Thomas Stache

@thomasstache@dresden.network
16 Followers
67 Following
108 Posts
Software developer by day, photographer and lover of food and wine at night
LanguageDeutsch, English
Instagramhttps://instagram.com/thomasstache
Pixelfedhttps://pixelfed.de/thomasstache

You know, I could write a whole blog post about this—and I might—but I think we need to start addressing the very likely possibility that the *entire thesis* that “UI should get out of the way” and “apps should focus on content” is wrong.

Apps aren’t just for looking at photos or videos. They’re for navigating through these things, organizing them, editing them. The tools to do those things should not get out of the way. They should be clearly defined and separate from the content.

Dieser kleine UI-Bug macht es noch witziger xD
Someone who works on YouTube needs to realize that bilingual people exist. For a while now the app insists in translating video titles from Portuguese to English (I use my devices in English). If I change the language to Portuguese, it then translates video titles from English to Portuguese. I just want to see the original content as it was posted by the creator. And now it's even auto-enabling AI dubbing 🤦🏻‍♂️ Give me a checkbox to turn this off, please!

In case you missed it, Android apps including Facebook, Instagram, and several Yandex apps including Maps and Browser have been silently listen on fixed local ports for tracking purposes

Disclosure and findings can be found below:
https://localmess.github.io

#AndroidDev #MobileSec

Covert Web-to-App Tracking via Localhost on Android

After 15 years, WhatsApp is finally ready for the iPad

WhatsApp for iPad allows users to join audio and video calls with up to 32 people, use the rear and front cameras, and share their screen with call participants.

The Verge
Neue Burgerbude auf der Louisenstraße
In den Räumen der alten Bäckerei Rißmann an der Königsbrücker, Ecke Louisenstraße, tut sich was. Zumindest gestalterisch. Große Plakate hängen in den Fenstern: "Graffiti Grubs" steht dran, und "wir kommen bald". Daneben prangt eine doppelte Boulette mit einem Hauch Salat und Käse im Körnerbrötchen. K
https://www.neustadt-ticker.de/226211/aktuell/neue-burgerbude-auf-der-louisenstrasse
#Aktuell #brger #Dresden #Louisenstrae #Neustadt #Rimann #Rissmann
Neue Burgerbude auf der Louisenstraße - Neustadt-Geflüster

In den Räumen der alten Bäckerei Rißmann an der Königsbrücker, Ecke Louisenstraße, tut sich was. Zumindest gestalterisch. Große Plakate hängen

Neustadt-Geflüster
I've been mulling over the Apple injunction today. I increasingly think that the root of the problem here is that Apple doesn't view developers as its customers. Over the last 17 years I've paid Apple an eye-wateringly large sum of money for the services they provide me, and I don't begrudge them that at all. We are likely the highest revenue per customers group, but reading this it is clear that at the highest levels we are viewed as a resource to be extracted from not a customer to be served.
Ueberhaupt wußte man von 50 g Zitronat.
On the example of Lesotho, why those "reciprocal" tariffs nonsense:
Der Kaffee wird ausgeschüttet; damit er sich besser hält.
×

You know, I could write a whole blog post about this—and I might—but I think we need to start addressing the very likely possibility that the *entire thesis* that “UI should get out of the way” and “apps should focus on content” is wrong.

Apps aren’t just for looking at photos or videos. They’re for navigating through these things, organizing them, editing them. The tools to do those things should not get out of the way. They should be clearly defined and separate from the content.

The problem is not the introduction of glass as an element of the visual design language. If used as the Dock background alone, it would be totally fine! But because someone said “UI should get out of the way” and no one challenged it—instead of content literally being the focus, Apple has to intentionally put content *out of focus* (blurring) to make the glass elements visible. They have to put a gradient behind the glass so you can see it. That should’ve been the “oh, it doesn’t work” moment.

But here we are with a new visual design language that somehow manages to compromise on both the content area *and* the UI.

