Having used it very briefly, I think it’s a reasonable direction. Before you all jump to tell me why I’m wrong:
1. It makes depth and layering extremely clear.
2. It prioritizes focusing on the content.
These are good principles and I think they’ll last the distance. There are plenty of refinements needed, especially for accessibility. I suspect over the next few years we’ll see the direction toned back a little while still retaining the best parts.
I appreciate your focus on the long run. Apple has a long history of focusing on the long run. So I am replying to tell you why you are right, given that I feel my single upvote wasn't thanks enough for your first hand take.
I am not sure we have a long run, as both dooms & destiny loom (eg Future Shock .. Singularity], but if we do then here is my background for my short take ...
1. Unlike you, I have not used the beta but I thoughtfully watched both Monday developer sessions on Liquid Glass & their new design system
2. My early computing experiences were, eg, ASR-33 teletype with paper tape to timeshare, then Altair 8800 and then punched card batches, so I have lots of personal evolution in ui/ux over many decades. Sadly my parents--born in 1922/1923--never used computers nor understood why I loved them and programming
3..665 omitted for brevity
666. in recent years I have devolved into Stone Knives & Bearskins dev mode within iPad Safari, because no one cares what I do and so I get to enjoy tinkering with tiny things in odd ways; ie I might be slightly crazy, so caveat emptor ...
Apple is threading a needle here. If they push too hard and fail they're doomed. If they don't take the lead (atop shock wave of tech) they're doomed.
Their leadership is rich and could easily retire, and Apple~ponderers need to always factor in that they dogfood their products because they believe in them.
Like Capital B Believe in Apple/products in that very real way in which one doesn't just say they dig a band but actually struggle and sacrifice to get to a concert thousands of miles away.
Allow me to observe that we already live in a trending post~Literate society and the ongoing collapse of the USA educational system, Covid~lost-years, the current Administration chaos, and the unstoppable engulfing of everything by ~AI++ makes a completely non-traditional ui/ux near term inevitable just by the principle: Flux !== inertia.
I am observing that the traditional ~marketplace deciders coupled with generational fashion du jour flocking are dwarfed by our Interesting Times just as diaspora can elevate tulips to mania and wheelbarrows full of money can fail to buy lunch.
Within that point of view (and if you're reading this far, no, to answer your question, I do not do drugs or write manifestos for public consumption) I will offer this condensed thought about Apple's current ui/ux steps ...
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Applying that to our extraordinary circumstances with a McLuhan Tetrad lens (Retrieval) suggests that all of classic myths to 20th Century SF&F invocation of magic words, gestures and holodecks are nearly upon us for reals.
Our devices are about to watch us, listen/hear us, immerse us in interactive faux reality to an unprecedented extent, ie apart from thousands of years of fanciful storytelling. Genies and demons. Dragons and Wizards.
Gods taking human form.
So.
If Apple is on a 1.5 year track to force developers to unify their runs-on-any~device ui/ux to a ~simplified magic, then I say we are witnessing Apple trying to mount their surfboard, quite calmly, incoming tsunami considered.
Lots of us may not be looking forward to getting wet.
The article feels shallow. It’s real but my experience is that the reasons can be more complex.
- some friends are more selfish than you realized and that only becomes apparent when they put their preferences above short term needs you have
- some parents are exhausted and stop putting in the work needed to maintain friendships
- some friends don’t want to see their social circle become parent-filled, whether that’s because they’d feel left behind or because it doesn’t match their sense of self
- becoming a parent will lead to some sort of change in worldview or who you are, and that’s not always compatible with the friends you had
- as a parent you might just want to talk to people that ‘get it’
People grow apart sometimes and that’s part of life. Other times of course it’s about harder discussions and working through things.
> becoming a parent will lead to some sort of change in worldview or who you are, and that’s not always compatible with the friends you had
This is it. Parenting drastically transforms you (your behaviour and values) for the next 18 years at the very least. In purely behavioural terms, you become someone else. Expecting people to hang out with a stranger (behaviourally speaking) of the basis of shared memories is odd. You share memories with your 19 year old self who would most likely be more interested in hanging around with others around his age than with you. No different for friends
If you actually want to write software without bugs:
Assume that your code will have bugs no matter how good you are. Correct for that by making careful architecture decisions and extensively test the product yourself.
There’s no silver bullet. If you put in enough time and make some good decisions, you can earn a reputation for writing relatively few bugs.
While this did happen and obviously isn’t great, there’s a more skeptical side too.
The ‘trapped’ man is the CEO of an AI consulting firm. He posted the video to linked in, didn’t press the abort button, and had a relatively successful customer support experience (5 minutes delayed and not charged for the trip). Apparently he is using a PR firm to handle questions.
Make of that what you will. Waymo can clearly do better, although for what it’s worth — my worst uber experiences have been much worse than this (legitimately unsafe driving decisions).
