Sebastiaan de With Rejoining Apple
Sebastiaan de With (Bluesky, MacRumors, The Verge):
Some big personal news: I’ve joined the Design Team at Apple.
So excited to work with the very best team in the world on my favorite products. ✌️
Great news. I wish they’d also hire Mario Guzmán.
Prior to Halide, de With had done other work at Apple, collaborating on properties including iCloud, MobileMe and Find My apps. It’s unclear if his exit will mean any notable changes for Halide, or for the Lux apps Kino, Spectre and Orion.
As we mentioned in the announcement post today, we’ve been working with legendary team at The Iconfactory on Mark III. We’re also super excited to be collaborating with the renowned colorist Cullen Kelly on the new looks in Mark III.
[…]
So in short, Halide is going nowhere. This has been my full time job since 2019, and I couldn’t imagine doing anything else.
I have spent my career leaning on Apple’s excellent design chops when building my own apps.
Now they’ve broken the design language of their operating systems so badly that it’s not possible to build excellent, bug free user experiences.
I’ve lost a north star here, and it’s heartbreaking because there’s no real way for them to turn this around for a very long time.
Here’s the thing about my trepidation around Sebastiaan de With going to Apple is he is but one man. The rest of the company has to give a fuck about design to allow people with taste and capability to make the things.
Last June, just ahead of the introduction of Liquid Glass at WWDC, de With imagined what a new design language from Apple might look like, which he dubbed “Living Glass.”
[…]
After using Liquid Glass for six months, I’ll add one more descriptor for de With’s design concepts: restrained.
See also: The Talk Show and Accidental Tech Podcast.
Previously:
- Halide Mark III Preview
- Alan Dye Leaving Apple for Meta
- Shipping Liquid Glass
- Rumored Redesign in iOS 19 and macOS 16
7 Comments RSS · Twitter · Mastodon
Might want to adjust the elided quote from Ben Sandofsky, because as it stands, it could be read as Halide is dead in the water. Including the next sentence ("This has been my full time job since 2019, and I couldn't imagine doing anything else.") would make it more clear it's the other meaning.
In response to Tony Arnold and devs in his thread: Stop fretting over Liquid Ass. Don't support it. It's a waste of your time and life. It's not on you to make Apple's stupid ideas and poor execution work. You owe them nothing and you owe your users better than to inflict Liquid Ass on them.
Ignore Liquid Ass and just disparage Apple to your users, in your blogs, everywhere. Running to the press works better than covering for Apple's LeetCode engineers and Slop designers. They've got billions in cash, take 15% and ∞ sanity from you, and expect you to fix their constant disasters? There's something wrong here. Stop adopting their shit, esp when you know it sucks.
The developer rejection of Vision Pro was the best thing I'd seen devs do. I wish we saw an even bigger rejection of Liquid Ass. Don't ruin your icons. Ship with UIDesignRequiresCompatibility = YES. Go out of your way to De-Ass your apps and strip icon clutter in menus. You know what the Mac should be, so make Mac Apps Great Again and defiantly reject the retards in Cupertino who hate you.
/rant
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Congrats to Sebastiaan. When you get access to their git repo, revert it to CoreUI from macOS Lion and "accidentally" trash all backups, globally.
> Halide is going nowhere.
Halide has been there for a while now, typical of subscription crapware.
From the article before this:
> Our next look is Process Zero II, the second generation of our acclaimed look we launched it a year and a half ago. The Process Zero disables all computational photography at the time of capture
So they are introducing version 2 of a "process" that disables all processing. Maybe if they disable it twice, it will be twice as good! Totally worth paying for a camera app monthly!
🤦♂️
Reading his post on Reddit, Sandofsky sounds like a really unpleasant person to work with. "I … I … I". Rebecca worked there for several years. Who know who else. Even if things didn't end as they should, not mentioning coworkers is just a terrible look.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/rebeccaslatkin/
She is even mentioned and pictured in the Apple PR:
https://developer.apple.com/news/?id=wezczlc6
https://developer.apple.com/news/?id=x6bv1a36
and interviews:
Fully agree with another poster that there's no need to deliver Anal Dye's Liquid Ass to anybody. Make your apps look good without any Liquid Ass and the many of us out here avoiding all 26 Liquid Ass garbage on all devices will be happy.
Some Liquid Ass garbage is trying to sneak into a few apps (menubar icons for ex) but I've had good luck sending in feedback and having those apps respond by removing the Liquid Ass garbage from their apps when running on Sequoia and earlier.
I judge a person by their choice to go work at Apple now, under what this leadership has shown itself to be.
One joins this system, because one aligns with it, not because one thinks one can change it.
