Apple's New Design Language is Liquid Glass (theverge.com) 68
Apple today introduced Liquid Glass, a new design language that brings transparency and glass shine effects across macOS, iPadOS, iOS, and its other software platforms. Alan Dye, Apple's VP of human interface, described the update as the company's "broadest design update, ever" and "the first time we're introducing a universal design across our platforms."
The design overhaul adds glass-like elements throughout iOS 26, including glass edges that appear when users swipe up on the lock screen and similar transparent effects across system interfaces. The changes represent Apple's most significant departure from the iOS 7 design philosophy that has shaped the mobile operating system for over a decade since 2013, when Apple moved away from skeuomorphism. App developers will need to adjust their applications to accommodate the new visual language.
The design overhaul adds glass-like elements throughout iOS 26, including glass edges that appear when users swipe up on the lock screen and similar transparent effects across system interfaces. The changes represent Apple's most significant departure from the iOS 7 design philosophy that has shaped the mobile operating system for over a decade since 2013, when Apple moved away from skeuomorphism. App developers will need to adjust their applications to accommodate the new visual language.
Apple invented Aero (Score:5, Funny)
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Truly they are completely out of ideas.
That's been stated for a decade but Apple copying the Windows Look&Feel is coming full circle with nothing left to defend.
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Nothing left to defend? Have you met SuperKendall?
And Apple doesn't copy everything from Microsoft, for example Apple won't let you turn the shit off.
Aero cam 6 years after Apple's Aqua (Score:2)
Truly they are completely out of ideas. That's been stated for a decade but Apple copying the Windows Look&Feel is coming full circle with nothing left to defend.
Apple is returning to its Aqua (2000) look and feel, which Windows Vista (2006) copied.
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I wonder if they will invent "DreamScene" next
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More blending. Maybe Apple's next inspiration will be the Disaster Area stunt ship [fandom.com]?
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Actually Linux had these 3d accelerated UI effects first... without any catchy name. Apple and M$ still don't have the cool desktop sphere/smoke/and wobbly rubber elements of it.
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Since you're that young, I suggest looking at early noughties Apple Aqua UI stuff. Linux didn't even have a compositioning graphics system back then, and still doesn't really, it's mostly stuck in its 1980s technology of X11 limitations, and "standards". Standards don't change, but in particular dead standards like that don't change either, being stuck in the past's technological limitations. Can you even change resolutions on the fly yet?
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I'll give you Aqua being first but compiz was a thing by the mid aughts and the effects are better. While you are right that just makes this announcement from Apple even more lame, they are reinventing themselves... do you know the difference between water elements and glass ones? NOTHING, they are both just transparent/translucent elements.
"it's mostly stuck in its 1980s technology of X11 limitations, and "standards""
Tell me you haven't seen a linux desktop in the last 20yrs without telling me you haven't
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compositioning graphics system back then, and still doesn't really, it's mostly stuck in its 1980s technology of X11 limitations
Don't listen to the Wayland developers, they are ignoramuses.
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I stand corrected, linux had them by the mid aughts and Apple themselves had Aqua, which had the same effects they are claiming to be newly releasing here but then they called it 'water.'
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Aero copied Apple's Aqua (Score:2)
"It's all about adding transparency" (Score:2)
Hmm... where have I heard that before?
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It needs to be transparent, because otherwise you'll have a UI you can see, and we can't have that!
Re: "It's all about adding transparency" (Score:2)
Fluxbox, 2001.
Looks nice (Score:2)
But then it did in the early 2000s. Never did understand why we moved away from the translucency stuff, it always looked spectacular to me.
Re: Looks nice (Score:3)
Translucency allows other apps to mess with the legibility of your app. Imagine trying to ready text on a translucent button that is peeking through to something animated and very visually busy. Not great.
But designers are not known for learning from past mistakes...
Re: Looks nice (Score:2)
"Imagine trying to ready text on a translucent button that is peeking through to something animated and very visually busy. Not great."
That's a problem with transparency, not translucency. With enough frosting, whatever lies beneath is mostly filtered out.
