Apple's Liquid Glass is prep work for AR interfaces, not just a design refresh

When Apple makes a mistake, it was really a genius 4D chess move and everyone will copy them and also it wasn't really a mistake, we just have to trust the plan.

It ignores the fact that there has been a welcome step back from the derelict wasteland of "flat design" that users have endured for far too long. Flat design is often cited as a reaction to absurd levels of skeuomorphism, which Apple certainly WAS a leader in. Remember the "felt" surfaces of Game Center, the "paint" upon which was inexplicably a control? And the "leather" binding of Notes?

Then there's this: "In AR, visual affordances work differently. A button that casts realistic shadows and responds to virtual lighting feels more "real" when floating in your living room than a flat, colored rectangle."

That makes it a SHITTY control, which will get lost in the visual noise of the real environment. This UI sucks for the same reason that sports-stats graphics that are tracked onto real surfaces in TV coverage suck: They don't stand out. It's that simple.

So after years of "flat" design where nothing was demarcated as a control and users were apparently supposed to click on every pixel and every character on the screen in a hunt for hidden goodies, this article celebrates Apple's plan to create the same problem in AR using OVERLY-decorated controls.

Not to mention the stupidity of crippling computer, tablet, and phone UI for the sake of a "VR" UI. This isn't just dumb from a practical standpoint, but from a technical one as well. There's no reason that the control library can't be rendered differently on different devices. So, if this (admittedly poorly-substantiated opinion piece) is right about the motivation behind Apple's exhumation of the "transparent" UI fad that died 20 years ago, we can only lament the end of desktop usability... which Windows flushed vigorously with Microsoft's brain-dead attempt to dumb its UI down for touchscreens years ago.

Even Android had moved to a flatter design pattern 1-2 years before iOS. While Material Design wouldn't be released until 2014, you can see them moving in that direction from Gingerbread to Jelly Bean, particularly when looking at the system components and first-party apps, since this was before the concept of a unified design language across third-party apps had been formalized.

At the time Apple introduced their flat design in June 2013, they were the odd ones out. In fact, I remember a Daring Fireball article posted in spring 2013 (a few months before WWDC) praising Apple for leading the pack in flat design, and HN excoriating it for making what was at the time a clearly preposterous claim.

The evidence suggests this isn't AR prep at all. I watched Apple's 20-minute design presentation, and their design team makes the same point repeatedly: Liquid Glass has very narrow guidelines and specific constraints.

Here's the actual design problem Apple solved. In content apps, you have a fundamental trade-off: you have a few controls that need to be instantly accessible, but you don't want them visually distracting from the content. Users are there to consume videos, photos, articles - not to stare at your buttons. But the controls still have to be there when needed.

Before Liquid Glass, your least intrusive option was backdrop blur or translucent pastel dimming overlays. Apple asked: can we make controls even less distracting? Liquid Glass lets you thread this needle even better. It's a pretty neat trick for solving this specific constraint.

So you'll feel like you're seeing Liquid Glass "everywhere" not because Apple applied it broadly, but because of selection bias. The narrow use case Apple designed this for just happens to be where you spend 80% of your phone time: videos, photos, reading messages. You're information processing, not authoring.

Apple's actual guidelines are clear: only a few controls visible at once, infrequent access pattern, only on top of rich content. The criticism assumes they're redesigning everything when they explicitly documented the opposite. People are reacting to marketing tone instead of reading what Apple's design team actually built.

[1] https://peoplesgrocers.com/en/writing/liquid-glass-explained

Reading the article's claims about translucent UI being ideal for AR, all I could think about was how bad this roadside traffic sign would be if it was white text printed on translucent glass. https://images.app.goo.gl/MU4kJmWZ8ogNGAD9A

Assuming the information a daily-use AR headset is presenting is important, it needs to be instantly legible to be useful. I guess my counter to the article would be images of "Roadside traffic signs as re-imagined in Apple's Liquid Glass." Would showing an intersection with a Liquid Glass stop sign and a car crashed into the side of another be too much?

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IrGYUq1mklk

Weird tangent, but I used tracing paper over piece of graph paper for notes for a while. I liked it because I could use the graph paper for drawing my figures or align my text, but then have something more aesthetically pleasing and nice for reading after. I find reading on graph paper annoying, due to the vertical lines.

Anyway, I can’t think of any way that a transparent OS window could be similarly helpful.

For walls of text you can still opt out of this and use a less translucent material.

I knew a lovely man, a kind hearted engineer, Larry Weiss, for whom this was not true... In the early 1980s I was in his VW van that he used for business roadtrips when he, while still driving, grabbed a felt marker and started drawing on the window in front of him to illustrate a point.

I learned that he kept markers handy and used them to capture his thoughts on long drives (to conferences, customers etc). Rough mechanical sketches mostly.

Back then I did not generally know to describe myself as (modern term) aphantasic as I had yet to realize I was different from most people, but hopefully this context helps you to understand why I then (and now) grokked the value of putting your conceptual thought into your ongoing visual field, non-occlusively aka transparently

Legibility is no more the deciding factor of ~utility here/AR/VR than it is in dreams. Indeed I have been very near sighted for over 50 years and I do not find this ~illegibility to be an issue for clarity of visual~assist to thinking.

The point John Carmack makes may have greater merit for other people or if we were limited to discussing text--but Liquid Glass is not about text per se, is it?

"...there’s way too much information to decode the Matrix. You get used to it. I…I don’t even see the code." -- Cypher from The Matrix 1999

P.S. If my story about Larry intrigued you, I am happy to share these two tiny tidbits I found in memoriam ...

https://isaac-online.org/wp-content/uploads/ISAAC-E-News-Oct...

https://w140.com/tekwiki/wiki/Larry_Weiss [re his work and patents at Tektronix in the 1960s]

Judging from the demos, Apple's version is even more translucent than Vista, so I have no doubt that it'll be bad.

