15 ms·

More assorted notes on Liquid Glass

184 points by freediver 1y ago

rickdeckard 1y ago
Almost hilarous: > Apple Design-Guide: "Ensure that you clearly separate your content from navigation elements [..]" Honest auto-complete: "[..] the OS will then use the GPU to draw all attention away from the content to the navigation elements"
rickdeckard 1y ago
> I’ve said this before, but Apple is forcing third party devs to be in service of Apple. The guidelines and rules are meant to sublimate the brands of the third party, and replace it with Apple. I have the same impression. Frankly I believe the whole purpose of "Liquid Glass" is to create an exaggerated version of the GUI Apple intends to use later-on in AR glasses, which is then toned back again in later releases to match the feasible implementation on the glasses. The expected migration curve seems to be to force all applications now to become more bland and less distinguishable from the OS (and Apple services), so that at the end of the journey (in a future AR-product) Apple can #1 render those apps consistently without disrupting their UX and #2 present itself as the user-facing service provider for all the value created by those apps (with the app-developer being responsible for the integration and UX-compliance). It's a dream-scenario. Need a ride-hailing service? Let "the Apple glasses" do it for you. Under the hood the apps are then hopefully so streamlined already that service-providers will compete to be the fulfilment entity for this task.
- mschuster91 1y ago
  > Under the hood the apps are then hopefully so streamlined already that service-providers will compete to be the fulfilment entity for this task. Probably going to be against the hivemind on this one, but I for one welcome this. Public transport, taxis, flights, hotels, to a degree even restaurants are fungible. I want to get from A to B, I want to have a bed for a few nights in some other city, I want to get some specific food. That's what I need. What I do not want is to waste time to get what I need with bullshit. That's why I love the "evil B" of hospitality - I see all available hotels for my travel, the associated price and pictures. I select an offer (usually the cheapest one that still has decent reviews), I click on "book", I confirm my data, that's it. I don't need to wade through dozens of websites, enter my data a dozen times, and then finally enter payment data on yet another shady website that's probably gonna get hacked sooner or later. I don't want to waste my time researching the phone number of the local taxi company, so taxi.de it is, I only select where I need to go and a few minutes later a taxi shows up, no need to call someone, spell out the street name I live in to someone barely understanding me on the phone because Germany's phone service is dogshit. I don't care about which specific Chinese restaurant I want, so I go on Lieferando, and half an hour later a nice load of fried rice with greens shows up at my door. And every time I have to go to a specific place (say for an anniversary) I know exactly why I despise the old way - everyone does seat reservations differently, no integration with anything. What still irks me is flight booking, because while Google and a fair few other resellers/brokers do at least compare available options of different fulfilment providers, the actual booking I have to do is still on each airline's different web page. And rail travel is similarly annoying once you try to leave Germany.
  - rickdeckard 1y ago
    This is very valid, I also don't like to install an app for every service. And I don't think there's a "hivemind" on this at all. But it's reasonable that the merchants offering in the marketplace of that ecosystem start to observe how their opportunity to become the next "evil B of X" are increasingly diminished, in favor of being the fulfilment entity for the "benevolent A". I neither need an "evil B" nor a "benevolent A", and substituting one for the other is not a solution either...
- dwaite 1y ago
  It is a direct response to developer feedback - that they only are going to make iPhone apps because redoing design to support even just iPad, let alone a watch, TV, Mac, and AR variant is work. Even Facebook hasn't found the resources to port the Instagram app to have a proper UX on iPad. This started with the separation of iPad OS (and release of Catalyst, and SwiftUI 1.0) in 2019. iPad OS is effectively the mother platform - an iPad app can be adapted down to target iPhone, or to target macOS and visionOS (with both those platforms also supporting running iPadOS apps natively without modification). The L&F changes in 2020 to macOS (with release 11) were heavily about making iPadOS and macOS more visually similar. It doesn't surprise me at all that a team at apple tasked to make a consistent HIG and L&F across all products is borrowing heavily from the most recent HIG/L&F they worked on (Vision OS).
PapaPalpatine 1y ago
I’m not a professional designer, but I like Liquid Glass. If you don’t like it, stay on iOS 18 or switch to Android. Aside from the criticism of icons, every complaint in the article just came across as nit-picks.
- rickdeckard 1y ago
  Beside of the fact that App-Developers don't have the option to "stay on iOS18 or switch to Android", that statement is equivalent to "Stop criticizing my country. If you don't like what it is doing, find yourself another country". Developers (and users) are citizens of that ecosystem, serving other citizens and contributing to its economy. It is their right to judge and criticize directions being taken. The owner of that ecosystem must endure and acknowledge this (especially when he continuously makes efforts to increase the difficulty to LEAVE that ecosystem), and other citizens should not take any offense from this at all.
  - nozzlegear 1y ago
    > The owner of that ecosystem must endure and acknowledge this Do they need to acknowledge it? Ecosystems aren't countries, they're markets, and citizenship doesn't exist here in the same sense – only participation in the ecosystem. Maybe there's some EU chicanery that makes it illegal for American companies to ship a UI that's displeasing to European tastes, but if we pretend that Apple is strictly an American company, would they need to acknowledge this at all if it didn't affect sales?
    - rickdeckard 1y ago
      I'm not sure we have the same understanding of "acknowledge". Apple can acknowledge criticism and still decide not to act on it. The rest of your comment I don't understand, sorry.
      - nozzlegear 1y ago
        > I'm not sure we have the same understanding of "acknowledge". Apple can acknowledge criticism and still decide not to act on it. We do, but what I'm suggesting is that Apple might exercise a third choice, which would be ignoring the criticism and pretending it doesn't exist if they don't think it will affect their sales.
nerdjon 1y ago
I have only been able to play with iOS 26 so far a little bit in the simulator, and so far it seems fine. To me it feels like after a couple months I will likely forget that a change was made (which TBH I think is a good thing, unlike when Windows has tried to make a change and never completes...). However there is one thing that I wanted to comment on here: > I’ve said this before, but Apple is forcing third party devs to be in service of Apple. The guidelines and rules are meant to sublimate the brands of the third party, and replace it with Apple. Personally one of the things that drives me insane is when an app tries to be special and have its own design language (looking at you Google) on my iOS device. The OS has an established design language and really should be used for most applications. I understand wanting to have a brand identity but too many apps take this too far that just lead to a clunky experience.
- rickdeckard 1y ago
  > The OS has an established design language and really should be used for most applications. This is a valid point. The other side of the story is that the iOS ecosystem is a marketplace where merchants offer goods and services, including Apple themselves. Apple increasingly wants to decide how you present your brand, to the point that the only brand-language Apple allows on its devices is its own. I think it's reasonable that merchants in this marketplace feel the increased pressure to work less on creating and refining their own identity and more on normalizing their offer like it could come directly from Apple, at their own expense and financial risk.
  - wtallis 1y ago