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With enough frosting, whatever lies beneath is mostly filtered out.
Bakers use the same treatment for less-than-satisfactory cakes.
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Unless they're doing temporal frosting, it's going to be an issue. No designer in their right mind would design text with an ever-changing background color.
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It was never a problem in practice because foreground glass was usually heavily shaded, especially if it was more important to see what was on top than what was underneath - which was usually always.
Usually a button was translucent and sat on a relatively sold background (say the requester.) So there was never any risk of messing anything up.
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But designers are not known for learning from past mistakes...
Designers are not known for being able to resist purposely repeating past mistakes. FTFY.
Re:Looks nice (Score:4, Insightful)
You seriously think the screenshots in the article look spectacular? You must have young eyes still. To me it looks like a blurry low-contrast grey-white mess. Wonder what their dark mode looks like.
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It looks clean, clear, professional, and non-distracting. Exactly what a UI should look like, and exactly the opposite of what we've seen since they started to deprecate the translucent UIs over the last decade and a half.
Now that everything has Metal ... (Score:2)
But then it did in the early 2000s. Never did understand why we moved away from the translucency stuff, it always looked spectacular to me.
Depending on the GPU there might be a performance hit.
Its safer to do now with everything supported having a capable version of a Metal GPU.
Have we all forgotten Aqua? (Score:3)
I think jobs famously quipped, I want people to want to lick it.
No, but now we have Metal (Score:2)
Licking can remove the anti glare coating ... (Score:2)
I think jobs famously quipped, I want people to want to lick it.
That removes the anti glare coating on the display. :-)
Re: Have we all forgotten Aqua? (Score:2)
I'm reminded of movies (Score:2)
Where people do serious planning using a whiteboard market on the office hallway window. We've all done that at some point right? Briefly? Until you realise when you do so you can't read shit and then go back to putting your text on a plain background?
Windows Vista (Score:3)
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So essentially, mac has become a rip-off of windows ripping off mac...
We've made more powerful machines (Score:4, Insightful)
so let's use up those extra CPU cycles and update the UI to slow everything down again.
You're welcome!
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so let's use up those extra CPU cycles and update the UI to slow everything down again.
You're welcome!
They will probably use the GPU to do a lot of the work, so the SoC may just get a little warmer with the additional workload, (and reduce battery life).
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That's what they did in the past as well. They never were CPU-bound. Regardless, it was wasteful and slowed down when the GPU got more taxed by all that BS, and then games and 3D apps ran slower as well, just from running UI compositioning effects in dormant apps in the background.
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so let's use up those extra CPU cycles and update the UI to slow everything down again.
UI elements have used hardware acceleration since the days of Windows XP and got fancy with Vista. Even the original iPhone had a fully hardware accellerated UI. Applying a different shader doesn't make something necessarily more complex or slower, it just makes it different. I doubt this uses any more processing power than any other UI we've created in the past 18 years.
I already hate the current floating toolbars (Score:2)
Now they will be transparent too and I will hate them even more.
Lemme guess (Score:2)
Lemme guess, the next iteration of design will be focused on tiling colored boxes, like Windows 10? Such innovation.
skeumorphism? (Score:5, Informative)
For those that also didn't know what skeumorphism is, via wikipedia:
a derivative object that retains ornamental design cues (attributes) from structures that were necessary in the original.[3] Skeuomorphs are typically used to make something new feel familiar in an effort to speed understanding and acclimation. They employ elements that, while essential to the original object, serve no pragmatic purpose in the new system, except for identification. Examples include pottery embellished with imitation rivets reminiscent of similar pots made of metal and a software calendar that imitates the appearance of binding on a paper desk calendar.
So, you know, familiarity.
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skeumorphism is when Jonny Ive took a big hairy shit on your screen, and is still getting paid for it.
I want my old old 3D GUI (Score:5, Insightful)
I want entry boxes you can type in to be sunk.
I don't want everything flat so you have know idea where you can type and where you can click.
