Live data from Hacker News

Bad Dye Job

daringfireball.net

51–60 of 129 posts

Re: Bad Dye Job

#51
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The healing begins with a joint HW/SW effort: bring iPhone touch ID back, and strip Liquid Glass down to the bare wood and fix it.

Liquid Glass I agree with. Not sure if the Touch ID comment is intended as a joke.

Cell phones from other brands have Touch ID and it works great. Apple has Touch ID on their iPads and it also works great. As it does on the MacBooks. As it does on the iPhone SE. It should be brought back.

Re: Bad Dye Job

#53
post #33
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See there are users who like Liquid Glass, just as there are users who like TouchID. A lot of Apple’s best work turned out to be quite polarizing at the time. iOS 7’s design language was almost universally panned, but if it were “the wrong decision,” other phones wouldn’t have adopted similar design language. Material appeared just a year later in 2014. It wasn’t bad, it was just arbitrary. (“I like Liquid Glass! I l…

On the topic of Alan Dye and the home button though, the swipe gesture interface they introduced when they removed the home button strikes me as one of few genuinely successful system-level Apple design innovations in recent years. That at least seems to have happened under his leadership. Can’t think of much else good to say about what I associate with design under him.

It’s my understanding that Chan Karunamuni was largely responsible for leading the iPhone X home buttonless interface, which, I agree, is fantastic and probably the best bit of UI to come out of Apple in years. Also, the Dynamic Island, which is less impactful, but really good and clever! Anyway, he’s excited about Lemay, so I am too. https://9to5mac.com/2025/12/05/acclaimed-apple-designer-says...

Here’s a video with him discussing the iPhone X interface around its introduction in 2018 that I find fascinating https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2018/803/

Re: Bad Dye Job

#54
post #41

Hardware Design: check Hardware: check Software Design: check Software: please!

I'm not willing to cede the point on hardware design for as long as their primary mouse product cannot be charged during use. It's such a simple and obvious mistake, like a throwback to the days of hockey-puck mice.

Not to mention its ergonomics issues. I held onto mine as long as possible because I loved the capacitive shell. Eventually I had to ditch it though to keep my wrist healthy.

Re: Bad Dye Job

#55
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Liquid Glass I agree with. Not sure if the Touch ID comment is intended as a joke.

Cell phones from other brands have Touch ID and it works great. Apple has Touch ID on their iPads and it also works great. As it does on the MacBooks. As it does on the iPhone SE. It should be brought back.

I am not a fan, simply because of the screen real estate that needs to be sacrificed.

Other phones tend to have it on the back, and I have heard there's good progress in having embedded thumbprint readers in the screen.

I have, however, really come to like Face ID.

[UPDATED TO ADD] I think that it's interesting that folks ding comments they disagree with. I upvoted all the responses to my comment, even though they may disagree with me, because they were made in good faith, and contribute to the discussion.

Re: Bad Dye Job

#56

> Putting Alan Dye in charge of user interface design was the one big mistake Jony Ive made as Apple’s Chief Design Officer. _One_??? Talk about rose tinted liquid glass(es).

Leaving him there was an even bigger mistake that Apple allowed and never corrected--Alan Dye had to correct that himself. Any dis post-departure only points the blame back at Apple's management.

Re: Bad Dye Job

#57
post #48
post #8

I am starting to think John Gruber doesn't like Alan Dye.

Where were Gruber’s posts about Dye so obviously being a problem before his exit?

Quickly googled his website and found this from January 2021:

> [...] I’m reminded of all the UI and interaction designs and changes in iOS and MacOS that are just bad. There’s a real sense that Apple’s current HI team, under Alan Dye, is a “design is what it looks like” group, not a “design is how it works” group.

And this, from June of this year:

> Re-watching Jobs’s introduction of Aqua for the umpteenth time, I still find it enthralling. I found Alan Dye’s introduction of Liquid Glass to be soporific, if not downright horseshitty.

He has been even more critical on his podcast. This has been a repeated refrain and increasing over the years. My first reaction, when I read the news, was "Apple bloggers and podcasters will be THRILLED."

Re: Bad Dye Job

#58

Hardware Design: check Hardware: check Software Design: check Software: please!

> Software: please!

Didn't Apples AI guy just get fired? That will have effects on software.

Re: Bad Dye Job

#59
post #36

Here is an unpopular opinion, how about Craig Federighi replaced with Scott Forstall. It isn't just about UI design. But the whole software stack as well. iOS is still 90% the same as it was launched, and yet the apps management is still inconvenient to say the least. Along with copying all Android features, if I wanted an Android I would have brought one. The software stack, how many years has Swift been announced?…

Cocoa was so good. I even liked old-school Interface Builder’s IoC. Now there are controls where it’s obvious drag and/or drop should be supported but it isn’t or simple things like opening a custom SwiftUI (né Preferences) settings window from legacy AppKit code is unsupported.

Unfortunately, Objective-C added modern language features too late. IB never used the term IoC or anything else devs coming from other ecosystems would understand. A lot of great stuff that NeXT built 30 years ago is still great today, but never had the notoriety of lesser frameworks and languages.

Re: Bad Dye Job

#60
post #35

This is cope dressed up in the stereotypical Gruber sycophancy. The decision to align iOS and MacOS with the glassy design of VisionOS was a broader corporate strategy that would have required buy-in from more execs than just the "chief design officer". If you accept that this particular bozo wasn't forced out but instead was tempted away by the scent of lucre wafting from Zuck's pockets, then that implies that there…

The problem is, Liquid Glass isn’t all that closely aligned with the visionOS UI, despite both having glass-like qualities. Most notably, the iOS and macOS versions are missing the usability affordances that the visionOS version has, and more superficially the visionOS version looks nicer.
Post reply on HN