Through the Liquid Glass

https://www.flarup.email/p/through-the-liquid-glass

by Destiner • 11 months ago

18 22 11 months ago

This type of "innovation" feels like a skit from the Silicon Valley TV show. That and Apple's patented "squircle".

Give me the vintage MacOS and Vista designs from the article over whatever the new fad of UI they keep trying to shove down our throats. It was flat UI before, now glass again but this time with raytraced refractions, so we waste compute power to get the glass buttons to look more realistic if you pixel peep.

I could swear we're living in a parody when I hear this being said with a straight face.

jjtheblunt• 11 months ago

where are you getting that compute is being squandered on ray tracing (rather than just metal shaders)?

crinkly2• 11 months ago

Not OP but you're right that it's probably metal shaders as it runs on pre-RT capable iPhones. But I've tried it my spare 13 Pro. It's laggy as hell on the betas. Like really laggy. If it goes into RC/release like that it'll go down like a lead balloon.

crinkly2• 11 months ago

Yeah this. I'd rather we have NeXTstep back than pastel blurry glassware oblivion.

I have a longing for 10.4 on my old plastic Intel iMac at this point.

webdevver• 11 months ago

App icons are per-user NFTs, and when the phone is dropped the accelerometer reports it to the ETH blockchain, and marks the app icon as "cracked", forever that user's app glass icon is cracked unless you pay $50 to AppleCare to get it "fixed"

efilife• 11 months ago

Apple does not have a patent on squircles. It's got a patent on a specific shape of a device

ofrzeta• 11 months ago

Have you watched this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrGYUq1mklk Like straight out of a parody.

moralestapia• 11 months ago

Narcissism, the post.

01HNNWZ0MV43FF• 11 months ago

These effects are GPU-accelerated, composited in real time, and built into the OS rendering stack

Sure but it's never gonna be faster or lower-energy than not doing it

halJordan• 11 months ago

Meanwhile the same people complaining about the energy intensity of their phone ui are the same people who refuse to use cheap foodstuffs like canola oil and instead demand exotic things like avacado oil. Come on bffr

cultofmetatron2• 11 months ago

Thats because canola oil is objectively terrible for your health and will make you die young. Jury is out on avacado oil but for cooking, its tallow, butter and cocount oil if you want to avoid burnout and premature aging.

ninkendo• 11 months ago

same people

No they’re not.

https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/Goomba_fallacy

gumby2713• 11 months ago

My favorite example of the ridiculous icon redesigns remains this one: https://mastodon.social/@BasicAppleGuy/115072885331562510

What fascinates me the most is not how bad the most recent one is, but how it now relies on you knowing the prior forms of that icon to know what the current one is conveying. Apple fans actually point this out as an artful homage, but to anyone not already steeped in Apple products, it's just a shitty icon made of basic shapes. I wonder if Apple has reached the point where they don't need the affordances of the past since people are familiar enough with their past, good designs. People point out that liquid glass will be amazing in Vision OS, and that's probably the thinking from Apple. It's just a shame that we have to unify a design language to the worst possible case: a transparent screen taped to your face. In my mind, that's an objectively stupid design decision, but the Apple fanboys will say, "Look at those little colored squares on the address book icon, what a brilliant reference!" And will be able to recognize from memory how the thing should work, all while the entire UI gets more and more melted.

gumby2713• 11 months ago

And you know what pisses me off the most about that icon? All three of the colored dividers can be seen through the transparent cover. They're all at the same layer, it doesn't even make sense!

Nevermark• 11 months ago

I am struck by how great the "@" sign was as a perfect (and currently applicable) synecdoche for contact information.

gumby2713• 11 months ago

Agreed, and for some reason they replaced it with what is pretty universally used as the "profile" icon, baffling.

a13712• 11 months ago

The A in @ also brings "Address book" to mind

kcplate2• 11 months ago

But is it though? My nearly 90 year old mother wouldn’t necessarily make that connection on her iPhone or iPad. I’d reckon that for many folks over 50 it would not necessarily be obvious without seeing @ used beyond email.

I agree the latest rev does require familiarity with the old one more than it should, but a weeble, to me, is a better universal iconographic symbol to denote a contact than an @ (just in general)

drpixie• 11 months ago

This isn’t just a fresh coat of paint.

Just how is this NOT just a fresh coat of paint? It is precisely the same controls, providing precisely the same effects, but looking different.

And probably requiring just a little more attention and thought to actually use - so the device becomes slightly more of an attention trap/sink :(

kcplate2• 11 months ago

Just how is this NOT just a fresh coat of paint? It is precisely the same controls, providing precisely the same effects, but looking different.

I am not sure how someone would come to this conclusion if they are actually using it. This comment feels more like “I’ve seen screenshots and this is the conclusion I have drawn from what I have seen. The elements of this UI change go far beyond icons.

I’ve been using it daily since the dev release. It’s most definitely not the same controls at least within the apps that use some standard control and navigation elements. It feels new, but still familiar enough that I don’t think beyond the first few uses will require any additional thought.

Personally I was surprised at how much it conveyed the concept in my mind just through its visuals of the touch experience that I was interacting with a “thing” more than just a UI element. I fully expected to hate it, but don’t.

Through the Liquid Glass

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