    On a phone, it can be tempting for an app developer to approach design as if their app is temporarily taking over the phone and transforming the entire device into the custom gadget your app embodies, since the app's UI will be filling almost the entire screen. On a desktop, it's more obvious that an app should instead strive to coexist alongside (literally) other apps and the rest of the OS. But in either case, ignoring the platform's established design language and UI conventions is still wrong, and not taking advantage of the user's preexisting knowledge about how to use their device is a wasted opportunity at best, insulting at worst. If the only reason for doing so is that you are placing your "brand identity" over actual usability and insist that your app look and feel the same on any device regardless of context, that's at the insulting hubris end of the spectrum. Given how widespread that problem is, it seems entirely appropriate and deserved for app developers to feel pressure from Apple (or any other OS vendor) to put more effort into conforming. We as users shouldn't want any app ecosystem to fragment into the mid-2000s WWW full of Flash UIs with zero accessibility.
_benton 1y ago
I have a feeling this will be yet another case of the nerds thinking something is a huge deal and when people update their phones this fall I bet most people won't care after 10 minutes.
- dr_kiszonka 1y ago
  It is probably largely true, but for people with vision and memory impairments Liquid Glass will be harder to use.
  - layer8 1y ago
    It will be harder to use for non-impaired people as well, though they might not consciously notice and/or still like how it looks despite being harder to use.
    - sixothree 1y ago
      That feeling goes away incredibly quickly. Like every major visual update before it, this is a non-event.
  - Spivak 1y ago
    Then you turn on "Reduce Transparency" in the Accessibility options. And then it's all gone. Testing it right now in the beta and everything is opaque. Even the faux-glass elements.
    - LordDragonfang 1y ago
      You're assuming that more than a fraction of users will know that setting even exists. The majority of people with vision impairments aren't people who are used to thinking of themselves as disabled and know their way around an a11y menu; they're 60-something grandparents trying to navigate their iphone to see photos of the grandkids. Good defaults are extremely important.
      - 1y ago
djoldman 1y ago
It's time we acknowledge that the purpose of most UI "progress" or "change" is sales. An entity like Apple introduces UI "enhancement" to attract prospective users and persuade existing users that the functionality of the product is new, efficient, or otherwise "good." UI is generally fashion and trend that seeks the "new" at great cost. This is why there is a lack of internal consistency or rigor with respect to some UI direction: consistency, functionality, etc. are not the point.
- wtallis 1y ago
  I think "sales" is just one of the post-hoc rationalizations. The real purpose very often is simply to justify the money you spent on UI designers; there's a kind of sunk cost fallacy where spending resources exploring design changes leaves management feeling like they must ship some kind of design change, and the UI designers are strongly in favor of leaving their mark on the product and securing a big accomplishment on their resume. The incentives simply aren't aligned to support a long-term strategy of not constantly messing with your UI.
  - esafak 1y ago
    > The real purpose very often is simply to justify the money you spent on UI designers It's backwards. It's for the UI designers to justify the money spent on them. They can't just sit there and do nothing. Designing is their job! It's the same with every position.
    - wtallis 1y ago
      It's a management failure. Either management is directly approving gratuitous UI redesigns, or they're making the mistake of giving designers unrestrained freedom to decide what UI changes ship.
      - TheOtherHobbes 1y ago
        Or they needed some kind of glossy faux-development to headline the marketing year when Apple AI tanked, and this was the best they could cobble together at relatively short notice. Meanwhile I get regular connection issues on Facetime on my iPhone 15 Pro Max, even though bandwidth isn't a problem here.
cedws 1y ago
The rounding on the corners bothers me more than anything else. It just doesn't look good on a mobile screen. There's already minimal space to play with, why make the target zone for a button even smaller? It adds to visual noise as well.
- rickdeckard 1y ago
  I believe that at this point Apple is less concerned about the mobile screen, with their existing userbase sufficiently locked-in the priority is probably a UI-language that works (and blends) well on large surfaces (AR-glasses)...
  - Cthulhu_ 1y ago
    Which is strange given that VR and AR are niche at best. The smartphone took off at the time because it was affordable and unobtrusive, Apple's own AR device is just silly to use in public. (I'm aware this is partly cultural desensitization, I remember the memes back when of people looking like shrimps staring at their phones etc).
    - rickdeckard 1y ago
      It is less strange when you consider that AR could be the technology to replace the smartphone itself. So far nothing could replace it (headsets, watches, other wearable) because while different ways of interaction exist, the users always needed a screen for (media) consumption. An AR device could suddenly tick all boxes, make a user buy such glasses as companion device and slowly transition away from his iPhone. So Apple needs to prepare and expand its ecosystem stickyness to AR.
  - geysersam 1y ago
    That actually makes a ton of sense and I don't know why you are being downvoted! In AR there's much more space, so padding and rounded corners matter less, and in VR you don't want control surfaces obstructing the view completely. It's useful to be able to see there's "something" behind that navigation icon. Even if you can't distinguish it clearly at least you won't walk into it. Not saying it's a good bet for Apple or for users, but it seems that's the bet they are making.
kakuri 1y ago
> I’ve said this before, but Apple is forcing third party devs to be in service of Apple I got my first taste of computers on early 90's Macs and was enchanted. Within a year I discovered DOS, Windows - and freedom. I did tech support for both Mac and Windows computers for several years. It's always been abundantly clear that the Empire of Mac exists for its own glorification (and obscene profits) - customers, developers, partners - they are all in service of Apple. It's unfortunate that Apple does some things with unparalleled quality and maintains a loyal following, because the apple has always been rotten at its core.
a3w 1y ago
About the icons: Original book looked best: we have lots of pixels, why not use them? The icon has a non-standard shape, making it easy to spot. Or if you actually need to have icon-shaped outlines, top-right one is beautiful, too. Although the shading should perhaps be removed if some OSs have their own shade logic for the whole images.
renecito 1y ago
Same sht over and over again. Apple keeps good or great things as their are: Apple is loosing its edge look how other are so innovative. Apple takes some risk and go bold on things: Why changing things? At the end everyone else complaining would just follow and copy. Rinse and repeat, bring the eyeballs and the money to my btching site or profile.
eviks 1y ago
> while you won’t actually be able to see the part of the image under the sidebar, on the other hand the transparency effect applied to the sidebar will make the text on it less legible overall. A great lose-lose situation, visually, don’t you think? Yes, of course, but it looks bold and innovative and designers can waste years tweaking various details across many apps! > reduces the amount of information displayed on screen, and you’ll have to scroll more as a consequence. ... You’re just injecting white space everywhere. Sure, but that's a common scourge in all modern design, why would an innovative design company stay behind?
jm4 1y ago
I liked Liquid Glass when I first saw it. I don't especially like the whole flat look everyone has had going the past few years so I was really looking forward to a refresh. I downloaded the beta and the more I use it the less I like it. The icons are blurry, washed out and look terrible overall. I have a difficult time using the buttons on the lock screen to activate the flashlight and camera. Most of the time, I push them and the lock screen customization screen comes up instead of the flashlight turning on. I don't know if they changed the geometry of the buttons or what, but I can't reliably use them anymore. There are other instances of low contrast text, weird blurry artifacts and janky animations. I hope these are all things that get worked out during the beta period. Overall, the whole thing looks unimpressive so far. I keep telling myself that OSX had the same kind of jank during the first beta and it will all work out. I want to roll back to iOS 18, but I can't do that without using iTunes, which isn't possible because I only have Linux machines.
- MangoToupe 1y ago