This could be partly because there's nothing immediately close to the window so any writing is the only real thing in the focal plane.

If I stand further back, it is somewhat harder to read, but I imagine this wouldn't be a problem with displays that can emulate that (like laser retinal displays iirc)

That basically is just a way of making people upgrade their iPhone

We're taking about Apple here, who prioritize aesthetics over everything else, shipping a defective keyboard design for 5 years straight just to shave 1 millimeter of thickness on the laptop.

It needs to 'wow' people in the Apple Store in terms of looks and feel, usability be dammed.

I don’t think I’d like to have it on everything, though. Or basically anything except my terminal, for that matter.

Usability issues only manifest after point of sale. Messaging/marketing happens after the work has been done (and can involve post-rationalization).

They’re more like quality of life issues that users will appreciate.

A now that 3rd parties can access Apple’s LLM models… let me correct that. Shortcuts, a visual automation app, can also access models on device or bigger, more capable models using Apple’s Private Cloud Compute.

Apple’s not playing multidimensional chess… but they are playing the long game, where users won’t have to use multiple AI chatbots to get work done, because most of what they want to do is handled by their current apps with new AI capabilities—on device.

Also, I can actually read the battery level indicator in the skeuomorphic display. I sometimes resort to getting out a magnifying glass to read it on my iPhone's current display. (Yes, I have old eyes. And I have to keep telling those Apple UI people to get off my grass.)

Sure, it's not pretty by today's standard, but it's way easier to use IMO.

I thought there was supposed to be a way to add a tint to it though, which I haven't found a setting for, and think I would do if I could find it.

I suppose it's easy to grok what the newsstand is[1], but I'm not convinced it would matter after the first five minutes.

[1] Because I've seen it in US media, along with the route symbol on the maps icon and the fire hydrants that are in captchas.

Same. But how would large teams of UI designers justify their jobs if they'd leave it like that for 10+ years?

If the display is naturally transparent, I don't see the need for a non-opaque UI.

People are in for a world of pain when they realize this.

Looking at Liquid Glass, they certainly solved it for higher-res backdrops. Low res should be simpler. It won't be as clean as Liquid Glass, but it could probably do VisionOS quality.

Wait, are you arguing that consumers will reject something that puts, say, a social media feed in front of their face 24hrs a day? That will allow them to just gaze at an internet site constantly without even having to think about it? That will allow them to have videos in their peripheral vision while they “concentrate” on something else?

AR headsets will not replace computers, they’ll replace phones.

Good AR glasses are already available and combined with modern LLMs you can have normal people thinking about computers the way we do. This will feel less invasive than smartphones do currently while being able to do much more.

I'm absolutely certain Apple will not survive the transition though.

Anything less than lightweight glasses is a non-starter outside of gaming and other enthusiasts. The Vision Pro is just too bulky for it to sell serious numbers.

the blog post explains this

in short, it's simply a continuation of the practices that resulted in apple's dominance in the first place

This will let them build up an ecosystem of apps ready at launch and it means you are already training users. This are all laying the foundation of a successful future launch.

This is a bingo for me. If you know your web, you know these effects are almost impossible to pull off. Or any other UI framework for that matter.

This is a play that will enforce the line between proprietary ”native” and cross platform technologies, no matter how performant or good they may be. It is designed to surface the underlying tech stack to the user, so it can be a differentiator kinda like the green bubble or the constant camera array realignment that are both pure social posturing.

10-15 years ago it might have worked, but honestly, I don’t think it will this time. It’s too specific to be adopted and copied by other UI platforms, and Apple-only ecosystem just isn’t feasible for even the most hardcore Apple fans.

It will certainly be adopted by Apple-only devs that make bespoke quality apps in Swift, but Apple really overestimates how much value those can deliver in a world where smartphone is utility in a broad ecosystem. Your average business, from libraries to airlines to grocery stores, don’t have a reason to create full-native apps in 2-3 completely separate stacks. The differentiating features on eg iOS vs Android are simply not effecting the vast majority of real-life businesses.

Pass-through is the only AR approach that currently allows black pixels, but it has uncomfortable limitations compared to a see-through optic.

https://stephango.com/black-pixels

Of course, now that Apple has invented it, it will be completely different.

r/unixporn disagrees

  > armchair experts were laughing at us old people for reminiscing about the eye candy of OS X ...they told us... everything needs to be flat. ... You're not supposed to know the difference between text and buttons...

Err, no it isn't. It would be more accurate to state "the only thing that apple has recently been successful at is entering markets later with more refined, integrated solutions".

But it's definitely not the pattern of what they've tried.

The 100 billion also includes tons of expensive failures, like self-driving cars, etc. Those are not cheap, and they were definitely playing catch-up.

Here's an alternate take - apple fails at things sometimes, and has historically been able to get people to ignore and minimize the failure. Leading to folks saying things like "Apple's pattern has always been to enter markets later ...." because they just ignore the failures that contradict this. In this case, they are not just failing at AI, but are failing to get people to ignore the failure.

Why isn't that a better explanation than "apple never fails, they secretly were not trying to succeed at AI, they aren't spending billions trying to catch up, they are spending billions on a secret knockout blow that nobody knows about"

It could also be that Tim Cook is just an ops guy who only knows how to hill climb graphs up and to the right and Apple is running out of the innovation momentum it had when Jobs died.

If and when this comes, I'll be changing the setting to maximal opacity, just like I did with Windows Vista.