I’m *living* on macOS Tahoe and I’m here to tell you that the apps that are a pleasure to use are the ones that haven’t adopted Liquid Glass (in essence... all the third-party apps.)

This should be a blog post. But I need to collect my thoughts and write it all better. So consider this a beta version. lol

@louie > But here we are with a new visual design language that somehow manages to compromise on both the content area *and* the UI.

This. So much this. I’ve had this truth before my eyes for the past 3 weeks, and I couldn’t condense it in so few words.

@louie I'm taking away a lesson from this: UI should be visually apparent such that it is easily found and recognized when needed. The user needs UI to interact with the content, so why shouldn't it have a distinct presence?

UI usually shouldn't be so flashy that it draws attention away from the content, but simultaneously it should not fade into the background and become illegible. Somehow Apple seems to be missing the mark on both of these points.

Using the AVP as a point of inspiration for the UI of their other OSs is a big mistake I think. It's more of a neat science project than a successful product.

@louie It feels a lot like they’ve forgotten that a computer is a tool, rather than a means of consuming content.

@Middaparka @louie

Or they want it to be for consuming content - F1! Intruding into a space near you! - and nothing else.

@Middaparka @louie it can be both, but used to be they were tools first and now are consumption devices first.

Which may be one of the main reasons the macOS UI changes of the last years have rubbed so many people the wrong way. They are still meant to be tool-first devices but are being evolved with the sensibilities of consumption-first devices.

@louie I have never once gotten the impression that anyone on Alan Dye’s UI team uses serious pro tool apps. They love making beautiful looking things, not solving difficult UI problems with clever solutions. And I suspect when confronted with difficult UI problems, they say “Shut up with that nerd stuff.”
@gruber @louie where did Alan dye come from?
debbie millman: Design Matters Live, Tonight with Alan Dye

@gruber @louie I am trying to make sense of one more thing, why glass?

When Google introduced material design, it was inspired by paper & ink which makes sense tbh. We write on paper and we interact with paper in real life.

But why glass? I get that glass is a real life thing, but where do we see this liquid glass in real life? Or am I missing something and I am dumb?

@Himalaya @gruber @louie You’re not dumb, but I don’t think Material Design is all that useful either. Translating paper and ink into a glass screen makes less sense (to me) than trying to make it feel like you’re directly interacting with the glass.

I think Liquid Glass is a great direction, but v1 definitely has some poor implementations.

@gruber @Himalaya @louie Dye himself has said that he's "terrible" and is afraid someday Cook will realize that.

I mean we all have imposter syndrome sometimes, but surely some of us are right when we think it...

@fcloth @gruber @Himalaya @louie

Sometimes the imposter syndrome is trying to help you escape a situation that isn’t right for you.

@gruber @louie I’m not even sure they’ve used a Mac for a full day’s work.

@chockenberry @gruber @louie Wait, what are you implying here? They do the UI design directly in Keynote? :)

Who is Mica for then?

@mrudokas @chockenberry @gruber @louie

The underlings who implement the bad ideas?

@jonhendry @chockenberry @gruber @louie Looking at the Icon Composer and how it was presented during the WWDC, I kind of don’t know what to think.

I know it’s v1, but it’s like doing the handoff to yourself, over, and over, and over again – more or less.

If that is the understanding of the proper tooling and development convenience, then it’s really fucked up – the bicycle for your mind ideology may be gone. But how? There are smart people inside, guaranteed!

@jonhendry @chockenberry @gruber @louie

Best course of action after beta period? What would be the modern version of pitch forks and torches in this situation?

1. Lawsuit based on demanding accessibility rights.

2. Infiltrate Apple, teach good taste.

3. Show how it is done from outside. (No leverage to apply force.)

4. Infiltrate Apple, steal the macOS source code, release as torrents, die in jail.

5. Hack Apple, steal the macOS source code, release as torrents, live anonymous.

...

@jonhendry @chockenberry @gruber @louie

6. Bring back the modding, the skinning, the Winamp/beOS era through OS patches without having source code, use other UI frameworks, build new ones.

