Do you like Liquid Glass on Mac?

[svenmany]

That's a very good post. Especially the bit about poor examples being handed out. You may have seen I posted a couple of design ideas and I also didn't go right to the top with the sidebar 'glass'. In my eyes it's redundant and removed it in later designs but most people are going to try and replicate what Apple have put out like you say i.e. side bars to the top, remove the extremely useful menubar, and obscure things by having floating icons etc over the content.

I agree DEVONthink's approach is a little less grating to the eyeballs but for me my eye is still drawn to the LiquidGlass bubbles everywhere instead of the content. It's just far too distracting a material to be used for an interface. Look how much the sidebar stands out compared to anything else! Also why is the left side bar a rounded glass sheet but the right sidebar is a frosted pane? (that's on any Tahoe app not just DEVONthink).

For me the biggest mistake Apple has made is removing the menubar. I work with many windows open and many of the files are named the same apart from the last 3 or 4 digits. I work in RGB and CMYK (sometimes SPOT) so have the same files in all colour spaces. Now with the stupid unified menubar I have to keep stopping and hovering over the menubar to recall which folder I have open - often I have both. If I drop an RGB file into the CMYK workflow and not notice I'm going to have some very angry customers when 50,000 printed brochures turn up and they're all washed out. That's going to cost me a ton of money and future custom.

Of course Apple cannot account for everyone's different workflows but removing incredibly important functional aspects for the sake of prettying things up (not really) or so they match iOS is a very ill thought out.

So for me personally there's two major problems with LiquidGlass. It is making my life more difficult with regards working practices and the overall style regardless of how it functions is ugly to boot. If they used the glass elements in smarter ways they could keep the style and it look better but also return to better function.

You said "menubar" many times. I think you might have meant "titlebar".

My screenshot of DT had no content. I took a screenshot of DEVONthink with some actual content so that you can draw a conclusion:

Sometimes I don't even display the preview panel since it's so easy to open the document or do a quick look.

In both cases, I consider the prime content (what I'll want to spend the most time looking at) is the listing of files and the optional preview. I consider the right panel to be secondary content. It's almost primary content as I try to figure out which item in the list deserves a closer look. Once I zero in on a particular document, the preview panel then becomes the primary content.

I am quite interested in your view here. Now that I've shown some content, is it still the case that some LG artifacts distract you and, if so, which ones in particular? I believe distraction is a measurable thing. I've looked into eye tracking a bit and there is work being done.

What is Eye Tracking in UX?

Enhance your understanding of user behavior and optimize your website's design with eye tracking in UX research. Learn more!

www.interaction-design.org

Distraction Detection and Monitoring Using Eye Tracking in Virtual Reality

Effective learning is highly affected by attention levels. Hence, Intelligent Tutoring Systems and other technologies for learning should be able to monitor the attention levels of learners and detect distractions in real-time to improve the learning process. We...

link.springer.com

I don't know anything about the topic.

OmniOutliner's choice to make the right sidebar extend to the top, slicing through a toolbar button and making some buttons display with a different background than others affects me. It doesn't distract me when I'm looking at content. But it does distract when I go to use a button (which is very seldom). Eye tracking software would pick up on that and might be able to quantify it.

In terms of personal preference, certain minds do better when they are subtlety distracted. A developer friend of mine said he always tries to read technical specifications in coffee shops where the noise and commotion help him focus. I've read elsewhere about this effect. I just found this now...

Brain on Background Noise: Why Some People Focus Better in Chaos - Brain Health University

Discover how background noise affects concentration. Learn why some brains thrive in noisy environments and how to harness ambient sound for mental clarity and creativity.

brainhealthuniversity.com

But that is more about noise. I've never heard about visual distractions helping. Here's an article that talks about the ability to suppress visual distraction.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13506285.2025.2466134

One quote "As is clear from the above, one can learn to suppress the frequent location of a distractor." could be why, as a regular DT user, the distractors that you notice fade into the background for me.

