I detest the modern trend of "grey-on-grey" hieroglyphics. Everything melts into some amorphous blob of whitespace with some scribbles on it, and you just have to magically know or painfully learn that this little scribble means "Sharpen" and this one means "Smudge". And god forbid we add a little color! Or detailed icons where I can look for an actual shape of something like "blue folder with yellow splotch", which my brain reinforces as meaning "Sharing Preferences" every time I use it since it says "Sharing" right underneath it.
If you download Pixelmator Pro on a Mac, on first launch (controlled by preference key `toolsOnboardingCompleted` in the plist), the default toolset on the right side of the window is a row of small, grey, hieroglyphics , but with textual labels off to the side. The moment you select one, the labels disappear forever to "make room" for a vertical pane with settings for the tool you have selected. Which, thank god, it's not like I have 2880 horizontal pixels to use.
You are given 1 single moment to learn what all these stupid tiny grey blobs mean, otherwise, you get to wait 5 seconds for the tooltip to appear to let you know. Hence, I never use Pixelmator until I absolutely have to, because it's a load of ballache to use. The people studying UX academically know that text labels are good. But muh SiMpLiCiTy! Muh MiNimALiSm! It's gotten absurd.
FWIW, if you're on macOS, and the application you're using is displaying an NSToolbar, you can typically force it into "Icon and Text" mode even if that option isn't displayed in the context menu on the toolbar by using PlistBuddy. Find the app's preferences `.plist` file, then look for a Key called `NSToolbar Configuration someUUID`. That key's dict will have a key called "TBDisplayMode". Setting it to 1 will force it into Icon and Text. Setting it to 3 will force it to Text Only. For example, I can force Pixelmator Pro to show me just text labels on the top toolbar of the window (the actual tool palette is some other likely custom UI component) by running:
This is one of the minor but "big in my mind" reasons I despise most web-app-in-a-box apps: they almost universally do not use CoreFoundation APIs to get preference keys from a file, which means none of what I sussed out, tested, and applied in the 10 minutes it took for me to hunt these keys down and find the documentation works.
If you download Pixelmator Pro on a Mac, on first launch (controlled by preference key `toolsOnboardingCompleted` in the plist), the default toolset on the right side of the window is a row of small, grey, hieroglyphics , but with textual labels off to the side. The moment you select one, the labels disappear forever to "make room" for a vertical pane with settings for the tool you have selected. Which, thank god, it's not like I have 2880 horizontal pixels to use.
You are given 1 single moment to learn what all these stupid tiny grey blobs mean, otherwise, you get to wait 5 seconds for the tooltip to appear to let you know. Hence, I never use Pixelmator until I absolutely have to, because it's a load of ballache to use. The people studying UX academically know that text labels are good. But muh SiMpLiCiTy! Muh MiNimALiSm! It's gotten absurd.
FWIW, if you're on macOS, and the application you're using is displaying an NSToolbar, you can typically force it into "Icon and Text" mode even if that option isn't displayed in the context menu on the toolbar by using PlistBuddy. Find the app's preferences `.plist` file, then look for a Key called `NSToolbar Configuration someUUID`. That key's dict will have a key called "TBDisplayMode". Setting it to 1 will force it into Icon and Text. Setting it to 3 will force it to Text Only. For example, I can force Pixelmator Pro to show me just text labels on the top toolbar of the window (the actual tool palette is some other likely custom UI component) by running:
Then just quit and relaunch. The key's possible values are in the enum here: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/appkit/nstoolbar/d...This is one of the minor but "big in my mind" reasons I despise most web-app-in-a-box apps: they almost universally do not use CoreFoundation APIs to get preference keys from a file, which means none of what I sussed out, tested, and applied in the 10 minutes it took for me to hunt these keys down and find the documentation works.