Acorn 8.3 With Liquid Glass
Acorn 8.3 is out and the big new feature is that it supports Liquid Glass for folks who are running macOS Tahoe (which is over 50% of Acorn 8 users at this point!).
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But the UI was a ton of work! And I made it extra difficult on myself by making Liquid Glass optional.
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The second option is “Display images edge-to-edge”. This one works on all versions of macOS that Acorn 8.3 runs on. This is the fancy look where the toolbar floats above the content as if it was a delicate and beautifully manicured piece of glass. It also removes the bottom toolbar, so there’s maximal room for your pixels to shine.
I also reworked the tool palette so that it no longer takes up the whole left side of the window and instead floats above the canvas and gives more space for your image to be viewed. (And every time I look at it, it makes me think of MacPaint and its tool palette. What a great app that was!)
That’s a good change, but I still question the premise of the new tool palette design. I kind like having the tool options and layers docked to the right side of the document window, but I don’t understand the desire to have the tool icons at the left displayed on top of the image. You save a little space but have to keep pressing Tab to see the whole image. I think the MacPaint and Acorn 6 way of having a separate tools palette worked just fine. Thankfully, Acorn still supports the Float inspector palettes in windows option.
Previously:
- Tahoe Window Corners
- Shipping Liquid Glass
- Liquid Glass: Content vs. Controls
- Acorn 8
- Rounded Quick Look Corners
- Acorn 7
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Such a travesty that developers feel obligated to spend so much time and effort to conform to a top-to-bottom UI regression.
I wish devs would stop trying to support liquid glass. It’s just not a good design and we shouldn’t humor Apple’s bad impulses
Also, it really sticks out to me that we went from static tool palettes to floating tool palettes you could move around (like Photoshop) to sidebars always attached to the window to fake floating palettes
It’s just weird. Being able to detach and move palettes around is useful AND would give the desired effect. But no, let’s fake it
For independent small-time developers, the fear is not falling into obscurity, looking outdated. For better or worse, this is what users are seeing on their devices, and, no matter if better, screenshots of apps from iOS 18 or macOS 15 look outdated. I’m guilty of this myself; if I see a website or a store page still displaying Leopard-era or even Yosemite-era screenshots, my instinct is to skip. If a developer can’t be bother to update their product’s screenshots, what else are they lazy about?
On the other hand, large developers seem to not give a fuck, including a lot of Apple’s own software.
I too was reluctant at first, but as time passed on, I updated my more popular open sources with the liquid ass look. It is what it is.
Gus has potentially doubled his UI work and testing in the areas he did this. He probably should just commit one way or the other.
There's no longer a standard for what an App should look or feel like. AppKit, Catalyst / UIKit, SwiftUI all have their own metrics, unique controls, and appearance. When Apple forces LA turned on (no fallback key), it'll further ruin platform cohesion as big devs with custom UI and Electron apps ignore it, fake it, or inherit varying degrees of partial support.
I think it's probably more important that an app is consistent all the way through, whether it chases the LA dragon or not.
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@Manx I despise it, but I could see Apple further carrot/sticking (forcing) devs to adopt LA with a dumb new App Store badge/status like "Optimized for Touch Macs" or something. That would be pretty bold -- that means a lot of devs sacrificed summer schedules to rush support for LA in their apps (for free) when they could have deferred the work as a paid upgrade task.
Eventually the best Mac apps, the ones with the most productive, most Mac-like UI / UX, will be Qt cross-platform apps like Krita.
