[HN Gopher] How to Turn Liquid Glass into a Solid Interface - Ti...
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How to Turn Liquid Glass into a Solid Interface - TidBITS
Author : tambourine_man
Score : 66 points
Date : 2025-10-14 19:27 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (tidbits.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (tidbits.com)
| kleiba wrote:
| Cool!
|
| (get it?)
| montroser wrote:
| These settings are only half interesting. In iOS it's not bad,
| but on desktop there's really no actually usable set of
| configuration parameters that result in a sane experience across
| the board.
|
| It is amazing how much time and effort must have gone into
| developing this liquid glass and rolling it out across products
| and platforms, all for a worse outcome in the end.
| CharlieDigital wrote:
| I looked at those shots for macOS and I'm just baffled by how
| they thought this was a good idea.
| clickety_clack wrote:
| The janky various-radius window borders on mac are crime
| against design.
| IlikeMadison wrote:
| What a nightmare Apple UI/UX design has become. Are they hiring
| real bad people now?
| andrepd wrote:
| Android design is similarly terrible. I'm not sure what's the
| explanation for UI design being so fucked up across the board
| for about 10 years now.
| veb wrote:
| I'm assuming it's because nobody can just leave something
| alone. It's always gotta change, it's always gotta be made
| "better". And it probably generates a lot of marketing, good
| or bad.
| pmontra wrote:
| If they leave it alone on what else would they be working
| on? Not on something in somebody's else department so it's
| either being layed off or convince the board that each
| year's iteration on the same things is the next
| groundbreaking invention.
| hagbard_c wrote:
| You're describing the classical dichotomy between
| progressives and conservatives, a dichotomy which extends
| far beyond the political sphere to which is usually is
| applied. Whether it is in the arts, in architecture, in
| engineering, in design or in software development. UI
| design in particular seems to attract the type of person
| who is among the first to pull down Chesterton's fence [1]
| with no though given about what might be lost by this
| action.
|
| [1] https://www.lesswrong.com/w/chesterton-s-fence
| troupo wrote:
| A lot of design in the early era of UIs (until sometime
| mid-~90s~ _Edit:_ : mid-2000s) was based on _a lot_ of
| research. From academic research to ergonomics to plain old
| user research. They wouldn 't always get it right, but they
| were _learning_.
|
| Original Apple guidelines started with things like
| "Simplified Jungian Perception" on page 18
| https://archive.org/details/apple-hig
|
| Microsoft collected and analyzed hundreds of thousands of
| data points about their software. See "No Distaste for Paste"
| https://web.archive.org/web/20080316101025/http://blogs.msdn.
| ..
|
| Now?
|
| Modern designers wouldn't understand what a book is if one
| hit them in the face. And their "research" is all vibes:
| "Quantified factors" are "32% increase in subculture
| perception", "a 34% boost in modernity" and "a 30% jump in
| rebelliousness" https://design.google/library/expressive-
| material-design-goo...
| andrepd wrote:
| More data points for my "everyone is 12 now" theory of the
| world.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _[EDIT] I removed an extremely sarcastic comment. It was quite
| puerile._
|
| I am a bit skeptical that they are "reaching for the best."
|
| Once you start to hire and promote folks with a certain
| "corporate culture," they start hiring and promoting folks that
| fit that culture (and driving out ones that don't). I suspect
| that the problems actually started years ago, and now, those
| managers are hiring less-than-stellar SWEs, managers, and
| designers.
|
| The thing about the _really good_ people at Apple, is that they
| don 't need to be subjected to an ugly corporate culture.
| They'll take their toys and go home (or to other companies),
| which is pretty much exactly what the less-than-stellar people
| want. The dichotomy of hiring high-Quality talent, is that they
| don't need to work for you, so you have to figure out ways to
| keep them. Often, money isn't the biggest driver. The good ones
| don't do it _[just]_ for the money, and they 'll always be able
| to make plenty, so, as their manager, you need to figure out
| what they _really_ want.
| aylmao wrote:
| I unironically think staying in Cupertino is hurting them.
| willis936 wrote:
| I'd be willing to bet it's more likely entrenched leadership
| that needs to be replaced. All of the 10x engineers in the
| world can't fix a bad vision forced on them.
| magnuspaaske wrote:
| There was also an article in Wired about this and I'll just say
| this: the fact the most discussed thing about the new iOS version
| is how to make their terrible new UI (that no one asked for) off
| is telling something about the state of innovation at Apple. It's
| annoying to see apps adapt to the new design, making a lot of the
| navigation in the top and the bottom worse (and great to see a
| couple of holdouts like Bluesky). A design philosophy where the
| full width of the screen is used is pretty good, not sure we
| needed Apple to prove it with a counter example.
