Through the Liquid Glass

Summary

It’s always nice being right.A few weeks before WWDC I wrote about the upcoming colourful and dimensional shift in interface design.That post ended up on the front page of Hacker News and was read 87,000 times.And then Apple announced Liquid Glass.People tend to push back on visual change. With Liquid Glass, it’s important to separate knee-jerk reactions from real critique. Contrast, legibility, noise—these are valid, fixable issues. And over the past few weeks, Apple has begun addressing them in the developer betas.It’ll be interesting to see how much gets resolved before the public release in September. (Remember: it took iOS 7 more than three major versions to iron out early flat design issues.)Glass has been part of interfaces for decades. Aqua had gloss. Aero had translucency and blur. Liquid Glass feels like something else. It bends light, moves with content, and brings depth in a new way. It might look like we’ve been here before, but we haven’t.Glass in UI isn't a new thing.It’s easy to dismiss Liquid Glass if you’re only looking at the surface. But this shift has been a long time coming. We need dynamic, dimensional systems that scale across screens, platforms, and spatial environments.Future interfaces aren’t static. They’re layered, content- and context-aware. Eventually gracefully morphing with the environment in a mixed reality world.People who only see the light bending into a prism flare along a refractive edge will lament the frivolousness of such nonsense visual flair. These people do not see where we are heading and how computing surfaces will have to adapt. To them, Liquid Glass is discarded as a useless gimmick.People who don’t understand how modern GPUs work, complain about performance.These effects are GPU-accelerated, composited in real time, and built into the OS rendering stack. If the beta feels slow, buggy, or battery-hungry, it’s not because of the design. It’s because early betas run extra diagnostics, lack performance tuning, and don’t ...