While interesting this is just… wrong. Imagine a world where:
- I tell people I’m 50 years old but I’m really just 49 1/2
- My phone says it’s Jan 7th but it’s really afternoon on Jan 6th
- My coworker says they’re a sr engineer because they’ve been told that they’ll definitely be promoted soon
Rounding shouldn’t be applied everywhere. Some things in life are supposed to use a floor function; common sense applies and most folks intuitively know that 1:00pm means ‘between 1:00 and 1:01pm’.
No one wants dark/cloud kitchens, and I don’t think anyone wants dark software either.
It’s extremely hard to do many things well. If a restaurant specializes in pizza, they’re going to get good at doing that — their employees will know the best way to cook them, their recipes will slowly evolve over time, etc. If a restaurant rarely cooks a pizza, none of that experience and refinement is there.
Not to mention, DoorDash doesn’t have any obvious health ratings visible for restaurants in NYC. I’ll happily order from somewhere I know, but not some unknown restaurant. And what’s to stop a poorly rated dark kitchen from closing shop and reopening the next day under new branding?
The whole model feels gross. It’s centered around profit and questionable tactics, rather than making a genuinely good product that people come back for.
> I’ll happily order from somewhere I know, but not some unknown restaurant
Exactly this.
Part of why I go to (or order from) a particular restaurant is that I've been there before and I have an expectation of the taste, quality, service etc. I could also, in theory, go look into the kitchen and see if there are safety issues etc (or outsource this to an inspector). Feels a lot tougher to do this if the "restaurant" is just a label on top of the dark kitchen product.
On a side note, this is why chain restaurants were so successful: you could go into one in any part of the country and have a predictable experience with some base level of quality. The mom and pop restaurant in the town you've never been to wouldn't have that same offering to you (it might for locals though).
I just wish the food problem was completely solved so I would be happy with dark kitchens. There should be a service that I don't have to think about bringing me healthy foods with taste thay I can bear. That is all I care about.
Think about it from the parent’s perspective: the safety of your toddler while you’re at a crowded amusement park is of high value.
Losing a young child must be terrifying, even if they’re found shortly after. I think the value proposition justifies the price, at least for a reasonable amount of parents.
When I was 18 years old, a security guard kicked me and a friend out of a grocery store, much to our confusion.
After talking to them and requesting the store manager, it turns out they had a photo of a shoplifter that looked very similar to me. Eventually we were let back in the store and it was all OK.
So, it’s not an entirely new problem? Although with facial recognition I guess there is less recourse; a manager is not as likely to believe they got it wrong if their computer tells them otherwise.
There isn't much recourse anyway, you were entirely lucky that they were willing to be reasonable. At least if you live in the US, not sure what laws are like around this in Europe
I don't think this status quo should be empowered further by error prone tech
Even without the facial recognition system, security guys can ask customers out, since those are private property. And you are lucky that store manager helped you with the issue. Most cases I heard around me are that the security guy and the manager just gives no explanation.
Some cases yes, but in plenty of cases, this wouldn’t be great.
- Browsing HN, and your scroll gesture happens to start where a link is? Before you know it, you’ve navigated away.
- Long pressing to delete an app, and the app opens in the meantime? Awkward UX.
In the majority of cases, press gestures are competing with other gestures like scrolling. Waiting until you’ve released is often the first moment that it’s 100% clear which gesture you intended. If both gestures get invoked, it will probably lead to much worse problems.
I’m sure there are cases where act on press makes sense, but I don’t think it’s as dramatic as the tweet makes out.
> For example, it should be easier to cancel an app launch in VR that you miss-clicked — it is irritating that the meta button doesn’t work during the launch process.
Or just implement an uninstall apps screen in settings. The ratio of tapping to launch apps on purpose vs deleting an app is, what, infinity:1?
Yep, UX design is all about tradeoffs. So it's important to ask: What is more important to have UX polish? Uninstalling apps, something that happens rarely for most users? Or launching an app, which most users do dozens or hundreds of times every single day?
Adding a couple of taps to the uninstall workflow, whether it be a settings screen or a way to switch the app list into a select-to-manipulate mode, seems like a good enough UX for less common tasks if the percieved responsiveness of the device is improved.
He clearly points out that scrolling is a good enough reason t o break the rule.
>- Long pressing to delete an app, and the app opens in the meantime? Awkward UX.
I don't think he's envisioning a world where long press and act-on-press are valid on the same object. You'd have to abandon long press and double clicks.
Well, you don't have to abandon double clicks in probably the most common case, where click is a non-destructive action like "select" that can precede the double-click action (e.g. "open").
1. It makes depth and layering extremely clear.
2. It prioritizes focusing on the content.
These are good principles and I think they’ll last the distance. There are plenty of refinements needed, especially for accessibility. I suspect over the next few years we’ll see the direction toned back a little while still retaining the best parts.