Last week I was driving and a popup from apple music to accept more terms and conditions showed up on top of Maps.

It was a tense 25 minutes of interchanges without nav before traffic was clear enough to deny the terms, and I purged the app and cancelled the subscription afterward.

So I, too, was motivated to watch Steve Jobs unveil Aqua [^0] and compare it against Alan Dye's Liquid Glass reveal [^1]. The difference is unbelievable.

Jobs might have been an asshole, but his enthusiasm for the details is incontestable. He couldn't wait to show people the Save window, in its many forms. That he cared about the small details in everything is easy to see.

Contrast that with Alan Dye's inspiration reel for Liquid Glass. He's clearly reading from a script, which is quite a downgrade but understandable given the production value of keynotes these days. However, the real problem is that this intro is all about how it looks, not how it functions.

Microsoft tried this move with Vista (and their Aero design, which mostly failed), then again with Metro (which also by and large failed). Meanwhile, the key concepts of Aqua remain timelessly in macOS 25 years later. Function over form always!

[^0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHrVGk0WwYM&t=381s

[^1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jGztGfRujSE

I really have to wonder who Gruber’s sources are.

His statement “prior to today never heard much about [Steve Lemay]” leads me to think he doesn’t have intimate access to anyone deeply familiar with design decisions, because anyone who’s spent a little bit of time behind closed doors in that space absolutely knows who Lemay is.

But then he quotes sources who are supposedly “in a position to know the choices”, which would imply they are quite embedded in the design org…

Maybe it’s all voluntary misdirection on his behalf.

Funny enough, my phone upgraded to iOS 26 tonight, and I am like - what is this garbage, who though this is a good idea? And lo and behold, now I know...

Immediately went Tinted mode, yet there is transparency where it shouldn't be, text overlays other text, etc...

> Putting Alan Dye in charge of user interface design was the one big mistake Jony Ive made as Apple’s Chief Design Officer.

_One_??? Talk about rose tinted liquid glass(es).

> particularly his attention to detail and craftsmanship

I can get on board with this. I feel as if that has fallen off a cliff, in the last decade.

I just released a rewritten version of an app, and spent many days, running it over, and over, and over again, looking for subtle "pain points." Sadly, some will remain, because SwiftUI is so limited, but I think it came out well.

I do feel that "polishing the fenders" is a big deal. I spent most of my career at a company that would have day-long cage mat- er, meetings, over seemingly insignificant details of user experience.

It will be an equally good news if Zuck poaches the person or team that manages Apple's feedback assistant tool, the one that's used to report bugs. Asking customers to file issues there and then not at all responding to those for months and years even after repeated pings should definitely generate some interest from Meta. Zuck, some more poaching please?

I am starting to think John Gruber doesn't like Alan Dye.

I’m excited for the new energy this will bring to UI design at Apple. The same way that Jony Ive leaving opened up the opportunity for thicker more functional machines. Never underestimate the power of a group of passionate people who’ve been repressed and now get a chance to set things right.

   Hardware Design:    check
   Hardware:           check
   Software Design:    check
   Software:           please!

My hope is this will lead to the reversal of the insane "HDR auto-brightness" behavior that causes any photo marked as HDR to go extreme brightness mode while the rest of the screen darkens:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/254050878 https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/436949/why-are-som...

I think Apple have jumped the shark, personally. Sure, trillion-dollar business and all that - but at the folk level, they have become the very thing they were always resisting: a tired old monopoly enforcing principles on their customers which are not in the customers' best interests.

OS vendors have lost the plot. Where a company decides to try to build an operating system for mass acceptance at scale these days, they build an ad delivery platform - not an operating system. The interests of far too many third parties have been elevated at the kernel-extension layer, and lower, and this is as troubling as it ever was.

Its the 21st century and people still don't understand how to manage the filesystem, having given all agency to the task to the backend/cloud, which harvests their data instead of granting the user more agency. In fact, most people have less agency over their data - and simply do not care about it - because they have been lulled into accepting the state of affairs by OS vendors who simply don't want to write a better Finder/File Explorer for the end user - choosing instead, to write an operating system for ad agencies to harvest user eyeballs.

Apple have traditionally avoided the usual pretence of 'ads in the start bar' by leveraging their platforms, and this is starting to fall apart at the seams. Convergence is going to be a joke, and will turn off a lot of computer users until a generation is raised, who will just accept the doctrine of their masters, and in so doing, lose knowledge to the generations.

