> but everyone I’ve spoken to is happy — if not downright giddy — at the news that Lemay is replacing Dye.
Count me in.
Count me in.
His statement “prior to today never heard much about [Steve Lemay]” leads me to think he doesn’t have intimate access to anyone deeply familiar with design decisions, because anyone who’s spent a little bit of time behind closed doors in that space absolutely knows who Lemay is.
But then he quotes sources who are supposedly “in a position to know the choices”, which would imply they are quite embedded in the design org…
Maybe it’s all voluntary misdirection on his behalf.
My friend, that was NZ prime minister Robert Muldoon who was quoted as saying “every time a New Zealander emigrates to sun themselves on the beaches of Bondi, the average IQ of both countries increases.”
_One_??? Talk about rose tinted liquid glass(es).
Two of the three worst interviews I've ever had were with them. Basically got flown out twice to be insulted by team leads or upper management. Everyone insists I'm supposed to keep trying until I don't encounter someone like that but that doesn't seem right to me, not for a company like this. I can wait
He got the message, Meta got the carrot.
He might even be a better fit for Meta.
It was a tense 25 minutes of interchanges without nav before traffic was clear enough to deny the terms, and I purged the app and cancelled the subscription afterward.
iOS 7’s design language was almost universally panned, but if it were “the wrong decision,” other phones wouldn’t have adopted similar design language. Material appeared just a year later in 2014. It wasn’t bad, it was just arbitrary.
(“I like Liquid Glass! I like Liquid Glass!” I insist as i slowly shrink down into the size of a corn cob)
Immediately went Tinted mode, yet there is transparency where it shouldn't be, text overlays other text, etc...
OS vendors have lost the plot. Where a company decides to try to build an operating system for mass acceptance at scale these days, they build an ad delivery platform - not an operating system. The interests of far too many third parties have been elevated at the kernel-extension layer, and lower, and this is as troubling as it ever was.
Its the 21st century and people still don't understand how to manage the filesystem, having given all agency to the task to the backend/cloud, which harvests their data instead of granting the user more agency. In fact, most people have less agency over their data - and simply do not care about it - because they have been lulled into accepting the state of affairs by OS vendors who simply don't want to write a better Finder/File Explorer for the end user - choosing instead, to write an operating system for ad agencies to harvest user eyeballs.
Apple have traditionally avoided the usual pretence of 'ads in the start bar' by leveraging their platforms, and this is starting to fall apart at the seams. Convergence is going to be a joke, and will turn off a lot of computer users until a generation is raised, who will just accept the doctrine of their masters, and in so doing, lose knowledge to the generations.
I yearn for an OS vendor to build an operating system that really makes the user control over their computer and their data, a number one priority. Apple isn't it. Microsoft certainly isn't it. There are multiple Linux OS vendors who could be it, if only they'd get their hardware act into shape. There are hardware vendors struggling to attain this goal, too.
My next laptop won't be an Apple, after 30+ years of adoption of the platform. I fear the future that Apple is laying out ahead of us - just as I feared that of Microsoft and Oracle and IBM too, through the decades.
If there is hope, it lays with the (low-end open source hardware/software-agency-protecting) proles.
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jGztGfRujSE (Apple promo) and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z73NELDwyhQ (iJustine interview)
The decision to align iOS and MacOS with the glassy design of VisionOS was a broader corporate strategy that would have required buy-in from more execs than just the "chief design officer". If you accept that this particular bozo wasn't forced out but instead was tempted away by the scent of lucre wafting from Zuck's pockets, then that implies that there are still plenty of clowns left at Apple to fill out the circus.
It isn't just about UI design. But the whole software stack as well. iOS is still 90% the same as it was launched, and yet the apps management is still inconvenient to say the least. Along with copying all Android features, if I wanted an Android I would have brought one.
The software stack, how many years has Swift been announced? how many years have they announced Swift UI? Xcode? HN discussed macOS problems not long ago [1]. It would have been far better they just stick to Objective-C for the past 10 years and actually get things done.
It was a precipitous fall from grace
I can get on board with this. I feel as if that has fallen off a cliff, in the last decade.
I just released a rewritten version of an app, and spent many days, running it over, and over, and over again, looking for subtle "pain points." Sadly, some will remain, because SwiftUI is so limited, but I think it came out well.
