Apple goes glass whole as it pours new UI everywhere Apple CEO Tim Cook on Monday opened the company's annual developer conference by talking up a forthcoming racing film called “F1”. If it seems odd for a company famous for hardware to open a major event with a chat about a movie, SVP of software engineering Craig Federighi stepped onto the stage and tied it to Apple’s core …
Live Translation - not much use if deafy Siri is too cloth-eared to hear spoken words properly.
Fix that first Timothy.
Something else to fix “I’can’t do that whilst you are driving” or giving you some results to web browse to.
“Siri when is Costco Haydock fuel open until ??”
…. An illustration of literally *WHEN* you need a voice assistant.
It's Frutiger Aero (2004-2013), invented first by Apple in 2025.
So looking forward to other manufacturers mindlessly following Apple so we can all travel back in time to +/- 2010.
Windows Aero – the design language used by the Microsoft Windows operating systems beginning with prototypes of Windows Vista (2001–2006) – was among the first to feature characteristics of what in 2017 was labeled "Frutiger Aero" by Sofia Lee of the Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute.
(You, might want to read the wiki's you reference before you post links to them.)
It seems el Reg has missed a couple of things reported over the weekend, one being the death of Bill Atkinson. I'll leave you to look for some of the tales of his exploits but one of them was that having accomplished efficient drawing ellipses and circles with the limitations of the 68000 Jobs brow-beat him into extending that to rectangles with rounded corners.
@Doctor Syntax
https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/11/bill_atkinson_obituary/
It should be in the mac basic survival guide, that you can turn off most of the bling via Accessibility extensions.
By fiddling with them, you can revert any of the pompous poop emoji releases back into something reasonable.
Try hard enough, you can make it look seriously like an original Mac -- albeit with a much larger screen.
We used to use the accessibility allowances to short cut the ~~brainwashing~~ education classes.
Reserve longer. Tried the Beta (yeah I know I know) on a recent Mac Pro + the Apple Display and it totally *****ed up and booted into nothing but a blank screen.
Reverting to Sequoia was an even bigger p in the a because of onboard security etc etc
But if Apple cant even get the graphics right in a Beta on their own hardware .....
Nothing dates so fast, as things that are supposed to be futuristic.
I've really come to like dark mode, on various UIs. Because of my black and shrivelled soul it seems be less eye-wateringly bright - while still offering contrast. Imagine if you had to live and work on JJ Abrams' idea of the starship Enterprise? You'd need sunglasses just to use the computers. There'd probably be a lighting droid, wandering round randomly shining bright lights into peoples' faces - for that authentic lens glare feel.
Then again, modern designers seem to hate contrast as well. Pastel text on white backgrounds appears to be a popular design choice, so why not turn the transparency up to 11 and make everything impossible to read.
My other big gripe is that all these touch UIs have pinch-to-zoom built in. But only for some bits of the text, and only sometimes. Some websites delieberatly stop you doing it, and the browser makers allow them to, for some strange reason. And you can't zoom in on tiny bits of the UI - presumably because the UI designers refuse to accept that they might have made a mistake and created something that's unreadable. OK, this is me whining, because I like to read on my iPad without my reading glasses - which I can do with zoom, until the point I'm betrayed by the UI and have to fetch them.
Just being able to effectively select for cut and paste on a phone screen would be a big win.
It's no better on tablet screens. For reasons I can't understand.
The UI designers seem to have decided that if you click on something you want select all. So if you're trying to correct something you've typed - you desperately try to get the curson into a word, to correct a typo, hit the letter you want - and hey presto! The whole email's disappeared! I admit that this is not the easiest thing to get right, but it seems to be terribly badly done. Windows Phone was quite good at it, certainly compared to my experiencens with Android - though iOS seems to be the worst.
Also Google deserve a shout out for their amazing YouTube UI. There's a feature where clicking on the progress bar of a video can bring up some enlarged version with thumbnails, that allows you to select more accurately where you want to be in the video. Nobody knows why they bothered though. Seeing as invariably, when you click on the cross on top right corner (to close the window) it takes you right to the end of the video. If you're unlucky enough to have autoplay on, it then immediately takes to to some random other video and straight into an advert.
