Christopher Butler writes a wonderful essay about the “best interfaces we never built,” exploring the UIs from sci-fi:

Science fiction, by the way, hasn’t just predicted our technological future. We all know the classic examples, particularly those from Star Trek: the communicator and tricorder anticipated the smartphone; the PADD anticipated the tablet; the ship’s computer anticipated Siri, Alexa, Google, and AI voice interfaces; the entire interior anticipated the Jony Ive glass filter on reality. It’s enough to make a case that Trek didn’t anticipate these things so much as those who watched it as young people matured in careers in design and engineering. But science fiction has also been a fertile ground for imagining very different ways for how humans and machines interact.

He goes on to namecheck 2001: A Space Odyssey, Quantum Leap, Inspector Gadget and others. I don’t know Butler personally, but I’d bet $1 he’s Gen X like me.

As UX designers, it’s very easy to get stuck thinking that UI is just pixels rendered on a screen. But in fact, an interface is anything that translates our intentions into outcomes that technology can deliver.

Vincent Nguyen writing for Yanko Design, interviewing Alan Dye, VP of Human Interface Design at Apple:

This technical challenge reveals the core problem Apple set out to solve: creating a digital material that maintains form-changing capabilities while preserving transparency. Traditional UI elements either block content or disappear entirely, but Apple developed a material that can exist in multiple states without compromising visibility of underlying content. Dye’s emphasis on “celebrating user content” exposes Apple’s hierarchy philosophy, where the interface serves content instead of competing with it. When you tap to magnify text, the interface doesn’t resize but stretches and flows like liquid responding to pressure, ensuring your photos, videos, and web content remain the focus while navigation elements adapt around them.

Since the Jony Ive days, Apple’s hardware has always been about celebrating the content. Bezels got smaller. Screens got bigger and brighter. Even the flat design brought on by iOS 7 and eventually adopted by the whole ecosystem was a way to strip away the noise and focus on the content.

Dye’s explanation of the “glass layer versus application layer” architecture provides insight into how Apple technically implements this philosophy. The company has created a distinct separation between functional controls (the glass layer) and user content (the application layer), allowing each to behave according to different rules while maintaining visual cohesion. This architectural decision enables the morphing behavior Dye described, where controls can adapt and change while content remains stable and prominent.

The Apple platform UI today sort of does that, but Liquid Glass seems to take it even further.

Nguyen about his experience using the Music app on Mac:

The difference from current iOS becomes apparent in specific scenarios. In the current Music app, scrolling through your library feels like moving through flat, static layers. With Liquid Glass, scrolling creates a sense of depth. You can see your album artwork subtly shifting beneath the translucent controls, creating spatial awareness of where interface elements sit in relation to your content. The tab bar doesn’t just scroll with you; it creates gentle optical distortions that make the underlying content feel physically present beneath the glass surface.

I kind of expected it: a lot more ink was spilled on Liquid Glass—particularly on social media. In case you don’t remember, Liquid Glass is the new UI for all of Apple’s platforms. It was announced Monday at WWDC 2025, their annual developers conference.

The criticism is primarily around legibility and accessibility. Secondary reasons include aesthetics and power usage to animate all the bubbles.

How Liquid Glass Actually Works

Before I go and address the criticism, I think it would be great to break down the team’s design thinking and how Liquid Glass actually works. 

I’ve been very interested in finding tools to close the design-to-code gap. Martina Sartor writing in UX Planet articulates why that is so important:

After fifteen years hopping between design systems, dev stand-ups, and last-minute launch scrambles, I’m convinced design-to-dev QA is still one of the most underestimated bottlenecks in digital product work. We pour weeks into meticulous Figma files, yet the last mile between mock-up and production code keeps tripping us up.

This is an honest autopsy of why QA hurts and how teams can start healing it — today — without buying more software (though new approaches are brewing).

Apple’s annual developer conference kicked off today with a keynote that announced:

• Unified Version 26 across all Apple platforms (iOS, iPadOS, macOS, watchOS, tvOS, visionOS)
• “Liquid Glass” design system. A complete UI and UX overhaul, the first major redesign since iOS 7
• Apple Intelligence. Continued small improvements, though not the deep integration promised a year ago
• Full windowing system on iPadOS. Windows comes to iPad! Finally.

Of course, those are the very high-level highlights.

For designers, the headline is Liquid Glass. Sebastiaan de With’s predictive post and renderings from last week were very spot-on.

Sebastiaan de With, former designer at Apple and currently co-founder and designer at Lux (makers of Halide, Kino, Spectre, and Orion) imagined what the next era in iOS design might be. (WWDC, Apple’s developer conference is next week. This is typically when they unveil the new operating systems that will launch in the fall. Rumors are flying as usual.)

But he starts with a history lesson:

Smart people study history to understand the future. If we were to categorize the epochs of iOS design, we could roughly separate them into the Shaded Age, the Adaptive Age, and the New Age.

