I'm still too locked in to consider switching, but my eye is on the door if this keeps up.
I’m just lucky. I’m a nobody that has nothing to do so I can easily switch over to android.
settings -> accessibility -> display and text size ->
reduce transparency ON
increase contrast ON
differentiate without color ON
That makes Liquid Glass marginally usable for me. Without those settings, I’d be doomed. What a horrifically bad design.
Not to mention the overly sympathetic headline.
I clearly remember the release of iOS7 (or maybe I'm mistaken) with its flat design in the summer of 2013. Users accustomed to the skeuomorphic style for years initially felt this change was terrible. However, within two months, people adapted to the change, and other companies' design teams were quickly following suit.
But this time is different. Even though Liquid Glass has been around for quite some time, looking at the screen on my Mac still makes me feeling unacceptable.
Even stuff that uses a more "clear" material now is a bigger obstruction of the content below it than the old translucent gray versions were. The huge play/pause blob over videos looks like a transparent material, but you can't see a goddamn thing through it anymore because they turned it into a crazy lens. For all the talk of the new UI getting out of the way of content, it really is a big shiny attention grabbing blob that blocks your content. You can get a hint of what colors are underneath it, and it's shiny.
The trend in Apple's design for years feels like it's been making things look pretty in screenshots, but less functional and worse to use.
Another recent fuckup is the Apple Watch's redesign where they traded scrolling lists of cards for full screen slideshows, because you wouldn't want to see what's coming or what you've scrolled past. You used to have more than one item in view at a time, and it was a hell of a lot easier to stop scrolling at the exact right spot instead of blowing past the thing you wanted to get to.
Also bad, the System Preferences redesign. The rearrangement of that wouldn't be as bad if the search bar could reliably find and take me to all of the settings, but it can't.
If they put someone in charge who prioritizes usability again, I don't think this is much of a loss for Apple. Heck, maybe he'll bring his design priorities to Meta and help Apple make a comeback with whatever their smart glasses / AR play is.
Really great time for an UI change, with governments banning the thing. If they want people to go to the effort of using a VPN to access meta, they should make it better, not worse.
The real news is that he is being replaced with Steve Lemay, one of the most OG interaction designers at Apple.
Not someone with a marketing or packaging design background; someone who sweats over pixels and knows what "discoverability" and "affordance" and "feedback" and all those dirty human factors words mean.
He should have stayed at least two years to make sure everything was complete. Yet Alan Dye walked away and left chaos behind. In Eastern culture, this is considered irresponsible. Polite congratulatory messages can’t cover that up. He even quoted a Steve Jobs line without understanding what “It turns out pretty good” really means.
SoftTalker•52m ago