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> Alan Dye, vice president of human interface design, who is joining Meta as its chief design officer. I wonder if he is responsible for all those niceties Mac

> Alan Dye, vice president of human interface design, who is joining Meta as its chief design officer. I wonder if he is responsible for all those niceties MacOS got for the last 10 or so years. Like the scroll bars in Serious Sam Mental difficulty, or the flat earth flavour icons, you know.

randycupertino 11mo ago
He created liquid glass, the much ballyhood but controversial new ios 26 update. Marketed like "magic" but mainly just visual updates that are buggy, drain battery and make things hard to read. Wonder if they'll keep supporting/pushing it.
- markus_zhang 11mo ago
  Ah, another blessing I get to enjoy due to forced update policy from our IT department.
- nine_k 11mo ago
  Feature request: a Dye Injector in the Control Panel that allows to add a tint to Liquid Glass, all the way to 100% opaque if desired. (Unscientific fiction, I know.)
  - beAbU 11mo ago
    Ironically this was a feature in Windows 7.
  - DonHopkins 11mo ago
    They'll virtualize the ink jet printer ink model: Totally Transparent Liquid Glass UI is free, DRM'ed dye is an in-app purchase that fades over time, or subscription that you don't actually own. User defined colors not possible, only expensive premium licensed Pantone, Disney Princess Pink, Barbie Pink, Tiffany Blue, Coca Cola Red, Cadbury Purple, UPS Brown, Target Red, Home Depot Orange, John Deere Green & Yellow, Vantablack, Stuart Semple Black 2.0, 3.0, etc.
- sharts 11mo ago
  It’s so weird that such a role could even have been allowed to be held by such a halfwit. How dies that even happen?
  - TheOtherHobbes 11mo ago
    He arrived from the world of fashion with Watch, and somehow that gave him enough cachet at the top to entrench an extended nonsense career. Looking forward to his tenure at Meta. With any luck he'll kill the company.
    - DonHopkins 11mo ago
      Gruber: Apple employees ‘giddy’ about Alan Dye’s departure https://9to5mac.com/2025/12/04/gruber-apple-employees-giddy-about-alan-dyes-departure/ https://9to5mac.com/2025/12/04/gruber-apple-employees-giddy-... Bad Dye Job https://daringfireball.net/2025/12/bad_dye_job https://daringfireball.net/2025/12/bad_dye_job >The sentiment within the ranks at Apple is that today’s news is almost too good to be true. People had given up hope that Dye would ever get squeezed out, and no one expected that he’d just up and leave on his own. [...] >It’s rather extraordinary in today’s hyper-partisan world that there’s nearly universal agreement amongst actual practitioners of user-interface design that Alan Dye is a fraud who led the company deeply astray. It was a big problem inside the company too. I’m aware of dozens of designers who’ve left Apple, out of frustration over the company’s direction, to work at places like LoveFrom, OpenAI, and their secretive joint venture io. I’m not sure there are any interaction designers at io who aren’t ex-Apple, and if there are, it’s only a handful. From the stories I’m aware of, the theme is identical: these are designers driven to do great work, and under Alan Dye, “doing great work” was no longer the guiding principle at Apple. [...] >That alone will be a win for everyone — even though the change was seemingly driven by Mark Zuckerberg’s desire to poach Dye, not Tim Cook and Apple’s senior leadership realizing they should have shitcanned him long ago. [...] >My favorite reaction to today’s news is this one-liner from a guy on Twitter/X: “The average IQ of both companies has increased.” https://x.com/8hipulin/status/1996318006335401997 https://x.com/8hipulin/status/1996318006335401997 "Dye [...] get[ting] squeezed out" of Apple is such vividly technicolor imagery! I too hope he makes Meta curl up and dye.
npodbielski 11mo ago
> Like the scroll bars in Serious Sam Mental difficulty, or the flat earth flavour icons, you know. You mean they invisible? Also I had fun playing mental. Finished FE on it ;)
- markus_zhang 11mo ago
  Damn I can’t even beat normal. I kept dying :/ Then I watched someone doing a long play on Serious and I think that’s a superman.
  - npodbielski 11mo ago
    Mental is actually easier than serious because monster are exactly like in Hard but just invisible from time to time. But they movement are easy to predict because they mostly run in straight lines ;)
apple4ever 11mo ago
He absolutely was responsible for all the bad UI introduced over the last 10 years. Nobody said no to them.
karmakaze 11mo ago
I don't know if it's only because he left, but there are stories about how bad he was in his position for such a long time. If that's true, Apple must be blamed for keeping him there--until he voluntarily left. WTF?
- markus_zhang 11mo ago
  TBH I don’t know much about the Mac eco except that I have been using a couple of MacBook Pro for work for the recent 5 years. My humble experience says hardware is easy but software is hard. Might be counterintuitive but that’s honestly what I felt.
  - TheNewsIsHere 11mo ago
    With hardware there are only so many sanely quantifiable ways someone might use, abuse, or hack up your product. And you don’t have to care about some or all of them. Someone might desolder an Apple silicon chip successfully and do something neat with it, but they’re unlikely to use it to power an MRI machine. But software - even inside the business that makes an application people will still find entirely surprising, realistically unpredictable ways to use it. Let alone the customers/users/tinkerers. At a former place I worked we had one customer who was smart enough to be technically correct about how our software worked to use it in the most insane manner any of us had seen, and which no one had ever contemplated. Not even in a way that was sane to test manually or with automation. (I’m being a bit vague because it’d be very identifiable broadly and specifically.) Eventually we had to say “yes you can use it this way, but you’d end up paying far more than you should and the experience is going to be awful.” (Even sales agreed on the former!)
terribleperson 11mo ago
I wonder if the already-bad Horizon OS will get worse now.

