Rui Carmo
There’s a special kind of UI regression that doesn’t look like a regression until you try to use it, and the Liquid Glass Tsunami just keeps on giving.
The huge rounded corners are turning a basic motor skill into a hand-eye coordination puzzle, and this piece goes into exquisite detail on that, and demonstrates how Apple completely botched window resizing.
Spoiler: the resize hotspot is still a 19×19px target, but with the new corner radius “about 75%” of that target ends up outside the visible window. So you do what any reasonable person does and aim inside the corner (where the window actually is), and nothing happens.
The best part (in a dry, slightly tragic way) is the conclusion: the “most reliable way” to resize is to grab outside the corner, which is exactly the kind of invisible affordance that makes people feel like they’re going slightly mad.
It’s also a neat reminder that Fitts’s Law doesn’t care about your design language, and that hit-testing should follow what users perceive as the object boundary, not whatever geometry is easiest to keep from the previous release.
Oh, and that whoever did Tahoe’s UX design is borderline incompetent.
Worth reading because it’s not just a rant, it’s a small, well-illustrated teardown of how a cosmetic change can quietly break muscle memory and cause endless attrition and frustration.
The annotated images (green “expected” area, blue dot, and the “accepted target area” sitting in empty space) make the point better than any amount of hand-waving, and we need more of this to make it obvious that Apple needs to reverse course on the whole thing.