Apple introduces a universal design across platforms • Hacker News Board

Re: Apple introduces a universal design across platforms

#581

Post by lxgr » Mon, Jun 09, 2025, 11:54 PM UTC

kylehotchkiss wrote: post #93

I really dig apple's work. It's so refreshing to get a tech event in 2025 where design is a huge focus and not just duck taping another LLM to everything. Design is expensive and it's clear they've invested a massive amount of resources into liquid glass. It's not perfect, but I think they'll iron out some of the contrast bugs. Agreed with other commenters that crappy electron apps will look increasingly out of place…

Not sure a massive misallocation of resources is something to celebrate.

> Agreed with other commenters that crappy electron apps will look increasingly out of place

Aesthetics is the smallest problem I've had with Electron (or generally non-native) apps.

Re: Apple introduces a universal design across platforms

#582

Post by makeitdouble » Mon, Jun 09, 2025, 11:54 PM UTC

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #431

rweichler wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When Cook became CEO, all of this was inevitable. I used to blame Jobs for not picking Forstall as his successor, but it recently dawned on me that it was never his choice to begin with. The board probably crowded him out again, just like the Sculley situation. In a month Apple will have been on autopilot for longer than Jobs was at the company during the 1997-2011 heyday. Jobs became iCEO in September 1997. After 16…

Literally everything I've ever read about Forstall and his behavior post-Jobs makes me think he would have been an awful CEO. It just sounded like he was "Game of Thrones-ing" from the second Cook became CEO. E.g. it was widely reported that Ive and Forstall could barely stand to be in the same meeting with each other. I may have some criticisms in my mind about some of Ive's design post-Jobs, but I don't think I hav…

TBF Jobs wasn't a well-rounded human being either.

It all comes down to what results they can produce inside the organization, people will bear the worst assholes if the output can justify it somehow.

Re: Apple introduces a universal design across platforms

#583

Post by lxgr » Mon, Jun 09, 2025, 11:54 PM UTC

leakycap wrote: post #198

kylehotchkiss wrote: post #93

I really dig apple's work. It's so refreshing to get a tech event in 2025 where design is a huge focus and not just duck taping another LLM to everything. Design is expensive and it's clear they've invested a massive amount of resources into liquid glass. It's not perfect, but I think they'll iron out some of the contrast bugs. Agreed with other commenters that crappy electron apps will look increasingly out of place…

Apple didn't talk about AI or Siri because they're currently flailing and so behind it's concerning. This was design-focused because skin-deep was all they accomplished.

Mission accomplished: Users are now angry about something else?

Re: Apple introduces a universal design across platforms

#584

Post by wpm » Mon, Jun 09, 2025, 11:56 PM UTC

leakycap wrote: post #342

plainOldText wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, it's reasonable to consider a switch. But while Android devices have come a long way in terms of physical design, capabilities, UI/UX, etc, out of the box Apple still offers a more comprehensive, user friendly and privacy focused security solution: lockdown, tighter controls of hardware/software integration, etc. So there's that.

Agreed; I will probably be staying with iOS no matter how garish it becomes - Apple has the foundations right. I can't say I feel the same about macOS before; as a user since the early 1990s, I'm likely moving to Linux rather than Liquid Glass for my personal computer.

Liquid Glass looks better on iPad and iPhone.

On the Mac it is offensive. Vulgar. Disgusting. Loathsome.

Re: Apple introduces a universal design across platforms

#585

Post by diabllicseagull » Mon, Jun 09, 2025, 11:56 PM UTC

dimal wrote: post #148

Oh no. It looks like every button and menu is now a translucent layer, so that any noise from the background shows through and muddles the text. This seems like an accessibility nightmare. Translucent layers generally make software unusable for me. In the video, I saw several instances that would be really really bad for me, where I’d be straining to understand the text. Looks really cool and futuristic though. Just…

I'm on the same boat. The specularity around edges don't match the refraction patterns and it throws me off every time. Somehow they thought this wouldn't affect readability of whatever button or panel it's applied to. They also use the specular bits as a border that's also so uneven depending on which direction light hits from. I noticed that some of the dark panels had almost no borders at the lower right corner.

