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Comment by GeekyBear | Hacker News Reader

They literally give you a new slider to increase or reduce the Liquid Glass effect to align with your personal preferences.

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Unfortunately the slider does not fix Liquid Glass. Notifications are still unreadable even when you go full opaque. You need to also toggle Reduce Transparency to actually get the UI to be opaque enough to be readable.

Jeez, it's an accessibility feature and they just turned it off!

I don't mind liquid glass and can handle the transparency mostly, but the notifications are just god-awful and difficult to read (white on light glass, using dark mode, who comes up with this stuff?).

But reducing transparency is a much harder setting now (should be "removing transparency"), I don't like it anymore, it also messes with the wallpaper. The previous setting was just right for me. Now the app squares are just black, very bad with dark icons.

Your saying the "reduce transparency" setting changed between 26 and 27?

I've been running it since 18 (first thing I do is go into accessibility and turn off any animations and screen effects that take GPU cycles)

Yes it changed, first it reduced the transparency in many places, most notably in notifications, and made the glass dark. Now it makes the glass just a black plastic, but also in the launcher, where dark icons don't pop out anymore.

The old setting was the perfect balance for me. Ah well, iPhone 12 mini is nearly dead, am eyeballing something with GrapheneOS anyway...

That's certainly not what the reviews say:

> I’ve been happily using the totally frosted look (slider all the way to the right) for a few weeks now. While I didn’t mind Liquid Glass as much as other folks, the frosted setting ensures I can read and see the text, menus and icons properly.

https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/ive-been-usi...

That's certainty not what the reviews say, the complaint was about notifications, your quote doesn't mention them

Just anecdotally, increasing the blur seems to have an associated performance cost, especially in Springboard ("the home screen".) It's probably only ~100ms for each interaction, so it probably won't impact latency-insensitive users.

As others have said, it helps with the legibility but Liquid Glass is still distracting and illegible. I share the wish that Apple eventually returns to a more sensible, legible UI.

> only ~100ms for each interaction

Wow.

I want to stress this isn't something I measured. There are just these noticeable lags before the sigmoidal animation starts when, e.g. opening a folder.

It's on top of the latency inherent to the animations of sliding, wiggling, wobbling, jiggling, etc. that are throughout the interface. ~100ms on top of a ~600ms input-blocking sigmoid probably just looks like a 700ms sigmoid to people.

Transparency is obviously not the only change they added with this liquid glass thing.

And fixed the dumb sidebar design

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