I yearn for an OS vendor to build an operating system that really makes the user control over their computer and their data, a number one priority. Apple isn't it. Microsoft certainly isn't it. There are multiple Linux OS vendors who could be it, if only they'd get their hardware act into shape. There are hardware vendors struggling to attain this goal, too.

My next laptop won't be an Apple, after 30+ years of adoption of the platform. I fear the future that Apple is laying out ahead of us - just as I feared that of Microsoft and Oracle and IBM too, through the decades.

If there is hope, it lays with the (low-end open source hardware/software-agency-protecting) proles.

My favorite reaction to today’s news is this one-liner from a guy on Twitter/X: “The average IQ of both companies has increased.”

My friend, that was NZ prime minister Robert Muldoon who was quoted as saying “every time a New Zealander emigrates to sun themselves on the beaches of Bondi, the average IQ of both countries increases.”

Here is an unpopular opinion, how about Craig Federighi replaced with Scott Forstall.

It isn't just about UI design. But the whole software stack as well. iOS is still 90% the same as it was launched, and yet the apps management is still inconvenient to say the least. Along with copying all Android features, if I wanted an Android I would have brought one.

The software stack, how many years has Swift been announced? how many years have they announced Swift UI? Xcode? HN discussed macOS problems not long ago [1]. It would have been far better they just stick to Objective-C for the past 10 years and actually get things done.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46114599

At one point years ago, there was an iOS release where the recently used apps would render, then re-order themselves after a second or two. You could tell it was caching then dynamically updating. It was frustrating from a UX perspective because you would go to tap on an app and by the time you tapped, it would open a different app because they had re-ordered themselves.

It was fixed in an update, but to me that's the canary in the coal mine that priority is wrong. Apple will be ok without Steve as long as somebody is obsessed with the UX being very good. When I see the quality of the UX experience degrading while other UX changes are made that don't improve the basic UX, then there's a problem.

I subscribe to Apple Music, and have built playlists on the service. The fact that I have to enable sync (which then wastes 70G of space on my iPhone) to use my playlists is BS. I don't see a technical reason for it. The only conclusion I can come to is they want to drive storage subscriptions by taking up space using music sync. If anybody wants to explain why sync needs to be enabled, that would be cool, but is a really concerning product management decision IMO.

I hope this improves things. The difference in attention to detail between classic Mac OS (as easily seen in Apple's "Macintosh" dynamic screen saver/wallpaper) and current macOS Tahoe is stark.

But I suspect that Apple Services have too much power so the platforms will continue to be corrupted with ever-more-intrusive advertising.

Related previously:

Apple Design Official Alan Dye Poached by Meta in Major Coup

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46142843

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46139145

> but everyone I’ve spoken to is happy — if not downright giddy — at the news that Lemay is replacing Dye.

Count me in.

Some previous discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46153852

This is like a Man United fan discussing a player who just left for a rival team. You sort of expect a large amount of bitterness.

This is a positive transformation for Apple

Hopefully this trend continues, there's too many dogshit people in positions they shouldn't have at Apple.

Two of the three worst interviews I've ever had were with them. Basically got flown out twice to be insulted by team leads or upper management. Everyone insists I'm supposed to keep trying until I don't encounter someone like that but that doesn't seem right to me, not for a company like this. I can wait

In the article, he asks why Apple didn't replace Dye with a "Dye acolyte".

Nerd that i am, I immediately thought perhaps the phrase "Dye acolyte" raises a null pointer exception.

Another post of his that isnt shadow banned!

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This is cope dressed up in the stereotypical Gruber sycophancy.

The decision to align iOS and MacOS with the glassy design of VisionOS was a broader corporate strategy that would have required buy-in from more execs than just the "chief design officer". If you accept that this particular bozo wasn't forced out but instead was tempted away by the scent of lucre wafting from Zuck's pockets, then that implies that there are still plenty of clowns left at Apple to fill out the circus.

I know a fraudster that everyone speaks highly of. Outright fraud and advocates against fraud themself. Whenever I read "everyone speaks highly of" I stop reading.

I also think Apple knew they rather wanted to move on without him. They probably gave him some targets that were to high and then reduced/dropped his bonuses based on low achievements.

He got the message, Meta got the carrot.

He might even be a better fit for Meta.