Photoshop’s “Modern” Spectrum User Interface
The first field is not focused, so you cannot start typing the number after opening this window. You need to immediately move your hand to the mouse.
If you click on any field, the value is not pre-selected, so you cannot start typing a new number then.
[…]
Clicking on parts of the input field doesn’t bring it into focus even though the hover state promises it. (Discrepancies between hover and focus handling are a horrible new thing I’m starting to see more in recent interfaces.)
[…]
Simply backspacing through the field shows a crude error modal and – to add a second injury to the first injury – the dialog removes focus from the field!
What’s going on at Adobe? As he says, “all those transgressions are solved problems”—figured out by Adobe itself decades ago.
This is a great post by @mwichary, demonstrating how Adobe’s apps are decaying. I have a couple to add to the pile for the new canvas window: It now accepts fractional pixels and shouldn’t, nudging increases or decreases by 0.01 pixels, and shift-nudging changes the value by 0.1 pixels.
there is no jumpscare quite like a “oh my god adobe updated the hue/saturation panel for the first time since 1978” jumpscare
I have been using Photoshop since John Sculley was the CEO of Apple. Longtime users can be brutally resistant to change, but I would like to think that I remain open-minded. One can’t have used Photoshop for more than three decades without having adapted to change and found utility in the new features Adobe has added over the years. I’ve used generative fill. I’ve used AI-enhanced edge detection. I’m hip and with it.
But, as Wichary detected, what Adobe is doing with the Modern User Interface is not to make a new, improved, modern interface. Adobe’s own description gives it away: It’s a hammering of all of Adobe’s user interfaces so they look alike, across Creative Cloud. It’s a “multi-platform design system,” which means in addition to Adobe being committed to “modernizing” Photoshop by making it look like Premiere, it’s also going to make it look the same on the Mac as Windows.
Already, Photoshop desperately wants to run in single-window mode, with multiple documents opening in a single uberwindow—in other words, the stink of Windows. Fortunately, you can turn that feature off, and I have.
[…]
That all said, of course, this decision could benefit Photoshop users, because Adobe could put in the work to make the app better while also fulfilling its own corporate goals of homogeneity.
Ha ha ha. Sorry. I tried to write that with a straight face.
We’re talking about Adobe, though. They sure had the resources, the talent, and the runway to manage that transition. They just chose not to. Priorities were different.
Remember Creative Cloud? Of course you do. We all do. It’s still with us.
Who likes it? No one.
One of the most insulting moves it enabled them to do is to hit people who dared to cancel their subscription with surprising, insane fees for trying to leave. What about that? Could you respect a company that treats their users like that? Most of them have supported and cheered them on for decades. It’s gotten to the point where, if you pirated their software, you would have a better experience.
[…]
They came up with the subscription model. It ended the last financial incentive to ship better software. They could cut down the cost of innovation, while charging customers more for the same. Win-win.
Previously:
- Acorn 8.5
- Adobe Modifies Your Hosts File for Their Analytics
- U.S. Sues Adobe Over Subscriptions
- Adobe at 40
Update (2026-05-01): Nick Heer:
If you do a little poking around in Adobe’s application bundles, a key reason for the jankiness of these user interfaces becomes apparent: it is because they are little webpages. These dialog boxes are HTML files that reference a chunky CSS file and oodles of JavaScript, and appear to be built with React.
This is loathsome.
There are people out there who will insist it is unfair to blame the tools and that bad user interfaces can be built in entirely native languages, too, which is true. Also, Adobe’s interface has always been unique and not quite at home on either MacOS or Windows. Maybe it really is possible to build a web app that feels platform native. But I have never used one — not once — and for this mess to be increasingly used in the industry-standard professional suite of creative tools is maddening.
[…]
I was going to write about how this stuff should have been tried with people who actually use Adobe’s apps in a high-pressure environment, but I am sure it was and, also, it does not matter. Wichary has it right. These are fundamental principles of user interface design that Adobe is ignoring because its internal tooling has taken precedence.
Previously:
Update (2026-05-04): Louie Mantia:
Photoshop “redesigned” the Actions panel, one of the most fundamental features of Photoshop. The default tab is “Essentials” which I never use. “Yours” is my actions. Of course they have a setting for “Classic” mode, which is what I do for effectively every Photoshop feature that gets redesigned.