The Shaded Age, or skeuomorphic age, took inspiration from the Dashboard feature of Mac OS X Tiger. And then the Flat Age brought on by the introduction of iOS 7.

de With’s concept mocks for the New Age are fantastic. Based on the physicality of visionOS, with specular highlights and reactive reflections, it’s luscious and reminds me of the first time I ever laid eyes on Aqua—the glossy, candy-like look of the original Mac OS X. Steve Jobs said at its introduction, “…one of the design goals was when you saw it you wanted to lick it.”

Nearly three weeks after it was introduced at Figma Config 2025, I finally got access to Figma Make. It is in beta and Figma made sure we all know. So I will say upfront that it’s a bit unfair to do an official review. However, many of the tools in my AI prompt-to-code shootout article are also in beta. 

Since this review is fairly visual, I made a video as well that summarizes the points in this article pretty well.

Allen Pike:

While chat is powerful, for most products chatting with the underlying LLM should be more of a debug interface – a fallback mode – and not the primary UX.

I agree. Pike breaks down the various non-chat UIs in his post.

There has been an explosion of AI-powered prompt-to-code tools within the last year. The space began with full-on integrated development environments (IDEs) like Cursor and Windsurf. These enabled developers to use leverage AI assistants right inside their coding apps. Then came a tools like v0, Lovable, and Replit, where users could prompt screens into existence at first, and before long, entire applications.

A couple weeks ago, I decided to test out as many of these tools as I could. My aim was to find the app that would combine AI assistance, design capabilities, and the ability to use an organization’s coded design system.

While my previous essay was about the future of product design, this article will dive deep into a head-to-head between all eight apps that I tried. I recorded the screen as I did my testing, so I’ve put together a video as well, in case you didn’t want to read this.

As a longtime Apple fanboy, it's a little hard for me to appreciate the visual design of Windows—Microsoft is a nemesis, if you will. But I will tip my hat to the design practitioners there who've made the company finally pay attention to design.

Side note, reminds me of a story about what Steve Jobs once told me when I was designing the welcome animation for Mac OS X.

I was sitting on a barstool next to my wife in a packed restaurant in Little Italy. We were the lone Kansas City Chiefs supporters in a nest full of hipster Philadelphia Eagles fans. After Jon Batiste finished his fantastic rendition of the national anthem, and the teams took the field for kickoff, I noticed something. The scorebug—the broadcast industry’s term for the lower-third or chyron graphic at the bottom of the screen—was different, and in a good way.

I posted about it seven minutes into the first quarter, saying I appreciated “the minimalistic lower-thirds for this Super Bowl broadcast.” It was indeed refreshing, a break from the over-the-top 3D-animated sparkling. I thought the graphics were clear and utilitarian while being exquisitely-designed. They weren’t distracting from the action. As with any good interface design, this new scorebug kept the focus on the players and the game, not itself. I also thought they were a long-delayed response to Apple’s Friday Night Baseball scorebug.

Apple finally launched its Vision Pro “spatial computing” device in early February. We immediately saw TikTok memes of influencers being ridiculous. I wrote about my hope for the Apple Vision Pro back in June 2023, when it was first announced. When preorders opened for Vision Pro in January, I told myself I wouldn’t buy it. I couldn’t justify the $3,500 price tag. Out of morbid curiosity, I would lurk in the AVP subreddits to live vicariously through those who did take the plunge.

After about a month of reading all the positives from users about the device, I impulsively bought an Apple Vision Pro. I placed my order online at noon and picked it up just two hours later at an Apple Store near me.

Many great articles and YouTube videos have already been produced, so this post won’t be a top-to-bottom review of the Apple Vision Pro. Instead, I’ll try to frame it from my standpoint as someone who has designed user experiences for VR. 

Welcome to the Era of Spatial Computing

This post was originally published on Bow & Arrow from PJA (my employer) on February 3, 2011.

The New York Times recently published an article about how apps and web services are enabling consumers to customize how they read their online content. From apps like Flipboard and Pulse to services like Readability and Instapaper, users are increasingly demanding to consume content whenever, wherever and however they want.

When Apple introduced the iPad a year ago, many print publishers saw it as a panacea for their dwindling readership. By creating digital editions, they hoped to recapture some of the eyeballs lost to aggregators and RSS feeds. One of the pioneering publication apps was the WIRED Magazine iPad app. Because of its novelty, its debut issue sold 73,000 digital copies in nine days, almost as much as on newsstands. There is a clear desire from users to read magazines on their tablets.

What that first generation of attempts miss though, is they are trying to replicate 20th century print experience on a 21st century device. The magazine apps feel very one way. But the iPad is an Internet-connected device and users on the Internet demand more interactive experiences. They want to copy and paste passages to put on their blogs. They want to share articles via Facebook and Twitter. Using Adobe’s Digital Magazine Solution, Condé Nast is starting to address some of these issues.