> Apple's designers (and those of many other companies) come back to the idea of translucency giving order and imbuing personality. I cannot for the life of me understand where this idea comes from.
When the company employs designers on a permanent salaried basis, those designers must make changes in order to assure their continued employment. To do otherwise risks the bean counters in the accounting department asking the pointed question: "Why are we employing all these designers when they are not producing anything?". The result is that there must be change for the purpose of assuring the designers continued employment. Result: translucent designs no one wants, but that looked great in the powerpoint presentations used to assure the designers remained employed.
You could apply precisely the same cynical calculus to engineering but I suspect a lot of the people nodding along with this could suddenly find it offensive when applied to their mission-critical DevSecOps roadmap.
The reality is there's always work to done responding to changing user needs, market forces and organisational objectives and it's not uncommon that UI design overhauls are driven by an abstract desire to make things seem 'fresh' but that doesn't come (solely) from designers, it's often a top-down strategic directive.
The problem with this explanation is that it also requires multiple parties to be unaware of things which you seem to think are obvious or even self-evident:
1. The designers must be unaware that "no one wants" these new designs (or perhaps they're incapable of creating new designs that people do want).
2. The executives must be unaware that "no one wants" these new designs.
3. The executives must be unaware of the designers' plot to prevent themselves from being fired.
This argument makes no sense, because if it's so obvious what the designers are up to, it should be easy for the bean counters to take that into consideration when deciding whether to fire the designers.
If the company makes cellphones, the cellphones need to sell. In order for people to buy the cellphone, they first have to want it, and so the cellphone needs to be universally desirable. The company hires a design team on a permanent salaried basis to do exactly this. Accounting really needs the number of phones sold to keep going up every year, so they really need the designers to think of new things that people might desire to include in the phones each year.
This was first done with cars, and that is why car companies also hire design teams on a permanent salaried basis.
> When the company employs designers on a permanent salaried basis, those designers must make changes in order to assure their continued employment.
I don't think it's exactly this, but it's close. Every so many years you have a new crop of talent rotate in and someone wants to make their mark and shake things up in order to be promoted. Rinse and repeat.
I'll take the bubble tea interface over the extreme flatness of every widget that dominates the UI these days where no cues are given as to what is just text, what's a button, an editable text input etc.
While liquid glass is perhaps mediocre and distracting, the current "everything is just a text label or a stick figure icon" paradigm is pure hell. I dread learning any new UI because of how bad most are.
Off topic, but I wonder if the youth of today will have nostalgia for hideous flat corporate design the same way I have a certain fondness for all those high gloss buttons from 2007.
Every time I spend significant time on my Mac with the Tahoe beta and then go back to an Android phone (with near Pixel UI) I experience genuine relief. Everything is just a simple color and a label, and I love that because it's so easy to descern. Tahoe legitimately makes me tired to look at sometimes. I vastly prefer clarity and flatness over decorations.
I don’t buy the argument that we need design harmony between platforms. If I wanted an iPad like experience on my Mac I would have bought an iPad. I paid for a mouse and keyboard centric experience. Liquid Glass actively takes away from that.
This is what's confusing to me as well, but I'm willing to admit that growing up with a mouse and other types of input devices gives me a bit of a bias. For someone that's only every used the input devices attached to their hands would probably be biased the other way. So maybe harmony will be reached when all of the olds finally phase out?? I've seen plenty of younger people touch my laptop screen in an attempt to interact with the laptop as if it were a touch screen. I've also seen the iPad keyboard/trackpad devices that just look weird with the cursor.
There are touchscreen laptops you can touch. It was a priority for Microsoft in the Windows 8 era but Apple always kept away from it because they’ve always wanted to maximize the psychological difference between laptops, tablets, and phones because they have every expectation of selling you all three.
One thing I find a little annoying about my steam deck is that it has a touchscreen and it works right some of the time but there are plenty of games where you have an object in the screen with a skeuomorphic interface that you ought to be able to touch but you have to work it with the game controller buttons. Back in the day with the PS Vita almost all games could be played with game controller buttons only but any touch target that should have obviously been a touch target was a touch target.
