This was quite an interesting read, even though I didn't understand some of the details. QuickLook is basically tampering with the accuracy/completeness of the item by using a border and rounded corners. Whoever designed this may have believed that this looks nicer, but there's no good reason to remove information (even if a little bit) while displaying things.

Apple provides basic symbols for some of their binaries–particularly older ones. I assume the default setting used to be to not strip those, or some kind soul picked that option and nobody revisited it. Unfortunately a lot of new code is shipped stripped by default :(

You might be thinking of Objective-C metadata, which contains information about classes, protocols and categories. Unlike symbols, metadata can’t be stripped.

be conscious of it, when the shiny thing appears, write it down on a piece of paper and tell yourself you'll come back to it if it's interesting enough. At the end of the day, throw away the paper :)

This was a great article. I've been playing around with Smalltalk for a few weeks, which I understand is like the spiritual ancestor of Objective-C, and this reminded me a lot of that. It's probably mostly down to the oddball calling convention, but I wonder if other GUIs are as easy to introspect and patch.

You have just improved my life significantly. Thank you. I filed it under "good things we had but were taken away", and now it's under "Great things we have". For future travellers: It's not enabled by default in Ubuntu. Gotta apt that thing.

I much prefer it, fwiw. Since MacOS apps have their settings in-app, I rarely use Settings.app and so I could never remember where to find things in the 2D grid of the old app. Now things are much more discoverable, since it’s a 1D layout that I scroll linearly. Even more so because there’s somewhat of a correspondence with iOS, whose Settings.app I use all the time (since iOS apps don’t have settings in-app). I say this as someone who has used macOS for almost 20 years.

I agree. The new settings app is one of few places where new design/reorganisation is actually better and people are annoyed just because of broken habits. Whats really bad though is how individual settings in the app are gradualy disappearing.

I never even try to find things in the 2D grid of the old System Preferences app. I just use Spotlight, or any number of Spotlight replacements that support searching for prefPanes. I say this as someone who has used macOS for almost but less than 20 years: perhaps my first introduction to OS X was Tiger so I'm more accustomed to Spotlight?

To me, it seems like the spirit of Jony Ive is still around. Seriously, you should email Craig Federighi about this with (any links to) criticisms or images showing comparisons. Sometimes Apple takes action only when people high up are alerted.

There's an accessibility setting to show button borders in toolbars. I turned it on the day I got my current Mac and now keep forgetting that it's not the default.

I'm puzzled someone in the macOS department made it a priority to fiddle with adding some border to QuickLook when there's so much stuff broken in macOS (and QuickLook itself)

Well that was an interesting journey. I don’t think rounded corners would bother me enough to go digging that deep, but I appreciate that it bothered someone enough that they went to the trouble and wrote it up.

My main objection to something like this (and cheers this person went to great lengths to fix it) is that as shipped you can't tell the difference between an image with square corners that got rounded off by QuickLook, or an image legitimately with rounded corners that looks like QuickLook. It shouldn't have been necessary to go to such trouble to turn that option off, one which will easily interfere with the workflow of a graphics professional.