Tough Season in the Apple Fields
We’re adopting Liquid Glass for NetNewsWire 7, which we’ll release some time after the new versions of macOS and iOS come out.
Stuart Breckenridge has been doing great work on getting this done — and he’s written up a couple blog posts (with screenshots!) on his progress. See:
Adopting Liquid Glass, Part II (NetNewsWire Mac)
Adopting Liquid Glass, Part III (NetNewsWire iOS)
Since the app is made with mostly stock Apple UI, you might think that using Liquid Glass would be very little work, that it might be pretty automatic or just a matter of checking a few boxes. But that’s not true this year: it’s been a fair amount of work.
Other apps, apps with more custom UI, will probably have even more work, but even for us it’s been more than a bit.
And we’re not done. There will be little things (hopefully just little things) still to do before shipping. Including verifying that it all works as expected on the actual OS releases.
But all credit to Stuart, who got right on this and did a superb job.
(Note: if you want to see the code, you can: it’s on our experimental/liquid-glass branch.)
But My Mac
As pleased as I am with Stuart’s work, I’m not pleased with Liquid Glass itself.
I don’t really care about it on iOS/iPadOS, because whatever. I don’t love those devices. I love Macs because it’s on Macs where you can set out to make new things that change the world.
(Okay. Fine. On iPhones and iPads you can, I guess, but generally it’s much harder, and it has to be an approved activity using an approved app. And one thing you definitely can’t do on those devices is create apps. [All apologies to people who do manage to edit their podcast episodes on an iPad or write at length on an iPhone. Cool! But I hope that even those folks will grant me my point.])
And so I seriously dislike the experience of using a Mac with Liquid Glass. The UI has become the star, but the drunken star, blurry, illegible, and physically unstable. It makes making things way more of a struggle than it used to be.
We had pretty good Mac UI, but Apple took the bad parts of it — the translucency and blurriness already there — and dialed it way up and called it content-centric. But it seems to me the opposite. Liquid Glass is Liquid-Glass-centric.
Perspective
First thing: I have many friends at Apple and I didn’t want to write any of this. And there are legions of engineers and designers who I don’t know but whose work I respect greatly. It’s not their fault that this is the direction of the UI.
And this is not the first time we’re going through a rough patch with Apple. I think of them as seasons — we had, for instance, terrible-keyboard season not so long ago. We were wondering if Apple would just stop making Macs altogether. But then that passed and we even got these wonderful Apple Silicon machines. Seasons end.
And we’re in a tough season with Swift these days too. It’s gotten so complex and difficult that I find myself daydreaming about going back to Objective-C. Objective-C is definitely funny-looking, but once you get past that it’s actually small and simple.
But with Swift approachable concurrency and other changes I can see eventually getting through this season and to a pretty great place, so I’m optimistic.
Seasons do end, in other words, or mostly seem to end (though not the App Store monopoly season, not so far), and I’ve resolved to just wait for Liquid Glass’s replacement. Perhaps along the way it will get refined enough so that people like me can use it without eye strain.
Better Perspective
But far, far worse than any of the above is Tim Cook’s gold statue presented to the President. And everything that went along with that. I felt utterly sick and I bet you did too. (And it made me seriously wonder if I wanted to continue writing apps for Apple platforms.)
I understand John Gruber’s argument in Gold, Frankincense, and Silicon that maybe Cook’s move was the best possible move in a terribly corrupted system.
But what’s the use of being so rich and so powerful, I would ask Tim Cook, if you, even more than regular people, have to debase yourself before the dictator?
It’s tempting to think that our current government is just a season, like the bad keyboards or like Liquid Glass will eventually prove to be. Wait till the mid-terms or the next presidential election, you might think.
But there’s no reason to think that this authoritarian turn is just a season. Something besides just wishing and waiting for better is required.