Comment by pilingual
12 hours ago
Interesting that Apple is praised.
> that a link? Maybe!
When Apple transitioned from skeuomorphic to flat design this was a huge issue. It was difficult to determine what was a button on iOS and whether you tapped it (and the removal of loading gifs across platforms further aggravated problems like double submits).
Another absurdity with iOS is the number of ways you can gesture. It started simply, now it is complex to the point where the OS can confuse one gesture for another.
I have a lot of gripes with Apple's various design decisions over the years, but they're at least consistent across their apps, which is the point of TFA.
Mystery gesture navigation is also now on by default and terrible on Android, too. It's awful with children or older folks (or even me!) who trigger it by accident all the time. Some of it I was able to disable on my children's iPads. It's still frustrating that easy to accidentally trigger but impossible to discover gestures are the default and also frustrating that we have the very last iPad generation with a button.
PWA dudes that all want to use some variant of shadcn or whatever same but different flavor of what is effectively the same design language are the more critically dangerous influences on design in my eyes than say apple. apple is highly opinionated on their design frameworks and that, at least, brings consistency. even if it's a dumb change, at least you can expect it everywhere
I think that the best UI design language is somewhere between "flat" and "skeuomorphic". I want neither a UI with notes apps that have Moleskine leather and vellum paper textures, nor the Android 12-like vague shapes of current-day macOS. The Windows 9x, and even more so, its predecessor NEXTSTEP, look and feel was perfect. Widgets had depth and definition, were still abstract but readily identifiable to the eye.