Some people will say that iOS has an option for ‘reduce transparency’ that mitigates the issue. But every time I turn it on, there’s a general lack of design polish in the OS and apps due to it not being the default.
Another point: I wonder how much of this is for the OS designer/UX/UI team to justify their existence at Apple. Suspect it’ll start out very glassy and gets flatter over time, so that they can claim ‘improvement to user experience’ over many years to come.
As someone who has to put on reading glasses to get any information from my apple phone and watch purely due to obnoxious design choices by Apple, I’d say they embody UI failure.
I think the real takeaway is that Apple has achieved a psychotic break from actual users, and its internal forces are driving decisions. Somehow user testing signal has been captured by these forces, and market signals are overwhelmed by the overall quality premium they deliver (and you can never prove the negative of how much better sales would have been without this).
I care less about the quality failings than the signs the Apple is too big to manage through the next few years. They’ve done a great job asserting independence from chip makers, but they’re no where near independent enough for the new era of assertive nationalism.
> Apple's designers (and those of many other companies) come back to the idea of translucency giving order and imbuing personality. I cannot for the life of me understand where this idea comes from. When multiple layers of different imagery shine through each other, I am not helped by this. The user interface placed on a semi-transparent panel is not more effective because it is set against a smeared mess of colors, nor am I emotionally fulfilled as a human being for knowing that the mess comes from a treasured personal memory.
This article acts as though design choices which are sub-optimal from a purely informational perspective, but which add personality and attraction to a product, have not earned Apple hundreds of billions of dollars in the past 25 years. The fact that he cannot understand where the idea comes from is okay, since he's not a product, UI, or industrial designer for Apple: that's their job, not his. The deeper question of why people form attachments to things that look 'cool' but have lower performance in some areas is indeed mysterious. But relentlessly pursuing that phenomenon has worked for Apple pretty well so far.
Liquid Glass isn't immediately impressive to me either, but it will either succeed or fail not based on whether it is more effective or not, but whether people like it or not, and those are two different things.
People who used to be able to get by with default settings are now going to Accessibility -> Reduce Transparency and Increase Contrast. Those are settings designed for disabled users. That so many will need those settings is Apple literally disabling users with their fashion choices. That's effed up.
But how big is the percentage of those users compared to the rest? Most likely not big enough to hurt the bottom line. I don't like the new UI either (I think Vista actually did it better contrast-wise), but most people don't tweak accessibility settings and will just stick to it.
I think what you're missing is that this is likely in preparation for some sort of AR glasses and something smaller form factor than the Vision Pro that will require transparency so you can see through to the real world etc...
It is possible for different devices to have different interfaces optimized for those different interaction models. Apple has the money to support this.
My Mac screen isn't transparent. Why should its UI be?
If there is "some sort of AR glasses and something smaller form factor than the Vision Pro that will require transparency so you can see through to the real world", limit the transparent interface only to that device.
> My Mac screen isn't transparent. Why should its UI be?
Mark my words, this is coming. It’s doable (as an effect) - rear camera captures what’s behind the screen, face tracking adjusts perspective in real-time to make it seem transparent/have correct parallax.
I look at my Mac screen to see what is on my Mac screen. Whether there is a tabletop, a window, or a cat behind my Mac screen is irrelevant. If I want to see what is behind it I would be looking it that instead of my screen
Repeat for application window, dialog box etc.
The only place translucence sort of kind of makes sense is for video content but even then, it still totally optional. My experience of watching a video is not really degraded if the play button is opaque.
As others have said, wanting to update the design simply because it looks cool is one thing. If that's the goal just say it. But Alan Dye's explanations do not inspire confidence. I get the impression that as in architecture, the chief audience of the design is not the user, but other designers.
AR glasses will have fixed-distance 2D overlays like your car's HUD. If they're preparing for a Vision Pro experience in spectacles form factor, they're about 10 to 20 years early with this glass UI change.
... could be the point of Liquid Glass on Vision Pro is to make AR on Meta's platform look bad. I mean, the MQ3 is a medium-spec smartphone on your face, the Vision Pro is a laptop on your face. The latter can support a much fancier UI without slowing down to the point where the video lags and you start crashing into things.