An especially apposite comment, given that Vista was one of the versions of Windows to appear after that platform had flirted with year-number versioning: 95, 98, 2000
It was once all the rage to use year-number versioning. Off-hand, I can't think of one which stuck. Like so much in tech, it always seems to be replaced in relatively short order by either acronym/name releases (XP, Vista) or reverting to more meaningful version numbers again.
All it seems to take is a release that offers insufficient differentiation from the N-1 release for a version number bump to appear absurd or, conversely, for a release to be such a huge advancement over the previous that N+1 is deemed insufficient by the marketing dept. Or a particularly disastrous release that motivates a desire to put clear blue water between that and the subsequent release, more than N+1 (or even N+x) can comfortably achieve.
I'll be surprised if this lasts much beyond ---OS 30.
"It was once all the rage to use year-number versioning. Off-hand, I can't think of one which stuck"
Ubuntu - 24.04 is the last LTS release, available since April 2024, latest release is 25.04 released April 2025, next release will be 25.10 in October this year. Same for many previous years.
The one bad thing about such a fixed schedule is that there is a push to get new features in that compromise the overall quality of the next release. I'd prefer to see a slight delay, rather than a rushed release.
If they keep rehashing ideas from the past, how long before they demo a “gorgeous new” pixelmorphic design, which is easier to use because of its high contrast - two spectacular colours, black and white, with 32 sharp pixels per icon - and no confusing transparency. And, to round it off, the iMac nano - with a crisp 9 inch screen.
All new. Revolutionary. Hello again. Again.
I watched a 20 minute summary of the day and I struggled for a while to know if it was like some AI parody or not. One minute i was thinking this is cool and then the next minute they talking about adding umm ... windows to iOS? Ffs
Then they say we've added notes so you can keep a notes when you need to remember something I thought surely they're taking the piss. And "now" you can drag an icon to the taskbar ... Then I'm like really suspicious that I'm on the multiverse
Smh I'm getting old
Like many other commentards I've a lot of objections to AI - that it's being touted in fields where you need an answer to be correct, rather than possibly correct; that cloud-based models are trained on who-knows-what; and that using it involves effectively paying a monthly tax to one of these cloud-based providers, not to mention giving them all your data and being locked into whatever solution they offer.
But AI on the phone, running local models that are available to apps over API? It doesn't solve the first answer, but it does partially solve the second and completely fixes the third. So that's progress.
Translation:
The existing product does everything you need* so as we can't add anything new and useful we'll faff with the UI so that learning that will make you think we really have added something and for extras we'll sprinkle it with AI shit.
* Within the walled garden confines of course.
This is like when you know where everything is in your supermarket and suddenly one day everything is moved around because... who knows. I'm sure the big brains at the supermarket think it's wonderful but nobody who uses it can find anything. The best people can hope for is spending months getting used to it so hopefully they can find the same stuff again in a similar amount of time as before.
The idea is to make you spend more time in the supermarket, hopefully browsing the products they carefully put at eye height (it's the more expensive shelf space - if you want to save money, learn to look down and up :) ).
What I personally don't get is what Microsoft gains doing the exact same thing with every release, unless their explicit goal is to reduce productivity rather than assist it. It's a temporary death to usability every time they do it. Worse, it means people have to develop new workarounds for new flaws such as the issues with flagged emails in the new(ly broken) version of Outlook.
I am not a fan of the new look but god am I tired of 'flat' UIs and this finally might be the thing that pushes away from this design decision.
They are low contrast, sometime ambiguous buttoned nightmares.
If it catches on, there might be some good skeuomorphic themes for XFCE/MATE beyond a half-dozen unmaintained projects.
Me: Please fix all the bugs and make things more stable.
Apple: Look how transparent everything is now!
I think the new look is ugly and dated. I thought Vista looked like hot garbage and this is just the same thing rehashed and called 'revolutionary'. Don't get me started on the visual clutter introduced when the background of a button constantly changes dependant on what's behind it. Are they purposely trying to make it hard to see what's written on UI elements?
The whole iOS UI is changing to be similar to the universally panned Photos app redesign. Excellent work Apple.
And what is this fascination with hiding UI elements? They keep saying the UI 'gets out of your way', but hiding frequently used buttons doesn't seem like a great idea to me. I don't want my UI to be 'discoverable', I want it to stay where it was last time I used it, not constantly pop in and out dependant on the time of day. I'm constantly having this argument with clients who keep insisting on hiding important web content behind a hover or a tap. If it's important, keep it on screen.
