Glad to see Liquid Glass getting some refinements. I was excited for it at Tahoe's announcement and deeply disappointed when it was released: partly because I think the current design language doesn't support it or let it shine; partly because I wanted a return to Aqua-inpired design, and glass as a Vista-style background is completely different to glass used for specific small control elements. Most fundamental legibility issues (IMO) with Liquid Glass come from this.
In my spare time I have been writing a library to render standard macOS controls with Liquid Glass.
It's shown me why they use it for the backgrounds: it's so heavily based on refraction (oddly, mostly on one axis, not sure if this is obvious visually!) that for something like a button, there's nothing to refract, therefore it looks very plain. You have to have a background for it to look good.[*] I can't help wondering at what happened internally: my personal pet theory, for which I have no evidence, is that someone missed Aqua, thought 'if we do it with shaders it will be new and shiny and we can release it', and that tech decision forced implementation aka glass backgrounds not foregrounds.
[*] My solution: add a background to buttons and other controls. I'm going for a look inspired by Lion. It doesn't have to be very prominent; it just has to be there for something to refract so your eyes see shape and recognise the glass.
Glad to see Liquid Glass getting some refinements. I was excited for it at Tahoe's announcement and deeply disappointed when it was released: partly because I think the current design language doesn't support it or let it shine; partly because I wanted a return to Aqua-inpired design, and glass as a Vista-style background is completely different to glass used for specific small control elements. Most fundamental legibility issues (IMO) with Liquid Glass come from this.
In my spare time I have been writing a library to render standard macOS controls with Liquid Glass.
It's shown me why they use it for the backgrounds: it's so heavily based on refraction (oddly, mostly on one axis, not sure if this is obvious visually!) that for something like a button, there's nothing to refract, therefore it looks very plain. You have to have a background for it to look good.[*] I can't help wondering at what happened internally: my personal pet theory, for which I have no evidence, is that someone missed Aqua, thought 'if we do it with shaders it will be new and shiny and we can release it', and that tech decision forced implementation aka glass backgrounds not foregrounds.
[*] My solution: add a background to buttons and other controls. I'm going for a look inspired by Lion. It doesn't have to be very prominent; it just has to be there for something to refract so your eyes see shape and recognise the glass.
The actual title is “macOS 27 'Golden Gate' delivers more Liquid Glass and updated Siri”.