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Apple introduces a universal design across platforms

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Re: Apple introduces a universal design across platforms

#671

Post by georgebcrawford »

dimal wrote: post #544
georgebcrawford wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Whoops, I didn't see parent comment and thought the reply was to the submission. It seemed massively out of context but absolutely wasn't :-)

Curse HackerNews' narrow indents!

Re: Apple introduces a universal design across platforms

#672

Post by [deleted] »

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

[deleted]

Re: Apple introduces a universal design across platforms

#673

Post by steve-atx-7600 »

MonkeyIsNull wrote: post #600
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 autistic, but this won’t only affect autistic people. A lot of people are going to have problems with this. I hope there’s a very prominent way to turn it off. How can that possibly be? Didn't he say it will: "bring joy and delight to _every_ user experience" That means YOU as well. No way he could over-selling something. Inconceivable.

Apple has historically been above average in terms of considering usability. So, I think seeing this new design as being asinine is not an unexpected opinion.

Re: Apple introduces a universal design across platforms

#674

Post by xnx »

ksec wrote: post #214

The whole thing is Windows Vista Aero Glass and iOS 7 all over again. Repeating all the SAME mistakes with 3D translucent design. Right now I really want skeuomorphism back. Much like iOS 7 they will have to spend another 2 - 3 years "tweaking" or basically walking back some of these design decisions. I believe the problem is when Tim Cook decided to merge "Design" under one umbrella. So the Design team now takes ove…

We can only hope the next redesign regresses further and copies Windows 95.

Re: Apple introduces a universal design across platforms

#675

Post by andrewmcwatters »

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…

Yes! And it was frustratingly patented! https://patents.google.com/patent/US7397964B2/en

I made a comment about this a couple of years ago, but I fudged the explanation of it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34937618

I suspect that their new technique implements the existing fast gaussian blur, and since the patent is about to expire, it was a good time to spice it up.

I suspect as others have mentioned here, they use a "Liquid Glass" shader which samples the backing layer of the UI composition below the target element and applies a lens distortion based on the target element's border radius, all heavily parameterized so as to be used with the rest of the system's Liquid Glass applications like the new icon system.

Re: Apple introduces a universal design across platforms

#676

Post by snowwrestler »

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…

There will undoubtedly be optional low-transparency and high-contrast modes, just as there are in iOS now.

Apple is pretty good on accessibility but sometimes it does involve changing some settings.

Re: Apple introduces a universal design across platforms

#677

Post by ahartmetz »

anotherhue wrote: post #88

Why, why, why, do all the Apple announcements have the exact same ASIMO stiff hand gestures? Hostage videos have more fluidity.

Might be an attempt at Steve Jobs imitation with special focus on the worst aspects. Regardless of his reported reality distortion skills in person, I always found his big public presentations stiff and fake. I, as not-a-fan of game consoles, think that Mark Cerny gives fantastic presentations. He is always fluent, comfortable, and has an air of sincerity (while the contents are a little salesy). Kinda like a much more polished but slightly more fake John Carmack.

Re: Apple introduces a universal design across platforms

#678

Post by mminer237 »

RollingRo11 wrote: post #430
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.

Currently replying from my iPhone 16 pro (granted, not old by any means) on the iOS 26 dev beta. MOST things actually feel smoother/snappier than iOS 18. Safari is a joy to use from a performance perspective. It’s in beta so ofc I’m getting a ton of frame hitches, overheating, etc. but my summarized initial thoughts are “it’ll take some getting used to, but it feels pretty fast”

How can you get overheating and better performance? Is it just using the big cores for basic OS functions now?

Re: Apple introduces a universal design across platforms

#679

Post by crossroadsguy »

Maybe a better iCloud+, a better iCloud (maybe version/history/logs?), a better way to operate/control two different seems (hint: "differently"), easy import/export of data from various services, less software opacity etc etc?

But instead we got this.

Does this how a massively large and rich company's intellectual bankruptcy begin?

Re: Apple introduces a universal design across platforms

#680

Post by bombcar »

jwilliams wrote: post #641

This is Windows Aero all over again - why is this a persistent design? You can't see or process the information behind the glass - at best it's major cognitive load to do so, at worst it's just very noisy with zero added information.

Because it looks really good in a five minute demonstration to the C-level execs.
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