Sebastiaan de With, in a wonderfully-illustrated piece (a) analyzing, intimately, the place iOS UI has been, and (b) speculating, with detailed mockups, the place he thinks/hopes it’s about to go, beginning at WWDC subsequent week:
I’d wish to think about what might come subsequent. Each by rendering some
UI design of my very own, and by considering out what the philosophy of
the New Age might be.A logical subsequent step might be extending physicality to the whole lot
of the interface. We would not have to go overboard in such
remedies, however we are able to now have the interface inhabit a way of
tactile realism.Philosophically, if I used to be Apple, I’d describe this as lastly
having an interface that matches the attractive materials properties
of its gadgets. All of the surfaces of your gadgets have glass
screens. This brings an interface of an identical materials, giving
the consumer a sense of the glass itself coming alive. […]I took a while to design and theorize what this might look
like, and the way it could work. For the New Design Language, it
is smart that identical to on VisionOS, the fabric of
interactivity is glass.
I hope, very a lot, that what Apple has been engaged on is alongside the strains of what de With has mocked up. It each seems nice (and higher than what we now have now) and is smart. I additionally agree with him that it could be a aggressive benefit for Apple to determine a brand new visible design language that no current design instruments can create. You may’t make the form of issues de With is describing with Figma. Opponents might (and I assure will) superficially copy the look, however not the interactive responsiveness of lighting results.
In a profound means, a UI language comprised of shiny and matte glass, working on telephones and tablets that themselves are made from shiny and matte glass, would hark again to the early days of Mac OS X, when the “lickable” translucent Aqua UI theme felt of a chunk with the colourful translucent plastic enclosures of the iMac, Mac Professional, and iBook. Proper right down to the pinstripes. (Apple by no means did make an Aqua-style PowerBook alongside these strains, as a substitute going straight from traditional black plastic to the Titanium PowerBook G4, the styling of which augured the post-Aqua look-and-feel of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard and the much-beloved 10.6 Snow Leopard.) I’ve been clamoring for buttons to appear like buttons once more ever since iOS 7.
However as a lot as I really love de With’s mockups, they’re all for iOS. What I’m left unsettled by is my failure to think about how this design language might be delivered to the Mac. Macs aren’t made from glass; they’re all made from aluminum. However the primary distinction is that the best way many people use MacOS is with numerous stacked home windows atop one another. The very last thing MacOS wants is extra transparency/translucency than it already has. Some depth to its UI controls, although? That’s one thing MacOS is in nearly determined want of. A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a Mac UI theme the place you possibly can inform, immediately, whether or not a button is enabled or disabled or which merchandise in a tabview controller is chosen.
We’ll quickly see.
