It’s like when safe area insets appeared in iOS 11: it wasn’t clear why you needed them until the iPhone X came along with a notch and a home indicator. And then it changed everything.

There has also been an emphasis on “concentricity”. It’s an impossible thing to achieve and an easy target for ridicule. But it’s another case where Apple wants to take control of the UI elements that intersect with the physical hardware. All of this makes me think that Apple is close to introducing devices where the screen disappears seamlessly into the physical edge. Something where flexible OLED blurs the distinction between pixels and bezel. A new “wraparound” screen with safe area insets on the vertical edges of the device, just like we saw with the horizontal edges on iPhone X.

Other challenges, like infusing your own branding into an app with clear buttons will be easier to reason about once the reality of the hardware drops. Until then, stay away from the edges and wait for Apple to reveal the real reason for Liquid Glass.

I seriously dislike the experience of using a Mac with Liquid Glass. The UI has become the star, but the drunken star, blurry, illegible, and physically unstable. It makes making things way more of a struggle than it used to be. We had pretty good Mac UI, but Apple took the bad parts of it — the translucency and blurriness already there — and dialed it way up and called it content-centric. But it seems to me the opposite. Liquid Glass is Liquid-Glass-centric.

this is not the first time we’re going through a rough patch with Apple. I think of them as seasons — we had, for instance, terrible-keyboard season not so long ago. We were wondering if Apple would just stop making Macs altogether. But then that passed and we even got these wonderful Apple Silicon machines. Seasons end.

In a way, one could say Liquid Glass is like a new version of Aqua. It has reflective properties reminiscent of that. One could also say it’s an evolution of whatever iOS 7 was, leaning into the frosted panels and bright accent colors. But whatever Liquid Glass seems to be, it isn’t what many of us were hoping for.

I am exhausted from hearing that Steve Jobs has been apparently rolling in his grave at the sole discretion of whoever didn’t have their expectations of Apple met. Instead of remarking that he would be displeased, maybe it’s better to mark his death as a point in time when things would invariably shift.

It is macOS that is the backbone of the company. Despite years of all the wishing and promising that another device will one day capture the market computers have a hold on, my Mac is still the only device that can make something for all those other devices. In that alone, it feels like Mac should be the one leading everything else. Not following behind. Yet, it’s the visual style from iOS and now visionOS that are dictating the visual style of macOS. It does not feel like a breath of fresh air as much as another nail in the coffin.

Liquid Glass and the general implementation of it will not meaningfully change during the beta phase of the “26” release cycle. They’re not going to backtrack. And they’re not going to address long-standing concerns all of a sudden. The general adoption of this may test the patience of an already weary community of developers who feel tired of toiling away on trivial changes such as this. As I said, I don’t think there is any meaningful benefit to it, and designers and developers may themselves feel that as they implement it.

Over the years, it feels harder and harder to relate with the general atmosphere Apple surrounds itself in. It wasn’t always this pristine. Everyone who presented wasn’t always so stylish. Not everyone used to talk like this. What is that, by the way? Why does everyone sound like a voice assistant?

Apple didn’t used to craft a narrative around every decision in order to justify it. I feel like their presentations are burdened by reason and rationale, and their individual WWDC sessions feel increasingly pretentious like each of them are gods coming down to share their wisdom with us plebs.

It’d be nice if they were knocked off their pedestal, because I think they’re better when they’re trying to outdo someone else rather than themselves.

I’m pretty sure that if you were to interview one of the designers at Apple responsible for this icon devolution, they would say something about reducing icons to their essence. To me, this looks more like squeezing all life out of them. Icons in Mac OS X used to be inventive, well crafted, distinctive, with a touch of fun and personality. Mac OS X’s user interface was sober, utilitarian, intuitive, peppered by descriptive icons that made the user experience fun without signalling ‘this is a kid’s toy’.

Not only is this the recipe for blandness, it’s also borderline contradictory. Like, Make a unique dish using a minimal number of simple ingredients. While it’s possible to make a few different dishes using just two or three things, you touch the ceiling of uniqueness and variety pretty damn soon.

The language in the current guidelines for app icons isn’t much different. It also reflects Apple’s current philosophy of ‘keeping it simple’ which, out of context, could be valid design advice — you’re designing icons with small-ish dimensions, not full-page detailed illustrations for a book, so striving for simplicity isn’t a bad thing. And yet — and I might be wrong here — I keep reading between the lines and feel that these guidelines are more concerned with ensuring that developers maintain the same level of blandness and unimaginativeness of Apple’s own redesigned app icons: