first time in years, the macOS update did not mess up the arrangement of icons in the Applications folder. There will be very few people, like me, who prefer to keep installed applications organized visually rather than alphabetically. But I still want to represent these few users and sincerely thank Apple developers for a fix we had been waiting for through countless macOS versions.²

What else can I say? I am really pleased that Apple has managed to fix so many embarrassing Sonoma bugs with Sequoia. Especially because the ones I reported were not related to exotic features of the operating system or of the file system, but rather easily visible issues for anyone using the graphical user interface of macOS.

I doubt that someone in Cupertino is avidly reading Melabit. But this also means that the issues reported in my previous posts were real and evident to other users and Apple developers alike, not just the imaginary concerns of an overly meticulous user.

The core problem remains: it makes no sense to continue with this policy of annual macOS (and iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, etc.) releases, each packed with shiny, but mostly useless new features that are inevitably under-tested and may introduce new bugs into the core of the system, without allowing enough time to fix existing bugs.

An annual release cycle may be great for marketing, but is it really what users really need?

For those interested in my saga about macOS Sonoma’s bugs (and more), here are links to previous installments:

So much so that soon afterwards, I also updated the Mac Studio I use for work. ↩︎
It seems clear to me that there was no technical reason behind this issue (such as the strict separation between the default macOS applications and those installed by the user), but simply a lack of attention to a detail that may be minor, yet is quite annoying for those who rely on it. ↩︎

Apple, we have a problem: a new macOS Sonoma bug

Thu, 14 Nov 2024 06:00:00 +0000

– Image generated by Microsoft Designer AI.

Sonoma’s bugs never fail to surprise, and here I describe a fresh one, which luckily has been fixed in Sequoia.

Take a new MacBook Air or Pro, where you’ve just installed Sonoma, or a MacBook where you erased the startup disk before installing Sonoma (what happens when simply updating from a previous version might be different).

Try inserting a USB stick or external USB drive (or even an SD card, when available). What you’ll see is this:

That is, you’ll see practically nothing, even in slow motion.

In theory, macOS should display a pop-up window asking the user whether they want to allow the connection of the USB accessory (as Apple calls it) to the Mac. The problem is, as shown in the video, the pop-up disappears faster than a Formula 1 car.

I must say that the first few times this happened, I didn’t even see it. Only after several unsuccessful and increasingly frustrating attempts, a very quick shadow on the screen made me suspect an overly zealous disappearing window.

This bug occurs with macOS Sonoma 14.6; I have no idea if previous versions are affected. To work around the issue, you need to go to System Settings under Privacy & Security and change the Allow accessory connections option from Ask Every Time, or Ask for New Accessories, to Always.

Once the USB drive is connected, for added security, you can return to selecting the Ask for New Accessories option—just remember to repeat the procedure every time you insert a new USB stick (or external drive).

At first glance, it seems strange that the consent request for connecting new accessories only appears on MacBooks and not on desktop Macs.

But thinking about it, it makes sense. I don’t believe macOS developers want to prevent us from connecting our own USB drives or those of people we know. Instead, I think they want to prevent someone from surreptitiously inserting a malicious USB stick (also known as a Rubber Ducky), which can now even be made at home with a low-cost Raspberry Pi Pico.

These sticks are programmable and can cause serious damage to a computer, from automatically transferring sensitive files onto the stick,¹ to erasing—if the programmer has the admin account password—the entire system disk.

It goes without saying that such an attack is more likely to happen on a MacBook, often left unattended, rather than on a desktop computer, which remains in more controlled environments like home or the office.

Including this type of security check in the operating system is therefore a great idea; what’s terrible is how it’s implemented in macOS Sonoma.

The good news is that in macOS Sequoia, the bug has been fixed, and the pop-up remains clearly visible on the screen until the user makes a choice.

For those interested in my saga on macOS Sonoma bugs (and more), here are links to previous posts:

It’s not just stealth aircraft designers at risk of this happening, as it could just as easily involve documents from a divorce case or a financial dispute. ↩︎