[HN Gopher] Transparent Ambition
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Transparent Ambition
Author : goranmoomin
Score : 58 points
Date : 2025-06-21 23:32 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (take.surf)
(TXT) w3m dump (take.surf)
| tanvach wrote:
| Some people will say that iOS has an option for 'reduce
| transparency' that mitigates the issue. But every time I turn it
| on, there's a general lack of design polish in the OS and apps
| due to it not being the default.
|
| Another point: I wonder how much of this is for the OS
| designer/UX/UI team to justify their existence at Apple. Suspect
| it'll start out very glassy and gets flatter over time, so that
| they can claim 'improvement to user experience' over many years
| to come.
| asadotzler wrote:
| If you're disabled, and going to the Accessibility settings to
| make the experience work for you, Apple has failed.
|
| We're all disabled now.
| wintermutestwin wrote:
| As someone who has to put on reading glasses to get any
| information from my apple phone and watch purely due to
| obnoxious design choices by Apple, I'd say they embody UI
| failure.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Back in the 1990s I remember CS professors taking a very
| chauvinistic idea of what an "operating system" was limited to
| the kernel, would probably exclude a CLI interpreter like bash,
| never mind the rest of the userspace and would particularly
| exclude anything having to do with GUI even if you had kernel
| drivers and tons of DLLs that came with the OS to support GUIs.
|
| Now you have Arstechnica, which should know better, which makes
| detailed reviews pixel-by-pixel of everything that changed
| between one version of MacOS and the next and seems to think the
| only thing that matters in an OS is the superficial things you
| can _see,_ at least if the OS is MacOS.
|
| Windows is refreshing because it has more widget sets than I can
| count but it doesn't matter because you can get your work done
| even though it is inconsistent and usually just a bit ugly. It
| beats Linux though, because at least in Windows if a label is
| 75px wide, Windows will make at least 75px of space for it,
| whereas in Linux nobody gets excited if it label gets clipped
| because they only left 55px -- they'll even close out a bug
| request about this as soon as you make it. But hey, Linux on a
| bad day looks better than the 99% percentile NFT.
| matthewfcarlson wrote:
| This was sort of the idea of some of QNX. The kernel never
| crashed, but display, keyboard, networking, uart, etc was all
| user space. So yes you had a kernel that never crashed but
| frequently turned into a useless brick until rebooted
| mikestorrent wrote:
| Yes, actual progress in meaningful _operating system_ changes
| in terms of how one might write a program, or access
| fundamentals like identity, have really stagnated in terms of
| making their way down to end users.
|
| We have high-concept things like Urbit that wanted to remake
| identity and secure communication that are utterly inaccessible
| to most savvy folks, never mind average end users. And in the
| meantime we're shipping entire Unix environments around inside
| OCI images to make up for the lack of consistency and
| portability on the backend.
|
| Regular users are left with a tragedy of the commons as
| paid/saas programs support integrations with other specific
| paid products instead of with general open standards that could
| foster more diversity and interoperability. Everything is
| tacked on at the application layer - imagine going back to the
| folks who designed Kerberos decades ago and telling them that
| bouncing the browser back and forth between websites is what we
| settled on!
|
| I like the new transparent theme, but yeah, it's just a GUI
| theme. Bring me back a consistent GUI where I can get themes
| from a modding community that apply to every app on the system
| and give me control over my look and feel! Instead, we get
| Wayland and a loss of 90% of the classic Linux desktop
| software. Bring me an OS that I can seamlessly deploy in a
| near-stateless/immutable fashion everywhere without falling
| into the trap of Nix! Instead, we get yet another rewrite of
| the fuckin' Ubuntu installer that still doesn't make the
| resulting system any more appealing for someone who would
| administer a corporate fleet of Linux workstations.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| One could make the case that theming in Linux is a problem,
| not a solution. You make your computer look like anything...
| as long as "anything" looks like crap.
|
| I remember in the early 1990s theming was all the rage for
| Win '95 applications and the smaller the crapplet, the more
| aggressively it was themed. People got the sense that _it was
| not cool_ and by the time Microsoft introduced really great
| theming support in WPF nobody wanted to use it.
|
| The existence of so much software written to existing APIs is
| a reason why innovation in the OS seems at best marginal
| these days. If you thought "there is so much bloat in POSIX"
| you're either going to have to rewrite the whole userspace or
| build a POSIX emulation layer so you can use the GNU tools.
| If you wanted to build a really cool OS for the eZ80 it
| probably runs CP/M applications because if it did you have a
| lot of software to run on it and if it doesn't you have to
| write a text editor and everything else.