Is that too much to ask ? Cos we had it in X-Windows in the 1980s FFS
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1000x ^^This
Put Norton Desktop 3 on Windows 3 and you have the most immediately understandable and usable general UI ever done. Things like forms in HTML were much better and easier to use with those old Windows 3.x common controls as well.
That environment took a lot of ideas from a lot of places but combined it all in a thoughtful way. A big part of that was strong visual indicators that told you what you could interact with and immediately communicated 'how'. There is nothing sensible and contemporary
Re: I want my old old 3D GUI (Score:2)
"Put Norton Desktop 3 on Windows 3 and you have the most immediately understandable and usable general UI ever done."
Yes, because it was a successful copy of what was going into Unix at the time. Windows 3's interface and Motif grew from the same root.
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I would say it was considerably better (just the interface not the system under it) than its contemporaries like CDE. Again not saying any of it was terribly original or a lot of those ideas did not start in software like Sun View, but the implementation looked better and felt better.
A lot of people think the opposite is true, but I firmly believe this has mostly to do with they tended to encounter Windows for Workgroups and NDW on PCs with video that was 800x600 and often 640x480 displays, while the syste
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Windows 3's interface and Motif grew from the same root.
Yes, that root is called NeXTSTEP, aka. everything Apple since they bought that and build everything they have on top of it.
I want underlined letters on buttons or labels (Score:2)
I want underlined letters on buttons or labels so that I can navigate and activate GUI elements by keyboard without having to use the mouse. Some people don't have the same range of motion so this helps with accessibility, some power users want to input things quickly without having to use the mouse, and some want to make macros that repeat keystrokes to automate certain things easily.
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Another couple:
- Right click menus for *everything*.
- It is a help not a hindrance if there is more than one way to access some given functionality. The same thing can be triggered from a dedicated Button, a Right click menu, or from the top menu bar, or elseways. Do *not* remove these duplicate methods.
Simplicity got lost, Apple, can we have it back? (Score:1)
When I look at something, I don't want to be distracted by the things that might linger underneath, I'd like the system to support my attempt to focus.
The original Mac combined simplicity and "human-friendliness" (e.g., round corners) with a systematic UX (apart from menus, which should have been attached to app-controlled windows from the beginning instead of changing in app
"glass shine effects" (Score:2)
Microsoft will imitate this, and call it "Windex."
Not a programming language (Score:2, Redundant)
I actually RTFA and the "design language" is not a programming language at all, it's a design scheme.
Per wikipedia [wikipedia.org]:
A design language or design vocabulary is an overarching scheme or style that guides the design of a complement of products or architectural settings, creating a coherent design system for styling.
I think call it a language is bullshit but that's just me.
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The term 'design language' has been in use for decades now. It isn't "bullshit", it is just the term that is used within the industry.
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Errr no one said it was a programming language. The term "design language" has been used in the creative industries long before the invention of the computer. Infact Ngram viewer shows the phrase started gaining popularity in the 60s, and used to be really popular in the 80s, going back it was even referenced in the 1800s.
The term "language" is nothing more than a system of communication, it is completely appropriate to use this term. The only thing bullshit would be to sit here and call something bullshit
Looks like Windows 7 with transparency. (Score:2)
so lame I don't even feel like punching down (Score:2)
It's become too easy, It's just not that much fun anymore.
Enjoy your Windows Vista.
That looks terrible! (Score:2)
Great Name (Score:2)
So this UI is extremely fragile, isn't comfortable to be near, and is extremely painful to touch? Nice.
They should go back (Score:1)
Sounds scary ... (Score:2)
I am not interested to buy a new Mac at this moment now.
But without looking at a video, that sounds scary. So a new Mac end of the year sounds out of the question. You hardly ever could install an old OS on a new Mac :(
I do seriously not want another UI fuckup from Apple.
First thing you will need to know? (Score:2)
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Settings - Accessibility - Display - Reduce transparency.
At least that's where it lives now, it could move.
Windows did it (Score:2)
Window Management? (Score:2)
Any chance they can fix window management in MacOS while they're in there working on their Windows Aero clone? I have yet to met a user who's impressed by that half-broken mess.