However— they also changed the behavior. Undo/redo is for the entire action rather than individual steps of an action. Not helpful! So, also uncheck “create a single history state.”
Update (2026-05-05): John Gruber (Mastodon):
The before-and-after screenshots look like examples from a lecture on user interface design — if you swap them around make the new ones “before” and the old ones “after”. Better balance, better focus behavior, appropriate platform-native typography.
Years ago the “hold option to toggle the cancel button to reset” stopped working in a bunch of effect or adjustment dialogs — like nothing would reset when the toggle was clicked.
I may-or-may-not have reported that bug at some point, but it wasn’t acknowledged or fixed for years after it initially frustrated me.
You have to go back to the 1990s and classic Mac OS, but Adobe’s best apps used to have exemplary native UIs. Apps like Photoshop helped push the state of the art in Mac UI forward. Tabbed palettes were a revelation.
Update (2026-05-06): John Gruber:
It feels like the world of software is bifurcating quality-wise. This whole thing about Adobe’s new craptacular “modern” UI language (a.k.a. “Spectrum”) exemplifies one side of that bifurcation — the bad-and-getting-worse side. Software that is the product not just of an ignorance of long-established principles of interaction design, but of a willful disdain for those principles. What Adobe is now shipping is just inexplicably bad UI, ignoring literally decades of great work and long-mastered concepts — a lot of which work was pioneered by Adobe itself!
The whole thing with MacOS 26 Tahoe is similar. […] Spectrum is where Tahoe suggests that MacOS was headed under Alan Dye’s leadership: cross-platform sameness for the sake of sameness, with a complete disregard for longstanding platform nuances and idioms.
[…]
The other side of the software fork is not deserted. It’s just populated, more than ever, by the products of small independent developers who obsess, first and foremost, over quality and artistic vision.
Update (2026-05-07): See also: Hacker News.
Then re-read the last two paragraphs, replacing “Adobe” with “Apple”.
I am Foster Brereton and Principal Scientist for this UI effort. Suffice it to say, the article and this thread have had their impact on the people behind the software. We are aware we got a lot of things wrong. As the primary technical lead on the UI migration, a lot of the implementation details ultimately fall up to me.
Two things I can tell you: the engineering team does care about Photoshop (I’ve been on the team more than 15 years for a reason) and this migration is far from over for us.
These sharp edges are acknowledged, and we are working on them. Some of them are already addressed. I know this will be of little comfort to some. But to the rest, we are still here.
Update (2026-05-13): Marcin Wichary:
Oh, and when I say “broken windows,” I’m not just being cute. Here’s an example of Photoshop’s “explore” halo that occasionally appears on top of another app just because I have Photoshop open underneath. And, there is nothing I can do in Photoshop to get rid of it[…]
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More convinced than ever that no one who works at Adobe uses Adobe's software. There's no other explanation for how they willingly introduce papercuts like these after this many years.
I can’t understand why they keep getting stuff like this so, so wrong. For one thing, they could just use a native interface and not have to deal with it. But since they insist upon using janky custom interfaces, they need to get it right
I’ve moved away from Adobe (Affinity, when you had to pay a one time fee) but it makes me mad because Adobe’s software was once really good
It seems like all software went to shit around 2012. Despite computers getting faster, more RAM, SSD drives, etc everything is as slow, awkward, janky, and buggy as ever. Just total shit. Using computers used to give me joy. Now I dread every new update of everything. It just keeps getting worse. Mac, Windows, iPhone… Adobe, Microsoft Office… all garbage.
@Ben G 2012 is arguably when desktop computing was completely abandoned for shallow mobile consumerism. Apple fired the last exec with a remnant of Job's product focus. Jony Ive would release his awful mobile interface the next year (which would later taint macOS). The Mac Pro would be replaced with a Trash Can the next year.
The Mac was already down hard since iOS cannibalized macOS. Every year after was a deeper commitment to "Mobilism".
"For one thing, they could just use a native interface and not have to deal with it"
This wouldn't fix the issues outlined in Wichary's article. The devs would still have to know to focus on the right field when the dialog opens, and select the text in a field when it is clicked.
The actual problem is that getting all of these details right isn't trivial, and modern companies are intentionally built so that individual employees are fungible.
If I'm just dumped in a team that has to replace the old dialog with the new UI framework, I'll look at the Figma and implement it, and if the designer didn't put "first field should receive focus when dialog opens", I'm not going to think to implement this, because last week I was working on the PNG parser and next week I'll probably be fired, so I have no context for how this dialog should behave or how people are going to use it.
