Apple Knowledge Navigator
macrumors 601
Precisely, the beta. And how much did Liquid Glass improve during last summer’s beta?
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macOS Tahoe: A Pattern of Poor Usability and Design Regression
- Thread starter Deuce2
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SilentSpecter
Suspended
Okay, I feel there is a big misunderstanding here.
I am not contesting the fact that new versions of macOS / iOS / iPadOS are more capable than predecessors.
I was not talking about features. I was talking about design. Big difference there.
And since Big Sur, no matter where you look, the trend is downwards. With each release, more slop was introduced. More nonsense. UI elements and experiences that worked and were literally brought down to perfection were changed, altered, butchered, just because... the interface was boring? And they wanted a change? So... lets but every icon inside a bubble and add a drop shadow underneath because... nah, just because.
So yes, from this perspective, yeah, I literally do not care about your new shiny feature. Your new shiny AI. The UI looks like ****. The Mac experience is gone, riddled with bugs and inconsistencies. Because of that, yes, I would prefer a Maverkis (okay, for the sake of argument, I know that is not possible anymore). Or a Sequoia, to more specific. Even tho I don't love that **** either. But is a lesser **** than Tahoe.
And that... that tells a lot about the state of Apple software and Mac experience today.
I am not contesting the fact that new versions of macOS / iOS / iPadOS are more capable than predecessors.
I was not talking about features. I was talking about design. Big difference there.
And since Big Sur, no matter where you look, the trend is downwards. With each release, more slop was introduced. More nonsense. UI elements and experiences that worked and were literally brought down to perfection were changed, altered, butchered, just because... the interface was boring? And they wanted a change? So... lets but every icon inside a bubble and add a drop shadow underneath because... nah, just because.
So yes, from this perspective, yeah, I literally do not care about your new shiny feature. Your new shiny AI. The UI looks like ****. The Mac experience is gone, riddled with bugs and inconsistencies. Because of that, yes, I would prefer a Maverkis (okay, for the sake of argument, I know that is not possible anymore). Or a Sequoia, to more specific. Even tho I don't love that **** either. But is a lesser **** than Tahoe.
And that... that tells a lot about the state of Apple software and Mac experience today.
SDAVE
macrumors 601
Good news is Alan Dye the main guy handling OS design is gone now, so maybe this years updates will head into the right direction. That guy was horrible. And now that John Ternus will be CEO, he's a hardware/usability guy so things might change (hoping).
Kal Madda
macrumors 601
I completely disagree. The older designs looked hideous and often didn’t make any sense. They were unnecessarily janky to use… The newer updates have fixed a lot of that, though not all, and brought it much closer to modern design on iOS and iPadOS. macOS Big Sur was the first step towards saving macOS and bringing it out of the early 2000s or late 90s… Big Sur finally brought some semblance of modernity to macOS, and the subsequent updates have made major improvements.
I, for one, am glad Apple didn’t let macOS stagnate with early 2000s design and thinking, and as a result, become quickly irrelevant and dead… Catalina and prior looked hideous, like Windows XP era, but even worse than XP... Nothing about them looked or felt modern… And so many things were convoluted and more difficult for no reason than they were on Apple’s other platforms…
Kal Madda
macrumors 601
Quite a bit. Just not in the way you wanted it to apparently… 🤷🏼♂️
Big Sur was the turning point for me. Since then, macOS has slowly lost a lot of what made the Mac feel unique as a desktop OS. The issue is not modern UI itself. It’s that Apple started prioritizing visual style and ecosystem consistency over usability. Too many things feel redesigned just for the sake of looking new. I still prefer macOS over Windows, but pre Big Sur macOS felt far more mature and intentional to me.
Apple Knowledge Navigator
macrumors 601
Could you compare the original beta to the current release, and the benefits of the changes? That’s the only thing that counts.
