A lot of those real world objects no longer exists, or are less frequently used than their counterparts, so I sort of see why moving away from that design language makes sense.

I'll hold of judgement of "Liquid Glass" until I've seen and used, but I don't feel like it's necessary. It's certainly not "the biggest" design update ever. System 9 to MacOSX was still greater.

This isn't really Apples fault, but I also expect others to start implementing something similar, but badly. Apple do have a point that this is something that only Apple can do well, because you do need to ensure that hardware can keep up. We're going to see other attempt something similar, but it won't been nearly as polished.

Overall I still feel that Apple is trying to force to much functionality into the phone platform. It would be really lovely to have an iOS light, that does less and with a simpler UI/UX.

This reasoning never made a ton of sense to me. Gen Z don't use devices with knobs and buttons anymore, therefore we should all design our interface elements to look like nothing in particular?

If you give someone young and tech savvy a digital UI, they will figure out how to use it. It's precisely the oldest and least tech savvy users for whom interface design is most important, as they are more like to get frustrated and quit your app. Why optimize for the young, then?

(I mean, it's a rhetorical question, as I already know the answer - the designers creating the interfaces are themselves young and tech savvy gen-Z'ers.)

We have volume sliders rather than knobs, because that's easier on a touch interface. I get your point, but does the button need to look like the button on the radio in our grandfathers car from 1960? Probably not. I was thinking more in terms of filling cabinets, floppies as save icons or even the phone as the receiver on a rotary phone. Would it be easier to set a timer on your phone if the UI looked like a kitchen egg timer? Having the email icon be a letter doesn't even make sense anymore. My kid has sent one letter ever and all the mailboxes will be removed next year. How does having a letter as an icon going to provide any meaningful frame of reference when we daily receive more email than we do actual letters in a year, or two, or three?

Usually the reasoning just stops at "but nobody sends letters anymore!" without going a step further and justifying why that even matters.

That is a good question. The "share" icon e.g. is something that has no real world equivalent, and I'd argue that it almost doesn't work. Technically it could be anything and we'd over time agree that "This thing means share".

We're still at a point where many still understand the references, but over time something like the letter in email icons, just becomes cargo cult. Perhaps you're right, it doesn't matter, as long as we agree what the icons mean.

The New York Times uses a box wrapped up in a bow.

I can't link to it because it's rendered as an in-line SVG, but this is HN, so picture this in your mind:

  <svg aria-hidden="true" width="19" height="19" viewBox="0 0 19 19"><path d="M18.04 5.293h-2.725c.286-.34.493-.74.606-1.17a2.875 2.875 0 0 0-.333-2.322A2.906 2.906 0 0 0 13.64.48a3.31 3.31 0 0 0-2.372.464 3.775 3.775 0 0 0-1.534 2.483l-.141.797-.142-.847A3.745 3.745 0 0 0 7.927.923 3.31 3.31 0 0 0 5.555.459 2.907 2.907 0 0 0 3.607 1.78a2.877 2.877 0 0 0-.333 2.321c.117.429.324.828.606 1.171H1.155a.767.767 0 0 0-.757.757v3.674a.767.767 0 0 0 .757.757h.424v7.53A1.01 1.01 0 0 0 2.588 19h14.13a1.01 1.01 0 0 0 1.01-.959v-7.56h.424a.758.758 0 0 0 .757-.757V6.05a.759.759 0 0 0-.868-.757Zm-7.196-1.625a2.665 2.665 0 0 1 1.01-1.736 2.24 2.24 0 0 1 1.574-.313 1.817 1.817 0 0 1 1.211.818 1.857 1.857 0 0 1 .202 1.453 2.2 2.2 0 0 1-.838 1.191h-3.431l.272-1.413ZM4.576 2.386a1.837 1.837 0 0 1 1.221-.817 2.23 2.23 0 0 1 1.565.313 2.624 2.624 0 0 1 1.01 1.736l.242 1.453H5.182a2.2 2.2 0 0 1-.838-1.19 1.857 1.857 0 0 1 .202-1.495h.03ZM1.548 6.424h7.54V9.39h-7.58l.04-2.967Zm1.181 4.128h6.359v7.287H2.729v-7.287Zm13.777 7.287h-6.348v-7.307h6.348v7.307Zm1.181-8.468h-7.53V6.404h7.53V9.37Z" fill="#121212" fill-rule="nonzero"></path></svg>

Computers are full of these things though. The Shift key is a reference back to how typewriters worked. We didn’t change the name of the key, because nothing physically shifts anymore. Most don’t know what it means historically, but they still know what it does on their computer.

