Very interesting article on how apple’s icon and style guidelines shaped the look of app icons, I especially liked this part:
The shape of apps is a squircle. And it has been proven to work for everyone. Companies can use their logo as an app icon. Designers can create something specifically for the platform. And both of these get to look like an app. Whether people consider the squircle a container or a canvas, this uniform appearance communicates its function: a squircle represents an app, just like how a piece of paper represents a digital document, or a folder represents, well, a folder.
Semantically, there’s something really beautiful about that. As an icon designer, I appreciate that different types of things have visual distinction.
And I agree! Having different shapes mean different, clear things is quite valuable, especially in MacOS, where having executables all around your home directory is more common.





















Not really, it’s like building your own furniture, cool, but far from practical and not worth it for most people.
The only way it would help the cause is by decentralising a service that’s mostly on one host, like bluesky, but that’s not a problem on lemmy, and the main advantage can be done by switching to a more niche instance (lemmy.world -> lemdro.id / bsky.app -> eurosky)