The real news is that he is being replaced with Steve Lemay, one of the most OG interaction designers at Apple.
Not someone with a marketing or packaging design background; someone who sweats over pixels and knows what "discoverability" and "affordance" and "feedback" and all those dirty human factors words mean.
The general direction of Apple's design has been the opposite of delight. I hope they right this ship. Their lack of leadership in the design space has trickled down to developers. iOS apps used to be a proud showcase of a company's best work but those days are long gone.
One example of Apple's fall from grace in software design was the perceived "design moat" that people thought that liquid glass would impart of apps that adopted it versus apps that didn't. People speculated that developers had to update their apps because those without liquid glass would look terrible in comparison to those with it. In reality, people (a) didn't care or (b) considered liquid glass a regression.
The human interface guidelines (HIG) used to mean something. Now it's a manual of hypocrisy.
...
Alan Dye is gone! Light the beacons!
Really great time for an UI change, with governments banning the thing. If they want people to go to the effort of using a VPN to access meta, they should make it better, not worse.
I clearly remember the release of iOS7 (or maybe I'm mistaken) with its flat design in the summer of 2013. Users accustomed to the skeuomorphic style for years initially felt this change was terrible. However, within two months, people adapted to the change, and other companies' design teams were quickly following suit.
But this time is different. Even though Liquid Glass has been around for quite some time, looking at the screen on my Mac still makes me feeling unacceptable.
Even stuff that uses a more "clear" material now is a bigger obstruction of the content below it than the old translucent gray versions were. The huge play/pause blob over videos looks like a transparent material, but you can't see a goddamn thing through it anymore because they turned it into a crazy lens. For all the talk of the new UI getting out of the way of content, it really is a big shiny attention grabbing blob that blocks your content. You can get a hint of what colors are underneath it, and it's shiny.
The trend in Apple's design for years feels like it's been making things look pretty in screenshots, but less functional and worse to use.
Another recent fuckup is the Apple Watch's redesign where they traded scrolling lists of cards for full screen slideshows, because you wouldn't want to see what's coming or what you've scrolled past. You used to have more than one item in view at a time, and it was a hell of a lot easier to stop scrolling at the exact right spot instead of blowing past the thing you wanted to get to.
Also bad, the System Preferences redesign. The rearrangement of that wouldn't be as bad if the search bar could reliably find and take me to all of the settings, but it can't.
If they put someone in charge who prioritizes usability again, I don't think this is much of a loss for Apple. Heck, maybe he'll bring his design priorities to Meta and help Apple make a comeback with whatever their smart glasses / AR play is.
I do wish they would bring Bartender-style menuextra containment as an official feature though. This is particularly awful today for visually impaired users, who are using the "Larger Text" screen scaling, lose a chunk of the menubar to the display notch, and then lose even more space to the big spacing they put between menuextras a couple of years ago.
The amount of bullshit that comes with a work laptop and wants to be in the menu bar is crazy, and when you run out of menu space things just disappear. Where did the VPN go? Sorry, displaced by your VOIP system and wireless presentation remote drivers and Dropbox and Teams and ...
It's nice that this software is quickly accessible without being in the Dock all the time, but the menu extras need to learn the same lesson as Control Center (and the Windows XP system tray 24 years ago) and have a second level that isn't space constrained.
I understand the new design scales better but I agree that the search is broken. Also it’s not responsive and feels like a web app.
What lies beneath the surface of subjective aesthetics should be the functionality of information acquisition efficiency.
Not meaning we need things to look gratuitously 3D. But that small amounts of 3D effect, edges, shadows and highlighting, greatly reduce the effort of "seeing" what is where and what it means.
And of course, the trend to simply use text for text, buttons, links, ... without very high standards and consistency of differentiation, is truly horrible design.
Stylistically, it was a decade ahead of other flat designs - and was much more pleasant to use than the shiny 3D overload of KDE 3 / OSX Aqua / Windows XP.
I don’t really mind liquid glass.
Of course, that’s mostly because there are bigger problems this release cycle. For instance, they didn’t test Magnifier on 13 mini sized screens. Now that it doesn’t fit, the other app teams will probably make more stuff uselessly cluttered/embiggened, rendering Apple’s last phone-size devices useless.
Liquid Glass is actually very good design that addresses design problems that persisted since the switch to touchscreens in a very comprehensive way.
More specifically, the problem of how to have universally recognizable and standardized UI controls in every app without interfering with their design identity.
To me it’s just a logical conclusion in the UI design field, and I fully expect Google and others to adopt something like it eventually.
The implementation isn’t flawless though.
I’d love if an actual UX designer could comment here.
I'm still too locked in to consider switching, but my eye is on the door if this keeps up.
I’m just lucky. I’m a nobody that has nothing to do so I can easily switch over to android.
settings -> accessibility -> display and text size ->
reduce transparency ON
increase contrast ON
differentiate without color ON
That makes Liquid Glass marginally usable for me. Without those settings, I’d be doomed. What a horrifically bad design.
Not to mention the overly sympathetic headline.
No one wants to see their content behind controls, they want to see the controls. The stupid glassy circles over my video are just distracting and literally make it harder for me to see the controls.
Just today I was scrolling and getting increasingly frustrated with the glass header flip/flopping between white/black text to account for the content under. For what??? I can't actually _see_ the content, it's warped and half-hidden.
Honestly, whoever thought "Hey, let's make things like the Safari address bar not cover the bottom so you can 'see your content'" should be fired (and I try not to say that often). It was a stupid idea, oh look now I can see 10px more of "content" that is just distracting and stealing space from useful controls. All the padding/margins got bigger in Liquid Glass all while reducing visibility and removing functionality.
Liquid Glass will go down as "Look over there" (re: AI), it was a distraction at best (because if people actually thought it was an improvement they are blind). Hopefully we don't have to wait quite as long as we did after iOS 7 for them to reverse course.
My iPhone 7 which I used for 7 years straight, was more bug-free than my current iPhone 15 Pro.
There’s no shortage of visual bugs with iOS 26, but that’s not my point. Recently I had to restart my phone (literally unheard of in Apple land) because I put it in Guided Access and it wasn’t possible to get it out without a force restart, which I had to learn how to do for the first time. That bug persisted for at least a month.
A few days ago the camera app would just show a grey screen and the fix was to restart your iPhone.
I’m sorry but that’s Android. If you have to restart your phone because of a bug, or core functionality like camera doesn’t work, you are not using an iPhone. But apparently, you are, and apparently Apple has finally succumbed to organizational corruption like every other company.
Still miles better than Android though, in which the OS is still an active warzone between Google and the manufacturer.