4 ms·

Material is fine, but it feels pretty uninspired to me. Like the corporate art version of UI. Big flat inoffensive blobs, washed out pastel colours, etc. The ne

Material is fine, but it feels pretty uninspired to me. Like the corporate art version of UI. Big flat inoffensive blobs, washed out pastel colours, etc. The new iOS demo kinda makes me feel excited to try the new update, once they iron out a few of the poor contrast spots.

IgorPartola 1y ago
I agree. It is clear, functional, and reminds me of staged doctor’s offices in commercials for prescription drugs. Apple now is entering their Windows XP design era. Once things get too gaudy they will introduce Flat Glass or pretend like they invented straight lines and sharp corners. But at least that seems to have a personality.
- JadeNB 1y ago
  > Apple now is entering their Windows XP design era. Is Windows XP universally understood to be bad design? I remember it as somewhere between blandly unremarkable and slightly pleasant.
  - coredog64 1y ago
    The "Fisher-Price" design language was unpopular, but ISTR you could turn off most of the eye candy and get a the Windows 2000 design language. Pretty sure that was like the first or second thing I did with both XP and Vista.
    - derefr 1y ago
      And even then, people were never against most of it. Scrollbar thumbs with grip stipple? Checkboxes that fill in with a roundrect rather than a checkmark? Buttons and tabs that have an inline ring-highlight "intent" color to them, akin to the fill color on modern Bootstrap theme buttons? These were all parts of the Luna theme as well — and people liked them. (And, IIRC, they were often sad that these parts got deactivated when reverting to the Windows Classic theme, and often asked if there was some hybrid theme that kept these.) With Luna, I think people were mainly just reacting negatively to two things: 1. the start button being big and green and a weird blob shape; the start menu it opens having a huge, very rounded forehead and chin — and both of these having a certain "pre-baked custom PNG image 8-way sliced in Photoshop and drawn by parts" look that you'd see used on web pages in this era. This made the whole UI feel very "non-brutalist" — form not following function, the way it did in Windows Classic (where the theme was in part designed to optimize for as few line-draw GDI calls as possible.) 2. both the taskbar and window title bars being vertically thicker, and having a vaguely-plastic-looking sheen to them to "add dimensionality." And my hypothesis is that, of these, it was mainly the "vertically thicker" taskbar+window decorations that upset so many people. This was an era where many screens were still largely 1024x768, even as monitor sizes were growing; so "small was cool" [and legible!] Websites baked their text into images using 8x5 pixel fonts; Linux users used tiny fonts and narrow themes in fvwm/blackbox/fluxbox, etc. In that era, a title bar stealing thirty whole pixels was almost blasphemy. (Same problem with the Office XP ribbon. Microsoft's visual designers must have been too far ahead-of-the-curve in what kind of resolutions their graphics cards supported, I think.) I think, if there was an alternate version of Luna that also shipped with XP, that just narrowed the taskbar and window caption bar to the Windows Classic dimensions... then Luna would have been universally acclaimed.
    - JadeNB 1y ago
      > The "Fisher-Price" design language was unpopular, but ISTR you could turn off most of the eye candy and get a the Windows 2000 design language. Pretty sure that was like the first or second thing I did with both XP and Vista. Ah, it is very likely that that's what I did, and so why I don't remember anything notable about it.
  - IgorPartola 1y ago
    I think any Windows GUI is going to be perceived with bias so I am not going to say that it was bad design, let alone universally bad. But it was bold, controversial, and short lived.
- chasil 1y ago