I’ll all for bringing skeuomorphism back.

And we kept the letter "c", even though in English this is always* either pronounced like "k" or like "s", or the "ch" digraph. But sutsh ðings go in sykles, and one day ðe English language will be simplified.

* Saying "always" is a risk on a forum like this, no doubt there's an example I've not thought of.

In a fictitious modern, phonology-based spelling system, you could write the above something like:

“Bat sač þings gou in sajkls, änd wan dej ðí Ingliš längwidž wil bí simplifajd.”

;)

Accents do make spelling reform difficult. For example, some of the people who grew up 5 miles from me (they were Cosham/Portsmouth, I was south Havant) pronounced both these "th"s as… I don't know the linguistic symbol, but something like a "v" or an "f".

What's your accent btw? In "standard" English, 'the' has a voiced consonant, whereas 'thing' is unvoiced.

EDIT: Sorry, I now see you already told about your regional accent.

Other than the specific location and the social category of "upper-middle-class", I don't know how to describe my accent. People at school thought I was posh, but I never saw myself that way.

Now I live in Berlin, so I might have started picking up a bit of a German accent (and perhaps an ESL accent if there is such a thing).

Everyone decided that "save" = "disk"

Maybe a different looking disk, but still a disk.

That universality across apps for basic functionality was the biggest feature: it didn't matter if I knew what a disk was or not, because I knew the disk-shaped thing meant save in every app.

The original modern sin of UX was having the hubris to ditch universality because they believed whatever batshit they dreamed up was better enough to justify doing so.

It wasn't. Arguably, it couldn't ever be.

You could come up with a unique wiz-bang UX for something that's objectively 25% better than skeuomorphism, and it still wouldn't be a net improvement. Because no user cares about one specific app enough to train on it.

But building a hammer that looks like every other hammer doesn't get you on the cover of design/UX magazines...

> Maybe a different looking disk, but still a disk.

I had a discussion about this with my parents, who saw the 5" disks actually flopping back in the days, but never cared enough about computers.

They thought the floppy icon meant it was saved on their drive, when it was actually commited to the cloud service they were using. They spent a while looking around, in their Document folder, Download folder etc. and gave up after a while.

I can't remember which service they were using, but boy were they pissed.

This reminds me of the Figma rant on how you can't do presentations offline even if you save your slides to disk, that's where the whole industry is trending.

While the Shift key keeps some resemblance of the original object behavior, a shortcut like Cmd + Shift V makes no sense in the metaphor.

Same way holding Shift while selecting objects in the finder, or arrowing around breaks the mental image. In many ways, the Command key's higher abstraction makes it easier for newcomers to grasp that it just does magical things.

Cmd + S saving the document needs no additional lore or image of a past clunky machine would had somehow reacted in a Rube Goldberg way.

Interfaces should be simple to use for simple tasks anyway, getting rid of semantic noise is IMHO a better way.

Knobs work as a tactile interface that require two fingers minimum to rotate predictably. With digital screens we lost the tactile element, and mandated a new one finger (thumb) minimum. Interfaces had to adapt, which is why knobs were replaced with sliders. Changes like this happened all over the place; not because of "gen-Z", but because they were the most effective solution for the platform.

Yeah, about that.

When iPhone SE2 was first released (April 2020), it featured the A13 Bionic, which was the most powerful SoC Apple has had at the time (to be succeeded by A14 in iPhone 12 couple months later), and ran iOS 13.

Every succeeding iOS release, the phone felt a little more sluggish. Right now, by iOS 18: it sometimes takes half a minute to open the share sheet; misbehaving apps can make the phone almost too hot to touch, and can freeze the app switcher UI for 10+s; Safari takes 4s to "cold start" into about:blank; and so on. None of these are signs of CPU throttling, it's all just software. I almost can't wait for Apple to drop support for major releases - even if the current release is crap, the next one will be worse.

I pretty much expect last year's devices to start struggling with this new design after 2 releases.

To be clear, an irreversible update caused my iPhone 4 to become immediately unusable.