Back in the 1990s I remember CS professors taking a very chauvinistic idea of what an "operating system" was limited to the kernel, would probably exclude a CLI interpreter like bash, never mind the rest of the userspace and would particularly exclude anything having to do with GUI even if you had kernel drivers and tons of DLLs that came with the OS to support GUIs.
Now you have Arstechnica, which should know better, which makes detailed reviews pixel-by-pixel of everything that changed between one version of MacOS and the next and seems to think the only thing that matters in an OS is the superficial things you can see, at least if the OS is MacOS.
Windows is refreshing because it has more widget sets than I can count but it doesn't matter because you can get your work done even though it is inconsistent and usually just a bit ugly. It beats Linux though, because at least in Windows if a label is 75px wide, Windows will make at least 75px of space for it, whereas in Linux nobody gets excited if it label gets clipped because they only left 55px -- they'll even close out a bug request about this as soon as you make it. But hey, Linux on a bad day looks better than the 99% percentile NFT.
You've got to be a bit more specific when comparing 'Windows' to 'Linux'! Both operating systems are used with a dozen different graphics libraries, each with multiple possible configurations, and sometimes more than one for a single application.
The culture of various Linux-related communities also varies considerably. I guarantee you that the KDE community, for instance, is not going to stand for a label getting clipped. They are absolutely meticulous, especially where accessibility is concerned.
Yes, actual progress in meaningful operating system changes in terms of how one might write a program, or access fundamentals like identity, have really stagnated in terms of making their way down to end users.
We have high-concept things like Urbit that wanted to remake identity and secure communication that are utterly inaccessible to most savvy folks, never mind average end users. And in the meantime we're shipping entire Unix environments around inside OCI images to make up for the lack of consistency and portability on the backend.
Regular users are left with a tragedy of the commons as paid/saas programs support integrations with other specific paid products instead of with general open standards that could foster more diversity and interoperability. Everything is tacked on at the application layer - imagine going back to the folks who designed Kerberos decades ago and telling them that bouncing the browser back and forth between websites is what we settled on!
I like the new transparent theme, but yeah, it's just a GUI theme. Bring me back a consistent GUI where I can get themes from a modding community that apply to every app on the system and give me control over my look and feel! Instead, we get Wayland and a loss of 90% of the classic Linux desktop software. Bring me an OS that I can seamlessly deploy in a near-stateless/immutable fashion everywhere without falling into the trap of Nix! Instead, we get yet another rewrite of the fuckin' Ubuntu installer that still doesn't make the resulting system any more appealing for someone who would administer a corporate fleet of Linux workstations.
One could make the case that theming in Linux is a problem, not a solution. You make your computer look like anything... as long as "anything" looks like crap.
I remember in the early 1990s theming was all the rage for Win '95 applications and the smaller the crapplet, the more aggressively it was themed. People got the sense that it was not cool and by the time Microsoft introduced really great theming support in WPF nobody wanted to use it.
The existence of so much software written to existing APIs is a reason why innovation in the OS seems at best marginal these days. If you thought "there is so much bloat in POSIX" you're either going to have to rewrite the whole userspace or build a POSIX emulation layer so you can use the GNU tools. If you wanted to build a really cool OS for the eZ80 it probably runs CP/M applications because if it did you have a lot of software to run on it and if it doesn't you have to write a text editor and everything else.
This was sort of the idea of some of QNX. The kernel never crashed, but display, keyboard, networking, uart, etc was all user space. So yes you had a kernel that never crashed but frequently turned into a useless brick until rebooted
> Apple's designers (and those of many other companies) come back to the idea of translucency giving order and imbuing personality. I cannot for the life of me understand where this idea comes from.
When the company employs designers on a permanent salaried basis, those designers must make changes in order to assure their continued employment. To do otherwise risks the bean counters in the accounting department asking the pointed question: "Why are we employing all these designers when they are not producing anything?". The result is that there must be change for the purpose of assuring the designers continued employment. Result: translucent designs no one wants, but that looked great in the powerpoint presentations used to assure the designers remained employed.
