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Liquid Glass – WWDC25 [video]

developer.apple.com

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Re: Liquid Glass – WWDC25 [video]

#161

Post by LoganDark »

intrasight wrote: post #138
serial_dev wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s an interesting point, never thought about it. These complicated lenses distorting light from all directions look fancy in a designer portfolio, having them almost everywhere… I’m not sure how it will work out. In contrast, the original material design was quite intuitive, iirc they based their design on paper sheets, much simpler, and much more common in our day to day life. I still have some hope it will work…

I see no way around all that optics physics not sucking up computation and battery. Perhaps Apple will add liquid glass silicon to the mix to do that physics in hardware. Using glass to compute glass, LOL

Liquid glass can't possibly be that much more expensive than vibrancy (if it even is). The refraction effects are effectively just a displacement map (probably calculated realtime, but still).

Re: Liquid Glass – WWDC25 [video]

#162

Post by LoganDark »

seydor wrote: post #158
intrasight wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see no way around all that optics physics not sucking up computation and battery. Perhaps Apple will add liquid glass silicon to the mix to do that physics in hardware. Using glass to compute glass, LOL

my initial thought is that apple is preparing to launch physically deforming screens which will create bumps similar to this liquid.

I remember finding this super cool when it first came out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JelhR2iPuw0

Re: Liquid Glass – WWDC25 [video]

#163

Post by M4v3R »

janalsncm wrote: post #15

I am trying it out and aside from being unpolished it’s also slower. My phone used to be buttery smooth. No longer.

To add to what others said - almost every major iOS / macOS release will be slower and drain battery more on the first day after install. The reason for that is they do a lot of indexing of your data and other preprocessing things that enable new features after you install. Once these processes end your device will go back to normal.

I’m surprised Apple does not communicate this fact more clearly to people, as many seem to be totally unaware of it (I do remember seeing notifications on macOS about that though)

Re: Liquid Glass – WWDC25 [video]

#164

Post by throw0101c »

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…

> The A-squad design team left Apple 15 years ago.

Does the A-squad include Steve Jobs, who seemed to have been a fan of skeuomorphism:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skeuomorph#Virtual_examples

Does the A-squad include Johnny Ive, who gave us butterfly keyboards and the Touch Bar (where (IIRC) the initial revision of which did not have a separate physical key for ESC)? Though Ive did get rid of skeuomorphism.

Re: Liquid Glass – WWDC25 [video]

#165

Post by VikRubenfeld »

Liquid Glass takes too many brain cycles for the user. It takes too much cognitive attention to watch all its changes and wait until buttons are ready to click. I don't want to waste a lot of attention "appreciating" Apple's new UI. I just want to get stuff done.

Re: Liquid Glass – WWDC25 [video]

#166

Post by mrafii »

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…

Exactly. You sums up very efficiently.

Re: Liquid Glass – WWDC25 [video]

#167

Post by hasmolo »

whiteboardr wrote: post #142
seydor wrote: post #18

We have 'instinctive visual cues' for depth and light coming from above, hence why button gradients are so immediately effective,because our visual system recognizes it in milliseconds. we don't have "instictive visual cues" for refraction and lensing , that's why we are confused about underwater distances . That's why magnifying glasses make us dizzy. I just can't believe this is coming from apple.

Plus, to be truly realistic it also would need to take into account ambient lighting scenarios surrounding the device displaying it. Like this it’s really just another try in recreating glass which never made sense to be used in UI. It is beyond me, how this got chosen as a way forward - taking visual design which makes sense in a VR/AR environment, to ruin their rectangular display UI. It will make implementation wa…

the liquid glass ends up being vital for windows in AR. the vision pro has this, and it really helps you see behind the windows you've placed. while a shit experience on a phone, i do think liquid glass is a useful choice in the AR world

Re: Liquid Glass – WWDC25 [video]

#168

Post by dgellow »

Naru41 wrote: post #150

This style of simulating faux-realistic materials (such as glass or aluminum) on the screen looks dated and cheesy now -- (Windows engineering team 2012) https://web.archive.org/web/20120614042824/http://blogs.msdn...

Looking back at this article, Windows 7 UI was really peak Microsoft

Re: Liquid Glass – WWDC25 [video]

#169

Post by gyomu »

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #149
kristianc wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

A lot of "old and senior people" also fumble with big mistakes a lot of the time. They're not all-perfect gods. In reality, most successful people are one trick ponies. They caught lightning in a bottle once early on that boosted their careers but that doesn't mean they're still relevant and correct with their decision making today. Look at John Romero, he knocked it out of the park with Doom 1, 2 and some of Quake,…

> They're not all-perfect gods. In reality, most successful people are one trick ponies. They caught lightning in a bottle once early on that boosted their careers but that doesn't mean they're still relevant and correct with their decision making today.

I don't think that characterization is quite right either. I'm a big fan of Brian Eno's "scenius" phrasing:

> A few years ago I came up with a new word. I was fed up with the old art-history idea of genius - the notion that gifted individuals turn up out of nowhere and light the way for all the rest of us dummies to follow. I became (and still am) more and more convinced that the important changes in cultural history were actually the product of very large numbers of people and circumstances conspiring to make something new. I call this ‘scenius’ - it means ‘the intelligence and intuition of a whole cultural scene’.

Extremely successful people benefit from the scenius within which they get to operate. But as that context changes and evolves over time, they fail to recreate their earlier wild successes - not because they lost any of their skills (although that can also happen), but because the skills aren't sufficient, and the deep, layered conditions that enabled those wild successes just aren't there anymore.

Re: Liquid Glass – WWDC25 [video]

#170

Post by whiteboardr »

hasmolo wrote: post #167
whiteboardr wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plus, to be truly realistic it also would need to take into account ambient lighting scenarios surrounding the device displaying it. Like this it’s really just another try in recreating glass which never made sense to be used in UI. It is beyond me, how this got chosen as a way forward - taking visual design which makes sense in a VR/AR environment, to ruin their rectangular display UI. It will make implementation wa…

the liquid glass ends up being vital for windows in AR. the vision pro has this, and it really helps you see behind the windows you've placed. while a shit experience on a phone, i do think liquid glass is a useful choice in the AR world

No question about that - see above.

What works for augmented UI doesn’t in a desktop, mobile or 10ft experience.

It’s a terrible mistake porting something to an environment where transparency isn’t helping but brings about the opposite effect.

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