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Liquid Glass on macOS is such a joke. Most of the redesign was just turning buttons into Fisher Price-looking circles and ovals. I'm typing this from Safari whi

by hbn 7mo ago

Liquid Glass on macOS is such a joke. Most of the redesign was just turning buttons into Fisher Price-looking circles and ovals. I'm typing this from Safari which looks so stupid in Tahoe. The tab bar is a giant oblong oval with a bunch of tab titles and icons floating on a solid background, only separated by a short, faint vertical bar that doesn't go to the top/bottom to truly separate them. The current active tab is a small oblong oval within the giant oval. The perfect visual metaphor for tabs which Safari set the trend for in macOS is gone. And then just above is a bunch more ovals and circles. The sidebar button is an oval, the back/forward buttons are in an oval, the Wipr extension icon is in an oval, the URL bar is an oblong over, etc. And (at least in light mode) this is all white ovals on a white background. It all looks so amateurish. I'm so glad that Hack Alan Dye is gone and I pray to God that Stephen Lamay can get us back to reason. I doubt they'll do an overnight Cmd+Z update in macOS 28 or whatever, but perhaps he can direct Liquid Glass in a direction that isn't just rounding things for the sake of it.

LoganDark 7mo ago
I really want something between Sequoia and Tahoe. (Probably mostly Sequoia, but with targeted applications of Liquid Glass.) I don't like how Tahoe treats everything as floating on top, as if properly dividing windows into sidebars and panels is wrong... There's so much extra padding and rounding now, I hate it. Everything's lost the depth, detail and cleanliness it used to have, replaced by this bubbly mess. Like, sheets don't even slide out anymore, they overlay like on iOS. The charm, expressivity, and, well, Mac-ness is gone. I love Liquid Glass - the blur and refractive effects are so pretty and technically impressive - but it should be used tastefully instead of this nonsense. I feel like Tahoe in general is straying way, way too far from the battle-tested Cocoa foundation and into this total top-down crap. Liquid Glass feels like some sort of shareholder-enforced enshittification. macOS is supposed to be defined from the bottom up; it always has been. There has always been importance in having a solid base; a robust foundation for developers to build on. HIG, Cocoa, CoreGraphics, all of that is in service of this. The user experience and vertical integration is a result of this and couldn't exist without it. There's so much wrong with Tahoe that goes against everything Mac has ever been. We don't want to dumb down the interface; that has never been the goal. The goal has always been to make the interface intuitive enough that anyone can learn it. macOS and iOS are fundamentally different platforms with fundamentally different design constraints and considerations. Icons being able to escape the squircle was supposed to be a reflection of the fact that apps on Mac are less contained than apps on iOS. They have more expressive power and more advanced capabilities. You're working closer to the metal and in a less controlled environment. Because of that, you can do more and you're not constrained to the flows of the system. iOS always hasn't been this. The constraints of touch are different than the constraints of the desktop. Steve Jobs spoke about this a lot back in his day, about why iOS is so much more locked-down than Mac. But Mac has always been a platform for freedom and control. And Tahoe strips the soul of that.
- rwc 7mo ago
  "shareholder-enforced enshittification" what on earth could this possibly mean?
  - Terr_ 7mo ago
    I assume the subtext is something like: "Customers are being abused to create the short-term illusion of improvement, to satisfy myopic investors in the financial markets and the personal compensation incentives of executives."
  - hbn 7mo ago
    Can't speak for GP but I got the feeling that after Apple embarrassed itself shipping almost none of the Apple Intelligence features announced at WWDC 2024, they scrambled to get something drastic out the door to show they're still "innovating" and "doing big things"
  - matheusmoreira 7mo ago
    Shareholders want to maximize stock price, therefore they choose psychopathic CEOs willing to do literally anything to achieve that. People who view reputation and goodwill as just capital to be spent. Giving out free service to get people hooked then turning the screws on them is a proven strategy.
  - LoganDark 7mo ago
    None of the siblings got it right. By 'shareholder-enforced enshittification' I meant when shareholders (or, generally, anyone from the top) enforce a direction that doesn't align with what's natural of the foundation. So the system ends up being stretched to afford it, corners get cut / shortcuts get taken, and then that becomes the final shipping version.
    - rwc 7mo ago
      "None of the siblings got it right." Perfectly proving my point. It's a meaningless argument built on vibes that every reader interprets differently.
observationist 7mo ago
It's the year of the Linux desktop. Break free of the walled gardens, there's no good excuse to throw your money away anymore. ElementaryOS and a few other projects have superb Apple flavored UI and UX. Apple just wants your money; they don't give a flying rat's ass about you or your needs. Let liquid glass be your red pill - come join us in the real.
- tambourine_man 7mo ago
  Not everyone uses Electron apps exclusively. The cross platform scene is much different these days. Electron apps suck, but at least they suck equally across all platforms. And there are many Electron apps. But a lot of people rely on Adobe, Microsoft or Windows-only, Mac-only apps. I don’t see that changing anytime soon, unfortunately.
  - observationist 7mo ago
    Breaking free is easier than ever. You don't need walled gardens. AI is making handling the edge cases that kept people locked in almost trivial. Any workflow, custom spreadsheet, specific OS-only app can be worked around, easily. Staying stuck on Apple or Microsoft is a choice - they're no longer returning value concurrent with the money they charge. You're free to continue giving them money, but the reasons to do so make less and less sense each day that goes by.
    - thunderfork 7mo ago
      "Adobe Creative Suite not running on Linux can be worked around easily" is something that people have been getting wrong for decades, but injecting AI into the premise is a new frontier of funny. What's the AI workaround for Illustrator/After Effects/etc.? You're not suggesting generating vector art or video assets via LLM replaces these, surely?
      - LevGoldstein 7mo ago
        I'm very curious what their workaround plan for something like U&I MetaSynth would be.
signal11 7mo ago
Liquid Glass is Apple’s Windows Vista. They had a ton of fun with Vista in their “switch” ads, if the Windows team were in better shape they could have a field day just screenshotting Tahoe on Social Media. Lucky they’re distracted with their own challenges. Liquid Glass does have some good points, but it feels like someone turned in C- level work.
- hbn 7mo ago
  I see the Vista comparison a lot but I'm not sure I agree with it. I never thought Vista was that ugly, I thought it was more most of the computer hardware people were buying at the time just wasn't capable of running those visual effects (and I recall it was pretty buggy too) It had a glassy aesthetic but the similarity doesn't go much further than that description. They didn't make all the buttons into glass blobs floating on top of the content with distracting warping effects; the window chrome was still generally separated from the content.