Kal Madda
macrumors 601
There are several, you have the “Tinted Glass” option for those who want the glass elements to be tinted light or dark, improvements to the toolbars in apps, several apps moved over to Liquid Glass such as Pages, Numbers, etc. And bug fixes that addressed the few bugs that people pointed to. And there wasn’t a lot to improve anyways, in my opinion, Liquid Glass shipped pretty much exactly the way it should have.
SilentSpecter
Suspended
Sorry, but “modern” in today’s world doesn’t necessarily mean good, polished, or well thought out. More often than not, modern design nowadays means rushed, half-baked, buggy, and changed purely for the sake of change.
Example time.
Take modal windows in macOS. Look at how beautiful and coherent the modal dialogs were in OS X. The modal window opened directly from the parent window and stayed visually attached to it. It communicated intent and hierarchy clearly. The animation was fluid and naturally showed where the dialog came from.
It felt logical, elegant, and purposeful.
Now, look at today abomination:
A simple fade effect. A new window just appears on top of the old one. That’s it. Very “JavaScript-style.”
Sloppy. Ugly. It throws away everything that made the previous design feel coherent and refined. Sad, honestly.
You know what this is? Cheap. Cheap design. Kitsch masquerading as modernity.
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Kal Madda
macrumors 601
And that’s just your opinion. I respect it as an opinion. It’s nothing more…. To me, the bottom screenshot looks much better, more polished, and is more consistent with Apple’s other platforms and design elements. It looks and works fabulous in my opinion.
We’re simply not going to agree on this…
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Apple Knowledge Navigator
macrumors 601
Can you compare the differences? Are they substantially different? And what other features of Liquid Glass evolved other the months following release?
Again, such as?
That wasn’t part of the beta process; and afterwards, this would have been an expected change anyway so not an improvement to Liquid Glass itself but an implementation.
Again, not an improvement to the concept.
So, your opinion followed by conjecture - since you don’t work for Apple.
Thank you! Wonderful to see someone who gets it and explains clearly what the damn problem is! From a design perspective, Tahoe is a nightmare. A four trillion dollar nightmare. Sad.
Kal Madda
macrumors 601
The changes were very well documented in this forum, I didn’t collect screenshots of every minor change over the course of a year… Tinted Glass is clearly a change/improvement for those who wanted that.
Toolbars were improved in regards to things like search buttons, etc. Again, it was well documented here.
It seems you’re moving the goal posts. You said “how much did Liquid Glass improve during last summer’s beta?”, implying Liquid Glass didn’t improve in any way over that span of time. So I listed several improvements made to Liquid Glass and its implementation over the course of the beta period. And then you dismiss those as not being “significant” enough, or not being part of the betas themselves, which was not the original question. The question was how did it improve in that time period, not whether every change was included in betas…
And yes, of course I’m stating my opinion, just as you are stating yours. You’re stating your opinions and conjecture, and I’m stating mine… But there have been, in fact, changes to Liquid Glass and its implementation over the course of time in question. That is very well documented.
And you start from the premise that Liquid Glass allegedly needed a lot of improvement in the first place. Hence why you dismiss what you deem to be “minor” improvements as “insignificant”. Because it’s your opinion that Liquid Glass needed a ton of improvements.
That is not my opinion. My opinion is that the Liquid Glass design has always been solid concept-wise from the beginning in the very first beta. In my opinion, the Liquid Glass design didn’t need to significantly “evolve” over the course of the past year. In my opinion, it’s always been a good design. It just saw a few bug fixes and improvements to accommodate for those with other preferences, which I think is perfectly reasonable. But I don’t believe the Liquid Glass design itself needed to be “improved”…
We have fundamentally different perspectives. You think the Liquid Glass design needs improvement, and needed improvement over the course of the past year. I don’t. I think the Liquid Glass design is good and doesn’t need any major “improvements”…
I respect your opinion, but I think we just have very different starting points and perspectives, which means we likely aren’t going to see things the same way. 👍🏻
svenmany
macrumors 68030
Your example leads me to another example. I'm not sure when it happened, but it used to be that you could move the modal save dialogs around in Apple's applications. This allowed me to inspect content a bit as I decided where to save the file and how to name it. I miss this, but I've adjusted to it with various workarounds. I just cancel the save and figure things out before reopening. Sometimes I do screenshots or copy a little text an editor before reopening the save dialog.
