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I hear you, but for most applications I don't want a lot of UI because it wastes screen space. It really depends on what I'm doing, but I feel the opposite that you do - most applications I use are full of widgets, separator bars, dots, mini buttons while I just want an empty canvas for work. When I add everything, I lose 1/3 of my workplace to UI alone and I don't like it.

That's one thing I miss from menu+hotkey UIs - the menu bar is all you have to worry about.

I'm the opposite, screens are huge these days, there's enough space for both a decent amount UI and the work.

(Not so much UI that it's distracting, of course)

> I just want an empty canvas for work

I want more than that. I want some sort of visual guidance for what's possible to do and how to do it. A blank canvas means that I have to focus more on "how do I do this?" than actually doing it.

Yeah, discoverability is getting worse. It would be slightly more okay if there were one canonical menu system for an app that you could summon immediately and unambiguously. But every app is a mess of inconsistent layout and hidden gestures.

> But every app is a mess of inconsistent layout and hidden gestures.

This is what happens when we decide that the web is the end all be all of application delivery platforms, even for desktop (Electron).

Call me old man yelling at clouds, but when native apps would use the operating system's components and APIs, they looked just like every other app or utility in the OS, behaved the same way, shared the same shortcuts, etc. You could just learn how to use the OS and that intuitively expanded into any native app written for that OS.

We decided to throw all of that out the window for custom branded "experiences" and lowest common denominator cross platform UIs.

Now things appear simple on the surface, but are much more difficult to use because instead of just learning your OS's conventions, you have to learn each individual application and its quirks.

Letting marketing people dictate app design was one of the biggest mistakes this industry has made.

Things are slightly better on macOS because it still has that mandatory main menu in every app. Which app developers can still ignore, but then it looks like a sore to the user, so they're incentivized to fill it out.

Unfortunately even there I increasingly see apps with features that aren't exposed through that menu at all.

> It really depends on what I'm doing

To me that's the part we're really missing on mobile. There's times a lot of controls are needed and other where they need to disappear.

We have that in classic UIs with collapsible tool bars and optional panels, things that will stay where they're set until explicitly hidden or moved away.

Having that kind of option to pin back the buttons when/as long as needed would make minimalist designs a lot more useable IMHO.

I got by just fine with a 5" screen and old cluttered Android. If the manufacturers have decided I'm no longer allowed to have a phone smaller than 6.5", least the developers can do is use that space to give me controls

I do get that, and I use my editor with basically no ornamentation, but that’s because I have a key combination for everything so it’s quick and discoverable. I’d accept voice commands that worked quickly and reliably maybe? Or fine, give me a burger menu but let me configure it (it used to be common with iOS apps to let you configure the toolbar, but not so much these days).

That's what full screen mode is for. But it should be opt-in, not the default, and definitely not something you can't even opt out of.

Separately, given the size and pixel density of your typical desktop screen today, if anything I find the "100% content" apps to look kinda bare because of all the empty space. Which makes sense, given that the UI paradigm with lots of toolbars etc dates back to the days when your typical desktop monitor was 14-17". For laptops, I'm more sympathetic to the sentiment.

I couldn't agree more. I didn't even like when Windows started adding those little transitions when you minimized/restored windows, because it delayed the presentation of the window for pure aesthetics. For a work machine, give me a Windows 2000 interface any day over the form over function approach of so many modern UIs.

> The transparency, blur and contrast issues are stupid but so obviously stupid that I assume they’ll be fixed.

lol

I thought the same when ios 7 came out - hidden menus requiring multiple taps, touch targets that don't look like touch targets, small targets, terrible contrast, silly unreadable fonts, on and on...

but not only didn't this get fixed, the SAME designs leaked into the rest of the world.

for example, the tesla car UI adopted ALL the same deficiencies. Hard to read center display? critical functions that require multiple taps? all while you're driving... wow

sigh

> Give me a brutalist UI that isn’t embarrassed to show itself. Gimme things that both explain and enable the app’s features. By all means make them shiny and lickable

[...or not, according to user preference. -- my addition /CRC]

In other words, give me Windows 7. Where I could select everything from the "Classic" (Win 95/NT4/2000) via the XP to the Vista UI "themes" (and then modify to my exact preference from there).