by hbn 7mo ago

LoganDark 7mo ago

I really want something between Sequoia and Tahoe. (Probably mostly Sequoia, but with targeted applications of Liquid Glass.) I don't like how Tahoe treats everything as floating on top, as if properly dividing windows into sidebars and panels is wrong... There's so much extra padding and rounding now, I hate it. Everything's lost the depth, detail and cleanliness it used to have, replaced by this bubbly mess. Like, sheets don't even slide out anymore, they overlay like on iOS. The charm, expressivity, and, well, Mac-ness is gone. I love Liquid Glass - the blur and refractive effects are so pretty and technically impressive - but it should be used tastefully instead of this nonsense. I feel like Tahoe in general is straying way, way too far from the battle-tested Cocoa foundation and into this total top-down crap. Liquid Glass feels like some sort of shareholder-enforced enshittification. macOS is supposed to be defined from the bottom up; it always has been. There has always been importance in having a solid base; a robust foundation for developers to build on. HIG, Cocoa, CoreGraphics, all of that is in service of this. The user experience and vertical integration is a result of this and couldn't exist without it. There's so much wrong with Tahoe that goes against everything Mac has ever been. We don't want to dumb down the interface; that has never been the goal. The goal has always been to make the interface intuitive enough that anyone can learn it. macOS and iOS are fundamentally different platforms with fundamentally different design constraints and considerations. Icons being able to escape the squircle was supposed to be a reflection of the fact that apps on Mac are less contained than apps on iOS. They have more expressive power and more advanced capabilities. You're working closer to the metal and in a less controlled environment. Because of that, you can do more and you're not constrained to the flows of the system. iOS always hasn't been this. The constraints of touch are different than the constraints of the desktop. Steve Jobs spoke about this a lot back in his day, about why iOS is so much more locked-down than Mac. But Mac has always been a platform for freedom and control. And Tahoe strips the soul of that.

