[captainmuon]

We have these brilliant high resolution displays, and these powerful, energy efficient GPUs that are always running and compositing frames like a game engine 120 times a second.

It's about time we start seeing more physicality in our user interfaces!

We can make things look convincingly like glass, or metal, or even materials that don't exist in reality. One reason for flat design is because it was the lowest common denominator and easy for devs to implement. If Apple makes it easy to implement this liquid glass stuff - Rectangle().background(.glass) or something - then it's going to be really successful.

[cosmotic]

Just because we can doesn't mean we should. Using this new design language as an example, things are now harder to read, identify, and understand. That's a huge loss to productivity and ease of use.

[nlarew]

> things are now harder to read, identify, and understand

What makes you think that? Do you have a specific example from the keynote in mind?

There must be something since you've never actually used this design system yourself. Or is this just your pre-judgement?

[zerocrates]

Even in their animations on this page there are things where the user scrolls the interface and the part under one of these glass buttons looks more exaggerated and draws the eye in an unpleasant way, and depending on where they land with it, the text on the button isn't particularly readable.

[yuehhangalt]

In the keynote, they showed an app, I think it was Messages, where the UI at the bottom was illegible because it was translucent and the background image and text were showing through too much. There are other examples that I was able to find were legibility was negatively impacted.

[Prickle]

Just the short demo videos on their website.

Their example of the music app. You have a translucent bar showing the currently playing music app.

It gets harder to read when it overlaps with the background music album covers. I can very easily see a situation where you need to scroll to an empty bit, just to be able to read what it is actually playing.

Now, imagine you have a visual impairment. It's already hard to read with mostly normal eyes. This will be impossible for anyone with bad vision, probably even worse if colorblind.

It is genuinely unreadable, and a mess visually.

[the_other]

> What makes you think that? Do you have a specific example from the keynote in mind?

Almost every button and menu they showed was harder for me to read than the ones on my current generation Apple gear. The icons on buttons are indistinct, the text is hard to read. The buttons themselves seem to sink into the content "below" making both the buttons and the content hard to see.

Some examples:

- the tabs at the bottom left of the photos app

- the address bar in Safari (what a complete mess... you can't see the content beneath because the address bar blurs it, but you also can't read the address bar because the glass effect destroys contrast

- in the colourless "translucent" colour way, all the icons look the same

- the (admittedly cute) "squish" effect when tapping menus and some of the buttons looked like it would slow down all interactions

- the highlights and light/colour bending effects are utterly distracting, catching your eye when you really want to be skimming the content or overview to orient yourself in the UI

True, I've not used it... but I was watching along with the launch video with rapt Apple fan-boi attention and I was surprised by how uncomfortable the new UI seemed to be. I've never felt that before.

This new design style is certainly "fun", but it looks like it'll get in the way of fast use of the tools.

I want my OS to promote clarity of affordances, and then to recede away from my attention so I can get on with doing what I was trying to do. This new design style looks like it's trying to hold on to my attention all the time I'm using the devices. (Admittedly today's keynote was an ad for the new design, so that sense of attention grabbing was hopefully accentuated over day to day use... but I'm skeptical.)

[cosmotic]

Looking at Apple's curated headline hero image on https://www.apple.com/os/ios/

Every single example of the five are hard to read, especially the second.

At least half of the example screenshots and videos I've seen in the keynote and on various Apple website pages are hard to read. The lense effects, only visible in the animations/videos, are technically impressive, visually stimulating, but terrible from a utilitarian perspective (unless you consider convincing people to buy iPhones using attractive visuals in a cinematic sort of way but not actually trying to use the devices as some sort of utility to Apple).

[CactusRocket]

See this from another comment in the thread https://imgur.com/a/6ZTCStC

[Micrococonut]

Look at the notifications in the middle of the landing page for iOS 17. https://www.apple.com/os/ios/ It is immediately awful. I hadn't even seen the keynote yet when I went to apple.com to see what had been announced and my very first thought was "Oh no"

[fortyseven]

There's literally dozens of examples being presented. Are you doing this on purpose to provoke a response?

[x0xrx]

I gotta be honest, I don’t find it particularly hard to read. I like how it makes it feel like there is “depth” to the screen, and when I focus on the top layer (eg Notification Center) the background falls away.

