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148 points methuselah_in | 22 comments | | HN request time: 2.058s | source | bottom
1. markus_zhang ◴[] No.46183142[source]
> Alan Dye, vice president of human interface design, who is joining Meta as its chief design officer.

I wonder if he is responsible for all those niceties MacOS got for the last 10 or so years. Like the scroll bars in Serious Sam Mental difficulty, or the flat earth flavour icons, you know.

replies(5): >>46183311 #>>46183914 #>>46183935 #>>46185367 #>>46187832 #
2. randycupertino ◴[] No.46183311[source]
He created liquid glass, the much ballyhood but controversial new ios 26 update. Marketed like "magic" but mainly just visual updates that are buggy, drain battery and make things hard to read. Wonder if they'll keep supporting/pushing it.
replies(3): >>46183377 #>>46183495 #>>46184392 #
3. markus_zhang ◴[] No.46183377[source]
Ah, another blessing I get to enjoy due to forced update policy from our IT department.
4. nine_k ◴[] No.46183495[source]
Feature request: a Dye Injector in the Control Panel that allows to add a tint to Liquid Glass, all the way to 100% opaque if desired.

(Unscientific fiction, I know.)

replies(2): >>46185432 #>>46187267 #
5. npodbielski ◴[] No.46183914[source]
> Like the scroll bars in Serious Sam Mental difficulty, or the flat earth flavour icons, you know.

You mean they invisible? Also I had fun playing mental. Finished FE on it ;)

replies(1): >>46184212 #
6. apple4ever ◴[] No.46183935[source]
He absolutely was responsible for all the bad UI introduced over the last 10 years. Nobody said no to them.
7. markus_zhang ◴[] No.46184212[source]
Damn I can’t even beat normal. I kept dying :/

Then I watched someone doing a long play on Serious and I think that’s a superman.

replies(1): >>46195505 #
8. sharts ◴[] No.46184392[source]
It’s so weird that such a role could even have been allowed to be held by such a halfwit. How dies that even happen?
replies(1): >>46187261 #
9. karmakaze ◴[] No.46185367[source]
I don't know if it's only because he left, but there are stories about how bad he was in his position for such a long time. If that's true, Apple must be blamed for keeping him there--until he voluntarily left. WTF?
replies(1): >>46186912 #
10. beAbU ◴[] No.46185432{3}[source]
Ironically this was a feature in Windows 7.
11. markus_zhang ◴[] No.46186912[source]
TBH I don’t know much about the Mac eco except that I have been using a couple of MacBook Pro for work for the recent 5 years. My humble experience says hardware is easy but software is hard. Might be counterintuitive but that’s honestly what I felt.
replies(1): >>46187091 #
12. TheNewsIsHere ◴[] No.46187091{3}[source]
With hardware there are only so many sanely quantifiable ways someone might use, abuse, or hack up your product. And you don’t have to care about some or all of them. Someone might desolder an Apple silicon chip successfully and do something neat with it, but they’re unlikely to use it to power an MRI machine.

But software - even inside the business that makes an application people will still find entirely surprising, realistically unpredictable ways to use it. Let alone the customers/users/tinkerers.

At a former place I worked we had one customer who was smart enough to be technically correct about how our software worked to use it in the most insane manner any of us had seen, and which no one had ever contemplated. Not even in a way that was sane to test manually or with automation. (I’m being a bit vague because it’d be very identifiable broadly and specifically.) Eventually we had to say “yes you can use it this way, but you’d end up paying far more than you should and the experience is going to be awful.” (Even sales agreed on the former!)

13. TheOtherHobbes ◴[] No.46187261{3}[source]
He arrived from the world of fashion with Watch, and somehow that gave him enough cachet at the top to entrench an extended nonsense career.

Looking forward to his tenure at Meta. With any luck he'll kill the company.

replies(1): >>46187333 #
14. DonHopkins ◴[] No.46187267{3}[source]
They'll virtualize the ink jet printer ink model: Totally Transparent Liquid Glass UI is free, DRM'ed dye is an in-app purchase that fades over time, or subscription that you don't actually own.

