I like their Material Expressive design a lot more now after Apple's big reveal. While it's still a bit too colorful and whimsical for my liking, it does stay much closer to what I think should be the top UX design ideal - be clear, legible, and get out of the way. On the new iOS every screen feels like some UX designer is shouting "look how amazing I am at this!!" at me.
I find as time goes on I am less-and-less excited about mobile releases. I’ve had a smartphone since the Google Nexus 1. The desktop experience is always better, and a good book is even more inviting.
Curious what other folks are feeling. A lot of these tools seem like useless frivolity.
Meanwhile, I have family who constantly get confused whether the iOS phone icon is FaceTime or the “real” phone; and I have to do multiple taps instead of one to make a FaceTime call—and Apple is busy making Liquid Glass, for what?
The old mobile OSs used to be hilariously lacking so every update was genuinely game changing. I remember getting really excited when Android Ice Cream Sandwich was adding screenshot functionality to tablets. And hearing people talk about folders getting added to iOS.
Now all the low hanging fruit is gone they are less exciting. The photogrammetry api stuff added to iOS probably took 100x the dev effort of adding folders and copy/paste, but gets far less excitement.
> A lot of these tools seem like useless frivolity.
That's me on a good day; I fuckin' hate smartphones (hardware and software-wise), lol. I have pretty much given up on a slab-style pocket computer (6-7 inch, essentially a deshittified, Samsung XCover-series smartphone on steroids, e. g. S-Pen, exchangeable batteries, audio jack, 1-2 USB-C ports, mSD card slot, lotsa memory, phone-functionality is second fiddle) or a small detachable (8-9 inch, also EMR-penabled, essentially an updated, miniaturized HP ZBook x2 G4 with Nintendo Switch-like capabilities for docking and attachments for a variety of controller options and the keyboard). :(
I got myself a lenovo duet 10" detachable second hand and put postmarketOS on it, it's got standby for days and a pen. No SD but a couple of usb-C ports a fun little Linux box!
So there are at least two of us! I'd be truly excited and willing to pay laptop-tier prices for either:
1) a bare (ala Pixel) foldable with S-pen and without large external displays to get cracked and complicate things
2) a rooted linux-computer-in-your-pocket that can be plugged into a usb-c hub and happens to have a SIM card/cell modem to work as a phone.
...but until then I just get by for years and years on whatever mid-tier phone happened to be the smallest form-factor and best-camera-for-$ at the time my last one became unusable.
The issue with Planet Computer's Linux support is the lack of it. They all rely on custom kernels using Android drivers and libhybris to function. For both the Cosmo Communicator and Gemini PDA they glue together a bootable version of Debian, tick the checkbox for "it runs Linux" and then call it a day.
Well, there's a reason I don't recommend them; my Gemini PDA, rooted on the Android side, was a nicely serviceable little writer's tool and portable terminal, until a poor battery protection implementation bricked it.
Why hate them though? They can be great for some things, like messaging, maps, shopping lists and taking pictures. I never consider them "the ultimate computer", and I wouldn't want them to be, mostly because mobile stuff can break/get lost/get stolen.
> Curious what other folks are feeling. A lot of these tools seem like useless frivolity.
Something I have long said when talking about operating systems is that I consider them tool boxes. The same kind of tool box a carpenter would have.
I don't "use" the OS per se. I use the OS to hold my tools in a manner that makes it easy for me to access them.
So, it's like a carpenter's toolbox where he carries around his saw, hammer etc. and can easily grab them when he needs them. He doesn't need to hear about Hammer v2.0 AI-edition or any of that shit!
I don't need my toolbox doing anything other than holding my tools and fucking right off out of my way!
>>> Curious what other folks are feeling. A lot of these tools seem like useless frivolity.
Personally I feel like phone OS releases need to slow down to a 2-3 year cycle and lock in on bug fixes.
My iphone 16e has some of the most glaring bugs I've seen in an iOS release in quite some time (Slow motion capture crashes the camera app unless you set it to 120fps first in settings, 240fps is broken).
I feel like we could all use a break from the update cycle for software to actually get patched and optimized.