Yep. What would the modern equivalent of the save icon - a cloud or an generic IC representing the soldered-on SDD? Hard drives, floppies, or any other user-controlled storage devices are now out of fashion.

Icons make localisation much easier. In fact flat web design has evolved a fairly standard set of icons for basic operations. Most people know what a burger menu and x in the top corner of a window do. Same for copy, share, and so on.

The problem with Liquid Glass is that it's making the background style more important than the foreground content. No one cares if buttons ripple if they can't see what they do, because icons themselves are less clear and harder to read.

So I don't know what the point of this is.

Unifying the look with Apple's least successful, least popular, most niche product seems like a bizarre decision. I'm guessing the plan is to start adding VisionPro features in other products, but without 3D displays the difference between 3D and 2D metaphors is too huge to bridge.

I really liked Aqua. It was attractive and it was very usable.

This is... I don't know. It seems like style over substance for the sake of it, with significant damage to both.

(It also displays a CRT with a Windows 95 BSOD for Samba network shares, but that's 100% on purpose.)

OTOH Apple's own apps haven't had a "save" button for a really long time now. Everything autosaves (and syncs to iCloud) automatically - use Undo if you need to. More complex apps, like Numbers, also automatically maintain a version history.

The middle school here has a "computer applications" class that covers all that kind of thing. Definitely not iPads only.

Just as visual design across the majority of digital touchpoints seems to have arrived at a mature level, this will unleash a giant wave of noise including gradients on text.

Brrr.

I swear, some decisionmakers deserve a brutal punch in their face. I don't even care anymore about being civil in such matters.

My age shows here as well and I'm not in any way excited about this design change at all. Suddenly Apple decided that this fancy acrylic glass animation for widgets, interface that says "look we aren't stagnant - we did something" will be enough to diverge attention from other problems. I sincerely doubt that it's gonna be.

This release feels like a return to transparency trend which we had somewhere around Vista and initial KDE Plasma releases.

From the preview so far I'm not excited.

I have to say app icons look nice (the borders make them pop just a bit more), the border highlights are clear without being loud, and elements like the dock look nice. The inactive button states actually look great – as shown in the Camera and Facetime screenshots – they actually do look like little glass buttons, which is good.

Where I have issue is when multiple of these glass elemenst are shown at once they fight for attention and it's persnally quite overwhelming for me. The image of the video player controls on iPhone and AppleTV are in my opinion awful and load, and that's especially where you want a quiet UI.

When the shape has a strong refractive index and that's where it becomes really noisy for me with the Safari and music tab bars being absolutely awful in my opinion.

It's a shame because I think if they kept the idea but dialed it down from 11 it could be fantastic.

I wonder if they manage to change anything or tweaks, polishing (sic!) will happen over next or two iOS releases.

  > Suddenly Apple decided that this fancy acrylic glass animation for widgets, interface that says "look we aren't stagnant - we did something"

And I honestly felt sorry for woman who tries to sell me amazing emoji combining "technology". Who actually uses this beside the obvious die-hard fans on dedicated sites and forums.

  > But this whole keynote video felt like it's on nearly same levels as car salesman, infomercials/teleshopping.

But I'm 100% behind you on "make buttons look like buttons" and "don't hide functionality behind arbitrary gestures that you never tell the user". UI designers may hate menus these days, but they were so good for letting a user browse through looking for the thing they want. Search boxes are a good speed improvement, but should never be the only interface object because many times the user doesn't know exactly what they're looking for.

This is also why most voice assistants don't get used very much, there's no easily accessible list of phrases they know and they aren't smart enough to really understand what the person wants, so people end up using the one or two phrases they know the assistant can handle and forget about it otherwise.

Thank you for saying this, you've just made me realise they share all the problems of text adventures while having none of the excitement.

So long for muscle memory (oh and for consiseness, it's worse in French).

Anyways, that's the prime reason there's no list: either they want to change the commands willy-nilly, or they don't know them because that's whatever the model's learned.

Only saying "15 minutes" initiates a timer for that long.

This goes even deeper in the "undiscoverable commands" issue at hand.