User defined colors not possible, only expensive premium licensed Pantone, Disney Princess Pink, Barbie Pink, Tiffany Blue, Coca Cola Red, Cadbury Purple, UPS Brown, Target Red, Home Depot Orange, John Deere Green & Yellow, Vantablack, Stuart Semple Black 2.0, 3.0, etc.

15. DonHopkins ◴[] No.46187333{4}[source]
Gruber: Apple employees ‘giddy’ about Alan Dye’s departure

https://9to5mac.com/2025/12/04/gruber-apple-employees-giddy-...

Bad Dye Job

https://daringfireball.net/2025/12/bad_dye_job

>The sentiment within the ranks at Apple is that today’s news is almost too good to be true. People had given up hope that Dye would ever get squeezed out, and no one expected that he’d just up and leave on his own. [...]

>It’s rather extraordinary in today’s hyper-partisan world that there’s nearly universal agreement amongst actual practitioners of user-interface design that Alan Dye is a fraud who led the company deeply astray. It was a big problem inside the company too. I’m aware of dozens of designers who’ve left Apple, out of frustration over the company’s direction, to work at places like LoveFrom, OpenAI, and their secretive joint venture io. I’m not sure there are any interaction designers at io who aren’t ex-Apple, and if there are, it’s only a handful. From the stories I’m aware of, the theme is identical: these are designers driven to do great work, and under Alan Dye, “doing great work” was no longer the guiding principle at Apple. [...]

>That alone will be a win for everyone — even though the change was seemingly driven by Mark Zuckerberg’s desire to poach Dye, not Tim Cook and Apple’s senior leadership realizing they should have shitcanned him long ago. [...]

>My favorite reaction to today’s news is this one-liner from a guy on Twitter/X: “The average IQ of both companies has increased.”

https://x.com/8hipulin/status/1996318006335401997

"Dye [...] get[ting] squeezed out" of Apple is such vividly technicolor imagery!

I too hope he makes Meta curl up and dye.

replies(1): >>46189494 #
16. terribleperson ◴[] No.46187832[source]
I wonder if the already-bad Horizon OS will get worse now.
17. thenthenthen ◴[] No.46189494{5}[source]
“ adding that 26-year Apple design veteran Steve Lemay will take over Dye’s role.”

26 year old ‘veteran’? This guy was 6 when Windows Aero was introduced…

replies(1): >>46190690 #
18. DonHopkins ◴[] No.46190690{6}[source]
It didn't say 26-year-old, it said 26 year, according to your own quote. You inserted the word "old", which changes the meaning entirely. If he's been working on design for 26 years then he is a veteran, not hired as a child.
replies(1): >>46190763 #
19. thenthenthen ◴[] No.46190763{7}[source]
Oh lol, totally misread that!
replies(1): >>46190824 #
20. DonHopkins ◴[] No.46190824{8}[source]
I'd far prefer a kid with actual HCI usability design skills and compassion for users, than a middle aged superficial cosmetician who scoffs at "programmer talk" and prides himself on not knowing what a "key window" or "Fitts' Law" is.

>After I published that post, I got a note from a designer friend who left Apple, in frustration, a few years ago. After watching Jobs’s Aqua introduction for the first time in years, he told me, “I’m really struck by Steve directly speaking to ‘radio buttons’ and ‘the key window’.” He had the feeling that Dye and his team looked down on interface designers who used terms like Jobs himself once used — in a public keynote, no less. That to Dye’s circle, such terms felt too much like “programmer talk”. But the history of Apple (and NeXT) user interface design is the opposite. Designers and programmers used to — and still should — speak the exact same language about such concepts. Steve Jobs certainly did, and something feels profoundly broken about that disconnect under Alan Dye’s leadership. It’s like the head of cinematography for a movie telling the camera team to stop talking about nerdy shit like “f-stops”. The head of cinematography shouldn’t just abide talking about f-stops and focal lengths, but love it. Said my friend to me, regarding his interactions with Dye and his team at Apple, “I swear I had conversations in which I mentioned ‘key window’ and no one knew what I meant.”

replies(1): >>46193065 #
21. thenthenthen ◴[] No.46193065{9}[source]
Absolutely
22. npodbielski ◴[] No.46195505{3}[source]
Mental is actually easier than serious because monster are exactly like in Hard but just invisible from time to time. But they movement are easy to predict because they mostly run in straight lines ;)