Liquid Glass – WWDC25 [video]

I’ve been using the beta on both iPad and iPhone for the last couple days and I have to say I quite like it.

I find the interactions intuitive, and the rearrangement of the UI (placement of buttons and such) better than prior versions.

I was concerned about readability, but has not been an issue at all.

There are some awkward portions, but seems like something that can be worked out.

I think I'm convinced with liquid glass design, the issues highlighted by the users in the beta release IMHO are a result of rushing it out for WWDC. It appears that they didn't have enough time to polish the UI to comply with the principles described in this video.

For example the designer in this video says no glass over glass but the control center and the lock screen are glass over glass. It looks cluttered and the legibility is horrible, as predicted by the designers here.

They probably just compiled the old UI with the new liquid glass framework without going through the design considerations that are required by the new system.

By the time of the release, it will look great if Apple doesn't shy away from letting their developers re-work everything.

What I wonder now is, why hadn't that happen already? Don't the internal developers have access to the new design and the people behind it until the last moment? If the designers of Liquid Glass and the designers of the locks screen and the control center have talked, they would have known the principles described in the WWDC video and avoid all that.

In this hypothetical, presuming you're putting the manhole (subsurface conduit/plumbing maintenance access point) in after you've already paved the road: it's because the tool you'd use to cut a hole into pavement (i.e. a concrete saw) cuts straight lines — and it's easier to make a square/rectangle out of straight lines than a circle. And sure enough, whenever you see workers hacking up the road, they generally are cutting square holes.

Refer, after that, to the process of constructing a manhole (https://www.envirodesignproducts.com/blogs/news/how-are-manh...).

At the end of this process, you have a square hole in the pavement, opening to a square excavation, bottoming out at a square concrete foundation, on which has been set a round concrete cylinder, which is then surrounded out to the edge of the square hole with packed earth.

Given this, you could equally-well finish this job either:

1. by placing a square of metal to fill the entire square packed-earth space you've constructed (as when bridging a pothole with a temporary steel surface plate);

2. or by first paving over the exposed packed-earth part, and then placing a circle of metal to cover only the manhole entrance itself.

...which is why people do justifiably ask why, in practice, we seem to always favor option 2 over option 1.

It's cheap and easy to install a vertical pipe when you're already laying a ton of horizontal pipe.

The most important thing about this new design is that it differentiates itself from Android. Not super important in the U.S. where iPhone lock-in is pretty endemic, but for the markets where there is competition, this bit of eye candy will make a big difference.

Usability is secondary. The directive from on high was probably about creating a more visually distinctive UI which takes advantage of Apple hardware, thus making it harder to emulate.

Think of the next YouTube review comparing devices. Liquid glass will stand out, regardless of its user experience.