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It's hard to justify Liquid Glass in general. The wastefulness of flat design (in terms of space) married with the visual excess of skeuomorphism, but without e
by sirwhinesalot 10mo ago
It's hard to justify Liquid Glass in general. The wastefulness of flat design (in terms of space) married with the visual excess of skeuomorphism, but without even providing any affordances (does the sidebar being raised give you any new information on how to use a sidebar? No).
If you're a designer at a top 10 S&P 500 company making 6 figures, you owe it to yourself to have some love for your craft. If a PM tells you to shove a UI style meant for an unsuccessful VR device onto desktop and mobile platforms, say no. Get your colleagues to say no. Make that PM read everything the Nielsen Norman group has ever written. Read it too.
- reddalo 10mo agoI agree, Liquid (Gl)ass is hideous. I'll stick to macOS Sequoia for the time being.
- codyb 10mo agoMacOS 26 highlights were... and this was _Apple's_ opening modal... "Icons that look like shit!" and "Notification summaries that may not be correct!" In general I feel as if Apple's software feels buggier and less solid lately across my iPhone and my computers. Won't be upgrading the personal computer for as long as possible
- euroderf 10mo ago> Apple's software feels buggier and less solid lately across my iPhone and my computers. Agreed. Rendering is very flaky. Input events are dropped. Blinky. Laggy. Two of the Seven Dwarves of Liquid Glass.
- shermantanktop 10mo agoBuggy, Flaky, Dropsy, Blinky, Laggy... that's five. How about Wobbly and Gloopy to round out the seven?
- Hamuko 10mo agoI got a new Apple Watch and just getting it set up was a pain. For some reason the passcode input would fail to register key prompts and I had to spam the buttons until something clicked. Then I gave my old Apple Watch to my mom and the setup failed like three times before we managed to get it done. Did make me wonder if anyone at Apple actually tests setting up these devices.
- bix6 10mo agoApple has been crashing with increasing frequency for me. Luckily all minor but I’m waiting for the big crapout. Also what happened to their filters? I get daily spam from Apple email addresses now.
- codyb 10mo agoWhat I love is how their own features don't even play well together anymore... For instance you can "hide your e-mail" by using Apple's relay, but if you do so... your payments using Apple Pay will fail unless you fill all the information in manually because the e-mail addresses don't match It's ridiculous how poorly tested everything is, and that combined with their newly entered foray into the world of politics has nearly destroyed three decades of steady Apple use for me. I'll be actively considering other options, not upgrading, and looking elsewhere for products in spaces they're in
- queenkjuul 10mo agoI finally talked my company into letting me swap out my MacBook pro for some little Dell. After the last year of updates, my Mac has stopped resuming from sleep reliably, everything is ugly, they took the already barely usable (imo) finder and system settings and found exciting new ways to make them worse. Sadly corporate security means os updates were not optional. I've never really liked macOS but it feels like someone at Apple was hired just to make it even less likable for me personally lol
- abustamam 10mo agoDo you like Windows dark patterns more than Mac's shitty designs? Seems like no one wins here. I personally just refrained from upgrading to Tahoe Edit:typo
- williamdclt 10mo ago> already barely usable (imo) finder been using a Mac for years, and to this day I don't know how it's possible to navigate directories using Finder. It only has shortcuts for a few folders by default (photos, documents...) and doesn't have a button to navigate to the parent folder. I have literally no idea how to get to my home directory, I need to use the CLI
- massysett 10mo ago> doesn't have a button to navigate to the parent folder. Command + Up Arrow, which is also visible if you click on the "Go" menu. There is also a toolbar button that shows the entire set of enclosing directories; offhand I can't remember whether this is visible by default. There is also "View -> Show Path Bar" which shows all this information at the bottom of the window. > I have literally no idea how to get to my home directory Go -> Home, which shows a shortcut key for this, Command-Shift-H.
