Imagine the weaponization possibilities when combining the census data with Amazon’s and Meta’s data, and possibly several other datasets readily available to this administration. Whatever is missing from one of them can be inferred or defined from the others. This might already be happening, it can’t be checked. Some (former) dictators would be salivating.
"it’s proof that the rot has been rooted out of Apple’s software design team"
Weird sentence given that three staunch supporters of liquid glass are still in that team, including Lemay. I highly doubt it's going anywhere, hopefully it gets a few more improvements before it will be replaced for The New Thing in MacOS 29.
Liquid glass isn't inherently bad, it just needed someone to dial it back when the prettiness is hurting legibility/usability.
There are lots of things (well, in iOS) that I think are a big improvement, like menus spawning from the button you tapped instead of a bottom sheet popping up from the bottom of the screen. And the nested list menus are very nice.
But completely eradicating toolbars and replacing them with a fade that still doesn't allow buttons legible in all cases was clearly a mistake. And it's something they're backtracking on!
Steve Lemay was a driving supporter of liquid glass, just like at least 2 other remaining designers at Apple. It's not going anywhere. Hopefully it will get toned down several times over though.
It is being toned down, at least in that they seem to be lightening up on that stupid lie that it helps you "focus on the content" because there were no toolbars. As if you're reading any text behind the buttons that are warping it and displaying another layer of text or an icon on top of it. And they ended up having to do an ugly fade at the top and bottom anyway cause you couldn't see the buttons on certain backgrounds.
that's just sunk cost fallacy. The icons are also publicly available and can be used on projects conforming to the Apple branding, so it's not truly a waste.
If anything, the waste would have arguably been putting people to work on a feature that needed to get removed in the first place. If there's any post-mortem to be done, it's "why did this get released in the first place, and how do we make sure we don't spent time on something like it again?"
What exactly? From what I’ve heard, most of what was released in the months after the acquisition were features that were already in development/behind feature flags.
Speed, UI improvements, esp in the backend. Vimeo has been languishing for years. If this was all done by the original team, I wonder why they didn't roll it out years earlier. I've switched several clients away because of it.
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