I always wondered if they considered that each control on the UI should match WCAG AA contrast/readability in their design by default?
iOS 26.1 lets users control Liquid Glass transparency
191–200 of 244 posts
Re: iOS 26.1 lets users control Liquid Glass transparency
#192This should have been in place from the beginning. The current state of large technology companies is really quite depressing. The intellectual capabilities of these companies have become completely stagnant.
Not when it comes to profit extraction. This is enshittification in full swing, done by professionals.
Re: iOS 26.1 lets users control Liquid Glass transparency
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unironically Mac OS 7/8/9 felt the best IMHO. Even though there were some missteps (the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_Strip was awful) and 9.x got a bit overloaded towards the end. Mac OS X (and macOS still) never felt as good.
Tiger was fine :D
Tiger still had that weird thing where half the apps were brushed metal for no apparent reason.
Re: iOS 26.1 lets users control Liquid Glass transparency
#194To be honest I think that the Liquid glass design is a really cool effect and creates a really nice atmosphere in the UI.
Google's design is based around bright colors and large, simple shapes, together with large margins. No doubt this is the superior choice for accessibility. At the same time I really have to say that I appreciate the Liquid glass design more. It was the first time that moving a slider felt magical.
Certainly it is a technical accomplishment, but besides the very reasonable concerns about accessibility, it feels like a great new choice in design.
Re: iOS 26.1 lets users control Liquid Glass transparency
#195IMO a big problem with Liquid Glass is that you're trying to recreate an effect that's highly reliant on the sense of depth we get from binocular vision in a 2D screen. When looking at glass in real life, your left eye and your right eye see slightly different refraction patterns since they're looking at the surface from slightly different angles. It might be minimal, but light refraction patterns can change a lot wh…
I'd love to see 3DS-style lenticular 3D display with the power of modern Apple hardware + FaceID hardware eye tracking. I bet they'd be able to do it seamlessly.
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Re: iOS 26.1 lets users control Liquid Glass transparency
#196I thought ios 18 was perfect.. It was simple, just fucking worked. Leave it to some uninspired people to fuck things up.
Agreed! No one asked for liquid ass!
Re: iOS 26.1 lets users control Liquid Glass transparency
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
>>That's not how I remember it. Back in the day the first thing you did was disable the Aero stuff to claw back some performance on Vista. I remember it being kinda like placebo - you did, you marvelled at how much faster it's working, but in reality nothing changed. I really liked the look, and it did run smooth unless you had something below the minimum spec(which a lot of people did at the time).
I mostly disliked Vista for a number of reasons, but the looks were incredible. I was actually blown away at the beauty
I liked aero too, XP was too fisher price.
Re: iOS 26.1 lets users control Liquid Glass transparency
#198In big engineering programs engineers are paid bounties for every kg they remove from the design. We need software developer bounties for removing CPU cycles and memory.
In the car industry this is the case because there is a direct incentive for the company to make a vehicle lighter.
A single kg is enormous likely saving tens of dollars per car, which sounds like nothing, but if a million of these cars are made the cost saving are in the tens of millions.
What does a software company save by their software running 10% faster on user hardware. Exactly nothing. In the case of apple they even have some incentives to make their software worse to get people to buy new devices.
The curse of software engineering has always been that there is very rarely a reward for your software being better. Software companies mostly make it on features and "good enough" stability.
Re: iOS 26.1 lets users control Liquid Glass transparency
#199How did they not do enough user testing to know users wanted this before it even got to beta? Are they so paranoid about secrecy that they can't do event the most basic of UX design processes?
Keep in mind the people complaining are more than likely the loud minority. Personally I had some issues in the early betas (too much opacity causes readability issues) but I haven't had any issues since July. Unfortunately Apple is listening to feedback when they should ignore it and continue improving their work (which is what they usually do).
Please stop gaslighting people. What Apple shipped as OS 26 series is clearly a beta as best and has been the most unpopular of OS update so far by a large margin.
Re: iOS 26.1 lets users control Liquid Glass transparency
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
They received a lot of bug reports and negative feedback from developer and public betas. Guess what, they’ve still released the glass almost unchanged. “We know better than you” is a fundamental part of Apple’s mentality
It's a fundamental part of many tech companies at this point, really
At least for Microsoft it is balanced by the real need to listen to business customers. Apple has none of such checks-and-balances because it caters primarily to individual users.