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.
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.
But I'm not so sure if I want transparent.
I remember the catastrophe of Windows Vista, and how you needed a capable GPU to handle the glass effect. Otherwise, one of your (Maybe two) CPU cores would have to process all that overhead.
They are heading in a good direction, it just needs to be toned down. But like any new graphics technology the first year is the "WOW WE CAN DO X!!!!" then the more tame stuff comes along.
Why do you think they are headed in a good direction? There is literally nothing I like about the liquid glass effect from a usability perspective. The transparency/translucency is wholly negative in my opinion.
The best analogy to me is physical buttons in cars vs. touch screens. The "headed in a good direction" there is to actually stop putting more shit into the touchscreen and have physical buttons for anything you'd touch while the car is in motion.
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
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)
Sebastiaan de With of Halide fame did a writeup about this recently, and I think he makes some great points.
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.
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.
Apple will spend 10x the effort to tell you way a useless feature is necessary before they look at user feedback.
https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/why-gen-z-infatuated-frutige...
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.
We were in a flat era for the last several years, this kicks off the next 3D era.
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.
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.
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.