Another bit I'd like to pick on is the speed at which transparent context bubbles spring out. Waiting for a panel to bounce back and forth so that you know where to put your finger next is so bad as a UX choice that I'm losing confidence in Apple.

From a visual point of view, there is now flat design mixed with this voluminous transparent design which is a weird combination of skeuomorphic and abstract designs in one. I really don't know what they were thinking.

Re: Apple introduces a universal design across platforms

#586

Post by data-ottawa » Mon, Jun 09, 2025, 11:58 PM UTC

pndy wrote: post #328

Someone1234 wrote: post #146

I'm really showing off my age here, but it has been all down hill since skeuomorphic design; because the focus was primarily on usability and teachability as first-class concepts. Heck, companies were spending millions on usability research at the time, much of which was used. I taught people to use computers in the 90s and early 2000s, and having those concepts matching to real world objects helped immensely. Recent…

This whole flat style fever which doesn't distinguish between active elements and informative text allowed to spread darkpattern tactics which lead to deploying adverse or even harmful changes for users. It also contributed to nullifying customisation under linux - looking exactly at you adwaita. My age shows here as well and I'm not in any way excited about this design change at all. Suddenly Apple decided that this…

I was initially excited as on paper it sounds like a fantastic throwback to the Aqua design, which I still think was fantastic.

From the preview so far I'm not excited.

I have to say app icons look nice (the borders make them pop just a bit more), the border highlights are clear without being loud, and elements like the dock look nice. The inactive button states actually look great – as shown in the Camera and Facetime screenshots – they actually do look like little glass buttons, which is good.

Where I have issue is when multiple of these glass elemenst are shown at once they fight for attention and it's persnally quite overwhelming for me. The image of the video player controls on iPhone and AppleTV are in my opinion awful and load, and that's especially where you want a quiet UI.

When the shape has a strong refractive index and that's where it becomes really noisy for me with the Safari and music tab bars being absolutely awful in my opinion.

It's a shame because I think if they kept the idea but dialed it down from 11 it could be fantastic.

Re: Apple introduces a universal design across platforms

#587

Post by kevingadd » Tue, Jun 10, 2025, 12:00 AM UTC

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…

Anyone who's ever written a blur shader knows that blurs aren't cheap.

Re: Apple introduces a universal design across platforms

#588

Post by ljsprague » Tue, Jun 10, 2025, 12:02 AM UTC

hbn wrote: post #506

Vegenoid wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow. That is really bad. Apple already does the transparency thing with the control center menu, but it blurs the background so much that you don’t notice it. Why they’d want to lessen the blur and make it more transparent is beyond me.

Remember this is the first developer beta. I’m pretty sure a lot of iOS 7 was dialed back between announcement and release

Maybe they overshot on purpose? When I change my gaming control sensitivities I will do this (overshoot and then dial back) because I think it helps me get used to them faster.

Re: Apple introduces a universal design across platforms

#589

Post by hajile » Tue, Jun 10, 2025, 12:04 AM UTC

slt2021 wrote: post #459

Macha wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meh, Vista laptops could run lots of translucency fine (well as long as they were actualy Vista era laptops and not just XP era laptops with Vista installed)

you just proved that MSFT released slow OS to force people refresh hardware. Plus, vista was released in 2007, XP SP2 (the most popular version) was in 2004. so its like ~3 years diff. So its not like hardware has progressed in 3 years, its more like new software got significantly slower

I don't think upgrading was the reason for Vista performance. MS wasn't in the hardware business back then (and is just a marginal player even today).

They WAY overreached in their goals with Longhorn. When they finally decided to cut back features to something actually attainable, they didn't have enough time to make a high-performance OS.

Windows 7 was a well-loved rebrand of what was essentially just a Windows Vista service pack and improved performance (though it was still too heavy for a lot of the older machines people tried to upgrade to Vista). If they'd have cut back on their goals earlier, Windows 7 is likely a lot closer to what would have shipped as Vista.

Re: Apple introduces a universal design across platforms

#590

Post by the_other » Tue, Jun 10, 2025, 12:07 AM UTC

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #549

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 nee…

I thought the same, about distractions, whilst watching the videos. Even the highlights and speckles at the edges of the icons grab your attention. It's the visual equivalent of running your finger over velcro: slip, catch, slip, catch the whole way down.