Golden Gate Menu Icons
macOS Tahoe threw an icon on every menu item, making them impossible to distinguish at a glance. macOS Golden Gate has rectified that design taboo with blessedly iconless menus.
In macOS 27.0, menu bar and context menus present a reduced set of menu item images, similar to the behavior prior to macOS 26.0. By default,
NSMenuhides all menu item symbol images — non-symbol images remain visible. For menu items created from a xib file,NSMenualso observes the value of the “macOS 26.0 only” checkbox in the menu item inspector. If this checkbox is unchecked, the menu item image remains visible; if checked, it is hidden. These changes in menu item image visibility apply to applications linked on macOS 26.0 and later. Review the updated Human Interface Guidelines to determine which menu items in your app should still display images. Use the newpreferredImageVisibilityproperty onNSMenuItemto customize the image visibility for your menu items. As in macOS 26.0,NSMenuautomatically provides default visible menu item images for certain common system-wide menu items, such as Settings, Share, and Print.
„Icons in menus are now hidden by default“ and you can specifically enable them to draw attention to the most important actions.
Don’t get me wrong, this is a great change! But to take a full year and your lead designer leaving to figure out that this was a mistake… woof…
I like that Menu Icons now are hidden by default again on macOS - Quite a lot of concessions towards liquid glass being the wrong move last year. Takes courage to take so many steps back, literally. I’m appreciating that. Even if they present it as improvements rather than “undo” - that’s just what one has to do for marketing.
Previously:
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Now get rid of the corners at the top of menus and connect them to the menubar again. They're menus, not windows.
Using images in a menu item still screws up the vertical alignment of menu item titles that *don't* use images (item titles do not vertically align). This makes vertical scanning harder and negatively affects readability. Compare this to status "checkmarks" that make every item in a menu get its own "column" to improve vertical scanning.
Just ship apps using:
`[NSUserDefaults.standardUserDefaults registerDefaults:@{ @"NSMenuEnableActionImages" : @(NO) }];`