  > I want to roll back to iOS 18, but I can't do that without using iTunes, which isn't possible because I only have Linux machines. I don't know about now, but about 20 years ago iTunes worked under Wine to connect with my iPod and perform backups.
- loloquwowndueo 1y ago
  I use virtual box to run Windows under, precisely to have iTunes to sync my mp3 library to my phone. No streaming here my dudes, you’ll rip (pun intended) my mp3 collection from my cold dead hands.
- foxglacier 1y ago
  God I gave up trying to use the camera from the lock screen because if you fail, it's slower than just unlocking it and using it from the main screen, which is itself pretty unreliably and slow. I wish there was a way to quickly and reliably take photos without constantly fighting the stupidly fragile UI. Back in the day, you could just press the shutter button on your camera and it would take a photo instantly, but somehow we've regressed and nobody cares. It eliminates a whole range of spontaneous photos.
hcarvalhoalves 1y ago
> Why would you want to “focus on the underlying content” here? Tab bars and toolbars still cover the underlying content, and the more transparent/translucent they are, the worse. When something fades to the background, it literally ceases to be in the foreground, so there’s no point in focusing on it. This is like proposing an interface that helps you focus your sight on your peripheral vision. I believe that's exactly what Apple wants. This new design direction appears to be a strategy to unify all UI for VR as well. If all controls are designed to be translucent, they (Apple) have freedom to put the control anywhere on the user's field of view on VR and allow "focus on the underlying content" (which in the case of VR, is the real world). Time will tell if this approach makes sense for 2D screens.
- vjvjvjvjghv 1y ago
  UI unification strategies for different platforms seem to be very temping but usually make things worse. MS tried it with Windows 8 but it turns out that it made all platforms worse. Not a good tablet and worse desktop experience. On the other hand, Apple optimized iOS for a phone without unifying with MacOS and was very successful. Optimizing phones for VR seems a really bad idea.
  - thmsths 1y ago
    I am not sure if I agree with the conclusion about the Windows 8 UI unification, I still believe it could have made sense. It's just that as is often the case with MS, they let a good idea go to waste by doing a half assed implementation, then backtracking...
    - kmeisthax 1y ago
      The problem is that they bought into the iPad hype. The correct way to build a tablet OS is to start with a desktop environment and optimize it - including third-party software - for fingers. We see this with iPadOS, which keeps getting hand-me-down features from macOS, implemented almost exactly the same as they are on macOS but with bigger tap targets. In contrast, Windows 8 saw Microsoft taking the contemporary state of the iPad - single window, everything full screen, etc - and treating this as the future. Hell, I'm surprised they even shipped split-screen on it. They even locked down the app runtime to signed Store apps only[0]. My guess is that management saw dollar signs from how much Apple made from the iOS App Store and thought turning Windows into an "iPad Killer"[1] would replicate the same success. Ironically, Windows 7 was already built to be a touch-friendly desktop, they just didn't actually finish making it touch-friendly. [0] Which created a fun bifurcation between widget toolkits in the Microsoft ecosystem that persists to this day. [1] Any time a company describes a product as a "killer" product, i.e. something intended to outcompete another product, they've already lost.
SirMaster 1y ago
First option I will be enabling immediately is "Reduce Transparency"
- 1over137 1y ago
  It doesn’t help as much as it used to. ;(
  - robin_reala 1y ago
    Tick “Increase contrast” as well?
cnrad 1y ago
This beautifully summed up a lot of what I've been thinking about Liquid Glass since I first saw it. A lot of it doesn't really make sense - in an effort to make usability clearer, they are designing everything to look the same and create more empty space for... vibes? As the years have gone on, it feels like computers are slowly losing every ounce of personality they once had. Software should be delightful to use! Computers felt fun! I'm hoping we eventually get through this minimal/bland era of UI design and come back around to design with a little creativity. It feels like Apple is trying to subtly introduce the concept of spatial UI for the future, where the norm will be to have controls and content on separate "layers" - but I don't think it should come at a cost of sacrificing the interfaces we already have.
- ctkhn 1y ago
  I agree, and I'm frustrated this is the new big update because it seems like liquid glass ate up most of the energy that might have gone to a real major feature. Not only is it just UI changes, it looks worse.
- damiante 1y ago
  I see the same sort of thing happening in housing, and I think it's because the nature of the thing has changed. Houses used to be for families; they were often quirky or strange or emergent, with weird layouts or materials. They may have garish wallpapers or floor to ceiling wood panelling. But these touches were reflective of the personalities of the owners. They met the needs of the specific people who inhabited them. Nowadays, as houses are more of a commodity, they must be generic. All flat white interiors, straight corners, no cornicing or archetraves or plasterwork or anything to give the home a unique character. Instead it must be a blank canvas such that any inhabitant can put his own things inside it to make it his. Computers are the same; what was once a niche product for enthusiasts and businesses has now become an instrumental part of nearly every moment of nearly everyone's lives. Thus they also must be generic and same-y, with limited avenues for superficial customisation, so that they can be interchanged or upgraded without jarring the user against the new version or device. Personally I prefer radical customisation and quirkiness. I find it charming. But it seems that those who are designing (or perhaps only selling) the things disagree with me.
arthurofbabylon 1y ago
Excellent summary of critiques. Not mentioned is the peculiar response by the Apple ecosystem pundits. They were oddly supportive of these maladaptive design system changes on the basis of excitement (they can’t afford to be left out of the media momentum…). I believe their collusive tendencies mask what would otherwise be perceived as a major flop or severe error. Also not mentioned in the piece, I remain curious as to the internal Apple team/culture changes that resulted in this design system failure. What on earth happened?
erickhill 1y ago
This is likely going to look really cool and feel even better on iOS and iPadOS. The phones haven't changed visually (hardware or software) a ton in a decade because, frankly, they are a really mature and solid product. There's a reason not many iPhone 15 users upgraded to 16. With Liquid Glass, for once in a long while iPhone users will look down and instantly see drastic change. Remember iOS 7? That took a long time to iron out all the "oof!" as well. But it slowly did improve. On MacOS, though, I really do worry it's going to take several iterations before things make a lot of sense. God forbid this new UI layer hurts performance, too, on these exceptionally fast machines. Good news is things are still in beta. Some ideas can always be walked back.
- mglikesbikes 1y ago
  Organizationally, Apple have definitely stuffed the Mac. Catalyst was a mistake and with hindsight they should have just made SwiftUI more capable, earlier. But now they’re focusing on building Android apps with it too?! To say nothing of locker service etc.
mglikesbikes 1y ago
How many have used the new iOS daily since it was announced? Gentle reminder that the average Mac user is nontechnical, especially the younger generation. IMO this is Apple slapping a formalized paint on the simplification of iOS 7, and doubling down on iconography (not app icons). Now all of that said — there are major usability concerns in iOS 26 and the liquid glass design language. The file picker’s previous “Done” has been replaced with a single checkmark. Significant meaning is lost in a few places, and there are super-odd double-X icons (in mobile safari while entering a URL, for example). Safari’s new tab button is now out of reach, while the previous new tab gesture is now new tab group. Context menus expand now, instead of swipe, meaning what used to feel more natural now takes extra taps/muscle memory updates. That all said, as iOS 7 improved over time and was nailed down, so will this. To me it’s given the iPhone - an incredibly boring platform/device 18 years in - new life. The new Lock Screen Photo Shuffle is incredibly personable and downright beautiful. From my understanding, a lot of work went into pre-composing app icons, many of which are objectively beautiful. I’ve found users can’t find buttons “under the thumb” so I’m curious how the dedicated tab bar search will work in practice. Overall I think for the goals of liquid glass as a design system, it’s something only Apple could do - in a good way.
