The more time I spend with Liquid Glass, the more I don't understand Alan Dye's and the design team's obsession with minimizing UI chrome and "prioritizing content" instead.
With collapsed tab bars in iOS 26, it now takes me two taps to switch between Library and Music.
Is that…better? The animations are gorgeous, sure. But does it actually *work* better? 🤔
Joe Fabisevich
in reply to Federico Viticci • • •Federico Viticci
in reply to Federico Viticci • • •I mean, you know me, I'm not the kind of person who hates change. I love to switch between systems, try new stuff, and be on the bleeding edge of tech.
But things have to be an improvement, and most of Liquid Glass feels like a sidestep with beautiful animations, a great physics engine, and worse usability than before.
We'll see what happens I guess!
Keir
in reply to Federico Viticci • • •Primal Anomaly
in reply to Federico Viticci • • •Machiel
in reply to Federico Viticci • • •Marina Epelman
in reply to Federico Viticci • • •MarkV
in reply to Federico Viticci • • •Federico Viticci
in reply to Federico Viticci • • •Like, let's be honest: does this look good? Is it readable?
The animations are fantastic. The glass effect is a marvel of engineering.
But does it work well?
SB62
in reply to Federico Viticci • • •Christian Lehrer
in reply to Federico Viticci • • •Jeremy Gonis
in reply to Federico Viticci • • •Machiel
in reply to Federico Viticci • • •Ged Maheux
in reply to Federico Viticci • • •Federico Viticci
in reply to Ged Maheux • • •Nic Goodman
in reply to Federico Viticci • • •Keir
in reply to Federico Viticci • • •Craig Grannell
in reply to Federico Viticci • • •Mark Dreger
in reply to Federico Viticci • • •Craig Grannell
in reply to Federico Viticci • • •Those animations are fantastic only if they don’t make you sick. Even now, *13 years* after I wrote about vestibular issues for The Guardian, this stuff still isn’t baked in. Instead, it’s a case of trying to convince Apple to fix things during the beta run and, just as often, begging them to sort it within a few months of September.
For a company that claims to care about accessibility, the 26 systems are a disaster right now. Even when accessibility settings are turned on.
Maxél
in reply to Federico Viticci • • •I just want the cool liquid movements and flow between actions and apps but with legibility. I’m happy for them to switch things up but this is tough.
What would Liquid Glass look like under someone else as design lead I wonder?
Michael Bishop
in reply to Federico Viticci • • •Jérôme
in reply to Federico Viticci • • •Greg Kaplan
in reply to Federico Viticci • • •jaredrfrancis
in reply to Federico Viticci • • •Matthias Hühne
in reply to Federico Viticci • • •Ricky Witherspoon
in reply to Federico Viticci • • •Lori Olson
in reply to Federico Viticci • • •DHa
in reply to Federico Viticci • • •Chris Armstrong
in reply to Federico Viticci • • •Jacobo Vidal
in reply to Federico Viticci • • •Brick Duck
in reply to Federico Viticci • • •max oakland
in reply to Federico Viticci • • •Collin Donnell
in reply to Federico Viticci • • •Tito Ciuro
in reply to Federico Viticci • • •Martin Du4
in reply to Federico Viticci • • •Ben Kirton
in reply to Federico Viticci • • •best I can tell, transparent UI exists only in movies, and only so we can see the actors faces through the screens.
I’m not sure why else you would want all that stuff behind it making your “content” unreadable.
dtrain
in reply to Federico Viticci • • •gkrnours
in reply to Federico Viticci • • •Wavebeem on cohost made this recreation of vista in pure css. I guess the frosted glass effect is both easier on the hardware and improve readability. The two other point that jump to me are the text on the frosted glass is color + softoutline so it's readable on dark and light background and the main content isn't displayed on semi translarent panel
dabblet.com
dabblet.compaladintom
in reply to Federico Viticci • • •Federico Viticci reshared this.
fatlazycat
in reply to Federico Viticci • • •BenRiceM
in reply to Federico Viticci • • •try doing it while the view is still scrolling 😛
(Though you can drag out from the collapsed tab button to change tabs in one gesture)
Bastian
in reply to Federico Viticci • • •I think the general paradigm they are moving towards is your OS learning from your usage and it knowing what you wanted to click on and just surfacing that. One already current example I can think of is my night time routine: When I open Audible at home around some time at night - a lot of time it’s already connected to the HomePod in my bedroom.
