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Liquid Glass – WWDC25 [video]

developer.apple.com

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Re: Liquid Glass – WWDC25 [video]

#121

Post by matwood »

iTokio wrote: post #13

I’ve been using it for 2 days now, and the first thing I noticed is that readability took a hit. My background is a mid tone warm photo, not dark or light, icons got a white foreground that’s very hard to read against their translucent background. The second thing I noticed, is that when I’m scrolling a webpage, icons now switch color randomly (according to the bg dominant color) and that’s distracting. The last thin…

> The last thing, is that my phone is getting warmer and scrolling has become less fluid, choppy. And that’s on the 16 Pro Max.

Happens with almost every beta, particularly on first install. The later betas typically improve, and even the current ones often get better if there was some new indexing that had to happen.

I’ve been running since the keynote and my phone was initially warm but has calmed down now.

Re: Liquid Glass – WWDC25 [video]

#122

Post by DavidPiper »

I don't want to be a hater, I've been an Apple fan for a long time. I'm hopeful they can finish strong and get this redesign over the high quality bar by the time it leaves beta. But this video diminishes that hope for me.

Almost everything they describe as advantages (primarily the fluid motion features) can be done without making the controls see-through. Everything else seems to be a straight-up degradation in quality. It all feels totally over-engineered.

Also, if you'll allow me to old-man-yells-at-cloud for a moment:

> The motion of liquids is something we all have an intuitive feel for

Ignoring that they're highlighting literal bubbles at that point in the video (famously not liquid, except at the bottom of the ocean), liquid is also famously hard to simulate well. It's literally the least intuitive form of matter.

> Tinting helps legibility and contrast

I want my controls to be legible always! Tinting should draw my attention or trigger a mental pathway (e.g. "red for dangerous operation"), not be the core thing that makes a component legible against its background.

> Here is a button that is using a solid fill instead of tinting. As you can tell [sic] it is completely opaque and breaks the visual character of Liquid Glass [also sic, there's no liquid glass in the shot yet]. But notice when it starts using the new tinting. All of a sudden it feels more transparent and more grounded in its environment.

No it doesn't! It literally appears more detached from it which is why it looks better and THE WHOLE POINT OF TINTING that you just described. I love the look and feel of this tinting example, but you just made it seem like you got to a good place by total accident.

I really want to believe y'all know what you're doing this time around.

Re: Liquid Glass – WWDC25 [video]

#123

Post by calmbell »

farzd wrote: post #63
mvkel wrote: post #36

I think I know what happened. The A-squad design team left Apple 15 years ago. The B-squad left 5 years ago. What remains is a sea of Gen Z designers who weren't yet alive when the foggy glass of Windows Vista seemed like a good idea. Meanwhile, the talent wars are raging, with every AI company offering 7-figure salaries to the best of Apple's prodigies. Apple is now the old guard. They're no longer cool, and as a pu…

It seems like they are trying to unify the UX for vision OS and other devices and have them finally morph with the AR interfaces that are to come. There is probably a bigger vision behind this than just shiny visuals.

They have been doing this slowly over the past several years. I decided to move from macOS to Linux the day settings turned into a scrolling iOS-style list rather than an actual settings menu.

Re: Liquid Glass – WWDC25 [video]

#124

Post by noisy_boy »

What I am curious about is that isn't there a team or group in Apple with a keen eye for UX that are independent of the designing teams, sort of dogfood these changes over a period and have the authority to initiate corrections/fixes? Sort of like UX QA but with actual powers?

Re: Liquid Glass – WWDC25 [video]

#125

Post by apexalpha »

This is the first time that I truly don't like what Apple has done with the UI.

Honestly there have been things where I had to give it some time, and maybe this design will grow on me too. Lord knows Apple puts a lot of resources into this.

But still it looks so Windows Vista...

Re: Liquid Glass – WWDC25 [video]

#126

Post by noisy_boy »

travisgriggs wrote: post #46

7:44 "These liquid glass elements form a distinct functional layer for controls and navigation..." Hala fricking luah. I think. This sums up--without under bus throwing--what I have loathed about the last 10ish years of "flat design" hell. I wonder if there will be some issues with what happens when elements are not clearly differentiable from from "controls and navigation" and "everything else"? But just recognizing…

I mean the idea itself isn't terrible; maybe the glass just needs to have some colour to provide background. Maybe "live glass" instead that knows the context in which it is and applies the right amount of tint of the most appropriate colour based on what's underneath it.

Re: Liquid Glass – WWDC25 [video]

#127

Post by larrysalibra »

deafpolygon wrote: post #58

I must be in the minority, but I love the design.

I was skeptical at first but like it a lot after trying out the betas. It's all very intuitive if you've used visionOS before and the potential readability problems aren't really an issue in practice.

Re: Liquid Glass – WWDC25 [video]

#128

Post by signal11 »

jajko wrote: post #116
matusp wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like to observe how organization affects how a company operates. As soon as you create a department, that department will start to generate reasons why it should remain being a department, as a sort of self preservation instinct. If you establish a design department, they will start planning complete redesigns sooner or later -- they need to have something going on to justify their existence. When I see this type o…

I see this daily in our banking megacorp. We have IT security team(s), which permeates all other IT activities like ink on paper. On its own its a good approach obviously, we weren't for example hacked or scammed in any high profile case, ever. But there is no limit to how much additional security you can bring, so they do bring all of it. Recently had to get new Tomcat distribution deployed via Chef tool, of course…

Conway’s Law is a bear.

Alternative approach, also from a financial services world: VMs are created with a DSL on top of qemu/firecracker, containers with Dockerfiles. Cyber are part of an image review group alongside other engineers that validates the base images.

But: no interactive access to any of these VMs at all. There’s hypervisors running on bare metal, but SRE teams have that scripted pretty well to the point a physical server can be added in a day or so. It does mean you’ve to be serious about logging, monitoring and health.

This is one instance where we got it right (I think). We do have some legacy servers we’re trying to get rid of. But we’ve learnt we can run even complex vendor apps this way.

Conway’s Law comes to bite us in other ways though! Like I said, it’s a bear.

Re: Liquid Glass – WWDC25 [video]

#129

Post by kristianc »

gyomu wrote: post #86
mvkel wrote: post #36

I think I know what happened. The A-squad design team left Apple 15 years ago. The B-squad left 5 years ago. What remains is a sea of Gen Z designers who weren't yet alive when the foggy glass of Windows Vista seemed like a good idea. Meanwhile, the talent wars are raging, with every AI company offering 7-figure salaries to the best of Apple's prodigies. Apple is now the old guard. They're no longer cool, and as a pu…

Alan Dye is the interface design lead at Apple, he's been there since 2006. One of the lead designers on Liquid Glass is Chan Karunamuni, who's been at Apple since the early 2010s. If you search for more of the names of the design presenters at this WWDC, you'll find a lot of people with similarly long tenure. So the theory that it's all Gen Z designers with no experience or talent seems pretty weak.

Especially at Apple where it’s very well known that ultimate decision making is centralised around very few, very senior people.

Re: Liquid Glass – WWDC25 [video]

#130

Post by Kwpolska »

ErneX wrote: post #95
Kwpolska wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone at Apple knows WWDC is in June, and WWDC is the event where Apple show off the new stuff and deliver a public beta. Some of the terrible designs were shown in the pre-recorded demos, and if anyone had used the new beta for more than five minutes, they would have ended up in the broken control center.

It’s a beta though, plenty of time until this comes out to polish.

It’s also the biggest software event in the Apple world. The implementation may improve, but the pre-recorded demo videos show off the bad parts pretty clearly, almost as if the terrible readability is intentional.
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