Liquid Glass can look elegant, particularly on the iPhone, but iOS wasn’t unattractive before. More importantly, I haven’t yet felt that Liquid Glass’s vaunted transparency does anything to make me more productive. Despite Dye’s departure (which appears to have been a surprise to upper management), Apple is unlikely to reverse course on Liquid Glass. We can hope that Dye’s successor focuses more on enhancing functionality to better align with the Steve Jobs quote that Apple badly misused when introducing Liquid Glass: “Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”
I hope that means we see a return to the ideas that made Apple software great in years gone by. A stronger emphasis on user experience, an obsession over small details, and a renewed passion for interfaces and controls. An appreciation of the foundational ideas that helped Apple’s products reach the pinnacle of software design.
I actually really like how Liquid Glass came out on iOS, although it does need some tweaks to be better from a usability standpoint. I hate it on my Mac and would gladly go back to the Leopard through Mavericks era if I could—there’s so much that feels unpredictable and cluttered, despite every marketing blurb being about clarity and focusing on content.
It’s obviously insanely hard to overhaul a UI – let alone across multiple major operating systems – but I’m going to go ahead an guess that Liquid Glass will transform to be both less liquid-y and less glass-y starting in relative short order.
I don’t expect any big changes because I don’t think he or Apple are looking at this as an opportunity to undo Jony and Alan’s influence on the company, but I do sincerely think this will all feel better with Lemay’s leadership.
I like a lot of things about Liquid Glass on iOS and iPadOS, but there are some horsey interface elements that I’d rather see gone for good. The Mac might be the least impacted of those three platforms, but it’s my favorite place to be and necessary for me to get things done, and I generally see it as, at best, as livable, and in some cases a serious regression. And OmniOutliner 6’s beta? Yuck. I’m hoping that the swole interface elements shrink and sharpen.