- hnlmorg 10mo agoI’ve said many times before that I think Finder is the worst default file manager of any popular desktop environment. I get it’s supposed to be easy to use but so much functionality is hidden behind non-obvious shortcuts. The end result is you either need to memorise a dozen secret handshakes just to perform basic operations, or you give up and revert to 70s technology in the command line.
- port11 10mo agoSame. And finally thinking that our KDE home server doesn’t look too bad, it’s almost comforting. The major reason to stay on macOS is stability. Hopefully they stop breaking things on the Mac front.
- pier25 10mo agoSame. Wish I could go back to Ventura or even Mojave though. There are zero new features I use. Still hate the newish Settings app.
- reddalo 10mo agoYeah, me too. The old Settings app was easy and intuitive; I hate the new one.
- plutokras 10mo agoI too have the techie urge to upgrade my software whenever I can, ut after watching the Tahoe demos, I'm staying on Sequoia indefinitely. I would really appreciate it if the next macOS would be about stability instead of some fancy features barely anyone asked for.
- bauerd 10mo agoIt’s not how you get promoted though. Plus implementing complex UIs is challenging which engineers like. The incentives are off.
- bradgessler 10mo agoYeah, software orgs ship their promotion structures.
- eddieroger 10mo agoIt's not only not how you get promoted, it's a pretty good way to get canned as well. If you don't like the work you're being asked to do, your options are pretty limited to doing it or going elsewhere. There are a million UXers and engineers who'd love to work at Apple and would be happy making whatever their boss suggests.
- EGreg 10mo agoSeriously. People got canned for resisting the corporate overlords. That’s capitalism. Corporations run by their employees? Guilds? Cooperatives? Hah! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynbgMKclWWc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynbgMKclWWc Just that usually the forcefed initiatives have to do with corporate profits for shareholders, or trends like shoving AI into everything. Imagine saying no to that! Even at the supra-corporate and supra-national level, if the organizing principle is competition, no actor not even a CEO or a corporate board or a government can afford to stop racing towards disaster. There is a simple mantra: “If we don’t achieve AGI first, China will and then they’ll dominate.” Once in a while, the world comes together to successfully ban eg chemical weapons or CFCs, and repair the hole in the ozone layer. Cooperation and restraint takes effort. Judging by the way we’ve drained all the aquifers, overfished the last fish, destroyed the kelp forests, cut down the rainforsts, bleached the corals, and polluted the world with plastic, I don’t think there is much hope of stopping. Insects and pollinators are way down, and many larger species are practically extinct, 95% of the world’s animal biomass is humans and their food, and people still pretend environmental catastrophe is all about a few degrees of temperature. PS: Yes, that escalated quickly. In the real world, it has taken only 80 years… :-/
- Noaidi 10mo agoAlan Dye ruined everything at Apple, no idea how he clung on for so long. You know he designed the horrible ios7 as well? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSzjcVZXolc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSzjcVZXolc https://tjkelly.com/blog/ios-7-sucks/ https://tjkelly.com/blog/ios-7-sucks/ And he also takes credit for the dynamic island. It is an assault on my senses to see everything constantly moving around on my screen. I have been working with Macs since 1995, but this year is my first using Pixel with GrapheneOS, that is how done I am with Apple. Unfortunately I know the UI will not change for years and I just could not take it.
- sirwhinesalot 10mo agoReally? Same guy? OUFF. What a track record...
- imbnwa 10mo ago>Alan Dye ruined everything at Apple, no idea how he clung on for so long Cook doesn't seem to a have any taste for product design, isn't he a logistics guy?
- jdougan 10mo agoYup. He is, by all accounts, a great supply-chain guy. eg. As far as I can tell, there were no significant breaks in Apple's supplies during COVID. But he clearly falls afoul of Steve Jobs'warning about leaders with no taste.
- michaelbuckbee 10mo agoThe only "real" justification is that this is a long term play to figure out a UI and interaction shift that will work for general augmented reality devices (aka whatever device Apple releases five years and two iterations from now based on the Vision Pro.)
- sneak 10mo agoThat isn’t a justification for fucking up the icons or using single retina pixels to differentiate them. It’s just stupid people doing stupid things.