- sixothree 1y ago
  I did a yolo and installed it the day after it was released. I have been daily driving it since. I like it. And I mean I really like it. When Apple says the focus is the content, they really mean it. The content is king here, not the interface. All of these things people keep telling me are "worse" are often things I thought were poorly designed in the first place. Being able to find controls easily seems to be the biggest complaint, for instance the buttons in Safari. I've always thought the buttons in Safari were unintuitive. This actually feels better to me. This idea that things are harder to find because of the visual changes, that goes away in like a day. Just like every major visual upgrade before this your eyes train to it _extremely_ quickly. I do feel like they "borrowed" the shape of textboxes from google though with the circular edges. I was never really a fan of that shape.
prng2021 1y ago
Serious question, anyone have guesses on how such an awful set of UI changes could have gotten approved? Even amongst my non-tech friends, they all agree that based on screenshots, things are harder to read. The latest iOS 26 beta even makes the glass effect more opaque which to me is an admission they screwed up, but they also certainly can’t completely backtrack at this point. Apple has consistently balanced beauty and function, from their hardware to stores to product packaging. They must have an army of experienced UX designers and well thought out user testing processes. Given all that, how in the world did this liquid glass idea even get past the preliminary mockup stage? Were/are they simply betting that the cool factor of the glass effect will outweigh the usability issues? And that Windows Vista’s glass UI went out of style simply because it wasn’t realistic enough?
- ls-a 1y ago
  They probably want to move users away from the iphone and onto a new platform? probably AR glasses? There is a similar (kind of) conversation on how car design got worse so people will fall less in love with their cars and switch to electric.
  - avalys 1y ago
    This is complete nonsense. No one in charge of product planning - for consumer electronics or automobiles - thinks this way.
    - ls-a 1y ago
      I think i meant electric and driverless
- wpm 1y ago
  > army of experienced UX designers They do, which means they have an army's worth of officers all trying to jockey for influence and power and position with little pet projects and "suggestions" and so on. Apple's best years in UX were well before the army arrived, when they had a single man with great taste ultimately green-lighting every decision. Apple's air of "design excellence" is stale, and is purely marketing now, i.e., a lie.
Waterluvian 1y ago
Meanwhile the VLC icon sidesteps all of it by making zero symbolic sense but never changing.
- RattlesnakeJake 1y ago
  Is there much about VLC that does change?
deleted 1y ago
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sandspar 1y ago
Commenters seem confident that Liquid Glass is basically a VR thing. But I thought the Metaverse bombed, Apple Ski Googles (correct name?) bombed. Why would Apple go all-in on VR when it's looking more and more like VR is not coming for a while, if ever?
mschuster91 1y ago
More like "liquid ass", please forgive the pun. The core issue is that Apple et al all have their UX/UI in-house, which means on the payroll, which means they have to produce something new to justify their continued employment. But instead of devs who always have some bugs to fix or some old cruft to refactor, these opportunities are rare for UX/UI, mostly because you'd also need to employ proper support teams that have a way of aggregating customer complaints or improvement ideas (and legal FUD surrounding the question of "copyright on suggestions" - LWT famously bans their employees from even reading r/LastWeekTonight to avoid getting held liable if they use an idea someone suggested there) and to derive improvement ideas from there. It's either "boom (every 3-4 years) or bust".
ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
The main issue that I have with Liquid Glass, is that it changes a bunch of dimensions and behaviors. If you are writing all your apps in SwiftUI, then that's probably OK. However, the vast majority of apps use UIKit (or use a library that is ultimately based on UIKit), with AutoLayout. In fact, I'll bet that most of the really big apps are still ObjC/NonAutoLayout. AutoLayout/UIKit is a big fat pain in the ass, but it works extremely well. It has had over a decade, to buff out the rough spots and corner cases. I can't think of a single UI conundrum that I've had, in the last ten years, that I couldn't figure out how to address with AL. With SwiftUI, I'm constantly running into "You can't get there, from here." Most (probably all, but I have a couple of old ones) of my apps work well in any display. That means resized (usually narrow vertical) iPad windows, rotated iPhones (where a lot of the UI scrolls off the bottom, and you need to scroll for it), and resized Mac windows. With SwiftUI, you tend to get support for that pretty much automatically, but with AL, you usually need to specifically design for it, so when the phone gets rotated, things flow into the right places, etc. Adding all the LG borders around things like tab bar items and navbar items, changes the layout; sometimes, fairly substantially. Right now, I'm just tossing a UIDesignRequiresCompatibility into the Info.plist, but that feels like a kludge, and I'll need to adapt, but that may take a while.
amluto 1y ago
I can’t help but read Apple’s guidelines and think they read something from the 90s or early 2000s and completely misinterpreted it. Quoting (and this theme is repeated over and over): > Ensure that you clearly separate your content from navigation elements, like tab bars and sidebars, to establish a distinct functional layer above the content layer. This makes perfect sense. Separate content and controls. In this variant, controls go on top, like a toolbar, and then there’s a horizontal division (maybe an actual line, maybe just blank space), then content. Then I looked at the pictures again and did a double take. Apple doesn’t have a clear separation at all. And the controls are at the bottom, not the top. The punchline, of course, is that Apple transposed the Y and Z axes! The functional layer isn’t toward the top of the screen — it’s toward the user! You are supposed to separate content and controls along X or Y so that content is next to controls but separated a bit but, for some reason, Apple is floating controls over content, in the Z axis. The separation is a plane, parallel to the screen, that you can’t see because the controls are in the way. Apple, turn off your fancy shaders and go back to the drawing board. You have so many more pixels than any 90s designer, and yet you can fit almost no unobscured content on the screen. And your poor users can’t see the divisions between content and everything else because you built the technology to rotate the whole UI 90 degrees about the X axis!
mat0 1y ago
it’s crazy. it seems like someone came up with this new design because they liked the transparency effect and only afterwards they came up with the arguments and reasoning about it. worse, if they would have the balls to say “we changed it because we believe it looks nicer and this is where we want to move with our uis” i would at least respect them because of it. but they cannot say something like this (prob because it’s not investor friendly), so they have to come up with these clearly conflicting reasons
- chakintosh 1y ago
  It's what happens when your designers take their inspiration from the garbage on dribbble.
IlikeKitties 1y ago
> But it’s not just that, it’s that these ‘Icon Appearances’ also remove colour, depth, and personality from third-party app icons too. This further dictates (and interferes with) what kind of design a third-party developer may choose for their apps. All this after recommending employing “a minimal number of shapes” and “prefer[ring] a simple background”. This is something Apple has been consistently great at. I do not want a 3rd Party App to look and feel massively different from a first party app. In fact I'd like all apps to look and feel very uniform. Whenever some third rate designer thinks their design is somehow better than the entire rest of the systems design you get ugly mismatches and clashing styles. Even if the 3rd Party Design IS superior, it won't look any good being completely out of place.

