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

Apple introduces a universal design across platforms

apple.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

541–550 of 1001 posts

Re: Apple introduces a universal design across platforms

#541

Post by DecentShoes »

ricardobeat wrote: post #400
austinl wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is also likely a performance nightmare. Funny that they mention that "new hardware has enabled us to..." which means that this will perform poorly on old devices. At a previous company, we were forbidden from using translucency (with a few exceptions) because of the performance cost of blending. There are debugging tools we'd use fairly often to confirm that all layers were opaque.

Unlikely. Frosted glass blur was introduced almost twelve years ago in iOS 7, and was supported all the way down to the iPhone 4. Many apps like control center have used a full screen blur without any performance issues for a long time. Apple at the time created their own 'approximate gaussian blur' algorithm specifically to enable this, and it ran crazy fast on devices where a simple gaussian blur would barely achie…

iOS 7 made the iPhone 4 practically unusable.

Re: Apple introduces a universal design across platforms

#542

Post by DecentShoes »

dmix wrote: post #437
slt2021 wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

these performance hungry "improvements" are forcefully introduced to legitimately slow down older devices and force the device refresh across the user base. I have been using 8 year old iPhone just fine, but features like these over time will make the experience slower and slower and slower, until I am forced to refresh my iphone

No matter what happens in the world someone will blame it on a top down conspiracy decided in some smoke filled back room.

But this one is true. Apple obviously puts out slowdown updates right as they release a new phone. They made my iPhone 7 unusable the same week they released the iPhone X.

Re: Apple introduces a universal design across platforms

#543

Post by bigyabai »

crazygringo wrote: post #501
plainOldText wrote: post #200

This looks horrible to be honest. This new liquid glass will lead to liquid brain, because my brain will be melting trying to process all that visual mess daily. Now of course, I'll have to experience this new design in practice to be sure, but judging from the screenshots it looks really hard on the eyes. Hopefully they'll allow the translucency to be customized. Apple had a good run, I've genuinely enjoyed using th…

> trying to process all that visual mess daily. That's exactly the thing, that's what I don't get. Apple's brand is all about simplicity and visual clarity. This is a visual mess . We've gone from clean delineated color areas to... slop? I really expected them to use subtle glass and shadow effects, but with minimal translucency. Heck, a lot of this is barely even translucency, more like transparency . I'm really sur…

> I didn't expect Apple to produce a design language that so easily turns into seemingly visual chaos.

I don't understand how anyone can act surprised anymore. Seriously. The App Store is an absolute mess, and Apple seems to be okay with it because it makes them money. Same goes for Apple News, Apple Music, AppleTV+, Apple iCloud, Apple Fitness+ and Apple Arcade. To say nothing of the quality of these apps (for their benefit), it's brand dilution. Am I supposed to believe that MacOS and iOS are spared from Apple's attention being divided into a hundred pieces? Am I supposed to expect them to invest in high-quality tentpole software when their logo is the only thing required to make people spend money?

At some point, consumers have to distinguish between the identity that Apple markets to them, and what Apple's actual impact is on the carelessness of modern design. People have been saying this since 2013, Apple's new design languages aren't even close to the HIGs from the Macs of yore. Liquid Glass has been destined to fail ever since, it's an iteration on iOS7 and not an interface people actually like.

Re: Apple introduces a universal design across platforms

#544

Post by dimal »

georgebcrawford wrote: post #281
thenaturalist wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not autistic, but this is just so weird. Why would you design readability and visibility to depend on chaotic, highly varied and probably sometimes bad underlying backgrounds? I fail to see any systematic approach/ consistent design language at play here. Let's hope this does not survive for long.

What does autism have to do with it?

Autistic people tend to have very different sensory sensitivities than neurotypical people. Most are very highly sensitive and tend have trouble picking out a signal when there’s too much noise around it.

To me, being socially awkward is kind of a secondary, less important trait, but that’s the one everyone seems to notice. We’re weird on the outside because inside, we’re dealing with overwhelming sensory input.