With apps from ~the XP era, when their UIs too were still useful.

> The transparency, blur and contrast issues are stupid but so obviously stupid that I assume they’ll be fixed.

I find your confidence here strange, because something so obviously stupid never should have been implemented in the first place, yet it was.

Never underestimate the incompetence and obliviousness of powerful people.

Yes. And if OP needs a confidence decrement, we went through another off design with iOS 7 and macOS Yosemite, and it was rough for a few years until course corrections were made.

This is a design that should have sat in a research lab and been researched further. And yes, I'm dogfooding it on test devices.

I wholeheartedly agree. There are two great examples of this in the latest iOS beta:

In Safari, there used to be a button at the low right to reveal all the open tabs, allow, allowing you to close the current tab, or any other others using just two taps. Now you have to hit a “…” button, followed by ”all tabs”.

Also, I noticed in the podcast app there used to be a skip 15 seconds button always available at the lower right when content started playing. Perfect for avoiding those obnoxious loud ads at the very first sample of audio. Now it’s two clicks away. Incredibly frustrating.

The fact that the "switch cameras" button isn't immediately visible in the Camera app but slides in after ~2s is beyond "mildly" infuriating.

That's fixed in the latest beta.

That is insane

> The transparency, blur and contrast issues are stupid but so obviously stupid that I assume they’ll be fixed.

They won't be fixed. At least not quickly, and not easily.

Because Liquid Glass is literally not designed to be fixed, and has literally never been tested in real conditions.

We've seen that with Apple's flailing in the first few betas

This particular approach has been tried many times before. I remember back when Microsoft introduced Aero transparency effects in Vista, and then had them dialed down substantially in Win7, in the same exact way ("frosted glass") that Apple seems to be speedrunning through in iOS betas right now.

So yes, it will be fixed, and the fix is easy. They just have to accept the fact that the "liquid" part needs to be strongly de-emphasized in favor of readability. It would be nice if they just did that and saved us all the grief, but worst case we'll just end in the same exact spot moving there step by step.

> So yes, it will be fixed, and the fix is easy. They just have to accept the fact that the "liquid" part

They tried it in betas. De-emphasizing "liquid glass" just turns everything into a dirty blur.

The difference from Aero is that Microsoft was smart and never applied the effects to contents of things: it was always in windows chrome, and never in the controls or toolbars.

Liquid Glass boasts glass/transparency/translucency/distortions basically everywhere. As betas show, they didn't test it even with the most basic real-world scenarios, and they cannot easily fix it without turning it off or making it quite ugly.

It wasn't just chrome in Vista. The taskbar was translucent, large parts of the Start menu were translucent, window titles were translucent (including minimize/maximize/close buttons). And controls and toolbars were bleeding into the chrome part of windows, so while the widgets themselves were opaque, they were placed on translucent background. And for some apps they went all in, e.g. Media Player. Here's a random screenshot from image search:

https://live.staticflickr.com/90/245324637_1e615ef573_b.jpg

I remember going into settings and turning it all off because of how annoying it was. But then Win7 came and turned up the frosted glass effect throughout, and that largely fixed all the outstanding issues.

It's funny because I saw this image side by side with Liquid Glass (can't find the tweet right now), and Vista looked almost opaque in comparison :) Hence my comment.

Memory is a funny thing

My iPhone mini does like this trend of hidding UI elements I have to say =)

Absolutely. JetBrains are, as one HN commentator put it "speedrunning enshitification" -- in no small part by attempting to ditch their classic GUI for some absolute piece of shit minimalist rip off of VS Code.

The sad part about this is how many other products will likely blindly follow suit.

At least a bit of credit to jetbrains, In the new interface you can pull all the gutter buttons off the side and put them in the top tool bar. That got it to be "good enough" for me. So many apps put in a double sized gutter to hold a half dozen icons.

All being said, my preference is still to the old interface.