Yay! I can’t wait to see what you guys have been working on… (This is nonpolitical, the timing is just spot on…) My last regular job in the literary world ended just days before the 2016 election. I have been freelancing since then. My next actual job is maybe starting soon. During my freelancing time I have used Scrivener nearly everyday for everything from collating research to typing up short stories.
I would not have survived if it wasn’t for this tool!
can we hate the icon in advance?
Seems you already do!!!
Mr X
I’m just going by KB’s statement that it will be the most hated thing about ANY update to Scrivener. I don’t want to be behind in early adoption!
People are bound to hate it; we always get complains whenever we change the icon. I expect complaints about the app tint colour too. I just hope you like purple. 
The purple is…
I bit the bullet and installed BS on my 2020 16" MBP. I’d been impressed running it as a VM under Fusion during the beta, but royally impressed with it as the main OS. Quick, Scrivener loads multiple projects in a flash. And this is all before you grace us with the BS specific tweaks. Looking forward to!
Now if the performance hints for the Apple Silicon MacBook Air are correct, I’ll have a ball using that when I travel.
Purple! Prince. Hendrix. I’m good with purple.
But DONT CHANGE THE ICON!!!
If you do the turtles may shift and upset the universe.
Well, I just hope there is a new app preference setting so users can choose their preferred purple: Prince, Hendrix, or Barney.
Or at least a “hazy” option?
For the record, I hate ALL the icons in Big Sloppy (explained in very next line)
Since I do nothing useful anymore, I dropped the Big Slop on my 2020 air. Can’t see a dang thing on it with my old-isa viewing orbs as the ridonkulous amount of padding makes the fonts too small. Oh well… I’m just an ant in the path to progress so I expect to be unhappily squished into the pavement as a general rule.
Also, if all y’all are seeing system speed improvements, something was wrong with your system or is horribly wrong with mine. Definitely slower on my almost brand new, unextended (only MoneyWell and Scrivener on it since last rebuild), 2020 8gb Air. Oh Well… again.
If anyone figures out how to reduce padding (not increase font size) you might be a hero. Or a nerd. You can decide.
You should have seen the early Big Sur betas - the translucency in menus made them nearly unreadable; I’m glad Apple rethought that.
I have to say that I’m not a fan of Apple now specifying that all app icons should be a rounded square - it really limits what you can do with an icon, and makes it much harder to pick them out from the Dock. I’m not sure what Apple has against making it easy to pick out icons, with their obsession with removing either colour or shape variations across the OS over the past few years. There’s not much you can do with a rounded square other than stick a letter or simplified image on it. That said, I do like Big Sur over all - I like the flatness of the toolbars. I do wish there was less translucency in sidebars and toolbars, though, but then the obsession with translucency has been a thing for a few years now.
Too much?
I know I can do that, but I like to keep the default settings as much as possible, especially on my development machine, so that I always see what most users are going to see when working in the app. And although I can turn it off, I wish it wasn’t there in the first place. 
You can end up with a giant red streak through the middle of a source list just because you have a web page open in Safari in the background. As I say, nothing new, though.
There was a time when I admired the Mac interface for its design. Not any longer. It is getting as bad as Windows, for my taste. I find it harder now to see which window has focus, and a particularly daft choice, to my mind, is that keyboard shortcuts in the menus are greyed out. The menu text is full black, but the shortcut is not – as if it were deactivated. Where is the logic in that? I really begin to wish there were skins one could use to tweak the interface to something sensible. I have tried out some of the Accessibility options, but they are as horrible to my eyes as the standard settings. No doubt I will get more used to the changes as time goes by, but at the moment they don’t look like improvements to me. But I’m usually completely out of step with fashion and general taste, so I expect the new look will be a raging success.
I think it was Ioa that said it looks like a move to support touch interface for OS X. To me it feels exactly like iOS UI. My guess is that they are moving to a “no keyboards” world leveraging either voice or gesture nav with voice exclusive input. It’s the only thing that makes sense.
It’s a great move for CONSUMER devices. It seems like apple is moving away from creators. At least that’s my curmudgeonly opinion.
That would explain a few things. In the meantime, there is already a German YouTuber championing gestures for all sorts: https://youtu.be/Vjn5BmhVF6M. I can see the advantages, though there is a lot of work involved.
Give HazeOver a try (hazeover.com, $10.00). It performs the sole function of increasing the contrast between the window that has input focus and the windows that don’t. You can set the contrast to a custom level that you find comfortable. It works in maybe 90+% of use cases and apps, with a few exceptions (like opening a link in Mail.app using the right-click “Open behind Mail” command does not invoke HazeOver). (Prior to HazeOver, my solution to increasing window contrast was to create a new color profile in System Preferences>Displays>Color>Calibrate…, which was far from ideal because it affected rendering of all colors. If you ever want to go this route, be sure to save your modified profile with a unique name, and don’t overwrite an existing profile.)
Also, I found these settings helped a lot (with High Sierra & Mojave):
In System Preferences>Accessibility>Display:
In System Preferences>Display, try the different resolutions to see which causes the least amount of eyestrain. Also, leave Night Shift off, to prevent the display from acquiring weird (to my eye, anyway) tints as the day progresses into evening / night onto morning.
Experiment with the F1 and F2 keys to find a brightness setting that works for you (depending on your keyboard setup, you may have to use Fn-F1, Fn-F2). This setting can be changed at any time as needed, as lighting conditions change.
On a related note, the “zap colors” bookmarklet at https://www.squarefree.com/bookmarklets/zap.html changes webpage text and background to black on white, and makes links blue and purple.
A screen shot of this menu behavior would be helpful. I had some problems with menu corruption where the shortcuts were stacked one on top of another. I found that rebooting solved this. Since then, I reboot every day.