I can personally see how others would find it hard to read, just really doesn’t bother me. I can imagine being unconvinced that anyone really finds it to be that bad, and thinking it’s just HN contrarians being annoying, as usual.

[avidphantasm]

Reminds me of when they added more transparency to the UI around Mac OS X 10.9 where they argued that it "helps you focus on what's important". Huh? By showing me what's behind what I'm trying to look at? The first thing I do when I setup a new machine is to go to accessibility settings and turn on "reduce transparency". Hoping there is a way to do something similar with this.

[keyringlight]

Similar with how MS brought 'glass' into their Aero theme for vista or win7. There was exactly no benefit to being able to see some blurry version of the background window if I'm trying to read the foreground. I don't think a version that lets background detail through clearly will do any better outside of flashy demos.

[paulcole]

> That's a huge loss to productivity and ease of use

Have you used it yet?

[cosmotic]

I have looked at the screenshots and videos. I can tell from those that text is hard to read and icons are hard to differentiate. iOS has a long history of these gaffes.

[paulcole]

Well at least you didn't come into it with any bias.

[oneeyedpigeon]

What makes you think this opinion is biased? They clearly and concisely explain the problem. Can you address it?

[paulcole]

I’ll try to address this:

> That's a huge loss to productivity and ease of use

They haven’t used it and haven’t lost any productivity because of it (outside of the time they’ve spent complaining about it online).

[dwayne_dibley]

Agreed. That should be the focus of any user interface.

[kergonath]

> Using this new design language as an example, things are now harder to read, identify, and understand

Wait until we have some real feedback to complain, at least.

[beAbU]

Microsoft did glass with windows 7, maybe even vista. Can't remember.

Kinda old hat at this point tbh.

And just because we have all this powerful hardware, does not mean we need to waste it on physically accurate glass surfaces on UIs.

If this rolls out to all iDevices, how much energy (in other words CO2) will be expended worldwide on rendering things like this?

[nottorp]

> that are always running and compositing frames like a game engine 120 times a second

Which is complete idiocy if you ask me. Why update a static screen at 120 fps? Are our batteries too large?

[satvikpendem]

> Why update a static screen at 120 fps?

Good thing it doesn't do that then, variable refresh rate displays that go down to 1 Hz are fairly standard now on phones as well as other displays.

[Pulcinella]

Even before that, mobile UI frameworks are retained mode GUIs, not immediate. They aren't drawing to a blank framebuffer 120 times a second if they don't have to. Redraws only happen when something changes (e.g. "Dirty" rects).

[tuetuopay]

Oh even immediate UI framework don't paint non-stop. If the UI has not been interacted with, or if there are no animations/gifs, it has no blimey reason to repaint, and it will not. It will repaint the whole screen, of course, but that's already a win.

[kllrnohj]

They don't. GPU rendering only happens when something changes. Even composition only happens when something changes thanks to panel self refresh (this is independent of the more recent VRR that also lowers refresh rate when idle, this is a relatively small savings compared to the other two)

[tsimionescu]

By this token, why not add particle systems and fancy explosions to every button click? Why stick to squares or rounded squares etc, when you can use voxel shading to generate complex n-gons with thousands of edges?

The problem with all this - and 'liquid glass' as well - is that far from adding anything to the experience, they take away from it. They muddy and visually complicate what should be a visually clear and simple interface, one that gets out of your way as much as possible while allowing you to reach what you really care about - the content in your apps.

[pzo]

only if each iOS app experience wasn't worse with each release. SwiftUI apps feels much slower than UIKit. My iPhone 13 experience with latest iOS overall feels very sluggish to old iPhones. This design feels not bringing much benefits but only drawbacks - more energy wasted, slower performance on older iPhones (apple want you buy new phone) and IMHO is just worse UX.

[satvikpendem]

> It's about time we start seeing more physicality in our user interfaces!

It's actually quite resource intensive to have translucency, in many implementations across the web and mobile.

[pzo]

apple need to persuade people somehow to buy new iphone.

[snarf21]

Highly dynamic frames makes sense for an immersive game. It doesn't make sense when I'm trying to read my email or what the name of the song that is currently playing is.