"notify me in 15 minutes" feels natural and casual, and how I'd expect to interact with modern voice assistants. "set a 15 minutes timer" feels overly formal and redundant (it does not help that in French, a timer is "minuteur", so you repeat the "minutes" sound twice), and how I'd expect to interact with old voice assistants. This new one is just some hidden trial-and-error thing deep in Siri that's likely an engineer that likes cooking that added it as a shortcut.

Among the many shortcomings of Siri is that it seems as if it's not good with verbs. I've learned to avoid them as much as possible. Put another way, it's better with nouns, so I focus on them. I guess that's why

"15-minute timer" and

"15 minutes"

work well. But similarly, I wanted to use the stopwatch the other day. Not something I ever really do. Just saying, "Stopwatch" got it open. And testing now on some non-Apple apps also worked (in case Siri has some built-in pro-Apple bias). One was WhatsApp. The other was an app for an insurance and banking company. That one, just saying its name opened the contact card I have for the company. That's fair. Trying again, and saying "company name app" opened the app.

Of course, sometimes the verbs are necessary. But I've had more success when I could avoid them. Do note that I say all this using a Siri-only phone that is too old for any of Apple Intelligence that may get mixed in with Siri.

But the reality is it doesn’t work and users have to specifically learn the few things it can do.

Regarding the "notify" vs "timer", I had a very similar experience with a friend. I went to a bakery, and she asked me to get her some kind of pastry. To me, she meant some kind of bread. Queue confused faces on both sides when she asked where her stuff was. Sure, it's still in the broad "baked goods" category, just like a reminder and a timer. This was in France, both living in major cities 200 km apart. It's not like some extreme variation of English from the other side of the world.

Turns out it's actually already a word: having the proper form or shape —used of minerals whose crystalline growth has not been interfered with

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/idiomorphic

That seems to fit amazingly well here too.

Likely related to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordance#As_perceived_action..., but it's a jargon word most tech people and others don't know, and it creates debates about what it means among those that do know it.

I usually say something like it should be obvious it's clickable, or obvious what it does, when it comes up.

> Affordances are what an object can do (truth). Perceived affordances are what one thinks an object can do (perception). Signifiers make affordances clearer (closing the gap between truth and perception). Signifiers often reduce number of possible interpretations and/or make intended way of using an object more explicit.

> A grey link on the screen might afford clicking (truth). But you might perceive it just as a non-interactive label (perception). Styling it as a button (background, shadow etc.) is a signifier that makes it clearer that the link can be clicked.

I don't think there's any more widely known terms here, and not any used within general tech audiences. I'd like it if there was a useful shorthand too but devs/users/clients are probably going to stick with e.g. "I couldn't tell that was a button" because the above have failed to catch on.

"Visual cues" feels accurate enough. I immediately understand "Buttons should look like buttons".

"Skeuomorphism" has caught on. It's not guessable but then it saves quite a few words so helps with communication. It probably got picked up by some tech news/blog sites and reached critical mass because skeuomorphism vs flat design resonates with people.

I strongly disagree. I don't mind if people like skeuomorphic graphics. Want to make the "play" button look like a 1987 tape deck? Not my thing, but everyone has different preferences. That's fine.

But I loathe, detest, hate, despise, skeuomorphic user interfaces. Remember when Calendar.app would only let you turn one month page at a time because that's how desk calendars work? How Podcasts looked like a reel-to-reel recorder and waste tons of screen space? Contacts app imitating the limitations of a physical black book because that's how real books work?[0]

If you like brushed metal or whatever, right on. Again, not my thing, but you do you! But I cannot abide the fake limitations that skeuomorphic design pushed onto software in the name of making apps work just like their physical equivalents. The UI on the magic boxes we're typing this on are limited only by our creativity. Please, please don't infect them with the real world's restrictions when it's not necessary!

[0] https://www.betalogue.com/2012/01/15/abook6-dumb/

This is my #1 take-away from this. At this point it seems pretty safe to assume that interfaces made by Apple will probably still be decent, in spite of this design philosophy.

The clones, however, are going going to take accessiblity to new lows.

I went to school in the 90s and learned computers in school.

All they taught us was the basics. How to use Windows explorer. What files are and how to rename and delete and undelete them.

And some hypercard clone. Which barely taught us anything about computers except "they can do stuff you tell them to," which I guess was a valuable lesson?

As I child of the nineties I was surprised to eventually learn that a file in a folder was a real thing and not only a computer concept.