Honestly, I'm happy my phone won't get an update. This way I won't be exposed to new bugs. I'm on Android 13 and the only thing I observed when updating from 12 was that now when I switch apps, the screen blinks for split-second, which is incredibly annoying. Functionality-wise, there's very little that can be improved anyway. It's mostly just fiddling with details of the UI here and there.
I think we grew up with technology advancing rapidly and expensive tech from previous year being outdated, but now we came back to baseline where technological advancement is just small fixes stretched over a long period of time.
They are not that old and we still don’t have proper dashboard integration. I would like directions there rather than on the central console.
Plus there has been nice features trickling to user from release to release.
I like that you can easily use your phone as a clock with a magnetic dock. Translation and text selection in screenshot were nice. Search from picture highlight is great.
Phone screening is nice. Hold for me is nice too. Chat apps have improved by leaps and bounds since Covid. Productivity is now okay-ish at least for joining meetings and reading things.
As someone that plug his phone to a dock from time to time, convergence is nearly there but some things still need polish. I really wish we could get a better version of Office for example.
It’s not ground breaking but meaningful incremental improvements have been there.
>>> we still don’t have proper dashboard integration
The last place I want mobile devs to get their buggy little code is my dashboard. Hell I don't even really want a screen there, but I make an exception for tiny info screens if they come with real gauges on the side. That same shitty little screen currently shows a directional arrow and mile/feet till the next turn passed to it by Carplay/Android Auto. Thanks Ford for getting one small thing right with my E-transit, shitty massive touchscreen radio/AC controls non-withstanding.
Android 12 made it possible to have unattended updates possible on fdroid. I sincerely will not recommend an Android version less than 12 at this point.
At some point, we will have something similar on a newer version of Android that we will want and that we can't have with an older version. I don't know what it is yet but i am sure there will be something at some point.
The layer separation on Material has been really not good for me. The floating action button is so hard to notice sometimes; I've reached out for IT help or support sometimes because I just didn't notice it.
I haven't used it yet but the refraction effect on Liquid Glass feels like it could be amazingly good at creating a sense of layer separation. Static content it's maybe not going to be awesome at, but as soon as the there's motion, the non-linear motion around the bend of the glass, for me, seems to create a very easy perturbance of regular motion that it feels like eyes, in their radar like way, instantly know of, without having to look closely and interpret.
In my view the dramatic reduction of depth in Material 2 and beyond was a real mistake. That was the one redeeming thing it had over other flat UI design systems.
My main complaint with Material Expressive is that every other button seems to be 85% padding and 15% actual content. What happened to reasonable information density?
For control surfaces, padding prevents misclicks. It's actually very important part of perceived interface quality when dealing with a handheld touchscreen device.
haha yes, I tried to use my kids phone the other day and I had forgotten how much larger I had set the fonts on my own phone. It was impossible to read anything.
It's actually a credit to google that you can scale the fonts up so much and then forget you had done it. In the old days, the UI would be broken in various places.
It is still often broken, especially when a non-English locale is set. A family member uses larger fonts in Android, and most labels are barely readable (barel… readab…), UI widgets often don't fit on the screen etc.
Different topic: CSS doesn't have a good way to manage nearby clicks? A tap just a few px outside a button should click the button? <Input>s can steal focus from nearby taps on Mobile Safari (which can also be a fuckup). I hate iPhone taps that slip a little and scrollable areas having queer interactions (causing usability/accessibility issues).
As a proof.. well just use HN on your phone. It absolutely sucks, so those UI puritanists - please learn a lesson and at least make touch targets reasonably sized!
Exactly: we need an easy way to increase the tappable area of the vote buttons. You can't just add a invisible tappable wide border because the tap zones must not overlap. It is hard to design to be contained within a component. I had to use customised elements/CSS because the tappable area depends upon where a control/component is placed next to another control/component.
I also recall an obscure fix necessary for Mobile Safari. If you wanted something clickable near an <input> you needed to take care how you designed it because otherwise the <input> would steal the click. You could add an onclick handler (Mobile Safari has a bunch of heuristic hacks where onclick= will cause differences to touch behaviours when a touch is on an element that has a click handler. You could also use a button which might or might not be more accessible depending on needs and design. I recall I needed a lot of fiddling depending on each control.