184 points by freediver 1y ago

Almost hilarous: > Apple Design-Guide: "Ensure that you clearly separate your content from navigation elements [..]" Honest auto-complete: "[..] the OS will then use the GPU to draw all attention away from the content to the navigation elements"

rickdeckard 1y ago

> I’ve said this before, but Apple is forcing third party devs to be in service of Apple. The guidelines and rules are meant to sublimate the brands of the third party, and replace it with Apple. I have the same impression. Frankly I believe the whole purpose of "Liquid Glass" is to create an exaggerated version of the GUI Apple intends to use later-on in AR glasses, which is then toned back again in later releases to match the feasible implementation on the glasses. The expected migration curve seems to be to force all applications now to become more bland and less distinguishable from the OS (and Apple services), so that at the end of the journey (in a future AR-product) Apple can #1 render those apps consistently without disrupting their UX and #2 present itself as the user-facing service provider for all the value created by those apps (with the app-developer being responsible for the integration and UX-compliance). It's a dream-scenario. Need a ride-hailing service? Let "the Apple glasses" do it for you. Under the hood the apps are then hopefully so streamlined already that service-providers will compete to be the fulfilment entity for this task.

mschuster91 1y ago
> Under the hood the apps are then hopefully so streamlined already that service-providers will compete to be the fulfilment entity for this task. Probably going to be against the hivemind on this one, but I for one welcome this. Public transport, taxis, flights, hotels, to a degree even restaurants are fungible. I want to get from A to B, I want to have a bed for a few nights in some other city, I want to get some specific food. That's what I need. What I do not want is to waste time to get what I need with bullshit. That's why I love the "evil B" of hospitality - I see all available hotels for my travel, the associated price and pictures. I select an offer (usually the cheapest one that still has decent reviews), I click on "book", I confirm my data, that's it. I don't need to wade through dozens of websites, enter my data a dozen times, and then finally enter payment data on yet another shady website that's probably gonna get hacked sooner or later. I don't want to waste my time researching the phone number of the local taxi company, so taxi.de it is, I only select where I need to go and a few minutes later a taxi shows up, no need to call someone, spell out the street name I live in to someone barely understanding me on the phone because Germany's phone service is dogshit. I don't care about which specific Chinese restaurant I want, so I go on Lieferando, and half an hour later a nice load of fried rice with greens shows up at my door. And every time I have to go to a specific place (say for an anniversary) I know exactly why I despise the old way - everyone does seat reservations differently, no integration with anything. What still irks me is flight booking, because while Google and a fair few other resellers/brokers do at least compare available options of different fulfilment providers, the actual booking I have to do is still on each airline's different web page. And rail travel is similarly annoying once you try to leave Germany.
- rickdeckard 1y ago
  This is very valid, I also don't like to install an app for every service. And I don't think there's a "hivemind" on this at all. But it's reasonable that the merchants offering in the marketplace of that ecosystem start to observe how their opportunity to become the next "evil B of X" are increasingly diminished, in favor of being the fulfilment entity for the "benevolent A". I neither need an "evil B" nor a "benevolent A", and substituting one for the other is not a solution either...
dwaite 1y ago
It is a direct response to developer feedback - that they only are going to make iPhone apps because redoing design to support even just iPad, let alone a watch, TV, Mac, and AR variant is work. Even Facebook hasn't found the resources to port the Instagram app to have a proper UX on iPad. This started with the separation of iPad OS (and release of Catalyst, and SwiftUI 1.0) in 2019. iPad OS is effectively the mother platform - an iPad app can be adapted down to target iPhone, or to target macOS and visionOS (with both those platforms also supporting running iPadOS apps natively without modification). The L&F changes in 2020 to macOS (with release 11) were heavily about making iPadOS and macOS more visually similar. It doesn't surprise me at all that a team at apple tasked to make a consistent HIG and L&F across all products is borrowing heavily from the most recent HIG/L&F they worked on (Vision OS).

PapaPalpatine 1y ago

I’m not a professional designer, but I like Liquid Glass. If you don’t like it, stay on iOS 18 or switch to Android. Aside from the criticism of icons, every complaint in the article just came across as nit-picks.

rickdeckard 1y ago
Beside of the fact that App-Developers don't have the option to "stay on iOS18 or switch to Android", that statement is equivalent to "Stop criticizing my country. If you don't like what it is doing, find yourself another country". Developers (and users) are citizens of that ecosystem, serving other citizens and contributing to its economy. It is their right to judge and criticize directions being taken. The owner of that ecosystem must endure and acknowledge this (especially when he continuously makes efforts to increase the difficulty to LEAVE that ecosystem), and other citizens should not take any offense from this at all.
- nozzlegear 1y ago
  > The owner of that ecosystem must endure and acknowledge this Do they need to acknowledge it? Ecosystems aren't countries, they're markets, and citizenship doesn't exist here in the same sense – only participation in the ecosystem. Maybe there's some EU chicanery that makes it illegal for American companies to ship a UI that's displeasing to European tastes, but if we pretend that Apple is strictly an American company, would they need to acknowledge this at all if it didn't affect sales?
  - rickdeckard 1y ago
    I'm not sure we have the same understanding of "acknowledge". Apple can acknowledge criticism and still decide not to act on it. The rest of your comment I don't understand, sorry.
    - nozzlegear 1y ago
      > I'm not sure we have the same understanding of "acknowledge". Apple can acknowledge criticism and still decide not to act on it. We do, but what I'm suggesting is that Apple might exercise a third choice, which would be ignoring the criticism and pretending it doesn't exist if they don't think it will affect their sales.

nerdjon 1y ago

I have only been able to play with iOS 26 so far a little bit in the simulator, and so far it seems fine. To me it feels like after a couple months I will likely forget that a change was made (which TBH I think is a good thing, unlike when Windows has tried to make a change and never completes...). However there is one thing that I wanted to comment on here: > I’ve said this before, but Apple is forcing third party devs to be in service of Apple. The guidelines and rules are meant to sublimate the brands of the third party, and replace it with Apple. Personally one of the things that drives me insane is when an app tries to be special and have its own design language (looking at you Google) on my iOS device. The OS has an established design language and really should be used for most applications. I understand wanting to have a brand identity but too many apps take this too far that just lead to a clunky experience.

rickdeckard 1y ago
> The OS has an established design language and really should be used for most applications. This is a valid point. The other side of the story is that the iOS ecosystem is a marketplace where merchants offer goods and services, including Apple themselves. Apple increasingly wants to decide how you present your brand, to the point that the only brand-language Apple allows on its devices is its own. I think it's reasonable that merchants in this marketplace feel the increased pressure to work less on creating and refining their own identity and more on normalizing their offer like it could come directly from Apple, at their own expense and financial risk.
- wtallis 1y ago
  On a phone, it can be tempting for an app developer to approach design as if their app is temporarily taking over the phone and transforming the entire device into the custom gadget your app embodies, since the app's UI will be filling almost the entire screen. On a desktop, it's more obvious that an app should instead strive to coexist alongside (literally) other apps and the rest of the OS. But in either case, ignoring the platform's established design language and UI conventions is still wrong, and not taking advantage of the user's preexisting knowledge about how to use their device is a wasted opportunity at best, insulting at worst. If the only reason for doing so is that you are placing your "brand identity" over actual usability and insist that your app look and feel the same on any device regardless of context, that's at the insulting hubris end of the spectrum. Given how widespread that problem is, it seems entirely appropriate and deserved for app developers to feel pressure from Apple (or any other OS vendor) to put more effort into conforming. We as users shouldn't want any app ecosystem to fragment into the mid-2000s WWW full of Flash UIs with zero accessibility.