| seabass-labrax wrote:
| You've got to be a bit more specific when comparing 'Windows'
| to 'Linux'! Both operating systems are used with a dozen
| different graphics libraries, each with multiple possible
| configurations, and sometimes more than one for a single
| application.
|
| The culture of various Linux-related communities also varies
| considerably. I guarantee you that the KDE community, for
| instance, is not going to stand for a label getting clipped.
| They are absolutely meticulous, especially where accessibility
| is concerned.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Maybe it should be /Linux/Red Hat/ as I've got personal
| experience with the GTK developers having a bad attitude
| about... everything.
| pwg wrote:
| > Apple's designers (and those of many other companies) come back
| to the idea of translucency giving order and imbuing personality.
| I cannot for the life of me understand where this idea comes
| from.
|
| When the company employs designers on a permanent salaried basis,
| those designers must make changes in order to assure their
| continued employment. To do otherwise risks the bean counters in
| the accounting department asking the pointed question: "Why are
| we employing all these designers when they are not producing
| anything?". The result is that there must be change for the
| purpose of assuring the designers continued employment. Result:
| translucent designs no one wants, but that looked great in the
| powerpoint presentations used to assure the designers remained
| employed.
| jakubmazanec wrote:
| This argument makes no sense, because if it's so obvious what
| the designers are up to, it should be easy for the bean
| counters to take that into consideration when deciding whether
| to fire the designers.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| If you believe the designers have some perverse self-centered
| motivation you might also believe the bean counters do too.
| xienze wrote:
| > When the company employs designers on a permanent salaried
| basis, those designers must make changes in order to assure
| their continued employment.
|
| I don't think it's exactly this, but it's close. Every so many
| years you have a new crop of talent rotate in and someone wants
| to make their mark and shake things up in order to be promoted.
| Rinse and repeat.
| tshaddox wrote:
| The problem with this explanation is that it also requires
| multiple parties to be unaware of things which you seem to
| think are obvious or even self-evident:
|
| 1. The designers must be unaware that "no one wants" these new
| designs (or perhaps they're incapable of creating new designs
| that people _do_ want).
|
| 2. The executives must be unaware that "no one wants" these new
| designs.
|
| 3. The executives must be unaware of the designers' plot to
| prevent themselves from being fired.
| matznerd wrote:
| I think what you're missing is that this is likely in preparation
| for some sort of AR glasses and something smaller form factor
| than the Vision Pro that will require transparency so you can see
| through to the real world etc...
| lanna wrote:
| My Mac screen isn't transparent. Why should its UI be?
|
| If there is "some sort of AR glasses and something smaller form
| factor than the Vision Pro that will require transparency so
| you can see through to the real world", limit the transparent
| interface only to that device.
| edoceo wrote:
| But, UnIFiEd eXpERieNcE
| appreciatorBus wrote:
| Yes.
|
| I look at my Mac screen to see what is on my Mac screen.
| Whether there is a tabletop, a window, or a cat behind my Mac
| screen is irrelevant. If I want to see what is behind it I
| would be looking it that instead of my screen
|
| Repeat for application window, dialog box etc.
|
| The only place translucence sort of kind of makes sense is
| for video content but even then, it still totally optional.
| My experience of watching a video is not really degraded if
| the play button is opaque.
|
| As others have said, wanting to update the design simply
| because it looks cool is one thing. If that's the goal just
| say it. But Alan Dye's explanations do not inspire
| confidence. I get the impression that as in architecture, the
| chief audience of the design is not the user, but other
| designers.
| whycome wrote:
| > My Mac screen isn't transparent. Why should its UI be?
|
| Mark my words, this is coming. It's doable (as an effect) -
| rear camera captures what's behind the screen, face tracking
| adjusts perspective in real-time to make it seem
| transparent/have correct parallax.
| xeonmc wrote:
| How do you adjust the frame rate of reality to match?
| whycome wrote:
| I prefer life to look like a movie...24fps.
|
| But if you're serious, I guess whatever the Apple vision
| does.
|
| I wouldn't be surprised if we see "transparent" heads up
| displays in vehicles that take on this design
| language/tech.
| joshmarinacci wrote:
| It is possible for different devices to have different
| interfaces optimized for those different interaction models.
| Apple has the money to support this.
| yborg wrote:
| Apple re-running the entire Windows Vista Metro arc.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| ... could be the point of Liquid Glass on Vision Pro is to make
| AR on Meta's platform look bad. I mean, the MQ3 is a medium-
| spec smartphone on your face, the Vision Pro is a laptop on
| your face. The latter can support a much fancier UI without
| slowing down to the point where the video lags and you start
| crashing into things.
