Material 3 Expressive

As someone who works in UX, I admire all the work the Google UX team puts into Material: tons of documentation, UI kits, theme generation tools, a lot of thinking on systematizing the color combinations, etc.

However, this article has a lot of "Pepsi Logo" vibes (https://www.scribd.com/document/541500744/Pepsi-Arnell-02110...). I never confirmed if this was a hoax, but it was made into many news websites at the time.

Many design justifications they put on the page don't make much sense: yes, a big send button increases the metric of people finding the button, but it also takes space from the screen, and your daily phone UI is not a kiosk. "New users" become "experienced users", so the big button quickly becomes annoying. Even the M3 documentation site is terrible on mobile: the tab switch at the headers of some docs is so big that just two tabs don't fit into the screen.

By contrast, Apple, which is often praised for its product aesthetics, never makes marketing content like this about its design language. It may present creating emojis as a huge feature or inflate some of its claims a bit, but in general, they let the product do the talking.

> By contrast, Apple, which is often praised for its product aesthetics, never makes marketing content like this about its design language. It may present creating emojis as a huge feature or inflate some of its claims a bit, but in general, they let the product do the talking.

On top of that, when Apple makes a change or does a redesign, it's usually not overly disruptive (new macOS settings aside). The core functionality and layouts remain more or less the same, but it's just a new coat of paint. I still use my Mac the same way today, with the same keyboard shortcuts and workflow I did in 2006. Meanwhile, Windows has gone through no less than 5 total UI disruptions since then.

> it's usually not overly disruptive (new macOS settings aside). The core functionality and layouts remain more or less the same

ios 18 photos app?

Similar to Settings app I think the Photos app was because they rewrote it in Swift.

I hope the rewrite will eventually allow me to tell it to stop pausing sync for "optimizing system performance". Every time I find that my photos have not uploaded despite the phone being locked on the charger for hours it is because of Optimizing System Performance. What a joke.