_benton 1y ago

I have a feeling this will be yet another case of the nerds thinking something is a huge deal and when people update their phones this fall I bet most people won't care after 10 minutes.

dr_kiszonka 1y ago
It is probably largely true, but for people with vision and memory impairments Liquid Glass will be harder to use.
- layer8 1y ago
  It will be harder to use for non-impaired people as well, though they might not consciously notice and/or still like how it looks despite being harder to use.
  - sixothree 1y ago
    That feeling goes away incredibly quickly. Like every major visual update before it, this is a non-event.
- Spivak 1y ago
  Then you turn on "Reduce Transparency" in the Accessibility options. And then it's all gone. Testing it right now in the beta and everything is opaque. Even the faux-glass elements.
  - LordDragonfang 1y ago
    You're assuming that more than a fraction of users will know that setting even exists. The majority of people with vision impairments aren't people who are used to thinking of themselves as disabled and know their way around an a11y menu; they're 60-something grandparents trying to navigate their iphone to see photos of the grandkids. Good defaults are extremely important.
    - 1y ago

djoldman 1y ago

It's time we acknowledge that the purpose of most UI "progress" or "change" is sales. An entity like Apple introduces UI "enhancement" to attract prospective users and persuade existing users that the functionality of the product is new, efficient, or otherwise "good." UI is generally fashion and trend that seeks the "new" at great cost. This is why there is a lack of internal consistency or rigor with respect to some UI direction: consistency, functionality, etc. are not the point.

wtallis 1y ago
I think "sales" is just one of the post-hoc rationalizations. The real purpose very often is simply to justify the money you spent on UI designers; there's a kind of sunk cost fallacy where spending resources exploring design changes leaves management feeling like they must ship some kind of design change, and the UI designers are strongly in favor of leaving their mark on the product and securing a big accomplishment on their resume. The incentives simply aren't aligned to support a long-term strategy of not constantly messing with your UI.
- esafak 1y ago
  > The real purpose very often is simply to justify the money you spent on UI designers It's backwards. It's for the UI designers to justify the money spent on them. They can't just sit there and do nothing. Designing is their job! It's the same with every position.
  - wtallis 1y ago
    It's a management failure. Either management is directly approving gratuitous UI redesigns, or they're making the mistake of giving designers unrestrained freedom to decide what UI changes ship.
    - TheOtherHobbes 1y ago
      Or they needed some kind of glossy faux-development to headline the marketing year when Apple AI tanked, and this was the best they could cobble together at relatively short notice. Meanwhile I get regular connection issues on Facetime on my iPhone 15 Pro Max, even though bandwidth isn't a problem here.

cedws 1y ago

The rounding on the corners bothers me more than anything else. It just doesn't look good on a mobile screen. There's already minimal space to play with, why make the target zone for a button even smaller? It adds to visual noise as well.

rickdeckard 1y ago
I believe that at this point Apple is less concerned about the mobile screen, with their existing userbase sufficiently locked-in the priority is probably a UI-language that works (and blends) well on large surfaces (AR-glasses)...
- Cthulhu_ 1y ago
  Which is strange given that VR and AR are niche at best. The smartphone took off at the time because it was affordable and unobtrusive, Apple's own AR device is just silly to use in public. (I'm aware this is partly cultural desensitization, I remember the memes back when of people looking like shrimps staring at their phones etc).
  - rickdeckard 1y ago
    It is less strange when you consider that AR could be the technology to replace the smartphone itself. So far nothing could replace it (headsets, watches, other wearable) because while different ways of interaction exist, the users always needed a screen for (media) consumption. An AR device could suddenly tick all boxes, make a user buy such glasses as companion device and slowly transition away from his iPhone. So Apple needs to prepare and expand its ecosystem stickyness to AR.
- geysersam 1y ago
  That actually makes a ton of sense and I don't know why you are being downvoted! In AR there's much more space, so padding and rounded corners matter less, and in VR you don't want control surfaces obstructing the view completely. It's useful to be able to see there's "something" behind that navigation icon. Even if you can't distinguish it clearly at least you won't walk into it. Not saying it's a good bet for Apple or for users, but it seems that's the bet they are making.

kakuri 1y ago

> I’ve said this before, but Apple is forcing third party devs to be in service of Apple I got my first taste of computers on early 90's Macs and was enchanted. Within a year I discovered DOS, Windows - and freedom. I did tech support for both Mac and Windows computers for several years. It's always been abundantly clear that the Empire of Mac exists for its own glorification (and obscene profits) - customers, developers, partners - they are all in service of Apple. It's unfortunate that Apple does some things with unparalleled quality and maintains a loyal following, because the apple has always been rotten at its core.

a3w 1y ago

About the icons: Original book looked best: we have lots of pixels, why not use them? The icon has a non-standard shape, making it easy to spot. Or if you actually need to have icon-shaped outlines, top-right one is beautiful, too. Although the shading should perhaps be removed if some OSs have their own shade logic for the whole images.

renecito 1y ago

Same sht over and over again. Apple keeps good or great things as their are: Apple is loosing its edge look how other are so innovative. Apple takes some risk and go bold on things: Why changing things? At the end everyone else complaining would just follow and copy. Rinse and repeat, bring the eyeballs and the money to my btching site or profile.

eviks 1y ago

> while you won’t actually be able to see the part of the image under the sidebar, on the other hand the transparency effect applied to the sidebar will make the text on it less legible overall. A great lose-lose situation, visually, don’t you think? Yes, of course, but it looks bold and innovative and designers can waste years tweaking various details across many apps! > reduces the amount of information displayed on screen, and you’ll have to scroll more as a consequence. ... You’re just injecting white space everywhere. Sure, but that's a common scourge in all modern design, why would an innovative design company stay behind?

jm4 1y ago

I liked Liquid Glass when I first saw it. I don't especially like the whole flat look everyone has had going the past few years so I was really looking forward to a refresh. I downloaded the beta and the more I use it the less I like it. The icons are blurry, washed out and look terrible overall. I have a difficult time using the buttons on the lock screen to activate the flashlight and camera. Most of the time, I push them and the lock screen customization screen comes up instead of the flashlight turning on. I don't know if they changed the geometry of the buttons or what, but I can't reliably use them anymore. There are other instances of low contrast text, weird blurry artifacts and janky animations. I hope these are all things that get worked out during the beta period. Overall, the whole thing looks unimpressive so far. I keep telling myself that OSX had the same kind of jank during the first beta and it will all work out. I want to roll back to iOS 18, but I can't do that without using iTunes, which isn't possible because I only have Linux machines.

