I'm almost positive that it's because they want to make as many apps as possible VisionOS-friendly.
I suspect that they were rather shaken at how poorly AVP was received.
I suspect that they were rather shaken at how poorly AVP was received.
They never did replace the productivity usecases. They replaced a lot of casual usecases, and created a bunch more usecases, mostly around media consumption.
But if you go to an office anywhere in the world, and you look around, it's not people on their phones. It's a sea of desktop computers, like it's 1995. Even at Apple. Not because everyone is out of the times, but because we did truly find the perfect form factor, and have chosen to refine it.
Apple vision pro wont replace the productivity suite, like the iPhone didn't. And it won't replace the iPhone, because it's way bigger and more inconvenient. So, I'm not sure where that leaves it.
VR headsets ain’t it but I’m convinced the reason every company is working on them and developing AR stuff for their traditional devices (which are terrible to use for AR) is because they don’t want to still be at the starting line if someone figures out smart glasses.
I’m not sure when we’re started dismissing the elderly’s advice as “just complaining because they’re old” but it seems we’re hell bent on reinventing the wheel of misfortune with every generation.
If old people complain about something, maybe they have a point?
ps. I am a grandparent, on the edge of elderly.
It’s not as though anything about Liquid Glass makes a meaningful difference in usability.
To move around safely with smart glasses on your face, apps need to be semi transparent from day one. It's not about superficial stylistic similarities this time. And it's not primarily about design either.
This is absolutely about core usability, just not for macOS or iOS.
So I don’t think I necessarily buy that apps have to have any transparency at all. If I’m walking around doing things in the real world with a Vision Pro on my head, that itself beggars belief to me. It’s wildly impractical for that with its 2-hour battery life, super heavy weight, and hilarious appearance, and all those will continue to be true long after the 5-year window when the “26” OS aesthetic will likely persist.
So, might some future glasses or something benefit from transparency? Maybe. But if I find myself walking down the street with a screen on my face, I’d personally prefer to just close the apps that I don’t need, rather than look through them. If the glasses are going to highlight place names, people’s names, etc. they can do that with text floating in midair, like a subtitle.
I don't. I'm just guessing what Apple may have in mind.
>But if I find myself walking down the street with a screen on my face, I’d personally prefer to just close the apps that I don’t need
Of course, but what about the apps you do need? Say you're in a shop, taking notes, browsing the shop's website, scanning barcodes with something like the Yuka app, maybe even keeping an eye on messages at the same time.
I kept wondering what's the point of covering things in this semi-transparent sludge that doesn't actually allow you to see through but still makes the things in the foreground harder to see.
Well, here's your answer. Avoiding collisions and maybe getting a vague idea of where we want to turn next.
Note that I'm not saying this is a good idea. It's just what I think Apple has in mind. I don't think we can know at this point how or if we really want to use smart glasses.
The goal is most likely to unify the experience around iPadOS, so that one codebase ports down the phone and watch and over to the Mac and AVP.
The delta between Mac and iPad UX elements goes down every release. The latest one gave the iPad a menu bar and multi window support.
Looking at it from a certain angle, the iOS codebase is the only one which has a native team for a lot of large companies - they might not even create larger views for an iPad native version, and may instead ship Electron for the macOS release. Apple is trying to recruit the native mobile team to be able to support native releases for the whole ecosystem.
It was bound to fail since day one.
How about porting "I Am Rich" to the Vision Pro, and it could just show a glowing red orb floating in front of your face.
But one of my big takeaways from e.g. https://www.tableau.com/blog/exploring-spatial-computing-and... (2024) was that some of the most basic UX research around 3D visualization was left to the market to discover.
> During Tableau Conference 2024 in San Diego, we recruited 22 attendees to help us assess the usability, learnability, and potential utility of Tableau on the visionOS platform, along with broader perspectives on the potential for HMDs to create engaging experiences around data. Participants were tasked with a series of analytical exercises using one of three datasets. These tasks included specifying filter settings, changing data fields, and interpreting trends across various visualizations, such as bar charts, line charts, and a 3D globe. Examples of tasks included identifying the country with the highest CO2 emissions in Asia and determining when poultry production first exceeded beef production in South America.
If you want to launch a $3000 device properly, why are you making Tableau do this themselves?
Except Liquid Glass looks nothing at all like visionOS. If they had just taken a carbon copy of the visionOS UI and put it on Mac and iPhone, I doubt there would have been any controversy. Buttons don't look like they hover way higher than the UI. Sidebars and toolbar buttons are indented, they don't scream "LOOK AT ME!".
Dye is just a moron.