 

[svenmany]

Oof. Those changes to OmniOutliner are brutal. Looks like a sandwich.

But I don't want to give the impression that I am not a fan of OmniOutliner. I am actually a super fan of their products (even with the LG stuff). Whenever I'm getting confused by some complex topic I open OmniOutliner to get my thoughts organized. When it gets really hard and I need to visualize, I open OmniGraffle to diagram things. I use them for simple, short-lived documents or complex ones that I've maintain and referred to for over a decade.

I've been using OmniOutliner and have just turned off translucency on my system as a whole and keep the right sidebar closed. It's a joy to use that way. It's one of the programs that gives me pleasure every time I fire it up. I've sacrificed having a transparent menubar on macOS just to use this product (and to a lesser extent Preview).

 

[TumbleDryer]

You said "menubar" many times. I think you might have meant "titlebar".

My screenshot of DT had no content. I took a screenshot of DEVONthink with some actual content so that you can draw a conclusion:

View attachment 2607115

Sometimes I don't even display the preview panel since it's so easy to open the document or do a quick look.

View attachment 2607117

In both cases, I consider the prime content (what I'll want to spend the most time looking at) is the listing of files and the optional preview. I consider the right panel to be secondary content. It's almost primary content as I try to figure out which item in the list deserves a closer look. Once I zero in on a particular document, the preview panel then becomes the primary content. This is because they are drowned out by the much busier screen.

I am quite interested in your view here. Now that I've shown some content, is it still the case that some LG artifacts distract you and, if so, which ones in particular? I believe distraction is a measurable thing. I've looked into eye tracking a bit and there is work being done.

What is Eye Tracking in UX?

Enhance your understanding of user behavior and optimize your website's design with eye tracking in UX research. Learn more!

www.interaction-design.org

Distraction Detection and Monitoring Using Eye Tracking in Virtual Reality

Effective learning is highly affected by attention levels. Hence, Intelligent Tutoring Systems and other technologies for learning should be able to monitor the attention levels of learners and detect distractions in real-time to improve the learning process. We...

link.springer.com

I don't know anything about the topic.

OmniOutliner's choice to make the right sidebar extend to the top, slicing through a toolbar button and making some buttons display with a different background than others affects me. It doesn't distract me when I'm looking at content. But it does distract when I go to use a button (which is very seldom). Eye tracking software would pick up on that and might be able to quantify it.

In terms of personal preference, certain minds do better when they are subtlety distracted. A developer friend of mine said he always tries to read technical specifications in coffee shops where the noise and commotion help him focus. I've read elsewhere about this effect. I just found this now...

Brain on Background Noise: Why Some People Focus Better in Chaos - Brain Health University

Discover how background noise affects concentration. Learn why some brains thrive in noisy environments and how to harness ambient sound for mental clarity and creativity.

brainhealthuniversity.com

But that is more about noise. I've never heard about visual distractions helping. Here's an article that talks about the ability to suppress visual distraction.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13506285.2025.2466134

One quote "As is clear from the above, one can learn to suppress the frequent location of a distractor." could be why, as a regular DT user, the distractors that you notice fade into the background for me.

Good spot about me saying 'menubar' yes I meant 'Title bar'.

With your latest screen shots because there is a lot of information and it is displayed visually balanced i.e. everything below the menu bar 'starts' at the same height there is a marked reduction in distraction from the Liquid Glass elements for me. This is because the extraneous glass edges etc all get lost within the page as a whole. Yes it's very busy but it is balanced. So for eye tracking purposes my eye is not really drawn to anything in particular.

If the left sidebar extended to the top as Apple suggests it would become distracting again as the page would be visually out of balance. It would feel 'top left heavy' if that makes sense. With my background (graphic design and typography) Im very aware of the subtleties of balance and if, like for most people, something feels off balance then it's distracting. The 'distraction' of something being off balance is drawn from the human nervous system need for safety. If something feels off balance it triggers heightened attention because it could be unsafe. Your brain treats it as a threat so to speak and brings it to your attention. I'm getting a bit deep here but a lot of design is about psychology and how people react, im sure you know this from studying eye tracking. Having things too close together can bring about tension for example but everyone's tension levels are different so it's a fine balance to get right.