7. Build fucking web apps.

8. Write angry blogposts and tweets, if you can see where to click to send those.

9. Do nothing. Wait for RC. Die in despair.

10. All move to EU, pass laws from there.

...

@jonhendry @chockenberry @gruber @louie

11. Mass-downgrade. (Global user base will not follow, can’t make apps as business without new versions of toolchains).

12. Pitch forks and torches.

@chockenberry @gruber @louie Apple should force their UI team to use Windows for all corporate tasks. No phones, nothing but windows. They will become passionate about UI design.
@gruber @louie The leading indicator for that is notifications, of course.
@chockenberry @gruber this. I’ve said it so many times now but I’m not convinced the people making decisions even like computers.
@louie @chockenberry opinions on this being a knock-on effect of mock-up tools like Figma? I frequently run into issues where designers spend far more time in these tools than using the actual app. I get more feedback if implementations don’t pixel-perfect match “comps” rather than actual usage
@codecaffeine
¯\ (°‿っ°) /¯
I don’t want to spend much time theorizing. I don’t know what happened. I don’t want to pretend like I do.

@codecaffeine @louie @chockenberry the “pretty pictures” UI design workflow. Make some pretty pictures, get important people excited about them, hand over to engineers.

Then move on to the next thing, your job is done!

@codecaffeine @louie @chockenberry And Apple’s internal mockup tools. They let designers obsess over the look of an application when they should be drawing from a standard set of units in order to implement a way of working. If someone wants a button to look completely unique rather than the standard UI style, they’re wrong, and they should feel bad.

@eschaton @codecaffeine @louie @chockenberry Decades of pro and consumer apps from Apple alone beg to differ. It’s perfectly reasonable to deviate and to create custom controls.

ProKit had a bespoke pipeline including animations for decades pre-Figma, pre-Sketch. It’s not a tooling problem, it’s about the design culture and approval chain.

@bgannin @codecaffeine @louie @chockenberry Apple is not exactly the gold standard here. ProKit’s design was function-first; it wasn’t dark to Look Cool, it was dark to avoid imparting tint to edited content, and often its controls had extra features that didn’t just make them aesthetically different buttons. And it should have been available to third parties from the start, as part of AppKit or as its own framework.

@eschaton @codecaffeine @louie @chockenberry You contradict yourself while proving my point.

“If someone wants a button to look completely unique rather than the standard UI style, they’re wrong, and they should feel bad.” <- that reads as ProKit shouldn’t have been made unless in the OS, but you assert the value of doing so

For the record, ProKit was very aesthetically driven with per major release variants of gray (I worked on Aperture and contributed to PK a bit.)

@gruber @louie I’m reading these posts in Ivory on iOS 18 on an iPhone 16 Pro and noticing how this huge tall screen has plenty of space for the reading material *even with* solid zones at the top and bottom where the buttons are. It suddenly strikes me that it’s like an iPhone 7 with the controls moved off to the forehead and chin, and it feels right. I wish there were one persistent full-screen toggle button (onscreen *or* physical) to show/hide the UI.

I honestly still miss the home button.

@gruber @louie see also “how do you make a beautiful ui with many buttons”… “hum, I don’t know so… hide them all into a single one?
@gruber @louie it’s almost as if playing with glass baubles on a table isn’t enough when designing a new UI.
@gruber @louie I’m not sure when in the design process they made those physical clear and tinted glass/plastic objects seen in the Liquid Glass introduction and how exactly they used them (Do you know?). It seems to me that they could be a pretty good tool for imagining beautiful and very large or extremely zoomed in digital mockups and demos of UIs. Actual normal sized (comparatively small) UI not so much.
@gruber @louie Every feature Alan Dye doesn’t personally use gets stuffed behind the 3-dot menu.
@gruber @louie You’ve got it. Human interface is about how it works, not what it looks like, and focusing overmuch on the look doesn’t just do users a disservice, it perverts the application frameworks themselves. The existence of NSVisualEffectView is an abomination.
@eschaton pardon but how it looks is very important. People love to pluck out the Steve Jobs “design is how it works” but forget he said “design isn’t just how it looks” first.
@louie @eschaton and the looks also have to work.