Argue with Apple because Mobile Safari makes a tap close to a button click the button (and it causes exactly the problems you've predicted, and workarounds are difficult). Do you do a lot of close testing?? Because the feature is quite noticeable.
Some positive padding, offset by the same negative margin, will do just that, i.e capture clicks near the link or button. It has some problems, but I've seen it used to make footnote links easier to click on mobile.
Buttons are whatever for me, but the padding on things like notifications and other information text is getting ridiculous. The notifications are taking up 1/4 of the screen and managing to only show 3 words of an email or text on my phone.
Material is fine, but it feels pretty uninspired to me. Like the corporate art version of UI. Big flat inoffensive blobs, washed out pastel colours, etc. The new iOS demo kinda makes me feel excited to try the new update, once they iron out a few of the poor contrast spots.
The OS is less the stage manager, and more the venue itself. Imagine if the Sydney Opera House or Carnegie Hall looked "inoffensive" rather than majestic.
Opera House had (possibly still have, I heard they did a redecoration [1]) very big issues with acoustics. It's bad functionality directly caused by aesthetics.
> Imagine if the Sydney Opera House or Carnegie Hall looked "inoffensive" rather than majestic.
Doesn't sound like a big problem. Some of the best plays and operas I've seen have been in bland concrete boxes, portakabins, round the back of pubs.... Of course all else being equal I'd prefer a building to look good, but good stage visibility and acoustics beats a flashy building every time.
It's definitely the stage manager for me as a Linux guy who likes to rip the WM out of whatever DE is running and replace it with i3. Different strokes!
It used to be better when Material Design came out. It was more rectangular, looked better. Take a look at Android 10. It was much more "expressive". Now, it's just round, as if they're trying to copy the trend set by Apple.
I updated my Galaxy S21 to Android 15 and I hate it. The new design occupies TOO MUCH space, I could check almost all my notifications (I only have 3-4 apps that send me notifications) with a quick scroll from the top, but now a single notification occupies like 1/5th of the screen, making it much more difficult to take a look at all my notifications at once.
The other stupid thing, they moved the media playback to the quick settings panel and made it a tiny widget on the lock screen, on the bottom, where you barely pay attention to it. I removed this widget thinking it would restore the old functionality, but I was wrong. Now, whenever I listen to music, I cannot control playback from the notifications panel or the lock screen, I must manually open Spotify and control it from there.
I don't know what drugs UX designers are on but I can safely say this is not convenient for the user and we didn't ask for it.
I agree. It is clear, functional, and reminds me of staged doctor’s offices in commercials for prescription drugs.
Apple now is entering their Windows XP design era. Once things get too gaudy they will introduce Flat Glass or pretend like they invented straight lines and sharp corners. But at least that seems to have a personality.
The thing with [Microsoft's] dictated GUIs is that they all end up on the trash heap.
Some people have affinity for a GUI aesthetic. I liked Motif and CDE. Ripping them away for the garbage pile is a supremely foolish thing to do, as it can drive users away.
Apple, and Microsoft, will surely add more to this pile shortly.
There's also another version of the story of why they removed it:
> So basically, Microsoft's claim of Aero being "cheesy" "and "dated" are just lies to cover up the fact where the original Surface RT is not powerful enough to handle them.
The "Fisher-Price" design language was unpopular, but ISTR you could turn off most of the eye candy and get a the Windows 2000 design language. Pretty sure that was like the first or second thing I did with both XP and Vista.
And even then, people were never against most of it. Scrollbar thumbs with grip stipple? Checkboxes that fill in with a roundrect rather than a checkmark? Buttons and tabs that have an inline ring-highlight "intent" color to them, akin to the fill color on modern Bootstrap theme buttons? These were all parts of the Luna theme as well — and people liked them. (And, IIRC, they were often sad that these parts got deactivated when reverting to the Windows Classic theme, and often asked if there was some hybrid theme that kept these.)