rwc 7mo ago
"shareholder-enforced enshittification" what on earth could this possibly mean?
- Terr_ 7mo ago
  I assume the subtext is something like: "Customers are being abused to create the short-term illusion of improvement, to satisfy myopic investors in the financial markets and the personal compensation incentives of executives."
- hbn 7mo ago
  Can't speak for GP but I got the feeling that after Apple embarrassed itself shipping almost none of the Apple Intelligence features announced at WWDC 2024, they scrambled to get something drastic out the door to show they're still "innovating" and "doing big things"
- matheusmoreira 7mo ago
  Shareholders want to maximize stock price, therefore they choose psychopathic CEOs willing to do literally anything to achieve that. People who view reputation and goodwill as just capital to be spent. Giving out free service to get people hooked then turning the screws on them is a proven strategy.
- LoganDark 7mo ago
  None of the siblings got it right. By 'shareholder-enforced enshittification' I meant when shareholders (or, generally, anyone from the top) enforce a direction that doesn't align with what's natural of the foundation. So the system ends up being stretched to afford it, corners get cut / shortcuts get taken, and then that becomes the final shipping version.
  - rwc 7mo ago
    "None of the siblings got it right." Perfectly proving my point. It's a meaningless argument built on vibes that every reader interprets differently.

observationist 7mo ago

It's the year of the Linux desktop. Break free of the walled gardens, there's no good excuse to throw your money away anymore. ElementaryOS and a few other projects have superb Apple flavored UI and UX. Apple just wants your money; they don't give a flying rat's ass about you or your needs. Let liquid glass be your red pill - come join us in the real.

tambourine_man 7mo ago
Not everyone uses Electron apps exclusively. The cross platform scene is much different these days. Electron apps suck, but at least they suck equally across all platforms. And there are many Electron apps. But a lot of people rely on Adobe, Microsoft or Windows-only, Mac-only apps. I don’t see that changing anytime soon, unfortunately.
- observationist 7mo ago
  Breaking free is easier than ever. You don't need walled gardens. AI is making handling the edge cases that kept people locked in almost trivial. Any workflow, custom spreadsheet, specific OS-only app can be worked around, easily. Staying stuck on Apple or Microsoft is a choice - they're no longer returning value concurrent with the money they charge. You're free to continue giving them money, but the reasons to do so make less and less sense each day that goes by.
  - thunderfork 7mo ago
    "Adobe Creative Suite not running on Linux can be worked around easily" is something that people have been getting wrong for decades, but injecting AI into the premise is a new frontier of funny. What's the AI workaround for Illustrator/After Effects/etc.? You're not suggesting generating vector art or video assets via LLM replaces these, surely?
    - LevGoldstein 7mo ago
      I'm very curious what their workaround plan for something like U&I MetaSynth would be.

signal11 7mo ago

Liquid Glass is Apple’s Windows Vista. They had a ton of fun with Vista in their “switch” ads, if the Windows team were in better shape they could have a field day just screenshotting Tahoe on Social Media. Lucky they’re distracted with their own challenges. Liquid Glass does have some good points, but it feels like someone turned in C- level work.

hbn 7mo ago
I see the Vista comparison a lot but I'm not sure I agree with it. I never thought Vista was that ugly, I thought it was more most of the computer hardware people were buying at the time just wasn't capable of running those visual effects (and I recall it was pretty buggy too) It had a glassy aesthetic but the similarity doesn't go much further than that description. They didn't make all the buttons into glass blobs floating on top of the content with distracting warping effects; the window chrome was still generally separated from the content.