

Finder and Previewįinder sees some significant changes. Could this be the first hint that macOS is preparing for touch support in the future? One interesting tidbit, is that even though the icons are based around the capsule shape, many of them (like Contacts, or Preview) have elements which protrude from them giving an extra feeling of depth. Everything is more rounded and it feels like everything has gotten a little bigger. First impressionsĪt first glance macOS is a lot more colourful with, and the biggest obvious change is the bright, slightly more cartoonish iOS shaped icons. I haven’t captured everything, but it is a good taste of the changes so far. I made a conscious effort not to resize any windows or change any default settings.

I decided to carry out a quick catalogue of the UI changes as this may be helpful to other people getting ready for macOS Big Sur.Īll of the screenshots below are taken on a default install of macOS and the Catalina version is always on the left. I found myself taking lots of screenshots to try and track the changes and thought this might be worth sharing.

I wanted to make sure my team was ahead of any coming changes as we were burned by changes in last year’s release of Catalina. Why did I end up doing this? Well, this week I installed the developer beta of macOS Big Sur as I was curious what impact the new UI would have on the app I currently design. This post is an attempt to provide a visual comparison of pretty dramatic UI changes between macOS Catalina and Big Sur.
