Post #3892305

2026-07-17 09:44 UTC

Was thinking earlier about games with action bars, like World of Warcraft, where each item is represented by a full-bleed illustration, masked to a chiseled square— and how gamers are making split-second decisions about which to activate, how long the cooldown is, how many are available. And yeah, there is spacial recognition, but I’ve not heard any gamers say they need distinct silhouettes to differentiate between these. But I keep hearing how it’s allegedly harder to identify apps in a Dock?

Replies (1)

@tbortels@infosec.exchange 2026-07-17 12:45

@louie@pdx.social I can say from experience that for the commonly used actions in World of Warcraft, we no more look at the icons than we look at the keycaps when touch type - the icons are bound to keystrokes and it's muscle memory, we could and did play without looking at them at all, as we looked at the tactical situation. We look at them when we set up our bindings, and honestly we look at the mouseover text, not the graphics. Personally, right now on my mac, day to day my muscle memory is about position in the dock for frequently used items. My browser is far left - librewolf for my home machine, chrome for the work laptop, but both far left and muscle memory. Apple itself belies any concept that icons convey a ton of meaning by switching the rules every few years. The squircle is the new fad - until it's not. Honestly it doesn't feel like it's about the user at all, it's about style and branding and what Apple wants rather than what is best for the user or developers.

Open ##3892303