it’s very easy to dunk on liquid glass for looking like shit and being inaccessible trash but now that I’ve been forced onto a new version of iOS and have first-hand experience with it, I feel it’s important to tell the truth:
it works like absolute shit too. who the fuck’s idea was it to make notifications work like this? who fucking sat there and decided what I wanted from the keyboard was for someone to fuck with its layout for no apparent reason?
not since the 90s have I interacted with a system UI whose animations were apparently designed to be as distracting as possible. I just looked at a masto notification and wondered why it had a weird tattoo (it was the UI of my active app showing through in bright blue, and I’ve got liquid glass on the “tinted” setting)
all my icons are fucking ugly now but the updated ones are worse. the calendar widget is a weird blob now. everything on my widget page is a weird blob.
what in the fuck did they do to the calendar, in general
who in the fuck is this for
holy fucking shit they made the CarPlay UI’s buttons smaller and made the daytime theme a set of colors that maximizes reflections and glare
I’d ask who decided this but “our users want smaller controls, more buttons, somehow also more whitespace, and less visibility for their driving interface” is a thoroughly LLM-brained decision
so who prompted ChatGPT and followed its instructions? I just want to talk (I’m going to run you over with my fucking car)
here I am severely disliking Apple’s UI for being materially the worst modern UI I’ve ever personally used (none of my computers run windows 11 and none of them ever will) and also disliking the macbook neo for being, by the numbers, a bad deal for everyone except Apple
maybe we can stop rewarding this company that’s doing a shit job of everything but increasing their share price with lipservice and thonkpieces about how the neo is great actually?
(I submitted the previous post too early because of liquid glass jank!)
maybe when we see a company like Apple capitulate to fascists in front of our own eyes and fuck up on security (the exploit kit that pushed me onto liquid glass) we shouldn’t reward any of that?
and like, you can punish Apple without leaving their ecosystem if you must stay. I get it. buy a used device. they’ll fucking hate if you buy a used macbook and it’s better and cheaper than the neo.
nah I must just be a hater
all I see when I look at this dreadful fucking UI is the big boy trophy they gave that fucker when they capitulated
and you want me to clap when they do things that increase their share price
also I still cannot get over how the new CarPlay UI made everything I use CarPlay for harder
the “go home” button is gone because now I guess I want to scroll a dreadful list of nearby food or gas or whatever?
app switching is fucking tiny for no reason
if I want to “end route” in maps, a thing I do constantly because maps can’t ever tell when I arrive (self-driving any day now I’m sure) I now have to swipe up on my arrival time (what) and tap a tiny end route button
sometimes the iMessage send button just glows instead of sending the message and I have to tap it again??
like I get it probably wants me to open the context menu I never use but like, I’ve tapped that button a lot and it never had this bug before and now it just keeps happening
oh dear fuck I opened the context menu and it can’t be closed by tapping the background, you have to find the tiny little close button and tap that or else you’re trapped
believe it or not Apple I don’t use these
I figured out the reason for this and it’s fucking worse than the context menu thing
they made the tap target for the send button tiny, roughly the size of how big the icon is (don’t ever do this on mobile, your touch targets need to be bigger than their visual representation)
if you miss the tap target due to muscle memory it pulses the entire text bar and if you do it next to the button, it makes the button glow bright white
it does this instead of tapping the damn button
what’s worse is if it’s a multi-line text: the button shifts position and instead of making the tap target the height of the text box as anyone with mobile UI experience would, your finger now has to track down where the button went
which it won’t because you aren’t looking for the button with your eyes. why would you?
“zzt how dare you. I bet you’re not even compiling a kernel right now”
jokes on you I’ve been compiling BSD since 1998. the same kernel, on a vax. it’s not done compiling yet
and as with the other liquid glass animations it isn’t subtle and it just can’t fucking stop
like who in the fuck’s idea was it to make the animation this fast and this visible? previous iOS animations were successful because they were relatively subtle and now I have fucking glowworms crawling around my icons in the most distracting way possible
[object Object]