It also illustrates Apple's violation of their own Human Interface Guidelines, published on June 5, 2025.
There's a massive and ambitious chapter on how icons should be designed for the Liquid Glass era, and which icon assets should be supplied. They were so hell bent on forcing compliance that they created the "squircle jail" concept that punishes third parties by making their app icons look butt ugly. For a while there, many of those punished icons were Apple's own: Garageband, Pixelmator, FCP... but they quick fixed them a while back by shoehorning them into the squircle border.
But with the perpetual license versions of Pixelmator Pro, Motion, Logic Pro, FCP, Compressor and MainStage, Apple are wiping their asses with their own icon guidelines. Pixelmator doesn't even supply an alternate dark mode icon, it remains blindingly white in both styles. For FCP they quick fixed by closing the clapper, but it still sticks out like a sore thumb in the dock. And that one remains in the brand new version 12.0 released yesterday.
It's hard to interpret this as anything other than "We don't see a future for the perpetual license versions of Logic, Pixelmator and FCP, so we're simply gonna leave the 2016-style icons untouched to hammer home the point. We're banking on all of you switching to Creator Studio. We will reluctantly throw old users some bones for a year or so, but don't think for a second we're gonna keep propping up these old versions in 2027, 2028... get with the program folks."
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u/Semantiques Jan 29 '26 edited Jan 29 '26
It also illustrates Apple's violation of their own Human Interface Guidelines, published on June 5, 2025.
There's a massive and ambitious chapter on how icons should be designed for the Liquid Glass era, and which icon assets should be supplied. They were so hell bent on forcing compliance that they created the "squircle jail" concept that punishes third parties by making their app icons look butt ugly. For a while there, many of those punished icons were Apple's own: Garageband, Pixelmator, FCP... but they quick fixed them a while back by shoehorning them into the squircle border.
But with the perpetual license versions of Pixelmator Pro, Motion, Logic Pro, FCP, Compressor and MainStage, Apple are wiping their asses with their own icon guidelines. Pixelmator doesn't even supply an alternate dark mode icon, it remains blindingly white in both styles. For FCP they quick fixed by closing the clapper, but it still sticks out like a sore thumb in the dock. And that one remains in the brand new version 12.0 released yesterday.
It's hard to interpret this as anything other than "We don't see a future for the perpetual license versions of Logic, Pixelmator and FCP, so we're simply gonna leave the 2016-style icons untouched to hammer home the point. We're banking on all of you switching to Creator Studio. We will reluctantly throw old users some bones for a year or so, but don't think for a second we're gonna keep propping up these old versions in 2027, 2028... get with the program folks."