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Apple has a private CSS property to add Liquid Glass effects to web content

alastair.is

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Re: Apple has a private CSS property to add Liquid Glass effects to web content

#151

Providing an OS feature only to first-party programs is a plainly anticompetitive practice. Using your privileged position in one market (cell phones/cell phone operating systems) to gain an advantage in another market (smart phone applications) that you withhold from your competitors is a textbook case.

this comment is bringing out the apple blinders in force and i love it. do people really see apple as "the good guy"? tech has zero good guys left

Tech was always a business. What this comment is bringing out is the people who see preferred technical choices as some kind of morality play. They aren’t. They never were. It’s childish to believe such things.

Re: Apple has a private CSS property to add Liquid Glass effects to web content

#152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The key distinction is the withholding from your competitors part. WinAPI may have a ton of features labelled "pls no use thx" but MS doesn't block you from distributing a program that uses them anyway.

It's not withholding, it's just not part of the AppStore if you do it. There are plenty of other ways to distribute your software, and yes, Apple will also still co-sign it or provide entitlements if you need those. Just not in the AppStore.

That seems like an unnecessary and unreasonable trade barrier. There isn't a technical or user-experience reason to exclude these sorts of apps.

Re: Apple has a private CSS property to add Liquid Glass effects to web content

#153
post #34

Nice find! Apple's new glass UI seems to draw a lot of ire, but I... kinda like it? It feels like the OS has some actual personality again instead of just being flat and boring. I can visually tell the size of click targets now and the buttons are finally visually distinct from text again. I view it as a welcome change. It's not just "nostalgia" either. It has actual utility. I installed the iOS 26 Beta to test some…

My suspicion is that genpop is not going to like it, broadly, mostly because the only people who seem to think that operating systems should have "personality" are techies. People just don't think like that; most people view these systems as means to an end, and anything that isn't in service to that is, at best, simply an interesting diversion for the first few days.

One thing I dislike the most about liquid glass is the new bottom tab bar that's been inserted into every first-party app. Apple Music got it the worst. There's now an additional click required to "move" between the Search interface and the remaining four tabs (Home, New, Radio, Library). When you click on Search, you need to click the the Search Box again to get a keyboard. All of these interactions have extremely sophisticated and slow animations; e.g. when on Home, clicking on Library slides a bubble across the tab bar that blows up beyond the tab bar itself, reflecting the intermediate tabs and underlying content, in a way that is tremendously distracting and serves no purpose. Neither Reduce Transparency nor Reduce Motion have any impact on these animations, on the latest release.

In fact, many of Apple's first party apps appear to have forgotten that Reduce Transparency and Reduce Motion even exist as accessibility options, or at best have half-assed their implementation. For example, with Reduce Motion enabled, clicking on an album in Apple Music deploys a much more subtle animation (good); clicking the back button uses that same subtle animation (good); but swiping back from the left uses the flowery, unnecessary animation that you'd get with Reduce Motion off. Apple Podcasts has the same problem. iMessage, as far as I can tell, totally disregards the Reduce Motion setting and does nothing different, and implements the Reduce Transparency setting not by softening the transparency as other apps do, but instead underlaying a #000000 black background on every item that did have transparency. There's dozens of examples all across iOS, and we're quite literally days from release; dropdowns such as the Apple Notes or Apple News hamburger [...] menu should animate less under Reduce Motion, but don't; when buttons are disabled on the keyboard, such as Apple News -> Search -> empty search box, the Enter button is greyed out in the wrong, barely legible color, only when Reduce Transparency is enabled, the list goes on.

Re: Apple has a private CSS property to add Liquid Glass effects to web content

#154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The better thing to get annoyed at Apple for is being slow to implement web standards. Now that Safari supports the HTML5 date picker (since iOS 14.1 - five years ago), this is more of a meme than fact-based reasoning. Unless you believe Google including something in Chrome automatically makes it a "standard." I have a list (unfortunately on a device I can't access now) of web standards that are supported on Safari a…

>> The better thing to get annoyed at Apple for is being slow to implement web standards. > Now that Safari supports the HTML5 date picker (since iOS 14.1 - five years ago), this is more of a meme than fact-based reasoning Apple forces all browsers on iOS to use the Safari browser engine, which they intentionally hobble by not implementing APIs that other browser engines have had forever so that Apple can force devel…

Maybe 5 years ago this was a true, they accelerated development and their standards support is pretty good now, better than FF. Again, not counting Chrome's "EEE" non-standard API's, they largely move fast and implement most modern ones. Some PWA stuff is missing which is valid, while Chrome is behind on a few nice design-focused standards Safari has.

Go here:

https://caniuse.com/?compare=chrome+143,safari+26.0&compareC...

Note the non-supported Safari API's, the vast majority are not web standards.

Re: Apple has a private CSS property to add Liquid Glass effects to web content

#155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are ignorant to Apple rules and practices, please don't be obnoxious about it. Apple has developer guidelines for the App Store, and they say you cannot use private APIs! They do not publish any "proof" to cite beyond what they write there. And they interpret and enforce the rules at their own whim. The private API is here: https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit/blob/613c42873c56e2b2073f91... it's on WKWebView and r…

Are you really asserting that a CSS selector is a private API? This is either a really wild misunderstanding about the difference between CSS and API, or somehow I totally misread your post. But I did re-read a few times and that seems to be the claim?

The CSS isn't the issue, it's that the CSS can only be enabled using private platform code, which no app will get approval for.

Re: Apple has a private CSS property to add Liquid Glass effects to web content

#156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I often suspect things in Settings, esp. account/iCloud section to be webviews, just based on how they load (icons appearing a short moment after the page opens for example).

Yes, those parts of the Settings app are built with web views that embed React Web: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30648424

Oh so that's why they're terrible and often break with no error messaging or recourse

Re: Apple has a private CSS property to add Liquid Glass effects to web content

#157
post #81

How is this any different from the effect shown in this Codepen? https://codepen.io/GreggOD/pen/xLbboZ

They're both glass-inspired effects. If you really want to know the differences, your best bet is probably the WWDC session "Meet Liquid Glass".

Re: Apple has a private CSS property to add Liquid Glass effects to web content

#158
post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not withholding, it's just not part of the AppStore if you do it. There are plenty of other ways to distribute your software, and yes, Apple will also still co-sign it or provide entitlements if you need those. Just not in the AppStore.

That seems like an unnecessary and unreasonable trade barrier. There isn't a technical or user-experience reason to exclude these sorts of apps.

[deleted]

Re: Apple has a private CSS property to add Liquid Glass effects to web content

#159

Providing an OS feature only to first-party programs is a plainly anticompetitive practice. Using your privileged position in one market (cell phones/cell phone operating systems) to gain an advantage in another market (smart phone applications) that you withhold from your competitors is a textbook case.

this comment is bringing out the apple blinders in force and i love it. do people really see apple as "the good guy"? tech has zero good guys left

Hey stop bullying the trillion dollar corporation! They are my favourite corporation and their actions are beyond question >:(
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