Apple’s new Liquid Glass interface design brings transparency and blur effects to all Apple operating systems, but many users find it distracting or difficult to read. Here’s how to control its effects and make your interface more usable. Although the relevant Accessibility settings are quite similar across macOS, iOS, watchOS, and tvOS, I separate them because they offer different levels of utility in each. I have no experience with (or interest in) a Vision Pro, so I can’t comment on Liquid Glass in visionOS.
↫ Adam Engst at TidBITS
An incredibly detailed article showing exactly how to change the relevant settings, and exactly what they do, for each of Apple’s relevant platforms. I have a feeling quite a few of you will want to bookmark this one.
I don’t know. This reminds me of people turning off Luna to make XP look like 98/2000. I mean, go ahead, but I was never one of those people. I had WindowBlinds installed to run Luna Silver on Win98 instead.
I for one, quite enjoy Liquid Glass and really have no problems with readability. The screenshots I see online are universally cherry-picked to look bad, and they do not convey how things act in motion.
I bet you that most people either don’t care or they agree with me. Same as it was with XP.
I haven’t upgraded to 26 yet, but I prefer a UI with less animations, and less transparency. It doesn’t really have much to do with my vision quality either (though for sure, certain settings make things much more easier to read when you do have vision issues, and this is something that designers must account for). When I was young I was all into the crazy spinning 3D effects and stuff, but as I’ve gotten older, I just want my computing devices to “feel” more responsive, and turning off animations really helps with that, it’s kind of amazing how snappy everything felt when I turned them off, and I never looked back
Computers and a phones are tools. I’d really appreciate if companies could stop fooling around with the user interface unless it’s a clear improvement.
For older people, it is very complicated. My grandfather is 91 and often complains that buttons change place. His eyesight is decaying and, once he figures out where things are, it’s hard for him to relearn. At some point, I took his old imac mid-2007 and installed Debian + GNOME and did my best to make it look like macos (before all the changes).
The same goes to animations and transparency effects. Eye-candy? No no – spare a few CPU cycles and let my battery last longer. Animations that assist with the user experience? Ok.
I have a HP 712 with nextstep 3.3 and, besides the need of clicking too much all the time, it is amazing to run an operating system where ALL APPLICATIONS respect the usability guidelines of the platform. It is very easy to transfer knowledge from one application to the other.
With this nightmare of electron apps, nothing looks the same. Each application UI team think they can solve all the usability issues of the world and that their idea will be naturally discoverable. BS. Being consistent lets us rely on muscle memory and figure out how to get applications to actually do what they are supposed to do much easier.
No one turns a computer on to use Windows or iOS or whatever. We want to get something done. Anything that gets on the way of that is nonsense and wastes my time.
Shiunbird,
I agree. Strong predictable UI guidelines was 90s era thinking. Standard controls dominated windows software and custom theming was abnormal enough that those that did it stuck out, think “winamp”. Microsoft had set a strong example on UI, but as time progressed it turned into Lord of the Flies, and they decided to burn the book on UI standards to make the way for more chaotic designs, doing what they felt was cool without regards to usability. These days everybody does their own thing always trying to reinvent the way things work not so much to improve it, but just to stand out. Consistency/usability/productivity are passé.
” … will want to bookmark this one. ”
yeah — nevermind bookmarks: they have a tendency to go awry.
I’ll be saving that page as a PDF and stashing it in as many places as I can, just for my own sanity.
My go-to place for “webpage I don’t want to lose” is saving it in my Web Archive account, including the outlinks.