The ability to move dialogs around still exists in some third-party apps. For example, the save dialog in Firefox can be moved. (You can't do it in Safari.) This is a developer choice, but Apple really believes in the approach they've taken with their apps (even the dimming).
Sheets | Apple Developer Documentation
A sheet helps people perform a scoped task that’s closely related to their current context.
and some excerpts:
They really have thought about it. I don't like the decision they've taken but I do understand it. In my apps I have spent a lot of time tweaking things to avoid visual confusion during some of my css animations. Apple has chosen to sacrifice utility in exchange for reducing the risk of visual confusion.
I definitely don't mean to suggest that they were successful or even close to consistent across their applications. Apple's Home app would make a great study in usability - it's complete lack of consistency in handling various modal situations is astonishing.
fisherking
macrumors G5
exactly; to you, this is how it felt. to others, different experiences. that's how subjective observation works. we don't (obviously) all like the same things (& it does, in the best moments, make the world an interesting place)...
SilentSpecter
Suspended
Good design. (TM) Apple 2026.
This is not a bug. This is what happens when you pull down the notification area. Boy, they really thought this through, alright.
Kal Madda
macrumors 601
That most definitely is a bug, and it never affected me on any betas… That is not what happens for me when pulling down the Notification Center. And it isn’t an inherent issue with the Liquid Glass design itself either…
Here’s my Notification Center accessed from the Home Screen (some text garbled for privacy):
Hopefully that bug is fixed for you soon. Perhaps resetting the device would help? I don’t really have any other troubleshooting suggestions since I’ve never heard of this bug unfortunately, but I hope you can get it fixed. 🙂👍🏻
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SilentSpecter
Suspended
Well… it kind of is. Previously, you had a combination of blur and fade-out effects applied to the elements underneath. By the time you reached the bottom, everything looked and behaved as expected. It wasn’t perfect either — from what I remember, the notification area worked best until iOS 10 — but at least it looked somewhat okay.
Now, with Liquid Glass, there’s no blur, no fade, nothing. Just glass everywhere.
From Apple’s perspective, though, this probably isn’t considered a bug. If you swipe down fast enough, you barely notice the visual mess they created. And again, it feels cheap. They basically went, ‘Nah, ship it.
Kal Madda
macrumors 601
I don’t find it to feel cheap, but to each their own. But I will point out, there actually are blur and fade effects even mid-swipe, at least for me. So maybe you’re encountering a bug where those aren’t being applied, I don’t know. But the blur and fade effects are definitely there for me.
Here’s a screenshot mid-swipe (again, some text is garbled for privacy reasons):
SilentSpecter
Suspended
I see what you've did there. 😀
Just come down a little bit further with the notification area, so the text "Notification Center" and the clock to arrive on top of the app icons underneath. Because I was not pointing at the blur generated by the notification bubble.
And one more funny part, but this is a bug since, I cannot remember actually (true, not a Liquid thing). Look at how the notification cards are stacked in your screenshot. I mean, common. 3 trillion dollar company, and they cannot fix this for god knows how many iterations now. And we expect AI and integration and stuff to work? Ohh...
Just come down a little bit further with the notification area, so the text "Notification Center" and the clock to arrive on top of the app icons underneath. Because I was not pointing at the blur generated by the notification bubble.
And one more funny part, but this is a bug since, I cannot remember actually (true, not a Liquid thing). Look at how the notification cards are stacked in your screenshot. I mean, common. 3 trillion dollar company, and they cannot fix this for god knows how many iterations now. And we expect AI and integration and stuff to work? Ohh...
Kal Madda
macrumors 601
What I did where? I’m not understanding what you’re saying there.