|
| Can't wait for them to release iOS 27 and announce they've made a
| useable UI again. "Hey friends, those accessibility settings
| you've used for a year? You don't need them anymore. Apple is
| where innovation happens!!"
| xattt wrote:
| "We've heard a lot of feedback about the incredible design
| changes we made in iOS 27. In order to meet the challenges set
| out by our users, we invented a new type of glass that is both
| transparent and opaque... at the same time! Physically
| impossible, you say? Not at Apple."
| itopaloglu83 wrote:
| There are a lot of Apple employees here that are going to
| downvote this but I cannot turn a blind eye to this
| abomination.
|
| I've been an early adapter since my first iPhone in 2009. But
| the new UI is plain ugly, lacking general accessibility, and
| full of bugs to the point that it's just user hostile at this
| point.
|
| They broke almost all of their design guidelines and make
| everything useless bubbles, I just cannot believe that Apple
| released this ugly thing to billions of devices.
| busymom0 wrote:
| A lot of these UI bugs are also of the kind where once I
| notice them, I can no longer un-notice them. The border
| around the Home Screen icons being one. When you swipe up
| from bottom to go back to Home Screen, the app icon doesn't
| initially have border while the animation is ongoing. Once
| the animation finishes, the border suddenly shows up. Once I
| noticed this, it's been annoying me everytime I swipe to go
| back.
|
| I thought the latest dev beta of iOS would fix this but it's
| still here.
| itopaloglu83 wrote:
| Exactly. It's especially bothering because the previous
| version had a lot of thought put into it, macOS
| specifically would allow you to drag a file onto terminal
| to get its path etc. such small but incredibly powerful
| things all around. It's the thought behind the design and
| its consistency that matters.
|
| Instead now we have a phone operating system UI posing as
| macOS. There's no proper text alignment, padding, or good
| margins. It's just not elegant at all, it feels like a
| knockoff.
|
| The other day, the keyboard stopped showing up in Safari, I
| was getting an empty keyboard tray when I click into a text
| input. How in the frozen hell are they able to achieve this
| level of incompetence. What's the goal of this, just
| extract money from people and enshitify everything. I'm
| just so tied of macOS at this point that I started enjoying
| my work computer which is Windows 11.
| rdtsc wrote:
| > I'll just say this: the fact the most discussed thing about
| the new iOS version is how to make their terrible new UI (that
| no one asked for) off is telling something about the state of
| innovation at Apple.
|
| I observed that too. Polled a few people I know who upgraded
| and they all have the same impression that they'd rather turn
| it off. I shared the accessibility settings with some to help
| them out. I haven't upgraded my main phone might have to wait a
| while longer.
|
| This has to be resume driven. I presume designers at Apple have
| to end the year with a review to justify their salaries. "So
| Bob, what would you say you do here?". The answer "Well not
| much, we designed things nicely already, and now we're just
| chilling, listening to podcasts and having 2 hour lunches" is
| not going to fly. They want to say something like "That flashy
| glass thing, we did that!". Except, in this case I wish they'd
| all just be chilling and having 2 hour long lunches, instead of
| messing with the interface since they apparently managed to
| make things worse.
| baq wrote:
| Not upgrading to Tahoe for as long as possible.
| johnjames87 wrote:
| I don't mind the liquid glass
| bn-l wrote:
| On desktop? Doesn't it make it harder to see? I used a phone
| with it recently and I wanted to turn it off immediately.
| larusso wrote:
| I also don't get the hate. I personally prefer the older one
| but I also don't see the big issue.
|
| I have more a problem with the menu structure then the glass
| effect.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| I don't mind the liquid glass itself, but a lot of iOS and
| macOS seems badly designed when liquid glass is applied. Bright
| white default backgrounds with transparent panels on top
| featuring white titels. Misaligned screens for some reason.
| Unresponsive controls while they're animating. Safari
| introducing weird viewport bugs because it tries to be fancy
| with the address bar.
|
| On iOS it feels unfinished, on macOS it feels unpolished. This
| has the potential to be pretty, or at least usable if you don't
| like the glass look, but someone needs to finish the process of
| porting to liquid glass.
| ThouYS wrote:
| The borders from "increase contrast" look great! I think I'll
| keep em
| robin_reala wrote:
| I only wish I could get them on iOS as well as macOS.
| tambourine_man wrote:
| That was available on previous versions as well. It gives the
| OS a System 7 vibe.