| asadotzler wrote:
| AR glasses will have fixed-distance 2D overlays like your car's
| HUD. If they're preparing for a Vision Pro experience in
| spectacles form factor, they're about 10 to 20 years early with
| this glass UI change.
| abraxas wrote:
| I'll take the bubble tea interface over the extreme flatness of
| every widget that dominates the UI these days where no cues are
| given as to what is just text, what's a button, an editable text
| input etc.
|
| While liquid glass is perhaps mediocre and distracting, the
| current "everything is just a text label or a stick figure icon"
| paradigm is pure hell. I dread learning any new UI because of how
| bad most are.
| elcritch wrote:
| Not to mention the lack of discoverable shortcuts on desktop.
| On touchscreen devices you get random gestures that are hard to
| do half the time.
| nancyminusone wrote:
| Off topic, but I wonder if the youth of today will have
| nostalgia for hideous flat corporate design the same way I have
| a certain fondness for all those high gloss buttons from 2007.
| floppyd wrote:
| Every time I spend significant time on my Mac with the Tahoe
| beta and then go back to an Android phone (with near Pixel UI)
| I experience genuine relief. Everything is just a simple color
| and a label, and I love that because it's so easy to descern.
| Tahoe legitimately makes me tired to look at sometimes. I
| vastly prefer clarity and flatness over decorations.
| joshmarinacci wrote:
| I don't buy the argument that we need design harmony between
| platforms. If I wanted an iPad like experience on my Mac I would
| have bought an iPad. I paid for a mouse and keyboard centric
| experience. Liquid Glass actively takes away from that.
| dylan604 wrote:
| This is what's confusing to me as well, but I'm willing to
| admit that growing up with a mouse and other types of input
| devices gives me a bit of a bias. For someone that's only every
| used the input devices attached to their hands would probably
| be biased the other way. So maybe harmony will be reached when
| all of the olds finally phase out?? I've seen plenty of younger
| people touch my laptop screen in an attempt to interact with
| the laptop as if it were a touch screen. I've also seen the
| iPad keyboard/trackpad devices that just look weird with the
| cursor.
| karaterobot wrote:
| > Apple's designers (and those of many other companies) come back
| to the idea of translucency giving order and imbuing personality.
| I cannot for the life of me understand where this idea comes
| from. When multiple layers of different imagery shine through
| each other, I am not helped by this. The user interface placed on
| a semi-transparent panel is not more effective because it is set
| against a smeared mess of colors, nor am I emotionally fulfilled
| as a human being for knowing that the mess comes from a treasured
| personal memory.
|
| This article acts as though design choices which are sub-optimal
| from a purely informational perspective, but which add
| personality and attraction to a product, have not earned Apple
| hundreds of billions of dollars in the past 25 years. The fact
| that he cannot understand where the idea comes from is okay,
| since he's not a product, UI, or industrial designer for Apple:
| that's their job, not his. The deeper question of why people form
| attachments to things that look 'cool' but have lower performance
| in some areas is indeed mysterious. But relentlessly pursuing
| that phenomenon has worked for Apple pretty well so far.
|
| Liquid Glass isn't immediately impressive to me either, but it
| will either succeed or fail not based on whether it is more
| effective or not, but whether people like it or not, and those
| are two different things.
| asadotzler wrote:
| People who used to be able to get by with default settings are
| now going to Accessibility -> Reduce Transparency and Increase
| Contrast. Those are settings designed for disabled users. That
| so many will need those settings is Apple literally disabling
| users with their fashion choices. That's effed up.
| trinix912 wrote:
| But how big is the percentage of those users compared to the
| rest? Most likely not big enough to hurt the bottom line. I
| don't like the new UI either (I think Vista actually did it
| better contrast-wise), but most people don't tweak
| accessibility settings and will just stick to it.
| stephenhandley wrote:
| UI design gripes posted on site with icon that doesn't link
| through to homepage
| w10-1 wrote:
| I think the real takeaway is that Apple has achieved a psychotic
| break from actual users, and its internal forces are driving
| decisions. Somehow user testing signal has been captured by these
| forces, and market signals are overwhelmed by the overall quality
| premium they deliver (and you can never prove the negative of how
| much better sales would have been without this).
|
| I care less about the quality failings than the signs the Apple
| is too big to manage through the next few years. They've done a
| great job asserting independence from chip makers, but they're no
| where near independent enough for the new era of assertive
| nationalism.
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