You could apply precisely the same cynical calculus to engineering but I suspect a lot of the people nodding along with this could suddenly find it offensive when applied to their mission-critical DevSecOps roadmap.
The reality is there's always work to done responding to changing user needs, market forces and organisational objectives and it's not uncommon that UI design overhauls are driven by an abstract desire to make things seem 'fresh' but that doesn't come (solely) from designers, it's often a top-down strategic directive.
The problem with this explanation is that it also requires multiple parties to be unaware of things which you seem to think are obvious or even self-evident:
1. The designers must be unaware that "no one wants" these new designs (or perhaps they're incapable of creating new designs that people do want).
2. The executives must be unaware that "no one wants" these new designs.
3. The executives must be unaware of the designers' plot to prevent themselves from being fired.
This argument makes no sense, because if it's so obvious what the designers are up to, it should be easy for the bean counters to take that into consideration when deciding whether to fire the designers.
If you believe the designers have some perverse self-centered motivation you might also believe the bean counters do too.
Another framing of the same phenomenon:
If the company makes cellphones, the cellphones need to sell. In order for people to buy the cellphone, they first have to want it, and so the cellphone needs to be universally desirable. The company hires a design team on a permanent salaried basis to do exactly this. Accounting really needs the number of phones sold to keep going up every year, so they really need the designers to think of new things that people might desire to include in the phones each year.
This was first done with cars, and that is why car companies also hire design teams on a permanent salaried basis.
> When the company employs designers on a permanent salaried basis, those designers must make changes in order to assure their continued employment.
I don't think it's exactly this, but it's close. Every so many years you have a new crop of talent rotate in and someone wants to make their mark and shake things up in order to be promoted. Rinse and repeat.
I'll take the bubble tea interface over the extreme flatness of every widget that dominates the UI these days where no cues are given as to what is just text, what's a button, an editable text input etc.
While liquid glass is perhaps mediocre and distracting, the current "everything is just a text label or a stick figure icon" paradigm is pure hell. I dread learning any new UI because of how bad most are.
Not to mention the lack of discoverable shortcuts on desktop. On touchscreen devices you get random gestures that are hard to do half the time.
Off topic, but I wonder if the youth of today will have nostalgia for hideous flat corporate design the same way I have a certain fondness for all those high gloss buttons from 2007.
Every time I spend significant time on my Mac with the Tahoe beta and then go back to an Android phone (with near Pixel UI) I experience genuine relief. Everything is just a simple color and a label, and I love that because it's so easy to descern. Tahoe legitimately makes me tired to look at sometimes. I vastly prefer clarity and flatness over decorations.
I don’t buy the argument that we need design harmony between platforms. If I wanted an iPad like experience on my Mac I would have bought an iPad. I paid for a mouse and keyboard centric experience. Liquid Glass actively takes away from that.
This is what's confusing to me as well, but I'm willing to admit that growing up with a mouse and other types of input devices gives me a bit of a bias. For someone that's only every used the input devices attached to their hands would probably be biased the other way. So maybe harmony will be reached when all of the olds finally phase out?? I've seen plenty of younger people touch my laptop screen in an attempt to interact with the laptop as if it were a touch screen. I've also seen the iPad keyboard/trackpad devices that just look weird with the cursor.
There are touchscreen laptops you can touch. It was a priority for Microsoft in the Windows 8 era but Apple always kept away from it because they’ve always wanted to maximize the psychological difference between laptops, tablets, and phones because they have every expectation of selling you all three.
One thing I find a little annoying about my steam deck is that it has a touchscreen and it works right some of the time but there are plenty of games where you have an object in the screen with a skeuomorphic interface that you ought to be able to touch but you have to work it with the game controller buttons. Back in the day with the PS Vita almost all games could be played with game controller buttons only but any touch target that should have obviously been a touch target was a touch target.
Some people will say that iOS has an option for ‘reduce transparency’ that mitigates the issue. But every time I turn it on, there’s a general lack of design polish in the OS and apps due to it not being the default.
