Organizationally, Apple have definitely stuffed the Mac. Catalyst was a mistake and with hindsight they should have just made SwiftUI more capable, earlier. But now they’re focusing on building Android apps with it too?! To say nothing of locker service etc.
How many have used the new iOS daily since it was announced?
Gentle reminder that the average Mac user is nontechnical, especially the younger generation. IMO this is Apple slapping a formalized paint on the simplification of iOS 7, and doubling down on iconography (not app icons).
Now all of that said — there are major usability concerns in iOS 26 and the liquid glass design language. The file picker’s previous “Done” has been replaced with a single checkmark. Significant meaning is lost in a few places, and there are super-odd double-X icons (in mobile safari while entering a URL, for example). Safari’s new tab button is now out of reach, while the previous new tab gesture is now new tab group. Context menus expand now, instead of swipe, meaning what used to feel more natural now takes extra taps/muscle memory updates.
That all said, as iOS 7 improved over time and was nailed down, so will this.
To me it’s given the iPhone - an incredibly boring platform/device 18 years in - new life. The new Lock Screen Photo Shuffle is incredibly personable and downright beautiful. From my understanding, a lot of work went into pre-composing app icons, many of which are objectively beautiful.
I’ve found users can’t find buttons “under the thumb” so I’m curious how the dedicated tab bar search will work in practice.
Overall I think for the goals of liquid glass as a design system, it’s something only Apple could do - in a good way.
I did a yolo and installed it the day after it was released. I have been daily driving it since. I like it. And I mean I really like it. When Apple says the focus is the content, they really mean it. The content is king here, not the interface.
All of these things people keep telling me are "worse" are often things I thought were poorly designed in the first place. Being able to find controls easily seems to be the biggest complaint, for instance the buttons in Safari. I've always thought the buttons in Safari were unintuitive. This actually feels better to me.
This idea that things are harder to find because of the visual changes, that goes away in like a day. Just like every major visual upgrade before this your eyes train to it _extremely_ quickly.
I do feel like they "borrowed" the shape of textboxes from google though with the circular edges. I was never really a fan of that shape.
This is exactly why I read HN! So cool. And a fellow Svelte lover. 10/10.
Good luck with the social network! It’s brutal out there..
PS — would be so cool to see a tailwind plugin of this (which in v4 should be just copying the vars in.. I didn’t look at the repo super closely). Great shit!
Thank you! We need more Svelte lovers against the tyranny of React.
RE: social network, I'm also gonna charge money to use it so I'm not yet another free option with a dubious future...an extremely tiny portion of people would pay for a social network so I'm hoping I can add enough features to make it feel worth it. So yeah, it's gonna be tough af out here LOL!
I've never used Tailwind because CSS-in-JS weirds me out. I looked at the docs and it seems like I just wrap my custom colors in `@theme.css`? Is there anything else I'd have to do? https://tailwindcss.com/docs/theme
I really love the principles that Svelte tries to advance but I find some of their design decisions downright puzzling.
About 2 years ago I had to make a decision about what framework we were going to use for a new project and one of our developers was really into Svelte. I went through the tutorial and made a sample site. It felt like there were always sharp edges I was catching myself on.
I don't remember the specific but I feel like state management got confusing and you had to use work arounds to manually trigger updates in certain situations. Just seemed odd.
Svelte 5 reimagines the reactivity features (“runes”) and gets rid of the foot-guns, I know exactly what you’re referring to with state management. V5 is much more straightforward to both reason about and bug fix.
To echo mglikesbikes, I remember wracking my brain trying to figure out state stuff for more involved things like session management at the time. Svelte 5 was released recently and changed how they were doing state.
For me it's annoying because I got used to the old way. For newcomers, it may make more sense by default.
To Svelte's credit, they don't allow you to mix old and new ways of doing state so that's a great way to force people to learn the (new) correct way of doing things. A lot of React's issues are the abundance of old tutorials on the 'net, confusing newcomers trying to do something.
That’s so funny — my social network[1] was paid, too! People hated that shit but — this was when Twitter had just started dying. Maybe there’s more appetite for sustainable alternatives now. I certainly see lots of projects in process on TikTok.
“The tyranny of react” is spot on. React single-handedly killed my passion for web development, but Svelte brought me back.
The case for this not being flagged: this is an intellectually curious forum and the mods have a proven ability to adequately moderate other contentious threads and allow politically-charged posts.
If what Pres. Biden said about a growing oligarchy holds true, more posts like this should be expected in the future (especially given the attendees from the tech sector at today’s inauguration), and it’s far better to have a trustworthy place to discuss these types of stories, given HN’s readership, than places like BlueSky or Reddit (read: content optimized for algorithms); the amount of intellect here could lead to positive outcomes. Additionally, given the amount of industrywide impact the actions of CEOs have, and a large percentage of us are founders, it would be more valuable than not to have the discussion.
So to the mods: please consider updating the site’s ToS to allow posts and discussions like this. It’s valuable to have these discussions, and quasi-favoritism like allowing pg’s DEI screed while flagging this, shows clear editorial bias.
I handled the “real human” problem by charging access to the platform (and doing something socially responsible with the profits). Saw recently that X is starting to do this for signups, which feels icky (and likely explains why my idea didn’t take off).
Bribing hotel clerks to make a new account every time a guest checks in and hands their passport over might be easier since in this case you just need to scan once to register. Maybe that sounds impractical and low volume but imagine you own a chain of hotels across thailand or whatever, you could probably make thousands of accounts a day and just sell that as a service.
Yes, that's just another problem with using ICAO biometric travel documents for something they have decidedly never been designed for: They don't have any PIN code protection, unlike some national digital ID schemes based on similar technology.
