physicality is the next UI

From the «upside the head» department:
Title: ‘Physicality: The New Age of UI’
Author: John Gruber
Date: Wed, 04 Jun 2025 00:37:15 +0000
Link: https://www.lux.camera/physicality-the-new-age-of-ui/

Sebastiaan de With, in a wonderfully-illustrated piece (a) examining, in
detail, where iOS UI has been, and (b) speculating, with detailed mockups,
where he thinks/hopes it’s about to go, starting at WWDC next week:

I’d like to imagine what could come next. Both by rendering some UI design of
my own, and by thinking out what the philosophy of the New Age could be.

A logical next step could be extending physicality to the entirety of the
interface. We do not have to go overboard in such treatments, but we can now
have the interface inhabit a sense of tactile realism.

Philosophically, if I was Apple, I’d describe this as finally having an
interface that matches the beautiful material properties of its devices. All
the surfaces of your devices have glass screens. This brings an interface of
a matching material, giving the user a feeling of the glass itself coming
alive. [...]

I took some time to design and theorize what this would look like, and how it
would work. For the New Design Language, it makes sense that just like on
VisionOS, the material of interactivity is glass.

I hope, very much, that what Apple has been working on is along the lines of
what de With has mocked up. It both looks great (and better than what we have
now) and makes sense. I also agree with him that it would be a competitive
advantage for Apple to establish a new visual design language that no existing
design tools can create. You can’t make the sort of things de With is
describing with Figma. Competitors could (and I guarantee will) superficially
copy the look, but not the interactive responsiveness of lighting effects.

In a profound way, a UI language comprised of glossy and matte glass, running
on phones and tablets that themselves are made of glossy and matte glass, would
hark back to the early days of Mac OS X, when the “lickable” translucent Aqua
UI theme felt of a piece with the colorful translucent plastic enclosures of
the iMac, PowerMac, and iBook. Right down to the pinstripes. (Apple never did
make an Aqua-style PowerBook along those lines, instead going straight from
classic[1]black[2]plastic[3] to the Titanium PowerBook G4[4], the styling of
which augured the post-Aqua look-and-feel of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard[5] and the
much-beloved 10.6 Snow Leopard[6].) I’ve been clamoring for buttons to look
like buttons again ever since iOS 7.

But as much as I truly love de With’s mockups, they’re all for iOS. What I’m
left unsettled by is my failure to imagine how this design language could be
brought to the Mac. Macs aren’t made of glass; they’re all made of aluminum.
But the main difference is that the way many of us use MacOS is with a lot of
stacked windows atop each other. The last thing MacOS needs is more
transparency/translucency than it already has. Some depth to its UI controls,
though? That’s something MacOS is in almost desperate need of. A horse, a
horse, my kingdom for a Mac UI theme where you can tell, instantly, whether a
button is enabled or disabled[7] or which item in a tabview controller is
selected[8].

We’ll soon see.
★ [9]

Links:
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerBook_180 (link)
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerBook_1400 (link)
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerBook_G3 (link)
[4]: https://sixcolors.com/post/2020/11/20-macs-for-2020-5-titanium-powerbook-g4/ (link)
[5]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2007/10/mac-os-x-10-5/ (link)
[6]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2009/08/mac-os-x-10-6/ (link)
[7]: https://erik-engheim.medium.com/big-sur-sucks-817cba889376 (link)
[8]: https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOS/comments/l1avfv/tried_to_make_the_ui_buttons_a_bit_more_defined_i/ (link)
[9]: https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/06/03/sdw-physicality-new-age (link)