00:00:20 ◼ ► With, you know, some bleed through here and there, but that's the basic split of how I'm doing things.
00:00:24 ◼ ► As I've been spending the last, you know, two weeks or a week and a half really diving into the design of liquid glass
00:00:53 ◼ ► And even my past self, like, I've been saying all summer, I've been telling everyone on the podcast,
00:00:59 ◼ ► like, hey, you should put this on your main phone because you have to learn the new design system
00:01:18 ◼ ► More in the sense that, first of all, you know, there is one major area of difficulty that things keep shifting and changing.
00:01:26 ◼ ► And it's really, it does not have the stability and maturity that you would expect from beta 4, which is what we currently are.
00:01:35 ◼ ► And so, there's still a lot, you know, rough and changing and maybe missing in certain areas.
00:01:45 ◼ ► A lot of stuff that, like, if I tried this and this was, like, the release version, I would be like, well, I just can't use this.
00:01:56 ◼ ► Maybe by the time it ships, I'll be able to use things like, you know, the new collapsing tab bar mini player kind of thing,
00:02:10 ◼ ► And so, I don't want to build my entire app around a navigation paradigm that is too rough for me to ship.
00:02:20 ◼ ► A bigger part of the challenge is a lot of times when I do something that adopts the new design,
00:02:28 ◼ ► whether it's glass or some other part of the design, you know, because that's an important distinction.
00:02:32 ◼ ► When we say liquid glass to refer to, like, the overall design, that's not the whole design language.
00:02:44 ◼ ► There are lots of other parts of the new design language that don't involve glass or translucent.
00:02:50 ◼ ► And, you know, a lot of just changes of shapes of things, you know, layouts of things, colors and tints of things.
00:02:57 ◼ ► Like, a lot of, you know, just kind of different visual language around the whole system, even without the transparency.
00:03:03 ◼ ► But anyway, part of my problem here is, again, the roughness of and that I feel like I'm building on quicksand.
00:03:11 ◼ ► A bigger part of my problem is that as I'm adopting a lot of the new visual language, I hate the results.
00:03:23 ◼ ► Like, when I change, if I change a screen in an overcast or I change a control, and, you know, first thing I do is I put it on my phone and I use it.
00:03:31 ◼ ► Like, you know, I don't do a lot of this design in the simulator, you know, only for, like, basic immediate layout.
00:03:36 ◼ ► And then as soon as I can get it on my phone, I get it on my phone and I try to use it.
00:03:40 ◼ ► And if it's something that I think is going to be, like, you know, potentially a big deal, I'll just build it and I'll put it on my phone and I'll just use it for a few days before I, you know, move on with it.
00:03:51 ◼ ► But, like, you know, so things like, you know, I've been playing with the design of the mini player on the navigational screens when something is playing, you know, the little mini player at the bottom.
00:04:01 ◼ ► That is part of the overcast design that looks the oldest and most out of place when you see iOS 26 and you see the old app running on iOS 26.
00:04:12 ◼ ► And it's in large part due to those big, mostly opaque gray bars on top and bottom of overcast.
00:04:20 ◼ ► And so, like, that's the first thing I wanted to change is, like, that looked the oldest.
00:04:24 ◼ ► And the new design system has very clear opinions on things like making all the corners rounded and concentric and pulling them away from the edges and, you know, all these other things.
00:04:32 ◼ ► So, as I've been playing with different designs for the mini player, every single one of them, when I actually go to use it over, like, the following day, I just hate it.
00:04:46 ◼ ► And so then I try to, like, well, how much do I go into hacking making this work better?
00:04:51 ◼ ► Like, if the touch targets got smaller, okay, I can, you know, do some hacks to, like, make a larger touch area that intercepts touches.
00:05:02 ◼ ► And what I end up with is I spend a lot of time making something that ultimately does look more in place with 26, but I kind of hate it.
00:05:15 ◼ ► And what gives me a lot of pause here is this tension, I feel, between, on one hand, what I've been saying all summer, you're going to look old if you don't do this.
00:05:33 ◼ ► On the other hand, I think this is going to be a really controversial new design among users.
00:05:48 ◼ ► And if I go all in on it, my app will look just like a lot of the system controls and system apps, which is a good thing in lots of ways.
00:06:09 ◼ ► So that could be good in the sense that, you know, it could be the upside of the controversy, which is like the people who are going to love it are going to love my app, maybe.
00:06:28 ◼ ► So I'm really having a hard time, like, trying to evaluate, even just whether to adopt the new system, how far to adopt it, how much to change about my app to fit the new design language and the new structures of things like tab bars and stuff.
00:06:48 ◼ ► And the biggest problem is that every time I use it, when I hate something, I'm like, well, if I hate this, I bet a lot of my users are going to hate this too.
00:06:57 ◼ ► And I've never been in a place where Apple has gone really strong in a design direction, and I've decided I don't know if I want to follow it or not.
