As the icons progress to the left, identification increasingly depends on colour and shape. Since there are a limited number of colours and shapes, they tend to get reused. This increasingly leads to mis-identification of icons.

This is particularly true for the visually impaired and some elderly and neuro-atypical people.

What matters in an icon is uniqueness. Only the skeuomorphic icons to the right can be unique enough for proper identification.

Trendiness of visual appearance has no place in the functionality of a complex machine. If you think it does, I submit the following for your consideration: you. are. a. monster.

Yes, I said that and I mean it. You followers of Jony Ive and his ilk are assholes. The rest of us don't give a shit about your design schools. We just want to be able to click on the right thing.

Hate me, but it's true.

> identification increasingly depends on colour and shape.

If only they would stop there. These design terrorists won't even let us have that much; Google's Android apps all use the same 4-color-rainbow scheme. Not only did they get rid of the ability to visually identify the icons by color, but you can't even really identify them by shape because applying four highly constrasting colors to a simple shape breaks up its silhouette into something that is not quickly recognisable at a glance. It's as though they're intentionally trying to make the icons have as little functional utility as they possibly can.

The worst part is, when computer screens were monochrome or had only 16 colors, (and perhaps 16 pixels a side) to work with, designers managed to create more distinct icons or pictograms. Perhaps they may not have looked as elegant as a set of items on a collector's display case, but they helped the end user quickly zero in on the part of the screen they were interested in.

Google's icons are actively hostile to usability. I honestly found myself using their apps less because I couldn't pick the one I wanted out from the rainbow soup.

Google's icons are basically just different shapes of the same rainbow camouflage.

While I agree that Google's is not a good approach, that is not what has gone on here.

> This is particularly true for the visually impaired and some elderly and neuro-atypical people.

The Slack and (Google) Photos icons on Android look so visually similar in the sea of green, blue, red, and yellow icons on Android that I frequently open the wrong application. Using my phone sucks.

Not sure if this will help you, but I keep just one homescreen page with my most-used apps on it, and I've developed muscle memory for all of them. When I set up a new device, I put the same apps in the same spots. Other than the inherent inaccuracy of touchscreens, I could probably open any of them blindly. I also only fill up the bottom half or so of the screen, so they're all easy enough to reach.

I don't know if you can change the icons with the default launcher, but you can with Nova Launcher. I changed pocket's icon to a taco. Not to make it visually distinct but because the placement of the icon on the background made it look like it was going into someone's mouth and I thought it was funny. Anyway, opportunities exist to improve your phone experience without needing to depend on Google to come to its senses.

Requires MacOS 15 or later, so it won't run on my machine.

Does it really require MacOS 15, or have you just joined Apple in destroying the planet with relentless unnecessary upgrades and ignorantly set your requirements in XCode?

That’s fair. The app is built and validated against the current MLX / Metal stack and a few other dependencies. Supporting older macOS versions would mean untested or degraded behavior, which I’m avoiding for now.

Well, just use your USB spectrometer, of course.

...you do have a USB spectrometer, don't you?

I have mine in my bedside drawer. I use it almost as often as my multimeter.

Does yours measure wavelengths that short? A lot of low cost spectrometers don't, because inexpensive glass and plastic optics transmit visible and near-IR radiation but significantly impair shorter UV wavelengths.

Do you have a recommendation for an inexpensive one? I’ve worked with OceanOptics Flame series, but they’re not exactly cheap, and their software was crap.

I need to get one :)

I thought I was having a stroke while reading that, and then I realized it was just AI slop.

Not really from scratch if it uses the SDL2 library. I'd try it if I had the first clue how to resolve this dependency without obtaining a university degree in the subject. Or if the README gave the slightest hint about how to proceed.

It may not be the flex you think it is to leave the SDL2 part as an "exercise for the reader". I don't think it would really affect the size of the data hoard on github if everyone who used an obscure and difficult-to-install library as the basis of their project explained how to get it. Isn't gatekeeping fun and cool?

Nothing any of us have ever done is “from scratch”. Even a carpenter who planted an acorn and waited 80 years to harvest the wood to make a chair probably didn’t mine the iron ore used to make her axe.

Here is how you install SDL2 on a Mac (copy and pasted from Google):

  brew install sdl2 sdl2_image sdl2_mixer sdl2_ttf

Can it do anything useful? From the prompts it looks like a learning exercise only that can generate nonsense for toddlers.

I get that it is a learning exercise, but I find learning exercises to be a complete waste of time if the end point isn't something useful.

Segfault at start on 14.7.7.

Or, and follow me for a minute here, what if everything people tell each other without supporting evidence is just nonsense, particularly when it is self-aggrandizing and intended to control others by emotional manipulation?

What, and I'm just blue-skying this here, if we're a random occurrence consisting of locally decreased entropy evolved on a chaotic substrate?

Or maybe, and this is just a what-if, we're just stochastic phenomena telling ridiculous stories to each other in a doomed and nonsensical search for meaning?

I'm not saying that humanity is the stupidest thing that ever existed and called itself sentient, but maybe think about that possibility for just one second before tripping off into mushroom-level miracle stories.

I merged https://github.com/angristan/MacThrottle/pull/2 to make it work on macOS 15. macOS 14 probably works, feel free to try it out and open a PR to lower the required version if it's the case