  You likely mean the "Aero" stage. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Aero https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Aero While many express nostalgia for Aero in Windows 7, Microsoft dismissed it in fairly harsh terms: 'Microsoft called the Aero interface it once championed and poured so much love upon "dated and cheesy".' https://www.theregister.com/2012/05/21/windows_8_aero_dead/ https://www.theregister.com/2012/05/21/windows_8_aero_dead/ The thing with [Microsoft's] dictated GUIs is that they all end up on the trash heap. Some people have affinity for a GUI aesthetic. I liked Motif and CDE. Ripping them away for the garbage pile is a supremely foolish thing to do, as it can drive users away. Apple, and Microsoft, will surely add more to this pile shortly.
  - Doohickey-d 1y ago
    There's also another version of the story of why they removed it: > So basically, Microsoft's claim of Aero being "cheesy" "and "dated" are just lies to cover up the fact where the original Surface RT is not powerful enough to handle them. https://old.reddit.com/r/windows/comments/38vyn7/the_true_reason_behind_aero_glasss_removal_from_a/ https://old.reddit.com/r/windows/comments/38vyn7/the_true_re...
    - chasil 1y ago
      Yes, it was obvious that the Windows 8 focus on tablets (and Windows phone) would not work well with Aero, since their GPUs were lacking.
lmm 1y ago
Bland and inoffensive is what I want from my OS. The stage manager should be facilitating the show, not trying out their own material on the crowd.
- derefr 1y ago
  The OS is less the stage manager, and more the venue itself. Imagine if the Sydney Opera House or Carnegie Hall looked "inoffensive" rather than majestic.
  - thedevilslawyer 1y ago
    Opera house is an app. Sydney is the OS; that needs taste, not majesty.
  - lmm 1y ago
    > Imagine if the Sydney Opera House or Carnegie Hall looked "inoffensive" rather than majestic. Doesn't sound like a big problem. Some of the best plays and operas I've seen have been in bland concrete boxes, portakabins, round the back of pubs.... Of course all else being equal I'd prefer a building to look good, but good stage visibility and acoustics beats a flashy building every time.
  - M95D 1y ago
    A very good example! Opera House had (possibly still have, I heard they did a redecoration [1]) very big issues with acoustics. It's bad functionality directly caused by aesthetics. [1] https://thespaces.com/sydney-opera-house-emerges-with-a-whole-new-sound-thanks-to-an-acoustic-refit/ https://thespaces.com/sydney-opera-house-emerges-with-a-whol...
  - safety1st 1y ago
    It's definitely the stage manager for me as a Linux guy who likes to rip the WM out of whatever DE is running and replace it with i3. Different strokes!
xinayder 1y ago
It used to be better when Material Design came out. It was more rectangular, looked better. Take a look at Android 10. It was much more "expressive". Now, it's just round, as if they're trying to copy the trend set by Apple. I updated my Galaxy S21 to Android 15 and I hate it. The new design occupies TOO MUCH space, I could check almost all my notifications (I only have 3-4 apps that send me notifications) with a quick scroll from the top, but now a single notification occupies like 1/5th of the screen, making it much more difficult to take a look at all my notifications at once. The other stupid thing, they moved the media playback to the quick settings panel and made it a tiny widget on the lock screen, on the bottom, where you barely pay attention to it. I removed this widget thinking it would restore the old functionality, but I was wrong. Now, whenever I listen to music, I cannot control playback from the notifications panel or the lock screen, I must manually open Spotify and control it from there. I don't know what drugs UX designers are on but I can safely say this is not convenient for the user and we didn't ask for it.
- pxoe 1y ago
  Seems odd to point at older Material versions as "more expressive" when it's the Material You theming in 12 that really got it to shine.
- M95D 1y ago
  > a single notification occupies like 1/5th of the screen > I must manually open Spotify and control it from there It seems like they did it on purpose, the purpose being the management of your attention.

