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Fluid Glass

chiuhans111.github.io

111–120 of 125 posts

Re: Fluid Glass

#111
post #88

Cool concept, just please never ever do this in anything production, it's bad enough we've now got a mainline OS with such awful legibility.

I’ll never understand this sentiment expressed online that Liquid Glass is bad design. After reading how awful it is on HN, I upgraded to see it for myself. After some pondering it was obvious why Apple went with this design. Today’s apps’ problem is every app has its own UI language, and users have to first learn that before being able to use an app. Apple recognized this. If you can’t see why it’s a problem, try to…

I never said Liquid Glass is bad design. I never even mentioned anything about individual elements, nor brought up anything about who it is bad for (and this is one of those occasions where no, it's not a "people aren't used to change" kind of things).

But to suggest the current implementation in iOS and macOS isn't problematic would mean you'd need to be incredibly unaware of basic accessibility needs of a significant portion of people, and right now both operating systems have made it significantly worse. That's not a design opinion, its fact.

Re: Fluid Glass

#112
post #88

Cool concept, just please never ever do this in anything production, it's bad enough we've now got a mainline OS with such awful legibility.

I’ll never understand this sentiment expressed online that Liquid Glass is bad design. After reading how awful it is on HN, I upgraded to see it for myself. After some pondering it was obvious why Apple went with this design. Today’s apps’ problem is every app has its own UI language, and users have to first learn that before being able to use an app. Apple recognized this. If you can’t see why it’s a problem, try to…

“Today’s apps’ problem is every app has its own UI language, and users have to first learn that before being able to use an app.”

Liquid Glass is far from the first attempt at this. See “material design”. Apple has had UI guidelines for years now, and all of their apps were more or less as consistent as they are now after the transition. My complaint is that shiny effects aren’t necessary for UI consistency, and it slows older devices and consumes their already degraded battery capacity even faster. At least you can “reduce transparency”, but it actually makes the UI looks less transparent than it was before.

However, my biggest complaint is how half-baked it is. iOS 26 is riddled with bugs. As an example that is ridiculously easy to reproduce: 1) Enable “reduce transparency” in accessibility. 2) Open the Files app to any directory. 3) Enable dark mode. Congratulations, the directory name at the top of the screen is now illegible due to black text on a black background. The same bug is also present in Freeform, except it also makes the status bar illegible. They removed the backing UI element without refactoring the text, and nobody noticed. And unless they didn’t mention it in the release notes, it looks like they still haven’t fixed this in the 26.1 beta.

Re: Fluid Glass

#115
Interesting, this crashed my browser tab trying to load it! Run for all of 15s at about 1fps ;) I'm of course, not on a phone, but on my 9800X3D desktop, which promptly spiked usage to 100%! I wonder what APIs are not available on a desktop that this uses.

Re: Fluid Glass

#116

Interesting, this crashed my browser tab trying to load it! Run for all of 15s at about 1fps ;) I'm of course, not on a phone, but on my 9800X3D desktop, which promptly spiked usage to 100%! I wonder what APIs are not available on a desktop that this uses.

I kept getting "Driver Message (OpenGL, Performance, GL_CLOSE_PATH_NV, High): GPU stall due to ReadPixels", which for anyone familiar with OpenGL probably knows... usage of the glReadPixels function is typically frowned upon if at all possible, because moving framebuffer data out of the GPU and back into system memory can cause huge performance issues.

I'm not sure why they need to use this function, or if it's just not optimized enough to go without it.

Re: Fluid Glass

#118
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah was also expecting my phone to get very toasty but it did not. Great job!

I noticed this pattern that a page with some text and images is often too demanding for my phone: it becomes impossible to scroll the page smoothly. We simply do not have the technology yet to handle text and images in a consistent way! But anything involving 3D graphics (or 4K video) will run just fine.

2d is more expensive than 3d to render. Video is hardware accelerated.

Re: Fluid Glass

#120
post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ll never understand this sentiment expressed online that Liquid Glass is bad design. After reading how awful it is on HN, I upgraded to see it for myself. After some pondering it was obvious why Apple went with this design. Today’s apps’ problem is every app has its own UI language, and users have to first learn that before being able to use an app. Apple recognized this. If you can’t see why it’s a problem, try to…

I never said Liquid Glass is bad design. I never even mentioned anything about individual elements, nor brought up anything about who it is bad for (and this is one of those occasions where no, it's not a "people aren't used to change" kind of things). But to suggest the current implementation in iOS and macOS isn't problematic would mean you'd need to be incredibly unaware of basic accessibility needs of a significa…

It’s weird to complain about accessibility in macOS when it has such a huge amount of easily discoverable accessibility settings to handle just about every need… including the option to turn off liquid glass effect!
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