One example that I hate on iOS: the notification/lockscreen curtain is supposed to cover the content as it slides down. That’s what a curtain does, this has been the language for years. Now the curtain is transparent, so it can’t cover the content behind. How does the content disappear then, as you slide the curtain down?
… it doesn’t. Icons do a buggy looking animation crashing toward the user and through the screen, and if it’s an app there is just no transition. You can check by sliding the curtain down slowly and then letting go.
i disagree about that one.
im not a UX expert by any means but my first impression at WWDC seeing liquid glass was "holy shit, they pulled that off? i know apple would never compromise on legibility, so... how? there are so many situations where this won't work, and they can't exactly control the content that the buttons are overlaid on top of"
cue my confusion when it was exactly that: an obviously problematic idea implemented with all the obvious flaws showing up
they have largely fixed it now, half a year later, but the liquid glass isn't very liquid anymore. it's frosted. which is fine, but obviously not the original idea they were going for
contrasty backgrounds are fundamentally incompatible with legibility
That's what I mean, even if worded badly. Someone probably managed the glass distortion effects as an experiment, or demoed a transparent redesign of a small portion of the UI, and it looked awesome. I think it's cool that they can green light weird ideas, otherwise there's stagnation. But it is obvious that there were fundamental unresolved issues, and yet something in the process pushed the idea forward anyway.
It signals something very wrong in company structure. If you can't trust the process to drop what doesn't work, then trying new things is risky. And as you say, it's an experiment that feels so unlike apple, to disregard polish and accessibility that way.
Same as Google's Material Design. Both are bloody stupid, in their own distinct way.
Is this compromising readability? Yes, but now there's another kind of perception problem, and it's whether you can see what's literally in front of your eyes in physical space.
VR setups make you isolated and vulnerable. Any VR device is really awkward to use in public (read: in your living room or in an office).
In turn, AR setups that let the world through reduce image quality by virtue of being transparent, and it is unclear that they provide advantages. You get a slightly more immediate access to notifications in return for permanently pointing a camera towards anything you look at, which is understandably not well received.
And that's just for content consumption. When you introduce work, input is still significantly worse unless you're sitting in front of a keyboard and mouse, in which case you might as well have a full laptop.
Why ? I'm sick of square windows. I want disc windows. And instead of scrolling them, i want to rotate them. /s
Fixing bugs is hard. Better focus on the aesthetics.
... liquid glass isn't very liquid anymore. it's frosted.
taken to an extreme, the heaviest possible blur results in just one solid color (at which point there is no visible difference between a gaussian blur and LG at all).
so the more blurry the shelf is, the less important liquid glass gets. therein lies the dilemma: you can't have interesting, complex backgrounds AND legibility. it's either one or the other.
the current design is good. or becoming good, finally. but it's also not worth the, what, 2 hour reduction in battery usage, the lags and visual glitches, the major changes many apps see themselves forced to undergo, ... because it looks almost like a gaussian blur now.
Probably nobody, just some artifact of the overlay APIs used default behavior that they didn't bother to streamline.
I see this kind of trend with apple since big sur. It's not new but it's becoming more obvious with every release.
If they have managed to fumble something so basic then one can't help but extrapolate what the state of the rest is.
Because we fucking have to see it every day. And the sloppiness compounds and is indicative of further rot.
Of course the different radii also means different code paths were used, which points to a mess of APIs and frameworks underneath too.
And that's before we add the usability issues (like hard to read labels due to the glass effect and such, or bizare dragging boundaries, etc).
>Doesn't that seem a bit... particular?
Good software is about being particular.
If we wanted any random crap, we'd use any random crap.
The number of times auto update of some app has caused the thought process “but that wasn’t like that yesterday… or was it… hm… oh it was an update”. Just minor things, small mostly unnoticeable if don’t have an “eye for details”.
I don't have OCD, but easily notice inconsistencies in various design choices these mega-corporations continue to fumble.
It's less "OMG I can't focus on coding because Calculator and TextEdit aren't sharing the same border radius" but more "The UX/UI department seems like they're on perpetual vacation if Apple is letting simple things like this slip through", and this specific case is just an example, every version of macOS seems to get worse when it comes to consistency.
And it seems they're lacking in many corners (scnr...)
People who lack attention to detail just think things are randomly different.
Because then, in apps without a toolbar, like Terminal, the window corner is concentric with the close button and has a smaller radius.
In apps with a toolbar, it still concentric with the close button, but has a larger radius. Because it probably also tries to be concentric with and accommodate toolbar items on the right-hand side.
But then, why not just keep the larger radius for both window types, so they are consistent? It wouldn't break concentricity and you wouldn't have non-matching corners, especially a the bottom, where there's usually few or no elements to be concentric with anyway.
That's exactly the kind of detail I'm talking about. There is a nice idea behind it, but it has not been thought through IMHO.
But that's not how apple works.
Does it matter if it's 3rd party apps or not? Wasn't a huge part of the sell with Apple's own GUI toolkits that all native apps work uniquely, but look familiar and like part of one and the same? The consistency and "all apps look and work great" I seem to recall being one of the "features" people used to tout about OSX.
FWIW; TFA compares the border radius of TextEdit and Calculator, both two Apple apps, built-in nonetheless.
Edit: it is fixed and they polished up the UI since then.
Used to be this sort of thing "just worked" on Mac OS --- you'd think with a diminishing number of UI tool kits/dev tools this sort of thing would get better/more consistent.... always liked "Themes" and this just gives me one more reason to wish that they would come back.
Or some well-done malicious compliance.
I think if there's any upside to Tahoe, it's that it might push me into blogging for the first time in my life ever, because I just can't keep things to myself.
I actually feel sorry for Apple's developers. I can't see how you can ship software so bad and inconsistent unless you've been handed a terrible design spec from Dye's team.
edit: On my screen, three layers' corners https://hcker.news/tahoe-corners.png