More assorted notes on Liquid Glass

Summary

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been trying to make sense of Apple’s latest user-interface redesign — Apple calls it Liquid Glass — that will affect all their platforms in the next iteration of their respective OS versions. But it’s hard to make sense of it when, after checking Apple’s own guidance, I’m mostly left with the feeling that at Apple they’re making things up as they go. If you’ve been following me on Mastodon, you’ll be already familiar with a lot of what follows. I just wanted to gather my posts there in a more organic piece here. Let’s start with a few notes on Adopting Liquid Glass, part of the Technology Overviews Apple has made available on their Developer site. In the Navigation section, we find this figure: The text above it says: Key navigation elements like tab bars and sidebars float in this Liquid Glass layer to help people focus on the underlying content. Now take a look at the area I’ve highlighted in the image. Why would you want to “focus on the underlying content” here? Tab bars and toolbars still cover the underlying content, and the more transparent/translucent they are, the worse. When something fades to the background, it literally ceases to be in the foreground, so there’s no point in focusing on it. This is like proposing an interface that helps you focus your sight on your peripheral vision. Below the figure, in the paragraph starting with Establish a clear navigation hierarchy, developers are advised to: Ensure that you clearly separate your content from navigation elements, like tab bars and sidebars, to establish a distinct functional layer above the content layer. Which is in direct contrast to what you’ve just shown on the image above. First you propose to blur the lines between controls and content, then you advise to “clearly separate your content from navigation elements”. Which is it? If you stop and think, it’s ironic that Ensure that you clearly separate your content from navigation elements, like tab bars and sideba...