The text icons initially looked really out of place (and obviously could be subject to change).
#Free 3d icons for mac tv
Yet Apple went out of its way to discard the video clapboard in favor of a text identifier, and did the same with TV shows. Everyone knows Apple’s Photos, App Store, Music, and Videos icons by now.
Removing text from the much larger-screened Apple TV’s UI seemed comparatively unnecessary at first, but starts to make sense given some of the icon changes Apple introduced. Last month’s debut of tvOS suggested that Apple’s decision to remove text labels might actually be a trend. But the Watch’s five separate, pre-installed clock icons hinted at the challenges third-party developers would have in designing distinctive icons to identify themselves on the Watch. Apps with well-known glyphs - Nike’s swoosh or the Starbucks mermaid - were easy to figure out, and it’s possible to squeeze tiny text into the shapes. The wearable’s tiny displays have so little room for text that its omission was excusable, though not ideal: there isn’t much space to really differentiate 80-pixel circular icons from each other. While it would be easy to write off Apple’s changes to text labels as one-off decisions for “really small screen” and “really big screen” devices, they collectively raise an interesting question: if developers properly redesigned their iOS icons, would text labels - a staple of graphical user interfaces for decades - really be necessary any more? I’ll take a look at some of the pros and cons below…Īpple’s shift away from labelled icons for the Apple Watch appeared to be a fluke. This month, it will release the fourth-generation Apple TV with a refreshed UI, again almost entirely eliminating below-app text in favor of redesigned icons with 3D depth. Is Apple considering another round of major changes to iOS’s Home screen? If watchOS and tvOS are any indication, the answer could be “yes.” Earlier this year, Apple launched the Apple Watch with a purely text-free Home screen, requiring users to identify 20-some initial apps (and manually-added third-party apps) by icon designs alone.