With Luna, I think people were mainly just reacting negatively to two things:
1. the start button being big and green and a weird blob shape; the start menu it opens having a huge, very rounded forehead and chin — and both of these having a certain "pre-baked custom PNG image 8-way sliced in Photoshop and drawn by parts" look that you'd see used on web pages in this era. This made the whole UI feel very "non-brutalist" — form not following function, the way it did in Windows Classic (where the theme was in part designed to optimize for as few line-draw GDI calls as possible.)
2. both the taskbar and window title bars being vertically thicker, and having a vaguely-plastic-looking sheen to them to "add dimensionality."
And my hypothesis is that, of these, it was mainly the "vertically thicker" taskbar+window decorations that upset so many people.
This was an era where many screens were still largely 1024x768, even as monitor sizes were growing; so "small was cool" [and legible!] Websites baked their text into images using 8x5 pixel fonts; Linux users used tiny fonts and narrow themes in fvwm/blackbox/fluxbox, etc. In that era, a title bar stealing thirty whole pixels was almost blasphemy. (Same problem with the Office XP ribbon. Microsoft's visual designers must have been too far ahead-of-the-curve in what kind of resolutions their graphics cards supported, I think.)
I think, if there was an alternate version of Luna that also shipped with XP, that just narrowed the taskbar and window caption bar to the Windows Classic dimensions... then Luna would have been universally acclaimed.
> The "Fisher-Price" design language was unpopular, but ISTR you could turn off most of the eye candy and get a the Windows 2000 design language. Pretty sure that was like the first or second thing I did with both XP and Vista.
Ah, it is very likely that that's what I did, and so why I don't remember anything notable about it.
I think any Windows GUI is going to be perceived with bias so I am not going to say that it was bad design, let alone universally bad. But it was bold, controversial, and short lived.
Apple did skeuomorphism really well, which is hard and requires a lot of design work.
I cannot understand why they gradually abandoned that, as it was clearly a competitive moat in terms of usability.
I've seen how computer illiterate or elderly people were able to navigate skeuomorphic designs with relative ease. Right now, they can't tell what is a button or a field and what isn't.
While the technology to create 'alive' skeuomorphic elements now exists, that wasn't the case a few years ago.
Older skeuomorphic designs were static/rasters which were clunky to either mix these static elements with animated elements (for example the iOS 7 menu title transitions) or to have transparency (how can you have transparent leather/velvet?).
Liquid Glass is actually an extension of the foundation laid by iOS 7.
Many parts of the iOS 7 transition guide might as well have been written for Liquid Glass:
- "Make sure that app content is discernible through translucent UI elements—such as bars and keyboards—and the transparent status bar"
- "Examine your app for hard-coded UI values—such as sizes and positions—and replace them with those you derive dynamically from system-provided values."
Not gonna lie, I've been using (and programming) GUIs since the Amiga and even I get thrown askew by "click here to enter your name" (expecting a subsequent GUI element to focus, or worse - a popup) vs. "click here to enter your name" (haha! the prompt text disappears now and this is just where you write it I guess!).
You'd think this is just a little thing, but it can really mess with you if you need to change focus and - of course - every application will 'haha!' you in a different way.
It has nothing to do with skeuomorphism really, but at least skeuomorphism seemed to give everyone an idea of what they were shooting for at least.
It was primarily because skeuomorphic UIs don't scale well with user experience levels. They're easier for novices but don't lend themselves well to expert use, unless you add a bunch of extra affordances that would seem really out of place in a UI meant to look like a real thing. And what does a skeuomorphic web browser or email app look ike? We don't have those in meatspace.
I thought it looks nice, and gives more focus to the content like they intended :/.
The space around a block style tab-bar/navbar is wasted anyway, might as well show some of the content. Most apps were doing it anyway. Seeing a system tabbar/navbar was getting rare in “good” apps.
Superfluous animations, cryptic icons and UI elements with no indication of function and capabilities, and ungodly amounts of whitespace that make my 5.8" screen have less information density than my 2009 Nokia. That's not what "legible and gets out my my way" means to me.