IgorPartola 1y ago

I agree. It is clear, functional, and reminds me of staged doctor’s offices in commercials for prescription drugs. Apple now is entering their Windows XP design era. Once things get too gaudy they will introduce Flat Glass or pretend like they invented straight lines and sharp corners. But at least that seems to have a personality.

JadeNB 1y ago
> Apple now is entering their Windows XP design era. Is Windows XP universally understood to be bad design? I remember it as somewhere between blandly unremarkable and slightly pleasant.
- coredog64 1y ago
  The "Fisher-Price" design language was unpopular, but ISTR you could turn off most of the eye candy and get a the Windows 2000 design language. Pretty sure that was like the first or second thing I did with both XP and Vista.
  - derefr 1y ago
    And even then, people were never against most of it. Scrollbar thumbs with grip stipple? Checkboxes that fill in with a roundrect rather than a checkmark? Buttons and tabs that have an inline ring-highlight "intent" color to them, akin to the fill color on modern Bootstrap theme buttons? These were all parts of the Luna theme as well — and people liked them. (And, IIRC, they were often sad that these parts got deactivated when reverting to the Windows Classic theme, and often asked if there was some hybrid theme that kept these.) With Luna, I think people were mainly just reacting negatively to two things: 1. the start button being big and green and a weird blob shape; the start menu it opens having a huge, very rounded forehead and chin — and both of these having a certain "pre-baked custom PNG image 8-way sliced in Photoshop and drawn by parts" look that you'd see used on web pages in this era. This made the whole UI feel very "non-brutalist" — form not following function, the way it did in Windows Classic (where the theme was in part designed to optimize for as few line-draw GDI calls as possible.) 2. both the taskbar and window title bars being vertically thicker, and having a vaguely-plastic-looking sheen to them to "add dimensionality." And my hypothesis is that, of these, it was mainly the "vertically thicker" taskbar+window decorations that upset so many people. This was an era where many screens were still largely 1024x768, even as monitor sizes were growing; so "small was cool" [and legible!] Websites baked their text into images using 8x5 pixel fonts; Linux users used tiny fonts and narrow themes in fvwm/blackbox/fluxbox, etc. In that era, a title bar stealing thirty whole pixels was almost blasphemy. (Same problem with the Office XP ribbon. Microsoft's visual designers must have been too far ahead-of-the-curve in what kind of resolutions their graphics cards supported, I think.) I think, if there was an alternate version of Luna that also shipped with XP, that just narrowed the taskbar and window caption bar to the Windows Classic dimensions... then Luna would have been universally acclaimed.
  - JadeNB 1y ago
    > The "Fisher-Price" design language was unpopular, but ISTR you could turn off most of the eye candy and get a the Windows 2000 design language. Pretty sure that was like the first or second thing I did with both XP and Vista. Ah, it is very likely that that's what I did, and so why I don't remember anything notable about it.
- IgorPartola 1y ago
  I think any Windows GUI is going to be perceived with bias so I am not going to say that it was bad design, let alone universally bad. But it was bold, controversial, and short lived.
chasil 1y ago
You likely mean the "Aero" stage. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Aero https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Aero While many express nostalgia for Aero in Windows 7, Microsoft dismissed it in fairly harsh terms: 'Microsoft called the Aero interface it once championed and poured so much love upon "dated and cheesy".' https://www.theregister.com/2012/05/21/windows_8_aero_dead/ https://www.theregister.com/2012/05/21/windows_8_aero_dead/ The thing with [Microsoft's] dictated GUIs is that they all end up on the trash heap. Some people have affinity for a GUI aesthetic. I liked Motif and CDE. Ripping them away for the garbage pile is a supremely foolish thing to do, as it can drive users away. Apple, and Microsoft, will surely add more to this pile shortly.
- Doohickey-d 1y ago
  There's also another version of the story of why they removed it: > So basically, Microsoft's claim of Aero being "cheesy" "and "dated" are just lies to cover up the fact where the original Surface RT is not powerful enough to handle them. https://old.reddit.com/r/windows/comments/38vyn7/the_true_reason_behind_aero_glasss_removal_from_a/ https://old.reddit.com/r/windows/comments/38vyn7/the_true_re...
  - chasil 1y ago
    Yes, it was obvious that the Windows 8 focus on tablets (and Windows phone) would not work well with Aero, since their GPUs were lacking.

lmm 1y ago

Bland and inoffensive is what I want from my OS. The stage manager should be facilitating the show, not trying out their own material on the crowd.

derefr 1y ago
The OS is less the stage manager, and more the venue itself. Imagine if the Sydney Opera House or Carnegie Hall looked "inoffensive" rather than majestic.
- thedevilslawyer 1y ago
  Opera house is an app. Sydney is the OS; that needs taste, not majesty.
- lmm 1y ago
  > Imagine if the Sydney Opera House or Carnegie Hall looked "inoffensive" rather than majestic. Doesn't sound like a big problem. Some of the best plays and operas I've seen have been in bland concrete boxes, portakabins, round the back of pubs.... Of course all else being equal I'd prefer a building to look good, but good stage visibility and acoustics beats a flashy building every time.
- M95D 1y ago
  A very good example! Opera House had (possibly still have, I heard they did a redecoration [1]) very big issues with acoustics. It's bad functionality directly caused by aesthetics. [1] https://thespaces.com/sydney-opera-house-emerges-with-a-whole-new-sound-thanks-to-an-acoustic-refit/ https://thespaces.com/sydney-opera-house-emerges-with-a-whol...
- safety1st 1y ago
  It's definitely the stage manager for me as a Linux guy who likes to rip the WM out of whatever DE is running and replace it with i3. Different strokes!

xinayder 1y ago

It used to be better when Material Design came out. It was more rectangular, looked better. Take a look at Android 10. It was much more "expressive". Now, it's just round, as if they're trying to copy the trend set by Apple. I updated my Galaxy S21 to Android 15 and I hate it. The new design occupies TOO MUCH space, I could check almost all my notifications (I only have 3-4 apps that send me notifications) with a quick scroll from the top, but now a single notification occupies like 1/5th of the screen, making it much more difficult to take a look at all my notifications at once. The other stupid thing, they moved the media playback to the quick settings panel and made it a tiny widget on the lock screen, on the bottom, where you barely pay attention to it. I removed this widget thinking it would restore the old functionality, but I was wrong. Now, whenever I listen to music, I cannot control playback from the notifications panel or the lock screen, I must manually open Spotify and control it from there. I don't know what drugs UX designers are on but I can safely say this is not convenient for the user and we didn't ask for it.

pxoe 1y ago
Seems odd to point at older Material versions as "more expressive" when it's the Material You theming in 12 that really got it to shine.
M95D 1y ago
> a single notification occupies like 1/5th of the screen > I must manually open Spotify and control it from there It seems like they did it on purpose, the purpose being the management of your attention.