MangoToupe 1y ago
> I want to roll back to iOS 18, but I can't do that without using iTunes, which isn't possible because I only have Linux machines. I don't know about now, but about 20 years ago iTunes worked under Wine to connect with my iPod and perform backups.
loloquwowndueo 1y ago
I use virtual box to run Windows under, precisely to have iTunes to sync my mp3 library to my phone. No streaming here my dudes, you’ll rip (pun intended) my mp3 collection from my cold dead hands.
foxglacier 1y ago
God I gave up trying to use the camera from the lock screen because if you fail, it's slower than just unlocking it and using it from the main screen, which is itself pretty unreliably and slow. I wish there was a way to quickly and reliably take photos without constantly fighting the stupidly fragile UI. Back in the day, you could just press the shutter button on your camera and it would take a photo instantly, but somehow we've regressed and nobody cares. It eliminates a whole range of spontaneous photos.

hcarvalhoalves 1y ago

> Why would you want to “focus on the underlying content” here? Tab bars and toolbars still cover the underlying content, and the more transparent/translucent they are, the worse. When something fades to the background, it literally ceases to be in the foreground, so there’s no point in focusing on it. This is like proposing an interface that helps you focus your sight on your peripheral vision. I believe that's exactly what Apple wants. This new design direction appears to be a strategy to unify all UI for VR as well. If all controls are designed to be translucent, they (Apple) have freedom to put the control anywhere on the user's field of view on VR and allow "focus on the underlying content" (which in the case of VR, is the real world). Time will tell if this approach makes sense for 2D screens.

vjvjvjvjghv 1y ago
UI unification strategies for different platforms seem to be very temping but usually make things worse. MS tried it with Windows 8 but it turns out that it made all platforms worse. Not a good tablet and worse desktop experience. On the other hand, Apple optimized iOS for a phone without unifying with MacOS and was very successful. Optimizing phones for VR seems a really bad idea.
- thmsths 1y ago
  I am not sure if I agree with the conclusion about the Windows 8 UI unification, I still believe it could have made sense. It's just that as is often the case with MS, they let a good idea go to waste by doing a half assed implementation, then backtracking...
  - kmeisthax 1y ago
    The problem is that they bought into the iPad hype. The correct way to build a tablet OS is to start with a desktop environment and optimize it - including third-party software - for fingers. We see this with iPadOS, which keeps getting hand-me-down features from macOS, implemented almost exactly the same as they are on macOS but with bigger tap targets. In contrast, Windows 8 saw Microsoft taking the contemporary state of the iPad - single window, everything full screen, etc - and treating this as the future. Hell, I'm surprised they even shipped split-screen on it. They even locked down the app runtime to signed Store apps only[0]. My guess is that management saw dollar signs from how much Apple made from the iOS App Store and thought turning Windows into an "iPad Killer"[1] would replicate the same success. Ironically, Windows 7 was already built to be a touch-friendly desktop, they just didn't actually finish making it touch-friendly. [0] Which created a fun bifurcation between widget toolkits in the Microsoft ecosystem that persists to this day. [1] Any time a company describes a product as a "killer" product, i.e. something intended to outcompete another product, they've already lost.

SirMaster 1y ago

First option I will be enabling immediately is "Reduce Transparency"

1over137 1y ago
It doesn’t help as much as it used to. ;(
- robin_reala 1y ago
  Tick “Increase contrast” as well?

cnrad 1y ago

This beautifully summed up a lot of what I've been thinking about Liquid Glass since I first saw it. A lot of it doesn't really make sense - in an effort to make usability clearer, they are designing everything to look the same and create more empty space for... vibes? As the years have gone on, it feels like computers are slowly losing every ounce of personality they once had. Software should be delightful to use! Computers felt fun! I'm hoping we eventually get through this minimal/bland era of UI design and come back around to design with a little creativity. It feels like Apple is trying to subtly introduce the concept of spatial UI for the future, where the norm will be to have controls and content on separate "layers" - but I don't think it should come at a cost of sacrificing the interfaces we already have.

ctkhn 1y ago
I agree, and I'm frustrated this is the new big update because it seems like liquid glass ate up most of the energy that might have gone to a real major feature. Not only is it just UI changes, it looks worse.
damiante 1y ago
I see the same sort of thing happening in housing, and I think it's because the nature of the thing has changed. Houses used to be for families; they were often quirky or strange or emergent, with weird layouts or materials. They may have garish wallpapers or floor to ceiling wood panelling. But these touches were reflective of the personalities of the owners. They met the needs of the specific people who inhabited them. Nowadays, as houses are more of a commodity, they must be generic. All flat white interiors, straight corners, no cornicing or archetraves or plasterwork or anything to give the home a unique character. Instead it must be a blank canvas such that any inhabitant can put his own things inside it to make it his. Computers are the same; what was once a niche product for enthusiasts and businesses has now become an instrumental part of nearly every moment of nearly everyone's lives. Thus they also must be generic and same-y, with limited avenues for superficial customisation, so that they can be interchanged or upgraded without jarring the user against the new version or device. Personally I prefer radical customisation and quirkiness. I find it charming. But it seems that those who are designing (or perhaps only selling) the things disagree with me.

arthurofbabylon 1y ago

Excellent summary of critiques. Not mentioned is the peculiar response by the Apple ecosystem pundits. They were oddly supportive of these maladaptive design system changes on the basis of excitement (they can’t afford to be left out of the media momentum…). I believe their collusive tendencies mask what would otherwise be perceived as a major flop or severe error. Also not mentioned in the piece, I remain curious as to the internal Apple team/culture changes that resulted in this design system failure. What on earth happened?

erickhill 1y ago

This is likely going to look really cool and feel even better on iOS and iPadOS. The phones haven't changed visually (hardware or software) a ton in a decade because, frankly, they are a really mature and solid product. There's a reason not many iPhone 15 users upgraded to 16. With Liquid Glass, for once in a long while iPhone users will look down and instantly see drastic change. Remember iOS 7? That took a long time to iron out all the "oof!" as well. But it slowly did improve. On MacOS, though, I really do worry it's going to take several iterations before things make a lot of sense. God forbid this new UI layer hurts performance, too, on these exceptionally fast machines. Good news is things are still in beta. Some ideas can always be walked back.

mglikesbikes 1y ago
Organizationally, Apple have definitely stuffed the Mac. Catalyst was a mistake and with hindsight they should have just made SwiftUI more capable, earlier. But now they’re focusing on building Android apps with it too?! To say nothing of locker service etc.

mglikesbikes 1y ago

How many have used the new iOS daily since it was announced? Gentle reminder that the average Mac user is nontechnical, especially the younger generation. IMO this is Apple slapping a formalized paint on the simplification of iOS 7, and doubling down on iconography (not app icons). Now all of that said — there are major usability concerns in iOS 26 and the liquid glass design language. The file picker’s previous “Done” has been replaced with a single checkmark. Significant meaning is lost in a few places, and there are super-odd double-X icons (in mobile safari while entering a URL, for example). Safari’s new tab button is now out of reach, while the previous new tab gesture is now new tab group. Context menus expand now, instead of swipe, meaning what used to feel more natural now takes extra taps/muscle memory updates. That all said, as iOS 7 improved over time and was nailed down, so will this. To me it’s given the iPhone - an incredibly boring platform/device 18 years in - new life. The new Lock Screen Photo Shuffle is incredibly personable and downright beautiful. From my understanding, a lot of work went into pre-composing app icons, many of which are objectively beautiful. I’ve found users can’t find buttons “under the thumb” so I’m curious how the dedicated tab bar search will work in practice. Overall I think for the goals of liquid glass as a design system, it’s something only Apple could do - in a good way.