| OGEnthusiast wrote:
| I personally wouldn't rely on the `defaults write -g
| com.apple.SwiftUI.DisableSolarium -bool YES` preference working
| for more than another OS release or two. Seems like a temporary
| stopgap to give third-party developers time to upgrade their
| apps, not a permanent way to disable Liquid Glass.
| flohofwoe wrote:
| Heh funny, I was wondering why after the Tahoe update I wasn't
| noticing much of a difference and wondered why everybody was
| complaining about the glass effects - turns out I had checked the
| 'Accessibility => Display => Reduce Transparency' checkbox
| already in some earlier update for reasons I forgot.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| If you develop apps, you can add this into your Info.plist
| file[0]. It turns off LG. Apple says that it's "temporary," but I
| think they'd be insane to start ignoring it.
|
| [0]
| https://developer.apple.com/documentation/BundleResources/In...
| strongpigeon wrote:
| My understanding is that this will be removed in iOS 27. Given
| how Apple has behaved in the past, I wouldn't be surprised if
| they really did it.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Yeah, that would suck. The designer I'm working with, is
| already projectile-vomiting over LG. I think he'd quit, if I
| insisted that he help me to transition to it (we're a
| volunteer team).
| lawgimenez wrote:
| My understanding Apple will remove it sometime next year
| April.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I'm hoping that some of the senior management will realize
| what a clusterf**k this is, and let it stay (they still
| support ObjC apps, and I will bet that lots of AAA apps
| can't be easily converted to LG).
|
| The thing that we have to keep in mind, is that some _very_
| "strong-willed" folks have staked their egos on LG, and
| will choose it as their hill to die on. We've seen that
| happen in many other instances (not just at Apple).
| ebbi wrote:
| Is looking at notifications from the notification centre on
| iPhone while it's halfway down a common use case?
|
| I see many critics of Liquid Glass (for iPhone, anyway) use the
| notification centre half down as an example of how bad Liquid
| Glass is, but it's way more legible when it's completely down and
| the background tints significantly.
| IlikeKitties wrote:
| > How to Turn Liquid Glass into a Solid Interface
|
| > Looks Inside
|
| > Long Article about how to turn of liquid glass
|
| Well done Apple
| t1234s wrote:
| Liquid Glass on mac is sort of like Apple's windows XP
| christophilus wrote:
| I really liked Windows XP. Do you mean Vista?
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I feel as if Vista is the best comparison.
|
| XP is sort of like Fisher-Price for Windows, but is usable.
| Vista ... was something else.
| oleganza wrote:
| exactly my thought. I never made it to Vista. In 2007 I changed
| WinXP (always used it with the classic grey theme) for OS X
| Tiger on a MacBook and never went back to Windows since then.
|
| I wonder where a decent alternative will be lurking in the next
| few years? Apple is losing some grip, but all others are still
| worse overall.
| andy_xor_andrew wrote:
| I truly, genuinely wanted to like Liquid Glass. I think the
| default reaction to ANY change in UX, even changes that are
| generally improvements, is: "I don't like this, it's different!"
|
| I thought that'd be the case for ios 26. But after installing
| it... yeesh. I can barely see anything. It's just awful.
| busymom0 wrote:
| Overall I don't mind Liquid Glass. I really just want to turn
| off the borders around the Home Screen app icons. They look
| okay for white background but very ugly with black or dark
| background. It looks too chaotic.
| jspash wrote:
| What really annoys me is the variance in corner radius now.
| Because some apps have released an upgrade and others haven't.
| thehours wrote:
| I have an iPhone SE 2nd Generation. After a recent repair I was
| forced to upgrade to iOS 26.
|
| My biggest gripe is the buggy keyboard. It shrinks a bit
| horizontally every time I open it. When using a mobile browser (I
| tested on a few), website footers and similar elements will get
| stuck above where the top of the keyboard would normally be, as
| if there was an invisible keyboard.
|
| These tweaks to minimize the glass effect go a long way, such
| that I'm not as put off by the overall design as I was in its
| stock configuration.
| kridsdale3 wrote:
| FYI: The iOS 26.1 beta has an improved Accessibility setting: It
| replaces Button Shapes with Add Borders, which gives everything a
| really nice Classic Mac OS look with black lines around grey
| containers. Helps a lot.
| replete wrote:
| Ventura got a security update last month. Sequoia will get
| updates for at least another 3 years. These glaring issues will
| get resolved eventually, even if it is the 'Frosted Glass'
| update.
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(page generated 2025-10-14 23:01 UTC)