Back in July, I was lucky enough to have my friend Louie Mantia on The Talk Show to talk about Liquid Glass and (as I wrote in the show notes) “the worrisome state of Apple’s UI design overall”. This was probably my favorite episode of the show all year, and I think it holds up extremely well now that we’re all using Liquid Glass, across Apple’s platforms, in release versions.

Included in the show notes was a link to Mantia’s essay making his case against Dye’s decade-long stint leading Apple’s UI design teams, “A Responsibility to the Industry”, which began thus:

Firstly, I maintain that it makes absolutely no sense that Alan Dye has the power he has, because he simply has no taste. But what’s worse is that he wields that power so clumsily, so carelessly. And because it goes unchallenged, unchecked by someone higher than him, the entire industry suffers the consequences.

Here’s Mantia today, regarding the news of Dye leaving Apple for Meta:

And good riddance!!

Tyler Hall, just one week ago:

Maybe it’s because my eyes are getting old or maybe it’s because the contrast between windows on macOS keeps getting worse. Either way, I built a tiny Mac app last night that draws a border around the active window. I named it “Alan”.

In Alan’s preferences, you can choose a preferred border width and colors for both light and dark mode.

That’s it. That’s the app.

The timing of this is remarkably serendipitous — releasing an app named “Alan” to fix an obvious glaring design shortcoming in recent versions of MacOS just one week before Alan Dye left Apple. (See Michael Tsai for more on the app’s name, including a callback to Greg Landweber’s classic Mac OS extension Aaron.)

It’s worth following Hall’s “the contrast between windows” link, which points to his own post from five years ago lamenting the decline in contrast between active and inactive windows in MacOS. That 2020 post of Hall’s refers back to Steve Jobs’s introduction of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard in 2007:

As I was preparing the above video for this post, I completely forgot there was a final feature about the new Leopard Desktop that was highlighted in that keynote.

Jobs took time out of a keynote to callout that it was now easier to tell which window is focused. At 1:29 in that clip, you’ll hear an outsized “Wooo!” from some of the audience just for this one improvement.

Jobs even prepared a slide, highlighting “Prominent active window” as a noteworthy new feature. In 2007, the increase of visual prominence for the active window, going from 10.4 Tiger to 10.5 Leopard, drew applause from the audience. But the level of visual prominence indicating active/inactive windows was much higher in 10.4 Tiger than in any version of MacOS in the last decade under Alan Dye’s leadership.

Nick Heer on Alan (the app, and, indirectly, the man):

I wish it did not feel understandable for there to be an app that draws a big border around the currently active window. That should be something made sufficiently obvious by the system. Unfortunately, this is a problem plaguing the latest versions of MacOS and Windows alike, which is baffling to me. The bar for what constitutes acceptable user interface design seems to have fallen low enough that it is tripping everyone at the two major desktop operating system vendors.

That doesn’t look like one of the fancy Mitsubishi traction elevators at Apple Park, but otherwise, this jibes.

Chance Miller: Alan Dye, Apple’s vice president of Human Interface Design since 2015, is departing the company. Bloomberg reports that Meta has poached Dye as part of its push “into AI-equipped consumer devices.” Stephen Lemay, a 26-year Apple design veteran, will take over the role from Dye, who officially joins Meta [to become Chief Design […]

Tyler Hall: Maybe it’s because my eyes are getting old or maybe it’s because the contrast between windows on macOS keeps getting worse. Either way, I built a tiny Mac app last night that draws a border around the active window. I named it “Alan”. Nick Heer: I wish it did not feel understandable for […]