Another point: I wonder how much of this is for the OS designer/UX/UI team to justify their existence at Apple. Suspect it’ll start out very glassy and gets flatter over time, so that they can claim ‘improvement to user experience’ over many years to come.
If you're disabled, and going to the Accessibility settings to make the experience work for you, Apple has failed.
We're all disabled now.
As someone who has to put on reading glasses to get any information from my apple phone and watch purely due to obnoxious design choices by Apple, I’d say they embody UI failure.
I think the real takeaway is that Apple has achieved a psychotic break from actual users, and its internal forces are driving decisions. Somehow user testing signal has been captured by these forces, and market signals are overwhelmed by the overall quality premium they deliver (and you can never prove the negative of how much better sales would have been without this).
I care less about the quality failings than the signs the Apple is too big to manage through the next few years. They’ve done a great job asserting independence from chip makers, but they’re no where near independent enough for the new era of assertive nationalism.
> Apple's designers (and those of many other companies) come back to the idea of translucency giving order and imbuing personality. I cannot for the life of me understand where this idea comes from. When multiple layers of different imagery shine through each other, I am not helped by this. The user interface placed on a semi-transparent panel is not more effective because it is set against a smeared mess of colors, nor am I emotionally fulfilled as a human being for knowing that the mess comes from a treasured personal memory.
This article acts as though design choices which are sub-optimal from a purely informational perspective, but which add personality and attraction to a product, have not earned Apple hundreds of billions of dollars in the past 25 years. The fact that he cannot understand where the idea comes from is okay, since he's not a product, UI, or industrial designer for Apple: that's their job, not his. The deeper question of why people form attachments to things that look 'cool' but have lower performance in some areas is indeed mysterious. But relentlessly pursuing that phenomenon has worked for Apple pretty well so far.
Liquid Glass isn't immediately impressive to me either, but it will either succeed or fail not based on whether it is more effective or not, but whether people like it or not, and those are two different things.
People who used to be able to get by with default settings are now going to Accessibility -> Reduce Transparency and Increase Contrast. Those are settings designed for disabled users. That so many will need those settings is Apple literally disabling users with their fashion choices. That's effed up.
But how big is the percentage of those users compared to the rest? Most likely not big enough to hurt the bottom line. I don't like the new UI either (I think Vista actually did it better contrast-wise), but most people don't tweak accessibility settings and will just stick to it.
I think what you're missing is that this is likely in preparation for some sort of AR glasses and something smaller form factor than the Vision Pro that will require transparency so you can see through to the real world etc...
It is possible for different devices to have different interfaces optimized for those different interaction models. Apple has the money to support this.
[dead]
My Mac screen isn't transparent. Why should its UI be?
If there is "some sort of AR glasses and something smaller form factor than the Vision Pro that will require transparency so you can see through to the real world", limit the transparent interface only to that device.
> My Mac screen isn't transparent. Why should its UI be?
Mark my words, this is coming. It’s doable (as an effect) - rear camera captures what’s behind the screen, face tracking adjusts perspective in real-time to make it seem transparent/have correct parallax.
How do you adjust the frame rate of reality to match?
I prefer life to look like a movie…24fps.
But if you’re serious, I guess whatever the Apple vision does.
I wouldn’t be surprised if we see “transparent” heads up displays in vehicles that take on this design language/tech.
Yes.
I look at my Mac screen to see what is on my Mac screen. Whether there is a tabletop, a window, or a cat behind my Mac screen is irrelevant. If I want to see what is behind it I would be looking it that instead of my screen
Repeat for application window, dialog box etc.
The only place translucence sort of kind of makes sense is for video content but even then, it still totally optional. My experience of watching a video is not really degraded if the play button is opaque.
As others have said, wanting to update the design simply because it looks cool is one thing. If that's the goal just say it. But Alan Dye's explanations do not inspire confidence. I get the impression that as in architecture, the chief audience of the design is not the user, but other designers.
But, UnIFiEd eXpERieNcE
Apple re-running the entire Windows Vista Metro arc.