A little example of this would be to get a piece of paper and print (or write) out a bit of text, just a few words for example, but place the start of the text as close to the left edge of the paper as possible. It gives off a feeling of uneasiness, yet give it a margin and it 'feels' better - (some people can be completely oblivious to this like many other things in the human pshyche however - they don't usually make good designers lol). This uneasiness can be offset by making the type much larger to give it weight and make it dominate the page thus giving off a confidence to the reader which over powers the uneasiness but you can't do that in most instances. To me it's clear this new younger breed of designers don't study things like this anymore. That doesn't mean I don't think there's any good designers out there, you don't get a job at Apple if you're not very good but I do feel there's a lot of stuff that no longer gets taught and even less thought about these days. Everything has a sense of urgency and a 'just get it out and it will do' approach.

Getting back to your screenshots in a less busy page the glass edges become much more pronounced as I pointed out in your first post. Things get worse when they are invoking shadows to fix poor contrast which then just compounds the distraction. Couple that with icons etc floating over text, the glassy edges, background colour showing through and more shadows, it's a totally backwards way of presenting information. Why present information, purposefully obscure it then 'fix' it with shadows? It's a bit like having a semi transparent road sign then having a second sign behind it with a solid black background so you can see the first sign better. Like I said if people took the time to actually think about how people interact with what you are designing, hint hint Human Interface Guidelines, then the result would be far better received.

There is so much negativity around Liquid Glass. It's not just me so it's clear Apple have got something wrong and for me it was the initial concept of transparency for a UI. They then went ahead with it anyway, realised it's a flawed concept (Vista anyone?) then tried to get round that with shadows and dynamic backgrounds etc. All are distractions, none of which would be needed if they thought about how people interact with a computer.

For me, in MacOS, the Titlebar needs to return for both function and form reasons. The function is obvious, a clearly defined area to click into so you can quickly and easily move around your windows etc but also allow long filenames to be seen without extra clicks and mouse movements and animations etc. The title bar will also automatically bring balance back to most windows as everything will visually hang down from it and it will stop the side bar from transgressing too far vertically intersecting various elements and adding weight to the left side of the screen all of which draw the eye away from the content. DevonThink already took that into consideration. This is what I tried to do in my screenshots from a few weeks back (shown below). I've reintroduced the titlebar which moves the glass buttons down away from the top edge of the window as they are too close to the top edge. With the glassy effect and shadows the eye struggles to see the edge of the glass effect, place them very close to the same and it's a compound distraction. If your eye is struggling to make something out your brain will bring it to your attention for threat assessment. Moving those down and aligning with the now lowered top edge of the sidebar brings clarity as there are now clearly defined sections for your eye (and brain) to navigate. Removing the sidebar completely looks even better in my opinion as it's completely redundant and only purpose is to add effect which by definition means its made to be seen. I've also defined the glass edges much more again for clarity. I've done away with seeing the colour of what's behind the window in the side bar and buttons because that just makes no sense and again is a distraction. I believe my concept is a much clearer, more functional design that still encompasses the LiquidGlass idea.

Regarding the quote "one can learn to suppress the frequent location of a distractor." The problem with LiquidGlass is there is no 'frequent location'. You just don't know what you're going to see next, because its determined by what's underneath the thing youre actually looking at, which to me is just a crazy concept.

Im sure a couple of people will disagree -> 🤣

 

[jgbr]

I seem to remember from class my old Professor said that if GUI is more distracting you from the getting the task done, then you have failed in HCI. It isn't negotiable. That's what liquid glass is, a distraction from you doing what you wanted to do.

Some of us are old enough to remember statements from Job's like: "I just gets out of the way so you can get what you need to get done, done." etc.