- afavour 10mo agoThat’s the same logic that led to the Windows 8 UI being designed tablet first because that’s “where we’re all going”. Fast forward to Windows 10 where MS had to concede that, no, turns out it isn’t where we’re all going and rolled most of it back.
- ghaff 10mo agoIt's somewhat understandable. A lot of us felt at the time that surely laptops and tablets would converge. Otherwise, what a waste of hardware. But it hasn't really happened. From a hardware perspective, things have gotten closer with the iPad's magnetic keyboard. But, I still find that the iPad as laptop replacement to be a compromise that I may tolerate for travel but don't love for a lot of laptop work.
- emchammer 10mo agoMagnetic keyboard on the iPad is such a lose. Some Thai hacker got full macOS running on his iPhone over Christmas. Apple are cowards collecting dividends.
- ghaff 10mo agoThe magnetic keyboard lets you use the iPad without it having to be resting on a solid surface like basically every tablet/keyboard combination out there. Microsoft has tried various hybrid laptop/tablet arrangements that did both things mediocrely. I have zero interest in what someone has hacked together.
- chuckadams 10mo agoI rather like the skeuomorphism ... on the buttons anyway. The distortion effect on the glass is simply annoying, and the overall effect on an already-cramped UI like Safari on a phone is just ... ugh. There's now basically three blobs of mystery meat at the bottom of the screen. So if Liquid Glass was made for mobile first, it's an even bigger failure. It's actually more tolerable on desktop, though the double-border effect on things like the control panel stick out pretty badly.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- kibwen 10mo ago> If you're a designer at a top 10 S&P 500 company making 6 figures, you owe it to yourself to have some love for your craft. I think you've unintentionally illustrated the root of the problem here. People motivated by profit are not incentivized to produce high-quality results. Rather, people motivated by profit are only incentivized to do the least effort that they can get away with. People motivated by pride are those who are incentivized to produce good results, because the result reflects on them personally. Which is all to say, pride motives produce a race to the top, whereas profit motives produce a race to the bottom. It's no wonder our modern economy can only produce slop.
- torben-friis 10mo agoMy main gripe with Liquid Glass is how distracting it is. Many top bars have become a group of bubbles over the content, which we’ve been conditioned to see as floating notifications for years. Things shine and move when they don’t require attention, just because. The end result is that my OS feels like a browser without ad blocker. As much as people hated flat design, at least it didn’t grab your attention with tacky casino tricks.
- bargainbin 10mo agoMy main gripe is that the visual shenanigans alone were enough of a change, why rearrange the buttons?! In the early iOS beta, the new tab button was at the top of Safari, as far away from your thumbs as it could be. Genuinely believe Apple’s design team are rudderless or have unintentionally been forced to produce something to justify someone’s career, because this whole thing is disastrous.
- wang_li 10mo ago> to produce something to justify someone’s career, This is the curse of being a UI designer for a long lived product. Once a thing has been created and future work consists of 99% code and 1% UI, your UI designer job has evaporated. And so we see that everything changes every major release of an operating system, so the UI people can justify their pay checks.
- hnlmorg 10mo agoI think you have cause and effect the wrong way around. These changes in design are intended to appeal to our magpie brain of wanting the latest, shiniest, things. You have to understand the vanity of consumers. If every new product looked the same then a lot of people wouldn’t both buying the latest gizmo because there’s no magpie appeal. So when the market stagnates, you need to redesign the product to convince consumers to throw away a perfectly good, working device. And it usually works as a sales strategy too. So designers then get told thy has to come up with something that looks newer and more futuristic than the current designs. Regardless of how much those designers might love or hate those current designs. They come up with this shit not to justify their jobs but because they’re hired exactly to come up with this shit.
- steve1977 10mo agoI also don't really understand where the raised sidebar gets its color tint from. Wouldn't the desktop background be underneath everything else?
- etempleton 10mo agoWithout hyperbole, Liquid Glass on Mac OS is visually the worst commercial desktop UX I have ever had the displeasure of using. It is amateurish and frankly, ill advised to have even tried to unify the aesthetic across devices so universally. I think much of what is on the phone works fine. There are some pain points and some bits that are visually awkward, but generally it works and is new and fresh, but on the Mac it is as if no one really cared. And that reflects really poorly on where Apple is at, because if nothing else, Apple seemed like the company that always really cared about the user experience. There are some things that are nice. The dock looks nice. The transparent menu bar is nice enough too and there is a toggle off switch if it doesn't work for you. Spotlight looks fine. But the rest is so bad that I just cannot fathom how someone at Apple did not stop it before release. I would be throwing a fit to stop it from being released if I was in Apple and had any sway at all. I assume the executive team was all looking at it and using it before release. So how did this happen? The new side bar and the new tool bars are abominations. I cringe every time I have to use the finder; it is just a blob of various shades of white or, if you prefer, dark mode, grey. My hope is that if nothing else they roll back the sidebar and the tool bar changes or do a complete rethink on how they are implemented. If they rolled back the extra rounded corners I wouldn't complain either.
- sirwhinesalot 10mo agoEven on mobile it took a few iterations from when the design was first introduced for it to be usable. Not good mind you, just usable. Even Apple's own marketing material had screenshots where text was near impossible to read, even for someone with good eyesight: grey text on top of highly transparent glass... what were they thinking!?
- bargainbin 10mo agoClearly a generation of mobile-first designers not understanding how desktops are used. It’s dreadful, it still blows my mind that out of Windows, macOS and Linux, my Linux desktop with KDE has the most premium experience now.
- dijit 10mo agoI agree. My first rebuttal was going to be Windows 8, but that was actually a lot better.
- Rebuff5007 10mo agoI generally don't place "conspiratorial" motivations to explain the decisions of tech companies, but I can't help but think this is a move from apple to keep their ludicrously powerful M-chips busy with mundane UI because the average user will never need to otherwise upgrade past an M1.
- xnx 10mo ago> If a PM tells you to shove a UI style More than likely designers are making up work to justify their jobs. Not good for your career if you admit the desktop interface was perfected in ~1995.
- drnick1 10mo agoThis. The Windows 95 interface was optimal in many regards. Given how much faster computers are now, every UI operation should just be instantaneous. It's ridiculous that desktop interfaces and Web pages became heavier as computers got faster, so that a heavy website today does not load meaningfully faster than a plain text webpage in 1995. Edit: On Linux, you have desktop environments like LXQt for this. Unfortunately, last time I checked, Wayland was not supported.
- RunSet 10mo agoWayland being as needful as Liquid Glass itself.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 10mo agoBeyond that, any lag from Win95 era was probably because of spinning hard drives. Running it on a SSD would be instantaneous. Also, file search might even work, instead of whatever we have now.
- smallstepforman 10mo agoDont worry, there are thousands of aspiring artists that will gladly do it for a 6 figure salary. The person that manages your salary, they determine what you work on. Dont like the work, walk away …
- nooee 10mo agoUnpopular opinion, but I find Liquid Glass incredibly satisfying (I set it to Tinded though). The transitions are just really well done. The glass effect itself is a fun gadget, but unnecessary. I dislike how it must waste my battery. Give me the transitions of Liquid Glass with a basic frosted glass material and I would be perfectly happy, but the current state is fine too.
- conductr 10mo ago> If you're a designer at a top 10 S&P 500 company making 6 figures, ... your career requires constantly chasing after what amounts to fashion trends every few years, otherwise it's a solved problem and probably does not provide much of a career
- Eric_WVGG 10mo agoThere seems to be two takes on the whole liquid glass thing. - UI/UX pros who understand this stuff: “I hate it” - everyone else: “I didn’t notice until you pointed it out”
- morshu9001 10mo agoI don't mind Liquid Glass. What annoys me is how it's seemingly someone's full-time job at Apple to periodically make me relearn how to find my photos or open Safari tabs.
