Mockup time! What could be a reasonable "middle ground" between the Mac OS design that we have today and the radical Liquid Glass design we saw this week from #WWDC25?
Disclaimer: this does not attempt to solve all the issues of modern Mac OS design, such as cramped toolbars caused by full-height sidebars and combining the toolbar with the title bar. I feel like the Apple of today is too far gone to do anything about those.
Read on to see what I actually tried to address.
Several people have said having the sidebar float over the window feels weird, and I agree. Here I effectively reversed the visual hierarchy: the sidebar extends from "underneath" the window like a drawer. We gain back the pixels from the left of the sidebar and we don't have to figure out how to extend the content behind the sidebar.
Conceptually, in most cases, the sidebar is not the most important part of your window, it's there to show/change the context of what's happening on the right.
The next obvious thing is what's happening in the toolbar. I think the progressive blur from Liquid Glass is cool, but for legibility and clear separation of UI vs. content, I went for the "classic" look. The toolbar is also more compact, so we can actually benefit from the space savings afforded by the combined titlebar.
And of course, the humongous drop shadows have been pulled back, now just serving to highlight the capsules. The spacing of the capsules and icons in them were also adjusted.
Overall, I just tried to bring back a bit of definition in places where it was lacking, such as the icon size slider thumb at the bottom right, which was almost impossible to see, even on the super crisp and nice MacBook Pro display.
I'm meh on the huge rounded corners on windows. It's the style of today so I kept them, but the smaller toolbar let me shrink them a bit. The size of the "traffic lights" also matches present Mac OS. Not all things in the Mac UI should grow in perpetuity.
@tuomas_h @marioguzman This looks a LOT better.
I still don’t like the corner radius being so comically large, but I guess you have to pick your battles.
Tuomas Hämäläinen 🇺🇦
Jeff C. 🇺🇦🇬🇱
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