And taken some of his acolytes with him.
John Gruber of Daring Fireball has some strong views on human interface and Mr. Dye’s transgressions in particular, and has hopes that his successor at Apple Steve Lemay, will do better.
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I am unable to read the quote as the near-white text vanishes in the near-white image. This seems…appropriate.
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Exactly. That’s the joke.
When I was young, industrial design was a method of designing products that combined style and functionality.
If it’s just style, it’s no longer design.
What’s more, today, products such as phones are hardly objects anymore: a screen and nothing else.
There isn’t much room for maneuver anymore, so they fall back on icons…
It is no more design but styling, like American cars of the sixties !
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Yeah, I hate it too. I’ve changed the contrast so it is more like what it used to be so now it doesn’t bother me.
iPhone users wouldn’t be talking about the iOS interface if Apple didn’t keep trying to fix what isn’t broken. The industry’s obsession with churning out new features that no one asks for solely as a marketing strategy is really backfiring imho. Consumers are totally addicted to newness for its own sake, and product developers are working overtime (and wasting resources) to feed the insatiable monster they have created.
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Don’t feel like the Lone Ranger, Doug. I so hate this new Liquid that I’m doing everything possible to not update to the new Tahoe in hopes that Apple will relent and at least give the users the absolute choice to either accept Liquid or reject it and stay with an interface that is comfortable, friendly, and useful and doesn’t make my lovely iMac look like an iPad! Bah, humbug for sure!
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I agree. It’s horrible, especially for those of us with vision problems. I plan on staying with Sequoia and iOS 18.
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Letting designers ruin functionality is like letting architects design buildings without the input of structural engineers. Pretty may look nice, but you don’t want it to fall down.
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Not to mention being miserable buildings to live or work in!
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think his choice in new employer says it all …
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A friend just told me that her iPhone automatically updated and it now looks horrible. I’ve made some of the preference changes that are on the web somewhere (maybe here?) and it looks better. I will have to find it and send it to her. I think this was a classic case of them not having much new, thanks to delays to AI, and they decided that someone’s experiments in UI appearance were now going to be a major new feature. It is annoying that Apple invests time on this, instead of working on supporting OpenMP, a system for multiple processing which probably wouldn’t take a lot of time.
Probably this:
2 posts were split to a new topic: Problems moving items into folders in the Finder
I’ve become somewhat visually impaired as I’ve aged and am finding liquid glass to be a difficult interface. All the suggested options to turn it off have helped but it’s still annoying and seems to be nothing more than an aesthetic decision. Another annoying related issue to the IOS 26 update is the loss of the full screen view when reading an email with your phone in a horizontal orientation. I’ve started using the Gmail app rather than Apple’s phone app when I need to read something lengthy. And the weird disappearing upper margin of an email or document is bizarre. No clue what the thinking was there.
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Overall I’m not finding Liquid Glass on Mac to be too bad. But I do have Reduced Transparency on. With it off, I had transparent menu bar and that drove me nuts and I couldn’t find a way to turn off the menu bar transparency by itself, like in the old days.
I am also running Dark Mode, which I think helps. I also adjusted contrast and a few colors for better readability.
But no major problems so far, except for the folder icon drop issue mentioned earlier. And Bartender 6 doesn’t work very well at all. I got rid of it and my menubar is fine without it.
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Personally I really really hate it. Every time I use my iPhone. I have turned off movement and reduced transparency but still every time I open a folder a “special effect” is shown that almost causes my stomach to roll. I now actually close my eyes or look the other way when opening a folder. It’s that bad. It’s clearly not for me.
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I am ambivalent on the overall look and feel, I cannot say it is ‘better’ or ‘worse’ than before, that is open to subjective discussion. However it is a step backwards in usability. Some examples…
On desktop the big rounded window corners make it harder to resize windows.
Reducing the height of the borders at the top of windows makes it harder to just ‘grab them’ and move them, you now how to click very accurately.
The shadows under buttons at the top of windows are just take up screen acreage - good button design should make them unnecessary.
The subtle greys in Safari make it hard for me to see which tab I have selected.
The ‘transparency’ means that say in Settings, when I scroll down the list on the left, as they go under the search bar it then makes text in there illegible and ‘muddy’.
I could go on. It is poor interface design – Apple used to be good at this sort of stuff. Did this get tested by real people at any stage? Any Apple execs reading this, I’d be happy to consult for you to help you stop you making these mistakes. Great interface design is not just ‘pretty things’ it is usability too.
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There’s a lot of it I like, mainly on the iPhone and iPad.
But there’s a bunch on the Mac I don’t. There are fussy additional borders around everything. The sidebar, every button… if someone can make that stop, I’d be grateful.
Agreed.
IMHO they debased an elegant, sophisticated, and intuitive GUI; Liquid Glass feels like using a Fisher-Price toy.
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