Re: Apple introduces a universal design across platforms

#545

Post by jonplackett »

stalco wrote: post #397

I installed it. I really wanted to love it but it’s bad. It’s very busy and the proportions in the Settings app are awful. It’s on the “cozy” side of things (as opposed to “compact”). This means you see less options at one time on the screen and have to scroll more around the OS to get where you need to. As for accessibility… It’s hell. Have a look: https://imgur.com/a/6ZTCStC

Holy shit. That has to be a joke. It looks like some bad UI mockup from Jon Prosser

Re: Apple introduces a universal design across platforms

#547

Post by chupchap »

stalco wrote: post #397

I installed it. I really wanted to love it but it’s bad. It’s very busy and the proportions in the Settings app are awful. It’s on the “cozy” side of things (as opposed to “compact”). This means you see less options at one time on the screen and have to scroll more around the OS to get where you need to. As for accessibility… It’s hell. Have a look: https://imgur.com/a/6ZTCStC

It's Apple Maps bad!

Re: Apple introduces a universal design across platforms

#548

Post by miffy900 »

ricardobeat wrote: post #400
austinl wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is also likely a performance nightmare. Funny that they mention that "new hardware has enabled us to..." which means that this will perform poorly on old devices. At a previous company, we were forbidden from using translucency (with a few exceptions) because of the performance cost of blending. There are debugging tools we'd use fairly often to confirm that all layers were opaque.

Unlikely. Frosted glass blur was introduced almost twelve years ago in iOS 7, and was supported all the way down to the iPhone 4. Many apps like control center have used a full screen blur without any performance issues for a long time. Apple at the time created their own 'approximate gaussian blur' algorithm specifically to enable this, and it ran crazy fast on devices where a simple gaussian blur would barely achie…

> Unlikely. Frosted glass blur was introduced almost twelve years ago in iOS 7, and was supported all the way down to the iPhone 4. Many apps like control center have used a full screen blur without any performance issues for a long time.

"Without any performance issues"? Entirely false - reviews at the time noted iOS 7 dramatically reduced battery life - all across the board for Apple devices, even for the then latest iPhone 5S and 5c (https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/09/ios-7-thoroughly-rev...).

The abuse of transparency/translucency in the UI was the primary reason - you could go to Accessibility settings and disable animations + transparency/translucency and get notable increases in both runtime speed of the OS UI and battery life.

Re: Apple introduces a universal design across platforms

#549

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

stalco wrote: post #397

I installed it. I really wanted to love it but it’s bad. It’s very busy and the proportions in the Settings app are awful. It’s on the “cozy” side of things (as opposed to “compact”). This means you see less options at one time on the screen and have to scroll more around the OS to get where you need to. As for accessibility… It’s hell. Have a look: https://imgur.com/a/6ZTCStC

Wow, that was full in "thanks, I hate it" territory for me.

I think that design triggered me for 2 reasons. First, it really gets to something that's bugged me a lot about technological advancement in general over the past 15-20 years or so. It used to be that I felt like tech advances were great because they actually solved a human problem. Now, so much tech just feels like "tech-for-tech's-sake". Like I get you need to have a lot of designers at Apple, and now that devices have more processing power that they want to do something "cool" with it, but this just seems like someone that literally nobody asked for and nobody wants.

Second, I'm someone who thinks very "linearly". I like to do one thing at a time, and I hate distractions (because I'm easily distracted). I hate these translucent interfaces because they are literally distracting to me even if I'm looking directly and squarely at one single thing. It just seems like another way that tech is constantly fucking with our attention.

Re: Apple introduces a universal design across platforms

#550

Post by danielvaughn »

I love designing and building UIs, but one thing that really depresses me is how you’re often pressured to keep changing things just to justify your continued employment.

It feels like that’s what happened here, to be honest.

It’s okay for a product to stay the same, if the current design is the right one. I just can’t imagine what problems they’re trying to solve with this update.

Post reply on HN