Oh right - I almost forgot we’re in the timeline where the “experts” always make the worst choice available to them.
Apple introduces a universal design across platforms
351–360 of 1001 posts
Re: Apple introduces a universal design across platforms
#352After installing the betas I'm very surprised at how much a departure this is on the Mac. Feels like using an iPad all of a sudden. There are some nice bits but they're going to have to tweak it significantly over the next couple of months. Safari tabs are an abomination. On other hand Spotlight has some great improvements and Launchpad is gone.
Re: Apple introduces a universal design across platforms
#353This looks horrible to be honest. This new liquid glass will lead to liquid brain, because my brain will be melting trying to process all that visual mess daily. Now of course, I'll have to experience this new design in practice to be sure, but judging from the screenshots it looks really hard on the eyes. Hopefully they'll allow the translucency to be customized. Apple had a good run, I've genuinely enjoyed using th…
I think it's time for me to look back at Linux. (*Looks at Gnome.*) Hm, they're getting worse faster than Apple does. Never mind.
The damage Gnome does to the reputation of Linux is surreal
Re: Apple introduces a universal design across platforms
#354Every Electron app is going to feel incredibly out of place. And for the few that aren’t okay with feeling out of place, the devs of those apps will now have to contend with shipping more macOS specific styles and workarounds. I’m not looking to discuss Electron performance/etc so please ditch that discussion before it starts. I just find it interesting how comparatively tricky this particular UI styling might end up…
Electron apps are already out of place. In the space of Mac-apps-for-SaaS-products such as Linear, Slack, Notion, Asana, Figma, GitHub, and Spotify, they inflict the company's own design system on Apple's OS rather than try to ship Apple's design system applied to their product. Even the most popular IDE, VSCode, is just a wrapper around a web page. And they're rational to do it this way. These companies shipping app…
> Electron apps are already out of place.
You're taking the boring argument track here. Yes, they use their own design system language, but they still roughly fit in with an OS that's not random transparency/glass effects everywhere.
They clearly will not fit in with the new UI styling without significant thought and work.
Re: Apple introduces a universal design across platforms
#355Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just because we can doesn't mean we should. Using this new design language as an example, things are now harder to read, identify, and understand. That's a huge loss to productivity and ease of use.
> things are now harder to read, identify, and understand What makes you think that? Do you have a specific example from the keynote in mind? There must be something since you've never actually used this design system yourself. Or is this just your pre-judgement?
In the keynote, they showed an app, I think it was Messages, where the UI at the bottom was illegible because it was translucent and the background image and text were showing through too much. There are other examples that I was able to find were legibility was negatively impacted.
Re: Apple introduces a universal design across platforms
#356Oh no. It looks like every button and menu is now a translucent layer, so that any noise from the background shows through and muddles the text. This seems like an accessibility nightmare. Translucent layers generally make software unusable for me. In the video, I saw several instances that would be really really bad for me, where I’d be straining to understand the text. Looks really cool and futuristic though. Just…
This is also likely a performance nightmare. Funny that they mention that "new hardware has enabled us to..." which means that this will perform poorly on old devices. At a previous company, we were forbidden from using translucency (with a few exceptions) because of the performance cost of blending. There are debugging tools we'd use fairly often to confirm that all layers were opaque.
I think brand most recent iPhones are ridiculously powerful for their average use, so I don't think this would be an issue.
For older models, on the other hand, it would be an issue, and will put pressure to people to buy a new one.
Re: Apple introduces a universal design across platforms
#357So, windows Aero?
Re: Apple introduces a universal design across platforms
#358Oh no. It looks like every button and menu is now a translucent layer, so that any noise from the background shows through and muddles the text. This seems like an accessibility nightmare. Translucent layers generally make software unusable for me. In the video, I saw several instances that would be really really bad for me, where I’d be straining to understand the text. Looks really cool and futuristic though. Just…
They say the text color adapts to the background based on contrast. I'm just wondering if Apple is going to make matching CSS updates in Safari so web app developers have matching visuals.
I'm just wondering if Apple is going to make matching CSS updates in Safari so web app developers have matching visuals.
color: contrast-color(rebeccapurple);
Re: Apple introduces a universal design across platforms
#359We have these brilliant high resolution displays, and these powerful, energy efficient GPUs that are always running and compositing frames like a game engine 120 times a second. It's about time we start seeing more physicality in our user interfaces! We can make things look convincingly like glass, or metal, or even materials that don't exist in reality. One reason for flat design is because it was the lowest common…
> that are always running and compositing frames like a game engine 120 times a second Which is complete idiocy if you ask me. Why update a static screen at 120 fps? Are our batteries too large?
They don't. GPU rendering only happens when something changes. Even composition only happens when something changes thanks to panel self refresh (this is independent of the more recent VRR that also lowers refresh rate when idle, this is a relatively small savings compared to the other two)
Re: Apple introduces a universal design across platforms
#360Every Electron app is going to feel incredibly out of place. And for the few that aren’t okay with feeling out of place, the devs of those apps will now have to contend with shipping more macOS specific styles and workarounds. I’m not looking to discuss Electron performance/etc so please ditch that discussion before it starts. I just find it interesting how comparatively tricky this particular UI styling might end up…
I mentioned this elsewhere, but if LLMs are improving developer performance so drastically, why are none of these gains being used to get back towards native app development?
> why are none of these gains being used to get back towards native app development?
One argument might be that, like with any LLM output, you still do need to know it well enough to know if it's good or not implementation-wise. You still need that knowledge to understand if your performance for rendering in some scenarios is going to fall off a cliff.
Web (via browsers or Electron/etc) are mostly one train of thought. When you're doing native application development using host OS frameworks, you have to actually know the framework. LLMs don't really save you from that; i.e, I could have an LLM spit out whatever flavor of Windows-specific UI I need. I have zero way of knowing whether it's correct or not.