I want to like Apple’s vision of their newest OS incarnations, but I find it hard at this point. I’m hoping that beta3 will change and help improve some of my feelings.
It appears that not only Liquid Glass breaks readability in many cases, but information density too is affected, something that I care even more. What comes after the iPhone 15 Pro Max to support this new UI paradigm? 🤦🏻♂️
This is the new readability standards from Apple, a trillion dollars tech company. Here’s a screenshot of two Finder windows. Which one is active? Why is the tab of the inactive window darker than the active one? Why can I barely distinguish the tab of the active window? And those “floating over the content” controls in the top portion, are just, weird and out of this place.
Matt Birchler in Liquid glass one month later
If I could sum it up briefly, I’d say that liquid glass is highly dependent on the content it’s covering to determine how delightful it is as a UI. That’s a real challenge to overcome and it’s a big reason why we tend to see these highly-transparent interface designs get more and more opaque in time. The highs are very high in my book, but there are still plenty of “yikes” moments that I wish weren’t there and I hope get improved by the fall.
This makes me think that iOS 26 is really the new iOS 7 moment in Apple history. I also agree with Matt’s critique and observations. I don’t think that a UI is good when you have to meet a certain context in order to make it look good. A great UI is good most if not all the time.
I’ve Got Better Things To Do Than This, and Yet
At the point when you have to blur the content area to make the UI stand out from it, how can you possibly argue that it gets out of the way? It makes no sense.
He puts words on something I couldn’t name myself.
According to MacRumors: New MacBook With A18 Pro Chip Spotted in Apple Code
That is interesting. I want Apple to be funky on this one with a unique design proposition. Obviously they are going after the Chromebook market here, if rumors are true.
Under macOS Tahoe, I decided to remove any menu items that have a Control Center equivalent. Is this the start of a trend? I hope developers will add support for Control Center when it ships.
This article points to an interesting prospect about the future of the Mac menu bar usage: we could see a possible migration of Mac utilities from menu bar items to the Control Center, thanks to the introduction of third-party Control Center applets. Provided developers add support for these, we will probably see a reduction on menu bar items, freeing much space in the menu bar. This might explain why Apple added the menu bar transparent mode.
With this year’s Apple OS releases, all Apple apps appear to have a similar look. Is this expected? Where’s the fun? Does everything need to be identical to be more approachable?
I’m happy that, in Canada, we don’t have Apple Pay (yet?) because otherwise we would be flooded by ads in the Wallet app. 🤦🏻♂️