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'Halide' Co-Founder Sebastiaan de With Joins Apple's Design Team

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Sebastiaan de With, co-founder of the popular iPhone camera app Halide, today announced that he has joined the Human Interface Design team at Apple.

Halide-iPhones.jpg

"So excited to work with the very best team in the world on my favorite products," he said.

This marks a return to Apple for de With, who previously worked on things such as iCloud, MobileMe, and the Find My app. He has also completed design work for other companies, such as Sony, Mozilla, Oracle, HP, and EA, in the past.

de With is a well-known figure in the online Apple and photography communities.

Apple's design team is undergoing many changes. Last year, the company's former software design chief Alan Dye left for Meta, and Apple's hardware engineering chief and leading CEO candidate John Ternus was reportedly tapped to oversee the company's entire hardware and software design teams towards the end of last year.

Over the past several years, some Apple designers have left to work with Jony Ive, the legendary former Apple design chief. Ive left Apple in 2019 to start his own design firm LoveFrom, and he has been working with OpenAI on a new AI device.

In related news, Halide's parent company Lux today launched a public preview of Halide Mark III, the next-generation version of its flagship camera app.

Article Link: 'Halide' Co-Founder Sebastiaan de With Joins Apple's Design Team
 
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https://www.macrumors.com/2026/01/28/sebastiaan-de-with-joins-apple/
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CarAnalogy said:
Hey this is encouraging news! Great app and great designer who has been publicly and specifically vocal about the issues with Liquid Glass!

I think this is as close as Apple is going to get to publicly admitting they are trying to fix it.
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Also before Liquid Glass came out he wrote that essay on what he imagined the UI would look like and his mockups are 1000x better than the crap Apple put out. I wasn’t expecting the real thing to be that good, mockups are one thing and a real UI is another, but I was so disappointed that the interface was not even close to what he envisioned. Hopefully he gets the chance to realize that vision now.

Hopefully he starts with MacOS which sorely needs it more than any of the other platforms.
 
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ZeroInspo said:
Also before Liquid Glass came out he wrote that essay on what he imagined the UI would look like and his mockups are 1000x better than the crap Apple put out. I wasn’t expecting the real thing to be that good, mockups are one thing and a real UI is another, but I was so disappointed that the interface was not even close to what he envisioned. Hopefully he gets the chance to realize that vision now.

Hopefully he starts with MacOS which sorely needs it more than any of the other platforms.
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I'm going to choose to imagine that the new design chief hand selected him based on those mockups among other things.

Apple Episode VII: A New Hope...
 
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"So excited to work with the very best team in the world on my favorite products," he said.
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Hmmmm....I truly hope he does not believe that. Maybe I am wrong, maybe it was screwed up management all along that created these GUI/HID issues. Maybe there are still some good designers and creators left. But I lost all hope with LG, the new Photos, and with the suggestion to use AI to auto-position icons.

Still, I wish him the best, and I hope beyond all hope that he can fix this horrible Liquid Glass.
 
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TL24 said:
Apple's whole camera department needs an overhaul, top to bottom.

Processing has been stale and over-processed in a bad way. They should really look at what Project Indigo is doing as far as processing goes, that's what Apple should go after.
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Ah Yes, The Clowns who Made Aperture go away (Right before the release of the iPad Pro - and a week later adobe had modified P'Shop for iPad) For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge'ing brilliant.
From someone who's whole Professional Workflow was built around it. Thanks so much 🍏 Really...
 
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de With is a brilliant designer, and also a quality thinker and writer.

In this blog post, he writes about the evolution of Apple UI since Mac OS X Tiger, the Flat Design™ era, and his post-WWDC impressions of (as he put it) "living glass." (spoiler: he was very critical of Ives-era non-obvious-buttons, and saw glass as a necessary new direction)

I think overall his optimism has not panned out, but he exhibits the kind of critical thinking that the actual designers of Liquid Glass were missing.

This is outstanding news for Apple.

[edit] interview with Jon Gruber re: Halide
 
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DocMultimedia said:
Day 1: Start the LG removal process.
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There's nothing wrong with liquid glass, it's their implementation and the sloppiness of parts of it that need work. For once since iOS 1-6, the UI actually feels like I'm interacting with it rather than just tapping some unresponsive piece of colored text. Elements have LIFE now. The problems that 99% of people care about are things like bugs, stuttering, lack of smoothness and polish, inconsistencies. But the actual UI is essentially just a skin. The jump from iOS 6 to iOS 7 was much more drastic visually.

Sebastian's strength is UX....HOW something actually works. Hoping he brings the windex to polish the glass!
 
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He must’ve gotten the shock of his life after seeing what Apple delivered was that much worse than what he mocked up. All in all great news though… looks like Apple’s design team will be getting right back on the right track. The response to Liquid Glass has been extremely polarising and I expect an evolution of it to come in iOS 27 and beyond.
 
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Eric_WVGG said:
de With is a brilliant designer, and also a quality thinker and writer.

In this blog post, he writes about the evolution of Apple UI since Mac OS X Tiger, the Flat Design™ era, and his post-WWDC impressions of (as he put it) "living glass." (spoiler: he was very critical of Ives-era non-obvious-buttons, and saw glass as a necessary new direction)

I think overall his optimism has not panned out, but he exhibits the kind of critical thinking that the actual designers of Liquid Glass were missing.

This is outstanding news for Apple.

[edit] interview with Jon Gruber re: Halide
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Yes some of those concepts look nicer than what we got (send button in mail).

Also hope this could mean there's some influence for the camera team to bring a less-processed option in the native Camera app. Like Process Zero, Project Indigo, or even just ProRAW style without having to deal with RAW.
 
soundweave said:
Yes some of those concepts look nicer than what we got (send button in mail).

Also hope this could mean there's some influence for the camera team to bring a less-processed option in the native Camera app. Like Process Zero, Project Indigo, or even just ProRAW style without having to deal with RAW.
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yyyyeah… that's a good point unfortunately… if they picked him up for his photography chops rather than his UI work, then, well, whatever.

speaking of which, he's also the guy who's been writing those iPhone camera reviews going back about eight years or so. iPhone 17 Pro here
 
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