- karmakaze 10mo agoThe problem with Apple's execution of Liquid Glass is that the intended audience isn't the iOS user, it's the onlooker watching the iOS user (FOMO). That was an effective strategy when iPhone popularity was growing rapidly. Now that we're in a plateau of market saturation (post-peak Apple), anything directed at the onlooker which detracts for the actual user will hurt their bottom line.
- recursive 10mo agoHow would this work? The only place I've ever heard of liquid glass is from iPhone users complaining about it incessantly and tutorials on how to turn it off or diminish it. What would I fear missing out on?
- karmakaze 10mo agoI'm merely saying that Apple is cargo-culting their own success formula and it's failing.
- drewbeck 10mo agoThese directions come from above the PMs, especially at a place as design-focused as Apple.
- sam1906 10mo ago[dead]
- jonwinstanley 10mo agoJust a note on Vision Pro - as it’s been priced at $3,500 - I’m not sure I’d say it’s unsuccessful. I bet they’ve sold approx as many as they thought they would. This product is a placeholder for a cheaper and lighter one in the future.
- neor 10mo agoI agree, the Liquid Glass isn’t working out for Mac OS. Few days ago I booted a very old device running High Sierra and the UI and old Dock look so clean. That desktop was peak for me, and the age starts showing a bit in Finder, but it's still more usable than today's versions.
- pbreit 10mo agoTour de force article...well done! (except the snow was highly distracting) Also absurd is that tabs and menus are not attached to their elements.
- brailsafe 10mo agoI'd say this is a pretty unhelpful, demanding, and borderline damaging take to spread. I've learned from experience that it's unlikely "a designer" should follow this advice or accept the archaic guilt-trip "because you make six figures" whatever that means. If you run your own design agency, you've got your own company's reputation and yours on the line, so be as opinionated as you find necessary, but otherwise if you're just an employee without an inordinate amount of clear authority within the scope of your discipline at the large company (you know if you do or don't) then don't try and create a mutiny, it will more than likely be a childish assumption of personal risk on your part, much more so than it costs the company, much more so than anyone else needs to care, because someone on a forum told you to be passionate about round rects or small icons or whatever. If you need to tell your boss "google NN group", you probably don't have the trust or experience to be successful with such a play. It's okay to have a personal hatred of it and do what you can to steer the work appropriately, but when you're tasked with a dumbass plan, let it be the decision-makers' dumbass plan, unless it's your decision to make. Let it be the project we tried and it didn't and couldn't have worked out, which sometimes happens, but you learn and then leave if it's pervasive and you have other options. It would be remarkably stupid to single yourself out as the person who thinks of themselves as the reincarnation of Steve Jobs and risk your livelihood to save Apple's reputation. The unlikely upside is that you get your way and that can boost your confidence, but the downside is that you fumble your best shot at financial security for the rest of your life because you thought you'd be received well. That's not to say you shouldn't say no to nothing, or have love for your craft, just don't pretend it's your job to, unless it is, which it's probably not. Disagree and let it be a failure if it's going to be, feel vindicated if it is, but the money is there for you if not. The people who worked on the Vision Pro aren't responsible for it being a dud product, and they can be proud of what they did design-wise and technologically despite that.
- calf 10mo agoI think your take is unhelpful, demanding, and damaging to engineering ethics. If you want to live in a 90s corporate workplace hierarchy model, that's your value system. But it is untenable and harms people in the long run.
- herbturbo 10mo agoNielsen Norman used to be quoted constantly during UX discussions at various places I worked. Seems like UX folks and Information Architects have slowly been replaced by a general purpose “designer”
- theodric 10mo agoThe justification is that they feel it necessary to make obvious, superficial changes in pursuit of differentiation between software versions to help keep the upgrade treadmill running. The only UI change that I've found useful since Yosemite was Mojave's introduction of a dark mode. They made the fonts look worse on non-Retina displays, threw out the Preference pane in favor of a weird list that can only be resized vertically, added transparent everything, and banned any icon that's not in a squircle. Such UI, many differentiation, much insanely great, wow! Anyway, I bought a ThinkPad.