And anyway, I'm not getting rewarded if the ticket that had two days estimated is going to take three days because I asked the designer to specify the behavior of the field when the user clicks on it. In fact, I'm going to be punished for underperforming.
The OKR the CEO looks at is subscriber retention, so the person who actually gets rewarded is the one who made the "unsubscribe" button less discoverable and increased retention by 0.2% over last quarter.
As someone who has mostly stopped working on UI as primary work but still dabbles from time to time, with corporate designers, my insight into why this "keeps happening" is a new generation of designers that simply do not understand platform conventions, are not familiar with standard platform controls, and frankly, do not understand UI best practices that have evolved over the decades. They have mostly grown in web or web-adjacent (Electron) UI world, where it's a wild west. Arguing with UX teams is almost never seen as beneficial, especially with younger engineering, and even if so, support from engineering management is limited, if any. The result is cultivating engineering that doesn't care, and UX that doesn't know (or, often, care). This is true in Apple and Microsoft, too, or we wouldn't have the "Liquid Glass" or "Fluent Design" shitshows. There too you have "designers" who push stupid designs with little to no familiarity with the platform convention they are pushed at, and toothless engineering that finds getting a bonus as a much higher job than putting the breaks and producing good software.
What I find fascinating about Adobe, being a design-focused software company, is that they somehow manage to make UIs that are _neither_ attractive _nor_ high-usability. They do attempt a dark-ish mode, which makes sense given the typical content. But beyond that, these modals are just hideous to look at.
Second, hard disagree on Tog's "a text field should select its entire contents on clicking" advice. Why default to a destructive action? I've never liked this about browser address bars, though at least I can see the reasoning that you most likely (but not always!) want to replace the entire contents, instead of append or otherwise modify. For a width field, though? I would find that counterintuitive. When I _want_ to do that, I can double-click into the field. In standard macOS controls, that will focus them _and_ select their contents.
Many other points in the blog are, of course, correct. Not respecting settings that the user has already made in macOS.
Even just the Canvas Size dialog feels like it has barely been improved in over three decades. Maybe some of these fields should be steppers. Maybe some should have live previews, or other forms of discoverability (for example, the Anchor set of buttons could be accompanied by a thumbnail that represents what each will actually do). Even though the dialog is about dimensions, the "Current Size" and "New Size" labels presumably are actually about (hypothetical) file size on disk, which is an entirely different meaning. Just about every control here could be improved.
As a 15 year user of Lightroom (finally caved into post-v6 subscription mode in 2024), the most I can hope for is that they don't screw up Lightroom like they have (been doing for years) Photoshop. The DAM functionality of LR makes the #1 "feature request": "just keep it working with new OS revs".
SwiftUI screwed this up, too: it did not support keyboard focus properly on the Mac in the beginning. Even now, SwiftUI is just not as polished or flexible as AppKit.
I wish “new” UI frameworks would avoid pushing to the public so quickly and spend more time in the oven, truly refining both appearance *and* behavior until it is as usable and well-thought-out as possible.
Switching to a unified or new UI is like using a new MacBook Pro which still has an annoying-for-some sharp corner on the front edge. Looks good. Looks consistent across the product line.
Using older software, that sharp front lip has been filed down by developers over years of small usability improvements and recognition of desire-paths, so that it’s more comfortable and usable.
That goes for liquid glass, but also here. The extra problem here might be that Mac and Windows can have different conventions for those small usability improvements.
Also, the devs/designers may not be expert users in the field of the product they’re working on.
Honestly, Affinity was no better (I haven't used the post-Canva version). Version 2 made the app the same single window mode Snell is complaining about - you couldn't have two documents open side by side, as you could in version 1, because they "had" to homologise to the Windows version. The UI is one of the jankiest tech demos I've ever seen - the floating palette sizes and positions will shift by a pixel or two every few hours or sleep / wake cycle, it's just laughably amateurish. Free open source apps like Krita can do palettes better.
All of the keyboard shortcuts are wrong, the drag modifiers are Command for grow in proportion (square / circle), whereas every other Mac app for ever has used Shift. There's no keyboard modifier to set the origin point for a dragged marquee / shape to the centre, whereas every Mac app for ever has used Option (and the Option Shift combo to expand from centre in equal proportion).