[noosphr]

>It's about time we start seeing more physicality in our user interfaces!

I'm not sure if this is a joke or not.

We had that, it was called skeuomorphism: https://miro.medium.com/v2/da:true/resize:fit:1200/0*6DRkHp3...

Then we got rid of it because it looked too 2010 now we are bringing it back because flat looks too 2020.

[kylehotchkiss]

so what you're saying is that we need to resurrect skeuomorphism?

[gaze]

I get the sense that the Scandinavian minimalism thing has worn too heavy on everyone and now we're taking a collective step back to explore things that are a bit more fun and maximalist. So yeah, maybe a little more skeuomorphism but done differently? That was a fun era!

[mrweasel]

> I get the sense that the Scandinavian minimalism thing has worn too heavy on everyone

As a Scandinavian: I don't feel like we tried that since Braun. Apple has tried to mimic a Scandinavian sort of minimalism, but only in appearance. The iPhone UI is way to busy and is to hard to navigate for me to classify it as minimalism.

[LoganDark]

Skeuomorphism in the sense of exactly mimicking existing physical interfaces probably mostly not, but skeuomorphism in the sense of using physically-inspired visual effects to add depth to a virtual interface I think so for sure. Liquid glass is so damn pretty.

[keyringlight]

I think modern skeuomorphism must be in a weird spot compared to a few decades ago. Right now our real world devices designers would be inspired are less likely to have physical controls, so the virtual versions are pulling from a more distant original source that's already been through a few degrees of separation. If the original industrial design that computer interface graphics was pulling from was the rise of industrial and consumer electronics through the 20th century (the various switches, dials, indicators, tuning knobs, etc), what new physical design is there to inspire that isn't feeding on itself.

[wartijn_]

I would be happy with that. After years of using iOS with the current design it still takes me a few moments before I’ve found the Photos app with its meaningless icon that looks way too much like some other icons.

[lukebuehler]

yes, I think this is exactly what's happening.

[Findecanor]

From one point of view, this design language is a type of skeuomorphism, by it mimicking pieces of rounded glass laid on top of one-other.

The problem with skeuomorphism in iOS' first design language was that resemblance to real-world objects was taken too far — at the expense of legibility. Users attributed affordances to virtual objects that they didn't have.

The problem with iOS 7's flatter interface was that the anti-skeumorphism went too far in the other direction, again at the expense of legibility. Users couldn't see what controls were supposed to do.

... And now the pendulum has swung back in the other direction, again too far, and missed the goal.

[WillieCubed]

This is the Jevons paradox [1] in full display here. It's much easier to take advantage of hardware to run software at 120 FPS, so why not?

And I agree about liquid glass being successful iff they make the developer tooling for this as easy as additional modifiers to components, or even the default for SwiftUI.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

[pcurve]

I don't mind physicality, but not glass. Please.

There are reasons why most controls are NOT made of glass in real life.

[9dev]

There are myriads of glass controls around you, just pay attention to it. From car interiors to elevator buttons, it's there.

Glas actually makes sense, given its an extension of the device's hull.

[Gigachad]

Probably the main reason is because they have ugly electronics behind them instead of pretty dynamic colors.

[RollingRo11]

I mean probably because they would break, no? I think glass-looking buttons are great (think Sony's Dualsense controller, Xbox controllers, tbh many controllers have glass-ish buttons)

I think it's a nice aesthetic. It obviously needs some tuning (contrast, transparency, etc.), but the idea is nice! I've installed the beta, and it isn't as bad as it looks, just takes some getting used to.

I also theorize this may be some grand transition phase to prepare everyone for the visionOS future apple wants to happen, but that could just be a stretch.

[vijucat]

> One reason for flat design is because it was the lowest common denominator and easy for devs to implement.

The 3D buttons in Windows 98 (Start button, for example) must have be harder to develop due to the animation involved. Yet, that was perfectly fine on hardware much older than those on which flat UIs were developed. I think you are missing the main point, which is that designers maul designs every season exactly like in the fashion industry due to merely being employed to do so and feeling a need to produce something new all the time (, which is sub-optimal for the humans who have to bear the UX consequences, to say the least).

https://copy.sh/v86/?profile=windows98