Transparent Ambition
take.surf
take.surf
When the company employs designers on a permanent salaried basis, those designers must make changes in order to assure their continued employment. To do otherwise risks the bean counters in the accounting department asking the pointed question: "Why are we employing all these designers when they are not producing anything?". The result is that there must be change for the purpose of assuring the designers continued employment. Result: translucent designs no one wants, but that looked great in the powerpoint presentations used to assure the designers remained employed.
In this framing, transparent ambition is apt
If the pontiff is chief designer*, and bean counters the cardinals..
>Hesse frequently mentioned his understanding of the Taoist philosophies of Laozi (老子) and Zhuangzi (庄子) in letters to his friends, and Taoist ideas such as 'Tao' (道) or 'One' and 'polar opposites and unity' recur across his work.
Another worthy ref: https://isonomiaquarterly.com/archive/volume-3-issue-2/the-u...
(What jumped out at me was that author considered Poland to be smaller than Switzerland)
Edit: the Godfather ref in TFA also worthy of consideration https://old.reddit.com/r/television/comments/1i74th9/seth_ma...
I don't think it's exactly this, but it's close. Every so many years you have a new crop of talent rotate in and someone wants to make their mark and shake things up in order to be promoted. Rinse and repeat.
1. The designers must be unaware that "no one wants" these new designs (or perhaps they're incapable of creating new designs that people do want).
2. The executives must be unaware that "no one wants" these new designs.
3. The executives must be unaware of the designers' plot to prevent themselves from being fired.
If the company makes cellphones, the cellphones need to sell. In order for people to buy the cellphone, they first have to want it, and so the cellphone needs to be universally desirable. The company hires a design team on a permanent salaried basis to do exactly this. Accounting really needs the number of phones sold to keep going up every year, so they really need the designers to think of new things that people might desire to include in the phones each year.
This was first done with cars, and that is why car companies also hire design teams on a permanent salaried basis.
The reality is there's always work to done responding to changing user needs, market forces and organisational objectives and it's not uncommon that UI design overhauls are driven by an abstract desire to make things seem 'fresh' but that doesn't come (solely) from designers, it's often a top-down strategic directive.
While liquid glass is perhaps mediocre and distracting, the current "everything is just a text label or a stick figure icon" paradigm is pure hell. I dread learning any new UI because of how bad most are.
One thing I find a little annoying about my steam deck is that it has a touchscreen and it works right some of the time but there are plenty of games where you have an object in the screen with a skeuomorphic interface that you ought to be able to touch but you have to work it with the game controller buttons. Back in the day with the PS Vita almost all games could be played with game controller buttons only but any touch target that should have obviously been a touch target was a touch target.
Another point: I wonder how much of this is for the OS designer/UX/UI team to justify their existence at Apple. Suspect it’ll start out very glassy and gets flatter over time, so that they can claim ‘improvement to user experience’ over many years to come.
We're all disabled now.
This article acts as though design choices which are sub-optimal from a purely informational perspective, but which add personality and attraction to a product, have not earned Apple hundreds of billions of dollars in the past 25 years. The fact that he cannot understand where the idea comes from is okay, since he's not a product, UI, or industrial designer for Apple: that's their job, not his. The deeper question of why people form attachments to things that look 'cool' but have lower performance in some areas is indeed mysterious. But relentlessly pursuing that phenomenon has worked for Apple pretty well so far.
Liquid Glass isn't immediately impressive to me either, but it will either succeed or fail not based on whether it is more effective or not, but whether people like it or not, and those are two different things.
If there is "some sort of AR glasses and something smaller form factor than the Vision Pro that will require transparency so you can see through to the real world", limit the transparent interface only to that device.
I look at my Mac screen to see what is on my Mac screen. Whether there is a tabletop, a window, or a cat behind my Mac screen is irrelevant. If I want to see what is behind it I would be looking it that instead of my screen
Repeat for application window, dialog box etc.
The only place translucence sort of kind of makes sense is for video content but even then, it still totally optional. My experience of watching a video is not really degraded if the play button is opaque.
As others have said, wanting to update the design simply because it looks cool is one thing. If that's the goal just say it. But Alan Dye's explanations do not inspire confidence. I get the impression that as in architecture, the chief audience of the design is not the user, but other designers.
Mark my words, this is coming. It’s doable (as an effect) - rear camera captures what’s behind the screen, face tracking adjusts perspective in real-time to make it seem transparent/have correct parallax.
But if you’re serious, I guess whatever the Apple vision does.
I wouldn’t be surprised if we see “transparent” heads up displays in vehicles that take on this design language/tech.
I care less about the quality failings than the signs the Apple is too big to manage through the next few years. They’ve done a great job asserting independence from chip makers, but they’re no where near independent enough for the new era of assertive nationalism.
Now you have Arstechnica, which should know better, which makes detailed reviews pixel-by-pixel of everything that changed between one version of MacOS and the next and seems to think the only thing that matters in an OS is the superficial things you can see, at least if the OS is MacOS.
Windows is refreshing because it has more widget sets than I can count but it doesn't matter because you can get your work done even though it is inconsistent and usually just a bit ugly. It beats Linux though, because at least in Windows if a label is 75px wide, Windows will make at least 75px of space for it, whereas in Linux nobody gets excited if it label gets clipped because they only left 55px -- they'll even close out a bug request about this as soon as you make it. But hey, Linux on a bad day looks better than the 99% percentile NFT.
Anyway my computer is not a car, nor my car is my laptop. The older i get the more i like the answer "it depends", because reality is like that, not pure or IFThisThenThat. It is a network of lots of knobs(weights) that together give a context dependent answer.
We have high-concept things like Urbit that wanted to remake identity and secure communication that are utterly inaccessible to most savvy folks, never mind average end users. And in the meantime we're shipping entire Unix environments around inside OCI images to make up for the lack of consistency and portability on the backend.
Regular users are left with a tragedy of the commons as paid/saas programs support integrations with other specific paid products instead of with general open standards that could foster more diversity and interoperability. Everything is tacked on at the application layer - imagine going back to the folks who designed Kerberos decades ago and telling them that bouncing the browser back and forth between websites is what we settled on!
I like the new transparent theme, but yeah, it's just a GUI theme. Bring me back a consistent GUI where I can get themes from a modding community that apply to every app on the system and give me control over my look and feel! Instead, we get Wayland and a loss of 90% of the classic Linux desktop software. Bring me an OS that I can seamlessly deploy in a near-stateless/immutable fashion everywhere without falling into the trap of Nix! Instead, we get yet another rewrite of the fuckin' Ubuntu installer that still doesn't make the resulting system any more appealing for someone who would administer a corporate fleet of Linux workstations.
I remember in the early 1990s theming was all the rage for Win '95 applications and the smaller the crapplet, the more aggressively it was themed. People got the sense that it was not cool and by the time Microsoft introduced really great theming support in WPF nobody wanted to use it.
The existence of so much software written to existing APIs is a reason why innovation in the OS seems at best marginal these days. If you thought "there is so much bloat in POSIX" you're either going to have to rewrite the whole userspace or build a POSIX emulation layer so you can use the GNU tools. If you wanted to build a really cool OS for the eZ80 it probably runs CP/M applications because if it did you have a lot of software to run on it and if it doesn't you have to write a text editor and everything else.
The culture of various Linux-related communities also varies considerably. I guarantee you that the KDE community, for instance, is not going to stand for a label getting clipped. They are absolutely meticulous, especially where accessibility is concerned.