Honestly, If I wanted to get serious work done in a graphics app, I'd look for a Qt based opensource app, or boot an older machine that can run CS5-6. Isn't that a sad reflection of the modern technology world, that new computers simply can't do tasks as well as old computers, because modern software is so bad.
I don't think anyone in the commercial graphics software world has the competence, or the inclination to prioritise quality in the work they do.
For a while, Sketch used to be a well designed software, but even they gave in to the "impactful designer" and broke with platform conventions with the version released/announced not long ago.
Acorn is nice. Every image can be its own window, and it feels like a native Mac app, for whatever that is worth in Tahoe.
@Plume Can Acorn's palettes / inspectors be torn off as separate floating windows, or is it all in on thie "palettes are part of the document window" garbage modern faux-iPad Mac apps do.
Pretty much every developer only shows their app in this configuration on their website these days.
You can have multiple docs open side by side in Affinity 2. Just have to tear off a tab like you do with a browser.
"These dialog boxes are HTML files that reference a chunky CSS file and oodles of JavaScript, and appear to be built with React."
I think it's fine to use HTML to render dialog boxes, or UI in general. HTML is an incredibly fast, powerful way of describing user interfaces that receives probably a hundred times more care, attention, and development than any native UI stack.
But using React to render two text fields and two buttons is hilariously awful.
> HTML is an incredibly fast, powerful way of describing user interfaces that receives probably a hundred times more care, attention, and development than any native UI stack.
LOL. LMAO.
> LOL. LMAO.
The sounds of somebody teetering on the precipice of an epiphany.
Anyway, from Wichary's updated article:
> Back to Photoshop. In the Hacker News thread,
> at least one person from Adobe dropped in to
> comment, and one paragraph caught my attention:
>
>> These changes were part of the Beta program.
>> As far as I am aware the response there was
>> not on the same level as this blog post.
This is absolutely wild to me. Does Adobe not have any UX designers? Why are they relying on the beta program to give them detailed UX design feedback? Is it Adobe's plan to just poop out this shit and then people do unpaid work for them and give them detailed notes on what's broken with every single fricken text field in every dialog box?
> HTML is an incredibly fast, powerful way of describing user interfaces
It can be, but the built-in elements were never really geared towards that.
> receives probably a hundred times more care, attention, and development than any native UI stack.
There’s truth to this. The Web stack has been iterating fast. Lots of good layout options in CSS these days, for example.
And more to what is probably your point, thus: “ These dialog boxes are HTML files that reference a chunky CSS file and oodles of JavaScript, and appear to be built with React. This is loathsome.” is silly.
The problems with that UI have nothing to do with the HTML underpinnings. They’re entirely a result of a culture that does not care.
Would native UI resolve some issues? Yep. But 1) it already hadn’t been native in decades (they moved to Qt long, long ago) and 2) again, that’s all about not caring.
> > LOL. LMAO.
> The sounds of somebody teetering on the precipice of an epiphany.
No, its the sound of someone who has to deal with people who think "HTML is the answer" for content in native apps, and who recognizes that even "a hundred times more care, attention, and development than any native UI stack" is just in the browser and rendering engines, not all of which are available everywhere, and some of which are incredibly buggy and the source of crashes in, once again, actual native apps. It is a joke, and you're the one it is being played on.
> is just in the browser and rendering engines
The word "just" doesn't belong in that sentence.
> not all of which are available everywhere
Yes, of course, if you're deploying apps to an MP3 player from the 00s, using HTML to render your UI is not going to work.
> It is a joke, and you're the one it is being played on.
I have no idea what that means. What joke? Played by whom?
> is just in the browser and rendering engines, not all of which are available everywhere
This is about Photoshop. Where in macOS and Windows is a browser layout engine not available? The US-Microsoft lawsuit about IE was _25 years ago_, and _that_ was already in part about "really? You want us to _not_ ship a web view component in a modern OS?" These days, it's table stakes.
What's the scenario where an Adobe GUI app would run but there's no web view?
> which are incredibly buggy and the source of crashes in, once again, actual native apps
I'm not a big fan of web UI, but your contention here seems to be that a web view is buggier and crashier than your average AppKit, SwiftUI, (insert Windows UI framework here) implementation, and… I'm not sure that quality gap exists.
_Maybe_ Qt has more polish than that, but I don't see Mac fans saying, "remember the good old days when Adobe UI was Qt-based?"
