Yeah I’m surprised by what a design misstep it was. The shiny corners of icons on iOS look so tacky and on macOS the corner radius mismatch is crazy. Also not a fan of the “bulbous” shapes of things with excessive rounded corners.
Whenever I use my personal Mac or iPad, still on the old OS, I wonder what they were thinking - I would guess it was rushed to hit the annual release, as it does have potential in parts.
That said, it looks from the few screenshots in this like you’re able to pare it back to something much closer to how it used to look, which is great and I’m glad they’re taking feedback on board.
The screenshots are generous. I just spent a few hours in macOS 27 and while yes, some of the absolutely galling and baffling errors have been rolled back, it's still bad.
I cannot help but think: they are such cowards, so afraid of anything that stands out after years of flat design. Like, you can almost feel like there is someone trying to sneak it in, only for it to get squeegeed at the last minute. The buttons could look like classic Aqua ( if they are allowed a background color that is), if it got slammed with a belt sander. Everything has to be too subtle, too toned down, too pale, and too faint, only noticable blown up to 4x on an OLED screen. It's like all they are allowed is "mimiminalizm", just remove, remove, remove, tone down, remove, slavishly, without thought. I'm supposed to cheer they added color back to in-focus window sidebars? First: good lord, what were they thinking? Of course they rolled such an utterly stupid decision back. Second: what color? Some single accent color applied to some whisper thin monochrome squiggles they call icons?
Its still more of the same. In the Installer app, there are windows where the dividing line between toolbar and content is like a 1px 30% grey line on same old bland 20% grey background, and that's with the new "Draw Borders" Accessibility setting turned on.
They can dress it up. Fix the worst issues. I'm thankful for it. Hell, I might not skip this one. But the problem still remains: Liquid Glass was a *bad, flawed* design from the start, whose central principle is contradictory (we'll get out of the way of your content by floating directly in front of your content all the time, in the way). There is no salvaging it.
FWIW you can bypass quite a lot of the Max visual stuff by using the JS support, which now finally supports modern JS (the v8 object). A lot of the LOM (Live API) is exposed there though you will no doubt need to use Max objects for some stuff. They also have web UI support with jweb.
I get the frustration coming to Max as a regular developer, but actually when I bothered to learn it was one of the most rewarding uses of time and I find it really quite fun to work in (and frustrating sometimes of course! But the JS support helps). You just need to forget everything you know about programming lol
Ha yeah I have considered the same. There’s not enough info exposed via the Python or Max APIs (or indeed this one) to sync all the state you’d care about so I think the only option would be syncing the actual als files (which are zipped XML) which means you’d only be able to sync at save points
The screenshots of RISC OS bring back fond memories of playing with it in our school computer room (which was mostly BBC Micros but had a few RISC) - mostly playing Lemmings as I recall! It felt pretty cool at the time though
I have been using the app for years but literally just because I like the step counter widget. I had no idea it did all this! Will try it for sure. Cool read.
I hooked Claude up to Ableton’s Python API last year and it seemed pretty promising https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2WxSB75U6vg and more recently I created a skill for Claude to manipulate Ableton arrangements (which aren’t exposed via the API so you need to manipulate the file, which is zipped xml, instead).
Both seemed pretty promising and fitted with how I’d like AI to assist rather than replace me for creative tasks.
This reminds me I should open source them as I’ve had no time to do more work on them!
Yeah +1, at the start of my career (mid 2000s) all the web designs were done in Photoshop. I think this was true until 2010/11 at least, when I first encountered Axure being used for some design stuff. I’ve never used Fireworks and never saw it in the wild (UK, in case it was a regional thing)
As chance would have it, I just tried this for the first time as I wanted to bind a keyboard shortcut to an option from a menu bar app which doesn’t support keybinding. ChatGPT wrote a script which uses AppleScript to do it. Really anwesome, and excited to find more cool things to do with it!
Whenever I use my personal Mac or iPad, still on the old OS, I wonder what they were thinking - I would guess it was rushed to hit the annual release, as it does have potential in parts.
That said, it looks from the few screenshots in this like you’re able to pare it back to something much closer to how it used to look, which is great and I’m glad they’re taking feedback on board.
reply