sixothree 1y ago
I did a yolo and installed it the day after it was released. I have been daily driving it since. I like it. And I mean I really like it. When Apple says the focus is the content, they really mean it. The content is king here, not the interface. All of these things people keep telling me are "worse" are often things I thought were poorly designed in the first place. Being able to find controls easily seems to be the biggest complaint, for instance the buttons in Safari. I've always thought the buttons in Safari were unintuitive. This actually feels better to me. This idea that things are harder to find because of the visual changes, that goes away in like a day. Just like every major visual upgrade before this your eyes train to it _extremely_ quickly. I do feel like they "borrowed" the shape of textboxes from google though with the circular edges. I was never really a fan of that shape.

prng2021 1y ago

Serious question, anyone have guesses on how such an awful set of UI changes could have gotten approved? Even amongst my non-tech friends, they all agree that based on screenshots, things are harder to read. The latest iOS 26 beta even makes the glass effect more opaque which to me is an admission they screwed up, but they also certainly can’t completely backtrack at this point. Apple has consistently balanced beauty and function, from their hardware to stores to product packaging. They must have an army of experienced UX designers and well thought out user testing processes. Given all that, how in the world did this liquid glass idea even get past the preliminary mockup stage? Were/are they simply betting that the cool factor of the glass effect will outweigh the usability issues? And that Windows Vista’s glass UI went out of style simply because it wasn’t realistic enough?

ls-a 1y ago
They probably want to move users away from the iphone and onto a new platform? probably AR glasses? There is a similar (kind of) conversation on how car design got worse so people will fall less in love with their cars and switch to electric.
- avalys 1y ago
  This is complete nonsense. No one in charge of product planning - for consumer electronics or automobiles - thinks this way.
  - ls-a 1y ago
    I think i meant electric and driverless
wpm 1y ago
> army of experienced UX designers They do, which means they have an army's worth of officers all trying to jockey for influence and power and position with little pet projects and "suggestions" and so on. Apple's best years in UX were well before the army arrived, when they had a single man with great taste ultimately green-lighting every decision. Apple's air of "design excellence" is stale, and is purely marketing now, i.e., a lie.

Waterluvian 1y ago

Meanwhile the VLC icon sidesteps all of it by making zero symbolic sense but never changing.

RattlesnakeJake 1y ago
Is there much about VLC that does change?

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

sandspar 1y ago

Commenters seem confident that Liquid Glass is basically a VR thing. But I thought the Metaverse bombed, Apple Ski Googles (correct name?) bombed. Why would Apple go all-in on VR when it's looking more and more like VR is not coming for a while, if ever?

mschuster91 1y ago

More like "liquid ass", please forgive the pun. The core issue is that Apple et al all have their UX/UI in-house, which means on the payroll, which means they have to produce something new to justify their continued employment. But instead of devs who always have some bugs to fix or some old cruft to refactor, these opportunities are rare for UX/UI, mostly because you'd also need to employ proper support teams that have a way of aggregating customer complaints or improvement ideas (and legal FUD surrounding the question of "copyright on suggestions" - LWT famously bans their employees from even reading r/LastWeekTonight to avoid getting held liable if they use an idea someone suggested there) and to derive improvement ideas from there. It's either "boom (every 3-4 years) or bust".

ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago

The main issue that I have with Liquid Glass, is that it changes a bunch of dimensions and behaviors. If you are writing all your apps in SwiftUI, then that's probably OK. However, the vast majority of apps use UIKit (or use a library that is ultimately based on UIKit), with AutoLayout. In fact, I'll bet that most of the really big apps are still ObjC/NonAutoLayout. AutoLayout/UIKit is a big fat pain in the ass, but it works extremely well. It has had over a decade, to buff out the rough spots and corner cases. I can't think of a single UI conundrum that I've had, in the last ten years, that I couldn't figure out how to address with AL. With SwiftUI, I'm constantly running into "You can't get there, from here." Most (probably all, but I have a couple of old ones) of my apps work well in any display. That means resized (usually narrow vertical) iPad windows, rotated iPhones (where a lot of the UI scrolls off the bottom, and you need to scroll for it), and resized Mac windows. With SwiftUI, you tend to get support for that pretty much automatically, but with AL, you usually need to specifically design for it, so when the phone gets rotated, things flow into the right places, etc. Adding all the LG borders around things like tab bar items and navbar items, changes the layout; sometimes, fairly substantially. Right now, I'm just tossing a UIDesignRequiresCompatibility into the Info.plist, but that feels like a kludge, and I'll need to adapt, but that may take a while.

amluto 1y ago

I can’t help but read Apple’s guidelines and think they read something from the 90s or early 2000s and completely misinterpreted it. Quoting (and this theme is repeated over and over): > Ensure that you clearly separate your content from navigation elements, like tab bars and sidebars, to establish a distinct functional layer above the content layer. This makes perfect sense. Separate content and controls. In this variant, controls go on top, like a toolbar, and then there’s a horizontal division (maybe an actual line, maybe just blank space), then content. Then I looked at the pictures again and did a double take. Apple doesn’t have a clear separation at all. And the controls are at the bottom, not the top. The punchline, of course, is that Apple transposed the Y and Z axes! The functional layer isn’t toward the top of the screen — it’s toward the user! You are supposed to separate content and controls along X or Y so that content is next to controls but separated a bit but, for some reason, Apple is floating controls over content, in the Z axis. The separation is a plane, parallel to the screen, that you can’t see because the controls are in the way. Apple, turn off your fancy shaders and go back to the drawing board. You have so many more pixels than any 90s designer, and yet you can fit almost no unobscured content on the screen. And your poor users can’t see the divisions between content and everything else because you built the technology to rotate the whole UI 90 degrees about the X axis!

mat0 1y ago

it’s crazy. it seems like someone came up with this new design because they liked the transparency effect and only afterwards they came up with the arguments and reasoning about it. worse, if they would have the balls to say “we changed it because we believe it looks nicer and this is where we want to move with our uis” i would at least respect them because of it. but they cannot say something like this (prob because it’s not investor friendly), so they have to come up with these clearly conflicting reasons

chakintosh 1y ago
It's what happens when your designers take their inspiration from the garbage on dribbble.

IlikeKitties 1y ago

> But it’s not just that, it’s that these ‘Icon Appearances’ also remove colour, depth, and personality from third-party app icons too. This further dictates (and interferes with) what kind of design a third-party developer may choose for their apps. All this after recommending employing “a minimal number of shapes” and “prefer[ring] a simple background”. This is something Apple has been consistently great at. I do not want a 3rd Party App to look and feel massively different from a first party app. In fact I'd like all apps to look and feel very uniform. Whenever some third rate designer thinks their design is somehow better than the entire rest of the systems design you get ugly mismatches and clashing styles. Even if the 3rd Party Design IS superior, it won't look any good being completely out of place.