I do feel that "polishing the fenders" is a big deal. I spent most of my career at a company that would have day-long cage mat- er, meetings, over seemingly insignificant details of user experience.
For me Tinted is ok. Original was indeed very hard to read in places (ie, quick peeks at the notification tray).
Here’s a video with him discussing the iPhone X interface around its introduction in 2018 that I find fascinating https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2018/803/
Other phones tend to have it on the back, and I have heard there's good progress in having embedded thumbprint readers in the screen.
I have, however, really come to like Face ID.
[UPDATED TO ADD] I think that it's interesting that folks ding comments they disagree with. I upvoted all the responses to my comment, even though they may disagree with me, because they were made in good faith, and contribute to the discussion.
> [...] I’m reminded of all the UI and interaction designs and changes in iOS and MacOS that are just bad. There’s a real sense that Apple’s current HI team, under Alan Dye, is a “design is what it looks like” group, not a “design is how it works” group.
And this, from June of this year:
> Re-watching Jobs’s introduction of Aqua for the umpteenth time, I still find it enthralling. I found Alan Dye’s introduction of Liquid Glass to be soporific, if not downright horseshitty.
He has been even more critical on his podcast. This has been a repeated refrain and increasing over the years. My first reaction, when I read the news, was "Apple bloggers and podcasters will be THRILLED."
Unfortunately, Objective-C added modern language features too late. IB never used the term IoC or anything else devs coming from other ecosystems would understand. A lot of great stuff that NeXT built 30 years ago is still great today, but never had the notoriety of lesser frameworks and languages.
iOS still needs work despite its file manager having become much more capable, but part of that comes down to the differing filesystem arrangement where user documents are kept within app bundles. If raw filesystem access were enabled, that model wouldn’t make a whole lot of sense even to many who are familiar with navigating filesystems. I could see the argument that it should be switched to a traditional desktop OS model, but that’s a deep architectural change.
Windows on the other hand… Explorer just keeps getting slower even if it’s not losing functionality, and Windows has always been poor when it comes to misrepresenting or obfuscating the filesystem. I hate trying to track down where files have been deposited in Windows boxes, and I would agree that it’s been contributing to users not understanding filesystems.
> I get to ask Alan Dye about [the shadows on Apple Watch faces]. And he was like, oh, we render a shadow? And I was like, oh, you never even looked. I just instantly realised he’d never really even looked at it. Like, somebody at Apple has, but Alan Dye didn't. […] It just suddenly came to me, oh, he doesn't do the job I thought he did.
In fact, it works so well, for me, that I was worried that it was too generous, but it is actually very secure.
https://daringfireball.net/2025/08/macos_26_tahoes_dead_cana...
You seem to have already had your mind made up, though, and are maybe not actually interested in evidence.
* Some iPads have the finger print reader on the side of the device, on the power button.
* Old Google Pixels had it on the back, conveniently able to be accessed with your index finger as you take the phone out of your pocket.
* Current Google Pixels have it where you just touch the screen.
My Google Pixel 10 has both an in-the-screen fingerprint reader, and a Face ID, and I use both. They're both useful in different situations.
Samsung phones have had a perfectly working finger print reader under the screen for many years now. There is no more progress to be made, it is complete.
That sounds great.
> Some iPads have the finger print reader on the side of the device, on the power button.
My main iPad is a Mini (latest gen). It has the Touch ID on the top. I find it to be a bit "flaky." It often misses prints. However, I think it works amazingly well, given that it's just a strip.
I also have an iPad Pro, with FaceID. That works nicely. I like that it works in both portrait and landscape. That didn't happen in my older phones, but seems to be the case in my latest (17 Pro).
It's also possible he has very few sources left: he's an outsider to the company, and it's hard to maintain sources since people leave, move to different positions etc.
It was fixed in an update, but to me that's the canary in the coal mine that priority is wrong. Apple will be ok without Steve as long as somebody is obsessed with the UX being very good. When I see the quality of the UX experience degrading while other UX changes are made that don't improve the basic UX, then there's a problem.
