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

831–840 of 1001 posts

Re: Apple introduces a universal design across platforms

#831

Post by p_l »

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…

Early iPhone hardware was barely keeping with rendering the UI with a total ban on transparency. Even on iPhone 4 which improved the hardware a lot had the issue that it also increased amount of pixels to be pushed around.

And yes, later iOS on early hardware was huge PITA and slowdown.

Re: Apple introduces a universal design across platforms

#832

Post by p_l »

WhyNotHugo wrote: post #395
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.

Windows Vista introduced this same concept. Performance was awful unless you had compatible graphics acceleration. 20 years later, I think most devices should be fine, especially Apple devices.

Vista was dogged by issues caused by migrating display drivers from NTDDM to WDDM 1.0, something that was only finished by 7 (which dropped NTDDM fully and introduced WDDM 1.1) and 8 (which afaik had mandated WDDM 1.1 only).

Unlike previous GDI acceleration, DWM.EXE could composite alpha channel quickly with the GPU, and generally achieved much higher fill rates on the same hw - if the drivers worked properly.

Re: Apple introduces a universal design across platforms

#833

Post by artursapek »

kstrauser wrote: post #394
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…

> it has been all down hill since skeuomorphic design I strongly disagree. I don't mind if people like skeuomorphic graphics. Want to make the "play" button look like a 1987 tape deck? Not my thing, but everyone has different preferences. That's fine. But I loathe, detest, hate, despise, skeuomorphic user interfaces. Remember when Calendar.app would only let you turn one month page at a time because that's how desk c…

Agreed. Use the medium’s capabilities! Don’t cripple it for the sake of familiarity.

Re: Apple introduces a universal design across platforms

#834

Post by zac23or »

For those who complain that the old interfaces were better and the current ones are horrible, including this one (I tried using some glass interfaces, transparencies, etc. in the past. It's horrible to use) you're right, and that's not going to change. It's a question of the market.

When nobody used computers, it was necessary to attract people. How? With the bestter interfaces, usability. A graphical operating system running on a CPU of 20 MHz or less was something. It's not fast, but it's the best possible for the time!

And after 2000, everyone is using computers. The market is not expanding as companies expected. It's no longer important to attract people, everything can be done without worrying about the user, he's no longer important. Now, the Android keyboard is bigger than the Windows 95 installation, and my computer crashes from time to time with CPUs operating at GHz.

No, the interfaces of the past were not perfect, but they were made to try to fool people.

Remember Netflix? It used to recommend sharing passwords, now it tries to charge for each different IP. Is the same thing, the stream market is stable now...

The good UI is lost, it's a thing of the past.

Re: Apple introduces a universal design across platforms

#835

Post by EZ-E »

vijucat wrote: post #815

I got a minor amount of hate for it, but to repeat what I wrote here [1]: "Slowly, I'm coming to the conclusion that designers should never be employed, only consulted on a per-project basis. If they sit around 8 hours a day, they end up changing something or the other to justify their existence. But human beings are not used to change at such a rapid cadence. Humans take time to settle into a design and establish pa…

> If they sit around 8 hours a day, they end up changing something or the other to justify their existence

I've seen this - it's not limited to designers, I've also business stakeholders with limited scope pushing for meaningless changes and revamps. The incentives to absolutely find something to do are too great. No one in higher management ever wants to hear that everything is fine and that we should do nothing. You'll be instantly booted saying that for lacking ambition and vision even if you're right. There should always be the next thing. As part of the tech industry earning a salary you always need to sell "something" internally.

Re: Apple introduces a universal design across platforms

#836

Post by yeahforsureman »

Theodores wrote: post #802
sgarland wrote: post #603

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Accessibility aside, I don't see the appeal in this design. I find the current design quite pleasant and usable. Translucent 3D text sounds like teenage-me messing around in Photoshop in the early 2000s.

Apple know their customers and what they like. I am actually Apple-phobic, a diehard linux user and incapable of doing simple tasks on Apple products. However, I think they have got a winner here. Although people talk of Vista Aero, it is more sophisticated than that, and, when this rolls out, Android will look distinctly old fashioned and low status, even if it is better as far as accessibility. I like what they hav…

Disagree on almost all points. Glass and the relative absence of color, texture and patterns make it look cold, detached, almost inhuman and absent of anything your eyes could rest on. There are ways to make this approach look cool and futuristic, but it suffers from the same downside as a lot of the white/glassy modernist architecture: the human eye abhors lack of detail and natural/organic patterns and texture. (It makes for a great canvas for graffitti though...)

Meanwhile, Android's Material You/Expressive design language is taking almost an opposite approach. Personally, I prefer it to Liquid Glass by a wide margin.

Re: Apple introduces a universal design across platforms

#837

Post by tootie »

vijucat wrote: post #815

I got a minor amount of hate for it, but to repeat what I wrote here [1]: "Slowly, I'm coming to the conclusion that designers should never be employed, only consulted on a per-project basis. If they sit around 8 hours a day, they end up changing something or the other to justify their existence. But human beings are not used to change at such a rapid cadence. Humans take time to settle into a design and establish pa…

Bad designers are like bad engineers. Seeking interesting things to do rather than serving the audience. Honestly, can't blame them either. They want to enjoy life not make profits.

Really good designers exist and are about as rare as good engineers.

Re: Apple introduces a universal design across platforms

#838

Post by CarVac »

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…

The translucent blur is... alright. The refracting edges look incredibly distracting for me.

Re: Apple introduces a universal design across platforms

#840

Post by WhyNotHugo »

majewsky wrote: post #504
WhyNotHugo wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can also disable animations on iOS. When switching between screens, there’s just a long pause instead of the animation. These pauses drive me crazy, it’s simply not possible to configure the device to be responsive.

I'm just as annoyed by this, but from what I understand, the animations are used to hide loading times, so the delay is not optional.

They're not [always] about hiding loading times. Even switching from an app to the desktop screen has a slow animation, or switching back and forth between two running apps.
Post reply on HN