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Comment by whiteboardr | Hacker News Reader

Plus, to be truly realistic it also would need to take into account ambient lighting scenarios surrounding the device displaying it.

Like this it’s really just another try in recreating glass which never made sense to be used in UI.

It is beyond me, how this got chosen as a way forward - taking visual design which makes sense in a VR/AR environment, to ruin their rectangular display UI.

It will make implementation way more complex than it is already and worse it will set off an avalanche of badly done imitations creating a mess throughout all touchpoints across companies taking years to clean up again - just as I thought that UI design finally reached an acceptable level of maturity.

Sad, really sad for a company like Apple to throw out precision, clarity and contrast for “effect”.

Sad.

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It's not actually glass, instead the apple engineers and designers are basically simulating effect of surface tension of drops of liquid. Unfortunately the refraction at the edges of a droplet is not informative about whether the droplet is inward or outward facing (i.e. if it it toggled on or off). Hence why they use additional highlights and shadow to indicate the 3D structure. The liquid effect is a total gimmick . And they added insult to injury by adding color-changes and movement which is totally distracting when you re scrolling that diffucult paper.

I know most people couldn’t care less about this, but those gimmicky animations probably consume more computing power than the entire Apollo project, which strikes me as unnecessary and wasteful. Given the choice, I’d much rather have a clean, efficient interface.

I tend to like Material Design in comparison. It’s clean, efficient, and usable. I just hope Google won’t try to "improve" it with annoying gimmicks and end up making things worse, like Apple did here.

"Flat" design is equally offensive by not demarcating controls as controls, or their state in an intuitive way.

Just as we were finally seeing UI step away from that BS, Apple jumps all the way back into much-scorned, cheesily-excessive skeuomorphism... adding a raft of failed ideas from 20 years ago.

Since this is in contrast to "wildly not flat and full of visual gimmicks": the modern "flat" style has severe (and very stupid) issues, yea. But "flat" has been around for a very long time in touch UI with clear control boundaries - just draw a box around it, maybe give it a background color.

That's better than plain text that just happens to be a hidden control, but text with a background color might just be... text with a background color, for emphasis. Or it's text with a background color, to distinguish it from editable text. A background color does not tell the user that it's a control.

A box around it? Slightly better, but still doesn't convey state. Sure, you can fill it in when it's "on," but that's still guesswork on the part of the user if he arrives to find it filled in already.

I'm pretty sure my Amiga 1000 had more computing power than the entire Apollo project. I mostly used it for games.

Historically, design as a priority worsened UI for average and new users, and Apple has prioritized a feeling of elegance over ease of use.

Liquid glass puts UI second (feature cues) in favor of UX (interesting experience), harkening back to skeuomorphism but misprioritizing UI. I appreciated in Jobs's time how skeuomorphism was used to reveal more features, and give new users simple cues.

Now there is this idea that there is a higher percentage of advanced users, but since now there are MORE users (anyone with a screen), and continual change, I think there is still a large percentage of less advanced users "harmed" by prioritizing UX over UI.

It's also ironic that so much effort has been spent on the "liquid" feel of the phone ... which is mostly lost when it's in a case.

I think they refuse to pick a shade of grey for their UI's background, so we're stuck with transparent elements.

You know the dominant apps used on phones have large full screen user-generated video and imagery, right?

These are UI elements designed to work great over scrolling content feeds, full screen product images, album artwork, and thirty second videos of people doing meme dances. There is no room for ‘a gray background’.

This doesn’t justify applying a less than suboptimal design for everything else.

UI on content is a special case just like AR and here it might be ok, but why add “glass” as a background on icons or panels for text that are served much better by using a single colored transparent background without the noise that glass is bringing to the table - if there’s a background needed at all.

The visual signal to noise ratio is being cranked up to 11 for novelty’s sake.

I think you’re watching a way different video about this than me.

In the design guidance they’re explicitly saying liquid glass is for selective elements in the navigation layer. When those elements pop up modals those use a very subdued and opaque glass that loses the adaptive contrast, but still physically embeds them in that same floating navigation layer.

They’re not saying everything needs to be made of glass. They’re explicitly saying don’t make everything from glass.

For highlighting text?

> These are UI elements designed to work great over scrolling content feeds, full screen product images, album artwork, and thirty second videos of people doing meme dances

Liquid glass also seems terrible for this type of application. TikTok's overlays are much less intrusive and distracting.

Now give the laptop back to your parents and go touch grass.

This has no place in the desktop.

What a patronizing and shallow response.

the liquid glass ends up being vital for windows in AR. the vision pro has this, and it really helps you see behind the windows you've placed. while a shit experience on a phone, i do think liquid glass is a useful choice in the AR world

No question about that - see above.

What works for augmented UI doesn’t in a desktop, mobile or 10ft experience.

It’s a terrible mistake porting something to an environment where transparency isn’t helping but brings about the opposite effect.

Back in my day (as far back as a month ago), we just called that effect “transparency” or “translucency”. Hell, there are types of AppKit popup windows that have the effect on by default, that have existed untouched since the early days of Mac OS X. Don’t give Apple more credit than they deserve here.

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