randycupertino 11mo ago

He created liquid glass, the much ballyhood but controversial new ios 26 update. Marketed like "magic" but mainly just visual updates that are buggy, drain battery and make things hard to read. Wonder if they'll keep supporting/pushing it.

markus_zhang 11mo ago
Ah, another blessing I get to enjoy due to forced update policy from our IT department.
nine_k 11mo ago
Feature request: a Dye Injector in the Control Panel that allows to add a tint to Liquid Glass, all the way to 100% opaque if desired. (Unscientific fiction, I know.)
- beAbU 11mo ago
  Ironically this was a feature in Windows 7.
- DonHopkins 11mo ago
  They'll virtualize the ink jet printer ink model: Totally Transparent Liquid Glass UI is free, DRM'ed dye is an in-app purchase that fades over time, or subscription that you don't actually own. User defined colors not possible, only expensive premium licensed Pantone, Disney Princess Pink, Barbie Pink, Tiffany Blue, Coca Cola Red, Cadbury Purple, UPS Brown, Target Red, Home Depot Orange, John Deere Green & Yellow, Vantablack, Stuart Semple Black 2.0, 3.0, etc.
sharts 11mo ago
It’s so weird that such a role could even have been allowed to be held by such a halfwit. How dies that even happen?
- TheOtherHobbes 11mo ago
  He arrived from the world of fashion with Watch, and somehow that gave him enough cachet at the top to entrench an extended nonsense career. Looking forward to his tenure at Meta. With any luck he'll kill the company.
  - DonHopkins 11mo ago
    Gruber: Apple employees ‘giddy’ about Alan Dye’s departure https://9to5mac.com/2025/12/04/gruber-apple-employees-giddy-about-alan-dyes-departure/ https://9to5mac.com/2025/12/04/gruber-apple-employees-giddy-... Bad Dye Job https://daringfireball.net/2025/12/bad_dye_job https://daringfireball.net/2025/12/bad_dye_job >The sentiment within the ranks at Apple is that today’s news is almost too good to be true. People had given up hope that Dye would ever get squeezed out, and no one expected that he’d just up and leave on his own. [...] >It’s rather extraordinary in today’s hyper-partisan world that there’s nearly universal agreement amongst actual practitioners of user-interface design that Alan Dye is a fraud who led the company deeply astray. It was a big problem inside the company too. I’m aware of dozens of designers who’ve left Apple, out of frustration over the company’s direction, to work at places like LoveFrom, OpenAI, and their secretive joint venture io. I’m not sure there are any interaction designers at io who aren’t ex-Apple, and if there are, it’s only a handful. From the stories I’m aware of, the theme is identical: these are designers driven to do great work, and under Alan Dye, “doing great work” was no longer the guiding principle at Apple. [...] >That alone will be a win for everyone — even though the change was seemingly driven by Mark Zuckerberg’s desire to poach Dye, not Tim Cook and Apple’s senior leadership realizing they should have shitcanned him long ago. [...] >My favorite reaction to today’s news is this one-liner from a guy on Twitter/X: “The average IQ of both companies has increased.” https://x.com/8hipulin/status/1996318006335401997 https://x.com/8hipulin/status/1996318006335401997 "Dye [...] get[ting] squeezed out" of Apple is such vividly technicolor imagery! I too hope he makes Meta curl up and dye.

npodbielski 11mo ago

> Like the scroll bars in Serious Sam Mental difficulty, or the flat earth flavour icons, you know. You mean they invisible? Also I had fun playing mental. Finished FE on it ;)

markus_zhang 11mo ago
Damn I can’t even beat normal. I kept dying :/ Then I watched someone doing a long play on Serious and I think that’s a superman.
- npodbielski 11mo ago
  Mental is actually easier than serious because monster are exactly like in Hard but just invisible from time to time. But they movement are easy to predict because they mostly run in straight lines ;)

apple4ever 11mo ago

He absolutely was responsible for all the bad UI introduced over the last 10 years. Nobody said no to them.

karmakaze 11mo ago

I don't know if it's only because he left, but there are stories about how bad he was in his position for such a long time. If that's true, Apple must be blamed for keeping him there--until he voluntarily left. WTF?

markus_zhang 11mo ago
TBH I don’t know much about the Mac eco except that I have been using a couple of MacBook Pro for work for the recent 5 years. My humble experience says hardware is easy but software is hard. Might be counterintuitive but that’s honestly what I felt.
- TheNewsIsHere 11mo ago
  With hardware there are only so many sanely quantifiable ways someone might use, abuse, or hack up your product. And you don’t have to care about some or all of them. Someone might desolder an Apple silicon chip successfully and do something neat with it, but they’re unlikely to use it to power an MRI machine. But software - even inside the business that makes an application people will still find entirely surprising, realistically unpredictable ways to use it. Let alone the customers/users/tinkerers. At a former place I worked we had one customer who was smart enough to be technically correct about how our software worked to use it in the most insane manner any of us had seen, and which no one had ever contemplated. Not even in a way that was sane to test manually or with automation. (I’m being a bit vague because it’d be very identifiable broadly and specifically.) Eventually we had to say “yes you can use it this way, but you’d end up paying far more than you should and the experience is going to be awful.” (Even sales agreed on the former!)

terribleperson 11mo ago

I wonder if the already-bad Horizon OS will get worse now.