I could imagine they are aiming for more experiences like that.
softmaus
in reply to Federico Viticci • • •Yury Molodtsov
in reply to Federico Viticci • • •Gracjan Nowak
in reply to Federico Viticci • • •Federico Viticci
in reply to Gracjan Nowak • • •Gracjan Nowak
in reply to Federico Viticci • • •Fabien
in reply to Federico Viticci • • •Actually there it's even worse. Tapping select photo or video, tapping again doesn't do anything, but LONG PRESSING on an already selected control reveals the further modes. Madness.
Kay
in reply to Federico Viticci • • •Liquid glass leaves developers the freedom to collapse tabbars when they feel that navigation isn’t the most common or important action on the screen. But it also allows them to keep navigation visible where that’s not the case. The AppStore never collapses its Tabbar, for example.
It just so happens that the Apple Music developers chose poorly. I wouldn’t blame Liquid Glass for this though.
dimsumthinking
in reply to Federico Viticci • • •Mario Guzmán
in reply to Federico Viticci • • •carlyn
in reply to Federico Viticci • • •Frederik Riedel 🐻❄️
in reply to Federico Viticci • • •Jeff Atwood
in reply to Federico Viticci • • •Aaron M
in reply to Federico Viticci • • •Matt Bonney
in reply to Federico Viticci • • •grmon
in reply to Federico Viticci • • •Pierre
in reply to Federico Viticci • • •Kevin Wammer | cliophate
in reply to Federico Viticci • • •Janne Ojaniemi
in reply to Federico Viticci • • •Kaya Thomas
in reply to Federico Viticci • • •Explore navigation design for iOS - WWDC22 - Videos - Apple Developer
Apple DeveloperFederico Viticci reshared this.
blazr
in reply to Federico Viticci • • •...we should all have faith... the new apple glasses will give us all hyper-retina-eagle-eye vision... the moment it hits the market. until then... well buy some decent lupe to read the signal from the noise of this.
in some way it's a sign for too much computational horespower in our pockets, if we can waste this much GPU cycles to stuff like frosted glass.
how about instead improving the "mark some text" function in any textview? that needs sone real improvement.
Viral Obscurity
in reply to Federico Viticci • • •that's the apple mindset. Form over function
They are a fashion brand more than a technology brand
I used to own iphones and macs but moved away when it all started becoming less intuitive and a battle to use the devices the way I wanted
As long as you have people obsessed with "ooo shiny" apple will continue on this road of pretty but unusable design
blazr
in reply to Federico Viticci • • •...also, i am tired of this kind of UI frenzy.
i posted what i had to post on the iOS 6-2-iOS 7 transition already:
thetawelle.de/?p=2279
most of this is still true. maybe lets try the other direction sooner than later and have less of a distraction in iOS 27... 🤣
iOS 7 – The Emperor’s New Clothes – thetawelle
www.thetawelle.dematthewpoplin
in reply to Federico Viticci • • •Kᑐᑌᑐᕮ
in reply to Federico Viticci • • •Sebastian Arcq
in reply to Federico Viticci • • •Nils
in reply to Federico Viticci • • •DeltaWye
in reply to Federico Viticci • • •Benjamin Gibbs
in reply to Federico Viticci • • •Rob
in reply to Federico Viticci • • •Max Gregroom
in reply to Federico Viticci • • •By making it harder for you to choose what you want to do, they make it more likely that you’ll go along with what *they* want you to do.
Also, none of them understand human-computer interface design. At all.
Matt Godden
in reply to Federico Viticci • • •The Animal and the Machine
in reply to Federico Viticci • • •@marcoarment
It seems to be denoising through detooling.
Not smart when the point is ‘there is an app for that’. The whole phone is a tool. Not a TV. We carry our phones, not our telly.
Jonathan Hendry
in reply to Federico Viticci • • •Vidit Bhargava
in reply to Federico Viticci • • •it’s a noble idea that would work better if some of the long standing app paradigms were also questioned.
Let content take focus with only the actions that are necessary showing up, sure, but how do we build a UI that dynamically adjusts to the necessary actions?
The current paradigms have you stick them to the UI statically and have no way of being adaptive and consistent at the same time.