AR glasses will have fixed-distance 2D overlays like your car's HUD. If they're preparing for a Vision Pro experience in spectacles form factor, they're about 10 to 20 years early with this glass UI change.
... could be the point of Liquid Glass on Vision Pro is to make AR on Meta's platform look bad. I mean, the MQ3 is a medium-spec smartphone on your face, the Vision Pro is a laptop on your face. The latter can support a much fancier UI without slowing down to the point where the video lags and you start crashing into things.
UI design gripes posted on site with icon that doesn't link through to homepage
Back in the 1990s I remember CS professors taking a very chauvinistic idea of what an "operating system" was limited to the kernel, would probably exclude a CLI interpreter like bash, never mind the rest of the userspace and would particularly exclude anything having to do with GUI even if you had kernel drivers and tons of DLLs that came with the OS to support GUIs.
Now you have Arstechnica, which should know better, which makes detailed reviews pixel-by-pixel of everything that changed between one version of MacOS and the next and seems to think the only thing that matters in an OS is the superficial things you can see, at least if the OS is MacOS.
Windows is refreshing because it has more widget sets than I can count but it doesn't matter because you can get your work done even though it is inconsistent and usually just a bit ugly. It beats Linux though, because at least in Windows if a label is 75px wide, Windows will make at least 75px of space for it, whereas in Linux nobody gets excited if it label gets clipped because they only left 55px -- they'll even close out a bug request about this as soon as you make it. But hey, Linux on a bad day looks better than the 99% percentile NFT.
You've got to be a bit more specific when comparing 'Windows' to 'Linux'! Both operating systems are used with a dozen different graphics libraries, each with multiple possible configurations, and sometimes more than one for a single application.
The culture of various Linux-related communities also varies considerably. I guarantee you that the KDE community, for instance, is not going to stand for a label getting clipped. They are absolutely meticulous, especially where accessibility is concerned.
Maybe it should be /Linux/Red Hat/ as I've got personal experience with the GTK developers having a bad attitude about... everything.
Yes, actual progress in meaningful operating system changes in terms of how one might write a program, or access fundamentals like identity, have really stagnated in terms of making their way down to end users.
We have high-concept things like Urbit that wanted to remake identity and secure communication that are utterly inaccessible to most savvy folks, never mind average end users. And in the meantime we're shipping entire Unix environments around inside OCI images to make up for the lack of consistency and portability on the backend.
Regular users are left with a tragedy of the commons as paid/saas programs support integrations with other specific paid products instead of with general open standards that could foster more diversity and interoperability. Everything is tacked on at the application layer - imagine going back to the folks who designed Kerberos decades ago and telling them that bouncing the browser back and forth between websites is what we settled on!
I like the new transparent theme, but yeah, it's just a GUI theme. Bring me back a consistent GUI where I can get themes from a modding community that apply to every app on the system and give me control over my look and feel! Instead, we get Wayland and a loss of 90% of the classic Linux desktop software. Bring me an OS that I can seamlessly deploy in a near-stateless/immutable fashion everywhere without falling into the trap of Nix! Instead, we get yet another rewrite of the fuckin' Ubuntu installer that still doesn't make the resulting system any more appealing for someone who would administer a corporate fleet of Linux workstations.
One could make the case that theming in Linux is a problem, not a solution. You make your computer look like anything... as long as "anything" looks like crap.
I remember in the early 1990s theming was all the rage for Win '95 applications and the smaller the crapplet, the more aggressively it was themed. People got the sense that it was not cool and by the time Microsoft introduced really great theming support in WPF nobody wanted to use it.
The existence of so much software written to existing APIs is a reason why innovation in the OS seems at best marginal these days. If you thought "there is so much bloat in POSIX" you're either going to have to rewrite the whole userspace or build a POSIX emulation layer so you can use the GNU tools. If you wanted to build a really cool OS for the eZ80 it probably runs CP/M applications because if it did you have a lot of software to run on it and if it doesn't you have to write a text editor and everything else.
This was sort of the idea of some of QNX. The kernel never crashed, but display, keyboard, networking, uart, etc was all user space. So yes you had a kernel that never crashed but frequently turned into a useless brick until rebooted