Please, Apple. Can we just have a Snow Leopard style stability release and hold off on the 'new shiny' for a bit. Also, we don't need a new OS every year. Just release it when it's fully baked, I'm fed up with fighting weirdness everyday.
I will give them some credit for making iPadOS a bit more useful with proper windowing and file management. However, the amount of development time that went into creating that could have gone into something else if they just gave people the option to run MacOS on M based iPads. I'm not talking about forcing everyone to run MacOS on an iPad, but the kind of power users who want these features in iPadOS are likely also the ones who would be happier with MacOS - and more importantly the full featured pro apps available for MacOS - on their iPad.
Very shiny.
But have they fixed Finder or Spotlight yet?
Sequoia has been bloody awful for basic functionality. The ability to preview .CR3 (Canon Mirrorless RAW) files in Finder is spotty to say the least. Sometimes it works, sometimes you just get a black 6000x4000 rectangle. Not sure why. Used to work, but they borked it.
Spotlight frequently doesn't find installed applications, instead offering to perform a web search (and yes, I've been through every forum thread, rebuilt the index, etc).
Meanwhile Finder is unfathomably slow. Save a file and it can take 30 seconds to appear in the finder window, which is just ridiculous on an M3 with NVMe storage and 24GB of RAM. Are you rebuilding the whole f-ing index?
Worse yet, Finder (or an underlying dependency) is apparently still single-threaded in places because a slow SMB share can lock all your Finder windows. Trying to move a document between two local folders? Sorry - if the thread is hanging on a NAS for an unrelated operation, you'll just have to wait. Which is weird because simultaneous transfers are perfectly possible. But seemingly certain operations like trying to index a remote folder will lock the whole thing up. This never used to be a problem, but is now. I suspect someone has tried to improve Finder and make it more responsive by predicting what you might want to do (on an assumption that storage is so fast you can afford to do some speculative stuff?), which has the opposite effect when you're accessing a HDD-based share.
If I go to "Save Image" or a PDF in a browser, I hear the disks in the NAS spin up before the Save Dialog opens. I'm not actually wanting to save it to the NAS - just my Downloads folder. But at a guess, the underlying file management system is saying "Aha, they have a share mounted. They might want to save the file there so we'll make sure that connection is awake before we let them do anything", rather than presenting the dialog and then pinwheeling if and when I select a network share to interact with. This presumption creates a pause of multiple seconds between clicking "Save" and the save dialog actually appearing, which is a right nuisance.
The saying used to go "What Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh away". But it's true of everyone - despite order-of-magnitude increases in compute and CPU speed, and massive growth in available RAM, the underlying UI responsiveness is seemingly not a priority for developers, despite being the single most important UX factor. If you want your UI to feel sluggish and slow, making users wait as you bring windows into focus or simply hanging when you browse to a different folder is how to do it. We managed this in 2005. How do we not manage now?
I was able to tab through 20MB RAW files quite happily on a 2008 dual-core Macbook (with SSD upgrade). Why do we struggle with doing the same on NVMe storage in 2025?
Agree with lots of your comments here. Canon RAW seems to be incredibly hit and miss. Frankly, QuickLook as a whole has been very flaky in recent years and often hangs for me, with the only way to get the functionality back being to force close the processes.
They have updated Spotlight a lot in MacOS 26, but I'd bet several pints that at its core it's still the same ropey indexing engine. I'd be happy if it would just let me eject an external drive without having to kill the Spotlight process. I know you can add the drive to the Spotlight exclusion list, but you have to do that with every new drive you use and nine times out of ten you get an error and adding doesn't work.
I'd also add in the frankly weird issues with SD Cards. They'll work one time when you plug them in, but the next they won't mount. Restart the Mac and they work again. I find that the only way I can read the SD card from my DJI Pocket is to plug the unit itself in with a cable. Sometimes even that doesn't work and you have to ensure the device is plugged in and turned on when you restart the computer. I've had these issues on both an M4 MacBook Pro and an M2 Mac Mini, so it's not hardware. It's an utter mess.
I don't hold out much hope that these basic issues will be fixed. They've been present for years. But hey, look how shiny and transparent everything is now!
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