NetNewsWire 7

I know nearly no one would even consider it, but I wish that iOS and macOS devs just refused to implement anything in Liquid Glass. I haven't seen /anything/ that is better than it was prior to adopting it and many things are worse.

Honestly, on iOS, I think it is literally impossible to make stuff better because you have to adopt the ridiculous stretchy bouncy text fields, etc.

Maybe if devs refuse to adopt it, Apple will get the message faster. Theoretically, it would be far less work to just skip this design dumpster fire and wait until Apple regains its sanity.

If this shows anything, it's that even a tastefully done Liquid Glass implementation is still bad. I guess the odd sidebar "box within a box" design is arguable, but the shadows behind the fields (like the Search field) look bad, the huge corner radii are terrible and pointless, and the blurry text scrolling into the header makes the header text difficult to read and looks absolutely atrocious.

It's an inherently bad design system, and even the best implementation is still worse than sticking with what we had before.

No one likes Liquid Glass and everyone hopes it goes away, but in the meantime, it's important that we slightly desecrate our own hard work in order to make Liquid Glass feel validated.

Brent Simmons has been shipping Mac applications since the 90s. He just adopted Liquid Glass and called it "cool." Michael says "the Liquid Glass stuff seems to be tastefully done." And I, who've been shipping Mac anpplications over a similar period, even been approached by Apple to put a boxed version in Apple Stores, really quite like a well done Liquid Glass interface.

But here come the comments explaining why he shouldn't have done it. Developers should collectively refuse, apparently. He's "desecrating his own hard work." Even a tasteful implementation is still bad.

This is the discourse now. Someone who's been doing this longer than most of you have been using Macs ships an update, adapts to the platform, does the work - and the peanut gallery lectures him about how he should have refused on principle.

"No one likes Liquid Glass" - except the guy who just shipped it and the guy who just praised it. And myself. The three of us combined would easily have over a century of shipping Mac applications. I'm pretty sure Brent has won multiple MacEddys and ADAs. I'm also pretty sure Michael has won a MacEddy or two. And my software has won both an ADA and MacEddys. But what the hell would we know?

Some of us ship. The rest write comments about how we're doing it wrong.

@DD I think you missed his previous blog entry on this: https://inessential.com/2025/08/25/tough-season.html

"Some of us ship. The rest write comments about how we're doing it wrong."

You have no idea who everyone else is, but given that you're writing comments about how other people are doing it wrong, I'm not sure if you realize that your own words are not painting you in the best light.

You're free to have your opinions on this, but so is everyone else. Being an ass to people won't make them like Liquid Glass more.

@galad Simmons expressed reservations during the beta. Then he did the work, shipped it, and called the result "cool." That's called iteration. It's also worth noting his own post frames Liquid Glass as a "season" that will pass - not the civilisational collapse the comment section, and design posers the likes of Gruber, Arment and Gemmell treat it as. There's money to be made at the moment bagging Apple. The outrage is commercially useful for them.

@Plume "Being an ass to people won't make them like Liquid Glass more."
I'm not trying to make anyone like Liquid Glass. I'm pointing out that people who actually ship Mac applications - people with decades of experience and industry recognition - have a different view than the grievance chorus of the echo chamber that is the self appointed Mac commentariat. And that lecturing Brent Simmons about whether he should have shipped his own app is breathtakingly arrogant.

As someone in his fourth decade of developing and shipping Mac applications, and who will continue until retirement, I care deeply about the craft. It's been my life. The performative outrage from the vocal minority is tiresome - it damages the platform and makes life harder for those of us who actually ship indie Mac software and care about our customers.

"And that lecturing Brent Simmons about whether he should have shipped his own app is breathtakingly arrogant"

Nobody was lecturing anyone until you showed up and started lecturing us. Your comments are also the most arrogant in this thread.

"The performative outrage from the vocal minority is tiresome"

Funny, I was thinking the same when I read your comment.

@DD he clearly likes it so much that it went and swizzled out all the icons from the menu bar items.

Brent Simmons (2002):
     One of the reasons I develop for OS X is that, when it comes to user interface, this is the big leagues, this is the show.

@DD

Liquid Ass follows a pattern Apple sucking at UI/UX (and software) and leaving their work in a broken or half-assed state, forever, expecting devs to pick up the pieces.

