4 ms·

One note on this with regards to the “flat” design - the technical reasoning for that was it decoupled the interface from the screen. Flat designs were all vect

One note on this with regards to the “flat” design - the technical reasoning for that was it decoupled the interface from the screen. Flat designs were all vector, and could scale to any screen or interface size. This has effectively unpinned Apple from fixed screen sizes (I’m genuinely not sure if any two iPhone designs have shared the same pixel counts in the last 5-10 years) and allowed them to scale the interface to any size. I’m not sure what I think about liquid glass, but I do agree with the premise that it’s being driven by the move towards AR and extending interfaces outside the phone/tablet. I think another interesting tell here will be the 20th anniversary iPhone, which should be coming in 2027 - the iPhone X set the tone for Apple devices for the next decade (so far), and I’d expect to get a better idea of what Apple’s doing here when they show off that hardware.

wizzledonker 1y ago
I’ve seen skeuomorphic designs done with vector art, surely this can’t be the only/real reason.
- andrekandre 1y ago
  like most things it was probably a combination of things: marketing (big new design), design trend catch-up (metro, android), and all those other technical reasons (memory, textures, vector graphics, enables easy dark-mode) etc etc just my guess, but making a dark mode (more easily) possible must have been a large factor too
kccqzy 1y ago
Apple has worked out a system of scaling to deal with differing pixel counts. One just provides assets in @2x and @3x versions. And most designers design non-vector assets once in 3x, and then downscale once. This system works remarkably well given that we have long reached the sweet spot of screen DPI.
specialist 1y ago
I have a very open mind wrt liquid glass. I expect an "AR based UI" to somehow leverage depth of field and focus. Blur and translucency/transparency used to achieve that could be amazing. I'm reminded of prior UIs which had Z depth. One of the iOS releases had parallax. Remember that awesome demo repurposing two Wii controllers to do head tracking? It transformed the screen into a portal that you that thru. Moving your head around changed your perspective. I want that. I just started watching the WWDC videos. So far I like what I see. I'm on board with stacked components; we'll see how it pans out. I love the idea of morphing UI elements, transitioning between list <-> menu bar; I really want this to succeed. Mostly, I want less clutter. No matter the appearance or theme, I'm overwhelmed by all the icons, options, etc. The age old conundrum of balancing ease of use against lots of features. Having created UIs in anger, I'm no smarter than anyone else and don't have any ideas to offer. Further, I'm apprehensive about voice (w/ GPT). Methinks this will become the best strategy for reducing visual clutter. Being an old, I just hate talking to my computer. Though I accept it feels natural for others, like my son's generation.

wizzledonker 1y ago

I’ve seen skeuomorphic designs done with vector art, surely this can’t be the only/real reason.

andrekandre 1y ago
like most things it was probably a combination of things: marketing (big new design), design trend catch-up (metro, android), and all those other technical reasons (memory, textures, vector graphics, enables easy dark-mode) etc etc just my guess, but making a dark mode (more easily) possible must have been a large factor too

kccqzy 1y ago

Apple has worked out a system of scaling to deal with differing pixel counts. One just provides assets in @2x and @3x versions. And most designers design non-vector assets once in 3x, and then downscale once. This system works remarkably well given that we have long reached the sweet spot of screen DPI.

specialist 1y ago

I have a very open mind wrt liquid glass. I expect an "AR based UI" to somehow leverage depth of field and focus. Blur and translucency/transparency used to achieve that could be amazing. I'm reminded of prior UIs which had Z depth. One of the iOS releases had parallax. Remember that awesome demo repurposing two Wii controllers to do head tracking? It transformed the screen into a portal that you that thru. Moving your head around changed your perspective. I want that. I just started watching the WWDC videos. So far I like what I see. I'm on board with stacked components; we'll see how it pans out. I love the idea of morphing UI elements, transitioning between list <-> menu bar; I really want this to succeed. Mostly, I want less clutter. No matter the appearance or theme, I'm overwhelmed by all the icons, options, etc. The age old conundrum of balancing ease of use against lots of features. Having created UIs in anger, I'm no smarter than anyone else and don't have any ideas to offer. Further, I'm apprehensive about voice (w/ GPT). Methinks this will become the best strategy for reducing visual clutter. Being an old, I just hate talking to my computer. Though I accept it feels natural for others, like my son's generation.