Hacker News Reader

Comment by mrkpdl | Hacker News Reader

This is great work, the interactive demo is a good way to show it off too. It’s fun to drag the window over the moon.

That said I dislike the use of frosted glass in user interface design, and feel it was a step backwards for Mac OS when it was added. Designers (hypocritically including myself - I use it too sometimes) are so seduced by it. But in practice it’s never ideal. Especially if the content behind the panel is dynamic or user generated.

It’s the brushed metal of the 2010s, I’m surprised that it leaked out of Windows Vista into everything else!

View on HN

Why isn't it "ideal"? Visual design is mostly about personal preferences about what looks good, rather than serving any practical purpose. Yes, design also impacts functionality, but it mostly exists to make the user experience more pleasant.

If you ask me, skeuomorphism makes interfaces more pleasing to use than the minimalistic trend of the past decade+, where everything must be flat. It adds a visual flourish that replicates surfaces and materials we're used to from the real world, making interfaces more familiar and approachable. From a practical standpoint, flat design makes it hard to distinguish elements and their state, whereas when we had 3D buttons, brushed metal and frosted glass, this was very clear.

I think the pendulum is swinging back now, as more designers are shunning the flat look, so hopefully we'll see a resurgence of more human-friendly UIs.

I think Windows 11 does it a lot better than Vista / 7 did. The issue I had with it was mostly that it looked good when you had a single window open and you could see your wallpaper behind the glass, not so much when you had multipe windows open and the area behind the glass was very busy.

I'm not a UI designer so honest question: is the problem the use of aesthetics, like frosted glass or brushed metal, in UI design or is it that in pursuit of presenting such interfaces some designers lost the visual queues needed to indicate where controls are and what they do?

My terminal windows have had a slight transparency for years, but now I've been rethinking it

I loved it but once I had to tail a live log of a Docker container with no option to install even 2-3 basic UNIX tools (like `tee` in order to append to a text log) and from that day and on I removed the 20% transparent background image.

Nowadays I have just one terminal program that is just slightly transparent and I have a nice desktop background that is fairly uniform and almost never gets in the way -- but I never use that one for my Neovim or for ssh-ing into remote machines. Only for myself fiddling around with stuff.

Transparency did look cool but once it prevents you from doing your job well once, it's out the door.

Brushed metal has no effect on information context. Blur offers sliding-scale context.

Blur is seldom the right choice, but sometimes it is.

Ironically previous versions of macOS also used brushed metal heavily

That's the reference. Brushed metal was a controversial design feature of early Mac OS X, unevenly applied across the built-in applications. (It was kind of supposed to be for media browsers, but then the Finder and Calendar and many others were also brushed metal for some reason.)

It debuted already in 1999 in QuickTime Player, years before Mac OS X:

http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/qtime.htm

The rumor was that Steve Jobs liked this style a lot, so it spread to the operating system despite the widespread external criticism (like the link above).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com