And there’s still blur and fade effects even when I swipe down further. 🤷🏼♂️
As evidenced here:
You may not like the blur and fade effects, or you may think they’re “insufficient”, but they definitely are there… 🤷🏼♂️
And personally, I don’t see any issue. It’s a transition effect. It’s not meant to be paused mid-way through… It’s meant to be swiped down until it’s fullscreen so it’s actually useful. In fact, if you pull it down past about half-way, it springs down the rest of the way itself. It’s a swipe gesture animation. A user has to intentionally hold it in place awkwardly to get it to look that way. I had a hard time getting that screenshot in the first place, because it was hard to hold that in place that low and take a screenshot simultaneously rather than it just springing open fullscreen. When it’s in motion, it’s blurry anyways. If that was the end position, that would be one thing, but as a part of a transition animation? I don’t think it’s a big problem that’s going to impact utility… And when it’s in motion, it looks pleasant the colors of the background content rippling as you scroll it, at least in my opinion… 🤷🏼♂️
I doubt many people ever even see it that way. Who is intentionally hanging onto it and dragging it that low to prevent it from opening fullscreen? I doubt there are many doing this…
And as I said before, this isn’t inherent to the Liquid Glass design.
Also, I like the notification card stacks. They sort notifications nicely. If they weren’t stacked, I would have a super long list of notification cards to dig through. I prefer this stacking vs a long list view with no organization. So I don’t get why you think notification stacking is supposedly a bad thing, or why it supposedly needs “fixed”… 🤷🏼♂️
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CrabQueenInc
macrumors 6502
Explained very well. Thank you. I miss when dialogue boxes slid out from the menu of the parent window. These elegant and thoughtful touches are no longer part of macOS.
Kal Madda
macrumors 601
I don’t know why I would ever want the save box to move outside its respective app window. That just would be a confusing mess. Never do that on my iPhone or iPad, why would I want to do that on a Mac?
I respect your opinion, I just don’t find ugly separate floating windows for in-app features like the save box to be very useful or visually appealing. I prefer the new implementation. 🤷🏼♂️ I guess this is just another matter of personal preference, to each their own. 🙂👍🏻
svenmany
macrumors 68030
I experience variability here, depending on how many notifications there are. I see what you see after I cleared my notifications. Earlier, when I had a bunch of notifications, as soon as I started dragging, everything underneath faded away almost immediately. This will be a hallmark of Liquid Glass, everyone seeing different things and missing the reasons. It will make discussions hard.
In this case it's debatable whether it's a "bug". If we had evidence that no designer of Liquid Glass intended such an extreme amount of translucency, then we could assert it's a bug. I would wager that the algorithm which is calculating the translucency in the example you show is not producing the intended effect. The Apple documentation about LG and their videos describing the behavior of LG glass artifacts, always have the glass somewhat visible. What you're seeing is complete transparency. AI, programmed in Apple-defense mode, would argue that was intended.
I posted an example on a different thread (https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/tahoe-and-apple-quality-or-competence.2481050/post-34582212) of extreme differences in translucency, but there's no way to know what the actual intention was, and that would be needed to decide which of the two examples (or both) are off.
Apple has a long way to go on tweaking its algorithms. I don't think they'll ever nail it since they have not demonstrated much competence in stabilizing it as we moved through the patches.
avkills
macrumors 65832
On my 13mini, it looks exactly like what SilentSpecter posted, but then when I reach the bottom the background changes to my lock wallpaper and looks like what my Lock Screen looks like but with notifications listed.
Seems like a bug to me, if you swipe fast it is fine, but slowly swiping down the abrupt change at the end feels like a bug; but on the other hand, a ton of stuff is unreadable before reaching the bottom.
🤷♂️
Seems like a bug to me, if you swipe fast it is fine, but slowly swiping down the abrupt change at the end feels like a bug; but on the other hand, a ton of stuff is unreadable before reaching the bottom.
🤷♂️