We're approaching 7 years of SwiftUI and Catalyst on Mac. Did SwiftUI on Mac ever git gud? Did any Apple-built Catalyst apps ever git gud? What makes you think LA will git gud?

I take the opposite view: the vocal /majority/ (those with Apple access and prominent devs) haven't been critical enough as the platform burned. Too many people don't want to piss off Apple. That's monopoly/duopoly territory, not "bicycle for the mind" territory.

At the least, take a passive stand: refuse to adopt whatever Apple pushes until it proves itself and benefits your users. WWDC is not marching orders and no one should shittify their apps to check a box because "Apple expects it". Make Apple do good again.

There’s nothing wrong with the app. It’s just using the system it has. Blame Apple here. The new app works great and looks just fine with reduce transparency enabled.

I agree the blur at the top is dumb and pointless but it’s not Brent doing that. The new web view itself is just poorly thought out.

Even people who like the look have to be able to see that the implementation was rushed and poorly tested.

@DD I thought it would be clear from all my coverage that I don’t like Liquid Glass. I don’t really think Brent does, either. But I think we both want our apps to be good platform citizens. I don’t want my customers to have a bad and unharmonious experience because I have a disagreement with Apple. I just redesigned all my icons this summer, even though I don’t like the new style, so that they would support the new appearance themes. I encouraged the designer to move in the direction of the more simplified style without going as far as Apple, which I think went overboard and may walk it back a bit. Hopefully this achieved a balance of the icons fitting in without losing their souls. I think this is the sort of pragmatism that’s going on with NetNewsWire. It supports Liquid Glass, but doesn’t do anything crazy (like Music.app), and the way it’s done will I think look fine when I do update to Tahoe and turn on Reduce Transparency.

@Plume @Hammer I fully support developers not wasting a lot of time chasing Apple’s fads. But I do think we need to pick up the pieces, e.g. use the appropriate APIs for huge corner radii to prevent buttons from being clipped. You can’t fully opt out of the new design system, so you have to make the best of it. So far, this is different from the situation with SwiftUI and Catalyst, where there’s a lot of pressure to switch but the favored technology often makes the apps worse.

Brent did absolutely nothing wrong. The fact that even the best implementation of Liquid Glass remains problematic is an indictment of Liquid Glass and Apple, not of Brent.

Why make an app that requires OS 26? IMO developers should support as many OS releases as reasonable. You are cutting out a large user portion—and for no good reason.

@ThDude I’m not sure about NetNewsWire, specifically, but I’ve generally heard that the APIs can make it hard to support Liquid Glass alongside previous OS versions. I’m sure it’s possible, but it’s extra work that maybe nobody wants to do as volunteers for an open-source project if the previous version is still available and works.

@DD I'm not sure how the opinions of "people who actually ship Mac applications - people with decades of experience and industry recognition" are more valid than the vast number of non-developers who have to *use* apps that have Liquid Glass UIs. The people complaining about LG are complaining about the user experience, not the developer experience.

@ThDude... this is a post about the NNW roadmap, from last October 7:

"NetNewsWire 6.2 for Mac and iOS. This is a Snow-Leopard-style release — the idea is to fix a bunch of bugs knowing that a lot of people, particularly Mac users, may be slow to upgrade to the 26es, and we want them to have something solid to use while they put off upgrading — because the release after this one will require iOS and macOS 26."

NNW 6.2 was released November 5, and does not require macOS 26. I read this to mean that while open source, 6.2 development is not ongoing. Also, I seem to recall Apple saying something to the effect that Xcode will stop supporting turning off Liquid Glass (by setting UIDesignRequiresCompatibility == YES) by time the 27 releases come out this fall.

It seems to me that simmons is doing it as best as any macOS developer can. And yes, I agree with you, it feels like macOS adoption is an issue, and developers should support - at the very least - macOS 15.

That's just their choice. There is no technical difficulty in supporting even macOS 10.13. It's a RSS reader, not rocket science. It's two table views and one web view UI wise.

"Some of us ship. The rest write comments about how we're doing it wrong."

And then there's another group of people who seem to feel a need to police other people's comments.

We don't have to like Alan Dye's design slop, DD. It's ok if you do and if you just gargle silent Time Machine bugs and whatever mistake Apple makes next. But holding others to a higher standard doesn't mean we're doing nothing else.