Have you tried the beta on iPhone? 75% of the time it seems much nicer with 25% degraded. It's a weird mix but I see why they went in that direction. The only real problem is the religious adherence to the glass design language that is hurting it... because there are very good UX/design improvements via the glass, just not everywhere.
I wouldn't judge the new Android until I tried it on a phone either.
> The only real problem is the religious adherence to the glass design language that is hurting it
That's also my impression, iOS 26 looks like some UI's were peer-reviewed and thrown back with the note "Not gaudy enough, it's not enough glass! Remember, the theme is 'Liquid Glass', Management wants to see traces of this on every screen!"
I installed the iOS beta and thought it was as bad, if not worse than the WWDC demos. In a lot of cases, text becomes outright unreadable. Control Center looks like a mess with all the transparency.
Like the grandparent I'm much more excited by Material Design 3 Expressive.
In Vista/Win7, they mostly used glass background for parts of the window that didn't have any text on them. And for the few exceptions where that wasn't the case (like e.g. window titles) they added a kind of halo so that black text would always contrast with that regardless of what was below the window, or else just significantly darken the glass and use white text. All for obvious reasons.
Looking at the new iOS screenshots, I'm surprised that those reasons apparently aren't obvious to Apple designers.
There's some instances of text illegibility that seems to be caused by buggy contrast detection and I think they'll probably fix that pretty easily since this is only the first beta. I think the readability concerns are really overblown.
Same experience. I hopped on the beta because I thought the current version was going to be really bad and I wanted to watch them move towards something more functional. Its definitely not perfect but the way that the UI reacts in real time to holding the phone and elements moving makes it work really well and isn't something you can capture in a screenshot or video.
Indeed, but Apple still wins when it comes to "wow factor". In a year's time Android will look old and busted, and Google will have to respond with a similar UI refresh. Of course it won't be as pretty, responsive, or slick but it will keep Android in the running.
Turns out "pretty" matters -- a lot -- in UI. Sucks for those of us who found Windows 9x, NEXTSTEP, or AmigaOS as the pinnacle of usability, but users find themselves more comfortable with a UI that looks modern even if said UI has other detriments like lack of affordance.
"Pretty" is subjective and changes every 6 months or so. I prefer no animations, no translucency, info density, and an accurate calculator no matter how fast I type. But for fashion reasons we cannot have nice things.
The great thing about Material Design is that it lays a solid foundation to put such gaudy elements on top, because if the design-language is properly followed it can also be globally adjusted.
So expect Android Device Vendors to expand their theme engines to support more excessive GUI eyecandy than even before, "liquid glass" will be the minimum
The odd thing about this journey is, that once you're used to the simplicity of Material Design, adding such liquid/glass/leather/concrete/... elements to the rendering just degrades readability.
My guess is that Apple now cranked up the eyecandy again for everyone to follow, to then tone it down in the coming years, again appearing more "mature" than others. And in the end we will settle on something close to Material Design again, with more z-axis separation (more shadows, floating,...) and liquid state-transitions (changing elements affecting other nearby elements)
I'm also disappointed in Apple right now, but the screenshots of the Calendar and Gmail Apps in this post are even worse. Content in Gmail is separated by kilometers of whitespace with not a divider in sight. The calendar reserves 10% of horizontal whitespace for this crucial 2014 low-poly wallpaper…
Whatever the hot takes... nothing is more "dangerous" than a sound design philosophy. Sure, there are tweaks to make and I don't love everything about Apple's new design, but what I see is a team with an opinion on how to unify design across a full suite of products. That sounds quite durable to me.
The opposite for me. I'm so tired of the boring and uninspiring flat design, that Apple may have convinced me to get an iPhone next time I upgrade. I don't even notice Android updates anymore, the past 3 or 4 just look and feel the same.
Huh? What does systemd have to do with UX? If you want a bare bones Linux GUI, there are plenty of options, e.g. i3, which are completely independent of your preferred process 1.
Not the user you asked, but systemd has been controversial for a long time, long enough that I see the topic come up about once a month on various forums. There's a few folks who even consider it a bit fascist, I guess.
I fully understand the controversy about systemd, but the comment I replied to seemed to imply that systems was related to the Linux GUI, which it is not.