@louie If you’re interested in other takes, I’m using iPadOS 26 full-time, and I like it.

It feels physical. Controls feel like they’re ‘on top’ of the content the same way tools sit on top of a desk.

For gallery apps (Files, Reminders, Photos), the use of floating buttons, rather than solid toolbars with empty portions at many window sizes, is a much better use of space.

Button grouping is useful.

It also just fits well with the shape of the screen and the device, and looks cool.

@louie Looking at the Xcode beta, it seems they do have an answer for editor apps which need to be more down-to-business.

@SalvagedTechnic Yes, where the answer is “well of course we still have delineated toolbars.”

They know they can’t apply this everywhere.

@louie Yeah! Perhaps having more choice in design approach between apps with different goals is a deliberate move?

We’ve only seen one editor app from Apple so far with the new design, and there are more to come, and designers at Apple knew this. They’re smart people too. I think it’s interesting to try and get inside their heads through their decision process, and I think it starts from seeing the minimal toolbars in consumer apps and wanting a better answer for those cases.

@SalvagedTechnic I’m sorry, but the crux of this is the requirement to think they’re right and we need to understand it rather than the possibility they might be wrong. I cannot possibly subscribe to any thought process where I cannot evaluate the possibility of it being wrong.
@louie Sorry if it seemed like I was suggesting they’re right. My reply wasn’t about picking a side, just around the idea of knocking down a steel-man rather than a straw-man as a tool for insightful critique.

@louie Because for sure, there are problems with the new design.

But a lot of the critiques I’ve seen so far just throw everything out and come up with a new design, or suggest the old design but modified. Which then doesn’t actually go into the problems with this design in much detail or depth, it becomes more of a ‘Look, I can design better than Apple’.

@SalvagedTechnic well, I wasn’t really inviting others to share their opinions but good for you I guess (??) I’m not trying to be rude. I just wasn’t asking for that.

@louie Fair! I’ve been critiquing some of the new stuff, and would love new perspectives on it where it can make me feel better about the changes.

Looking forward to the article! I think with your experience you’ll put the issues into focus better than I could!

@louie yeah this is it in a nutshell
@louie One thing that’s really wild is that there’s no longer any indication of where you can drag a window? Not even a hover state or pointer change. The only way to know where you can drag a window from is if you know how it used to be designed. They’ve really crossed a line where “focus on the content” has become a goal itself rather than a goal to serve a purpose (like maximizing screen space, or removing clutter when it’s a distraction)
@robotspacer dude yes it’s killing me. It entirely relies on your platform memory and guessing. Terrible.
@louie Totally agree. And to add: By placing the UI elements onto the content, by adding blurs and translucence, by introducing floating sidebars with seams around them where content shines through, the designers are adding visual noise. This does the opposite — it smudges over the content instead of getting out of its way.
@reimar Definitely compromising on what’s good about both to make both... worse.
@louie 💯
There can be apps that are ONLY about the content and the UI should get out of the way.
But most apps should have both modes, like Keynote, Photos, Preview, … one mode is about the content and the other is about the UI. View mode vs. edit mode. The edit mode should then focus on the UI/UX #my2ct
@chbeer Right. Glass away in a QuickTime Player window. See if I care! (The tab bar in these kinds of apps is atrocious, however.)
@louie We’re on the same page, once again. From my latest post:
@louie Someone at Apple created a tool to make realtime glass physics a thing the compositing engine could do. Then everyone fell in love with the tools so much they lost sight of what they were using the tools to make. It didn't matter if the OS became unusable, the UI a dumpsterfire of wasted space and excessive corner radii, as long as they got to use the Glass tools to make it, they were content. Soon everything that fails to serve using Glass will be gone.
@metaning well, that’s a nice story but there’s no way I’m going to put that narrative into my brain as anything that resembles a fact.