Comment by codethief
6 days ago
> New Design with Liquid Glass
Looks like software UI design – just like fashion, film, architecture and many other fields I'm sure – has now officially entered the "nothing new under the sun" / "let's recycle ideas from xx years ago" stage.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aqua_%28user_interface%29
To be clear, this is just an observation, not a judgment of that change or the quality of the design by itself. I was getting similar vibes from the recent announcement of design changes in Android.
To me it looks more like Windows Vista's "Aero" than OS X's "Aqua".
And I couldnt be happier to see it back. I have not been a fan of the flattening of UI design over the last 15 years.
But the opposite of "flat" is not "transparent".
This was posted in another HN thread about Liquid Glass: https://imgur.com/a/6ZTCStC . I'm sure Apple will tweak the opacity before it goes live, but this looks horribly insane to me.
6 replies →
Yes, I immediately thought of Windows Aero too!!! I wasn’t able to enable it until I got a 9800GX2 a few years later, very cool at the time combined with the ability to have movies as your desktop background. It was a nice vibe.
It's the second coming of Frutger Aero[1]
[1]: https://aesthetics.fandom.com/wiki/Frutiger_Aero
It also looks like KDE 4.
Maybe this is consequence of the Frutiger Aero trend, and that users miss the time where user interfaces were designed to be cool instead of only useful
Current interfaces are not aimed at being optimally useful. Padding everywhere as of today means more time scrolling and wasted screen space. Animations everywhere means a lot of wasted time watching pixels moving instead of the computer/phone giving us control immediately after it did the thing we (maybe) asked for. Hiding scrollbars is a nightmare in general in desktop OSes but is the default (once lost half an hour setting up a proxy because the "save" button was hidden behind a scrollbar).
Usability feels it has only been down since Windows 7. (on another hand, Windows has plenty of accessibility features that help a lot in restoring usability)
I love that we're getting some texture back. UI has been so boring since iOS 7.
Sebastiaan de With of Halide fame did a writeup about this recently, and I think he makes some great points.
https://www.lux.camera/physicality-the-new-age-of-ui/
Open link and type into this box "physicality is the new skeumorphism"
Read on and:
They are completely dynamic: inhabiting characteristics that are akin to actual materials and objects. We’ve come back, in a sense, to skeuomorphic interfaces — but this time not with a lacquer resembling a material. Instead, the interface is clear, graphic and behaves like things we know from the real world, or might exist in the world. This is what the new skeuomorphism is. It, too, is physicality.
Well worth reading for the retrospective of Apple's website taking a twenty year journey from flatland and back.
They’re describing material design, which Google popularized. Skeuomorphism with things that could exist in the real world, avoid breaking the laws of physics, etc. Which then morphed into flat design as things like drop shadows were seen as dated. You are here.
Interesting, I never made the connection between dashboard widgets UI and early iPhone UI. It does make sense, early iPhone had a UI that was glossier and more colorful than "metallic" aqua.
I kind of hate it. Every use of it in the videos shown so far has moments where it's so transparent as to have borderline unreadable contrast.
Same. And white on light blue is just as bad. Looks like I’ll be using more accessibility features.
This is the first time I have ever thought “maybe I don’t want to update my phone“. Entirely because of the look.
In Settings -> Accessibility -> Display, you can enable Increase Contrast or Reduce Transparency to get rid of some of the worse glass effects, and Settings -> Accessibility -> Motion, you can enable Reduce Motion to get rid of the some of the light effects for content passing under glass buttons.
The last example in the first carousel is the worst, the bottom glass elements have complete unreadable text
I agree with you, I hope they quickly tweak this into something more readable. There could be a really nice mid ground here.
I used to find these changes compelling but now I think they are mostly a pain in the ass or questionable.
Proof of a well-designed UI is stability, not change.
Reads to me strongly of an effort to give traditional media something shiny to put above the headline and keep the marketing engine running.
If you read the press release, you can see it's 100% about marketing and nothing else.
Apple will spend 10x the effort to tell you way a useless feature is necessary before they look at user feedback.
Just one or two years ago I remember a handful of articles popping up that Gen Z was really into Frutiger Aero, that's the first thing I thought of, with the nature themes and skeuomorphic UI elements.
https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/why-gen-z-infatuated-frutige...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frutiger_Aero
Thanks, I wasn't even aware the style had gotten a name in the meantime.
I’m usually on board with Apple UI changes but something about all the examples they showed today just looked really cheap.
My only guess is this style looks better while using the product but not while looking at screenshots or demos built off Illustrator or whatever they’re using.
I love it. Reminds me of Windows 7. The nostalgia is too strong with this one.
The world flip flops from flat to 3D UI design every few years.
We were in a flat era for the last several years, this kicks off the next 3D era.
In fact, Apple once did a version of Aqua that did an overengineered materials-based rasterization at runtime, including a physically correct glass effect.
It was too slow and was later optimized away to run off of pre-rendered assets with some light typical style engine procedural code.
Feels like someone just dusted off the old vision now that the compute is there.
Back when Jobs was introducing one of the Mac OS X versions, there was a line that stuck with me.
Showing off the pulsating buttons he said something like "we have these processors that can do billions of calculations of second, we might as well use them to make it look great".
And yet a decade later, they were undoing all of that to just be flat an boring. Im glad they are using the now trillions of calculations a second to bring some character back into these things.
He was selling. The audience were sales. OS's were fully matured at that point. Computers were something you buy at a store. It was a selling point.
A decade later they were handling the windfall that came with smartphone ascendancy. An emergence of an entirely new design language for touch screen UI. Skeumorphism was slowing that all down.
Making it all flat meant making it consistent, which meant making it stable, which meant scalability. iOS7 made it so that even random developers' apps could play along and they needed a lot of developers playing along.
Liquid Glass is not adding a dimension. It is still flat UI, sadly. They just gave the edges of the window a glass like effect. There's also animation ("liquid" part). Overall, very disappointing.