Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Liquid Glass – WWDC25 [video]

developer.apple.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 306 posts

Re: Liquid Glass – WWDC25 [video]

#251

Post by Groxx »

DidYaWipe wrote: post #242
rahen wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know most people couldn’t care less about this, but those gimmicky animations probably consume more computing power than the entire Apollo project, which strikes me as unnecessary and wasteful. Given the choice, I’d much rather have a clean, efficient interface. I tend to like Material Design in comparison. It’s clean, efficient, and usable. I just hope Google won’t try to "improve" it with annoying gimmicks and en…

"Flat" design is equally offensive by not demarcating controls as controls, or their state in an intuitive way. Just as we were finally seeing UI step away from that BS, Apple jumps all the way back into much-scorned, cheesily-excessive skeuomorphism... adding a raft of failed ideas from 20 years ago.

Since this is in contrast to "wildly not flat and full of visual gimmicks": the modern "flat" style has severe (and very stupid) issues, yea. But "flat" has been around for a very long time in touch UI with clear control boundaries - just draw a box around it, maybe give it a background color.

Re: Liquid Glass – WWDC25 [video]

#252

Post by foobarian »

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.

I have a feeling it's a bit of cart driving the horse. Look at all this GFX power we have, how could we harness it for UI instead of boring old compositing and alpha?

At the same time remember how much of a struggle it was in the 90s to show transparent layers? Good times

Re: Liquid Glass – WWDC25 [video]

#253

Post by chartered_stack »

avalys wrote: post #207
chartered_stack wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main issue I feel is that Apple's internal threshold for what quality of software is acceptable to be launched to the public has dropped a lot in the years since the last major redesign. Yes, they iterate through versions and drop things that don't work with their design philosophy (parallax effects on iOS 7) but the first major version they released always seemed well thought out and solid from a design perspect…

This hasn’t been “launched to the public”. It’s a developer beta so that developers can start working on testing and updating their apps for the new OS.

You're right that this isn't "launched to the public" and is just a developer beta. However, I meant it in a more "outside of Apple" kind of way. I guess that should have been clearer.

Re: Liquid Glass – WWDC25 [video]

#254

Post by nixpulvis »

iTokio wrote: post #13

I’ve been using it for 2 days now, and the first thing I noticed is that readability took a hit. My background is a mid tone warm photo, not dark or light, icons got a white foreground that’s very hard to read against their translucent background. The second thing I noticed, is that when I’m scrolling a webpage, icons now switch color randomly (according to the bg dominant color) and that’s distracting. The last thin…

The rise of dynamism in UI design is not only a waste of compute cycles, but also distracting and a trigger for people like me who can be easily distracted.

What I want are UIs built more like E readers or newspapers, with screen updates taken seriously.

Re: Liquid Glass – WWDC25 [video]

#256

Post by bigstrat2003 »

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.

> I just can't believe this is coming from apple.

Apple has prioritized style over usability for decades now. Remember the godawful hockey puck mouse and how stubbornly they clung to it? It shouldn't be a surprise when Apple picks a solution that looks cool but is worse to use; that's who they are.

Re: Liquid Glass – WWDC25 [video]

#257

Post by bigstrat2003 »

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,…

> Look at John Romero, he knocked it out of the park with Doom 1, 2 and some of Quake, but all his projects after have been flops of catastrophic proportions.

And the other guys from id haven't exactly recaptured the same magic either. It's a shame they broke up, it turns out that the team was way stronger together than any of them has been on their own.

Re: Liquid Glass – WWDC25 [video]

#258

Post by jeffgreco »

madeofpalk wrote: post #97
chartered_stack wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main issue I feel is that Apple's internal threshold for what quality of software is acceptable to be launched to the public has dropped a lot in the years since the last major redesign. Yes, they iterate through versions and drop things that don't work with their design philosophy (parallax effects on iOS 7) but the first major version they released always seemed well thought out and solid from a design perspect…

iOS 7's first beta design was worse than this. They walked back some pretty distinctive parts of the design - mainly the ultra thin fonts - during the betas and following releases.

Agree to disagree I guess - iOS 7’s initial preview wasn’t perfect but not incoherent and illegible to this degree.

If anyone wants to refresh their memory: https://youtu.be/6jBK3Dggkwg

Not to mention way more functionality added to the OS that year than this.

Re: Liquid Glass – WWDC25 [video]

#259

Post by atonse »

ivape wrote: post #115
travisgriggs wrote: post #51

I see some "it's just Aero all over again" comments. Isn't this a common Apple schtick though? Doing something that others have done already, but doing it more comprehensively, executing it better? I'm sure this isn't perfect yet. But watching the video, I certainly felt like a more holistic approach went into this than what Microsoft tried years ago. Time will tell whether the design teams goals will have the reach…

Liquid Glass looks awesome, people are just piling on.

Agreed. I initially thought "this is going to make everything look so messy" but after I watched this particular video, it's clear that they've put so much thought into every scenario imaginable, including giving developers a lot of advice on when to use it, and when not to use it.

All that is very old-school Apple actually. Way way way more thought put beneath the surface than just meets the eye, when it comes to UI interactions.

I remember the inertial scrolling, rubber banding stuff on iOS. During those early days, people analyzed things like the navigation push and pop animations, and there was a lot more going on there than just "go left, go right"

Re: Liquid Glass – WWDC25 [video]

#260

Post by DidYaWipe »

Groxx wrote: post #251
DidYaWipe wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Flat" design is equally offensive by not demarcating controls as controls, or their state in an intuitive way. Just as we were finally seeing UI step away from that BS, Apple jumps all the way back into much-scorned, cheesily-excessive skeuomorphism... adding a raft of failed ideas from 20 years ago.

Since this is in contrast to "wildly not flat and full of visual gimmicks": the modern "flat" style has severe (and very stupid) issues, yea. But "flat" has been around for a very long time in touch UI with clear control boundaries - just draw a box around it, maybe give it a background color.

That's better than plain text that just happens to be a hidden control, but text with a background color might just be... text with a background color, for emphasis. Or it's text with a background color, to distinguish it from editable text. A background color does not tell the user that it's a control.

A box around it? Slightly better, but still doesn't convey state. Sure, you can fill it in when it's "on," but that's still guesswork on the part of the user if he arrives to find it filled in already.

Post reply on HN