I subscribe to Apple Music, and have built playlists on the service. The fact that I have to enable sync (which then wastes 70G of space on my iPhone) to use my playlists is BS. I don't see a technical reason for it. The only conclusion I can come to is they want to drive storage subscriptions by taking up space using music sync. If anybody wants to explain why sync needs to be enabled, that would be cool, but is a really concerning product management decision IMO.
For the record, I actually like Maps for driving. I find the level of detail just right for how I use it.
My main complaint happens when you are not driving: if you let it have access to your location, Maps is constantly resetting your pan/zoom if the app becomes inactive. So on MacOS I block location, but a phone has to have your location for nav of course.
Jobs might have been an asshole, but his enthusiasm for the details is incontestable. He couldn't wait to show people the Save window, in its many forms. That he cared about the small details in everything is easy to see.
Contrast that with Alan Dye's inspiration reel for Liquid Glass. He's clearly reading from a script, which is quite a downgrade but understandable given the production value of keynotes these days. However, the real problem is that this intro is all about how it looks, not how it functions.
Microsoft tried this move with Vista (and their Aero design, which mostly failed), then again with Metro (which also by and large failed). Meanwhile, the key concepts of Aqua remain timelessly in macOS 25 years later. Function over form always!
Ive's vision of Apple as a luxury brand certainly aligned with Cook's focus on profit, and the results of that sadly still echo through the company today.
This article? If it caused consternation it boggles the mind. These are all completely normal reactions to Apple's AI missteps.
If detailed but milquetoast criticisms are grounds for excommunication, maybe the company really does have serious management issues.
And the form refused to submit. I was on my iPhone. I clicked the button. Nothing happened. I clicked it again. Nothing.
I reminded myself of the reason I had my commitment: Apple does not want my feedback.
After the great influx of Redditors, the HN comment section has taken a sharp turn towards the hateful. But don't mind those people, their opinions and votes are as worthless as they are.
This has always been the case at Apple. Tons of ex-employees have commented about challenges in criticism.
Apple Design Official Alan Dye Poached by Meta in Major Coup
Nerd that i am, I immediately thought perhaps the phrase "Dye acolyte" raises a null pointer exception.
"But maybe instead of firing him, they start selling pizzas out of the back of Apple stores and Alan Dye can run that and do the graphic design on the boxes. Do the menus. I think Alan Dye could kill that with his Levi's experience, right?"
That's rougher than anything he has said post-firing, in my opinion.
The filesystem UI has been abandoned in favour of newer, better abstractions, such as 'just throw it all at the Cloud and let our analysis software give you a front-end to it, eventually..'
I think users not understanding filesystems isn't really a computing problem, but a literacy one. In some senses, computing becomes the victim of itself.
Cloud storage certainly has a convenience factor which is worth considering, but at the same time most people don’t actually need everything available everywhere at all times and only have a handful of files that can intentionally be synced as needed. I really don’t believe that supplanting traditional filesystems with a big bag of data that lives in the cloud is the right answer.
Let's all pretend he totally wasn't going out of his way to prevent burning bridges with his Apple connections but starts throwing Alan under the bus after he's gone like he was so obviously the problem at Apple.
You seem to have an axe to grind against Gruber, are immune to all evidence against your preconceived worldview, and are projecting this behavior onto the other side of the discussion.
In any case, we see eye to eye on the convenience factor - it is inescapable, the success rate is clear - but we are looking at the edge case of things anyway, no? The future of Apple is an interesting one - we long term users surely can have an opinion. (Hacked my first Apple in 1981, haven't stopped since.)
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/254050878 https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/436949/why-are-som...
On iPhone, specifically, it was awful for me. I was too likely to have wet hands (raining, just got out of shower, whatever—even dried, the higher moisture in my skin meant it didn't work) or gloves on or some other problem that made it fail. Trying to hold it the right way, one-handed, to get a finger in the right position (waaaaay down near the bottom) was also a high-risk maneuver for a drop, and was not a way I'd otherwise have tried to hold the device.
I'm with you there.
Forstall's skeuomorphism gets a lot of hate. It certainly got pretty weird visually. Especially on OS X where a leather-bound Calendar had to interact with other normal windows. But unlike what Ive and Dye have given us, Forstall's UX remained functional overall. I'm glad skeuomorphism is gone, but much of it was done to help the user. Just maybe a bit misguided.