00:07:08 ◼ ► You know, one option is I can just use that plist flag that just keeps the old design for a year or whatever.
00:07:33 ◼ ► Another option is I dive full in and fully continue to adopt the new system, and I ride the wave of controversy that I think is very likely to come this fall, which could be exciting and destructive.
00:07:47 ◼ ► A third option is I update the app to not look old, but kind of my own way, which is tempting, but that I think is a risk in a lot of ways.
00:08:05 ◼ ► Like, I don't think there's enough time left in the summer for me to do a good job of that.
00:08:13 ◼ ► I'm kind of in a pit of despair right now about design in Overcast this fall because I really am not happy with any of the options I have ahead of me right now.
00:08:35 ◼ ► Like, we often, you know, you and I will come to the show with a list of sort of, like, topic ideas or things we're interested in talking about.
00:08:40 ◼ ► And my, like, my idea for today is about how I have now finished my, like, first pass through complete redesigns of Pedometer++ and Widgetsmith.
00:08:52 ◼ ► Here's some strategies that I learned about this and how excited and happy I am about liquid glass, which sounds like is essentially the opposite of the experience that you are currently having.
00:09:01 ◼ ► Rather than being in the, like, the pit of despair, I'm on the mountaintop of, like, you know, victory.
00:09:14 ◼ ► Like, there's so many – it is a really, like, twisted and complicated year to work through.
00:09:37 ◼ ► Like, there's some APIs, some parts of my app that, like, and I did my redesign that are, like, hmm, this is – like, if the API eventually works, I have a little note to myself to go and fix it to use the, like, fancier, shinier version.
00:09:47 ◼ ► But I have the less shiny version in there now and it will work fine if it doesn't get better.
00:09:55 ◼ ► It's a little complicated because the design keeps changing in terms of visually things are adjusting in terms of, like, the – I mean, the one that gets overly talked about, but it's, like, the obvious one is, like,
00:10:06 ◼ ► the opacity of the glass and how opaque it is and how much that informs different designs and things.
00:10:12 ◼ ► And it's, like, it's hard because if every beta changes, it's hard to know if a design is going to work until we know the general opacity.
00:10:19 ◼ ► And so, like, that – the uncertainness of that is tricky if you're going down a path and you need to know, like, does it work?
00:10:25 ◼ ► Though on that, like, there's also, like, there's other – like, I have other strategies for that where there are a few places in my app where I've been – I was – I'm not – whatever the degree of opacity of the –
00:10:35 ◼ ► the opacity of the glass is, I find it isn't enough in any of the betas, like, whatever, like, beta 3 where we had the most frosted glass or whatever.
00:10:42 ◼ ► And so, like, there's places where I'm tinting the glass and putting – increasing the opacity – or decreasing the opacity of it so that it's, you know, more legible.
00:10:59 ◼ ► And if it becomes super frosted at the system level later, like, I can unroll that back.
00:11:11 ◼ ► And, like, that's a – that's a really challenging thing to deal with because it's kind of happening to us whether we like it or not.
00:11:34 ◼ ► You know, this isn't – like, there's a large part of you that is reflected back in the work that you've done on Overcast.
00:11:48 ◼ ► And I – I mean, it's fortunate, you know, in terms of – for my emotional state that I think now when I look – you know, I look at the redesigns and I love them.
00:11:57 ◼ ► And I look at the old app when I'm doing, like, you know, testing on iOS 18 and I'm like, who made this terrible app?
00:12:04 ◼ ► And, like, that – it works really well for me as a motivation and encouragement to keep moving forward and, you know, it's been helpful over this time.
00:12:17 ◼ ► Like, I – liquid glass feels very much like one of these things that has a strong division.
00:12:24 ◼ ► Like, it isn't like this kind of medium centrist design language where it kind of, you know, works for most people.
00:12:40 ◼ ► Like, it's strong and forward and has a, you know, has a view on how things are going to look, the way they're going to interact.
00:12:48 ◼ ► And that's really tricky if that isn't exactly – if it isn't something that's really sort of sticking with you.
00:12:54 ◼ ► And I think regardless of how that kind of comes out, like, that feeling is going to be really complicated.
00:13:12 ◼ ► Like, and so maybe that's just where you are and it will kind of come back up as you go.
00:13:18 ◼ ► But if you don't, like, there's no great answer there beyond just kind of going your own way.
00:13:24 ◼ ► And because I was like, that is always a possibility here in the sense of it looks old against iOS 26, but not insofar as, like – I'm just thinking of, like, Overcast has two big competitors, Spotify and Apple Podcasts, I would imagine.
00:13:59 ◼ ► Like, it is going to – like, and so you can choose in some ways which of those you're going to go for.
00:14:07 ◼ ► Like, you could be a Spotify and just kind of stay away from it at least for a little bit I think is the other thing that's also fairly reasonable.
00:14:30 ◼ ► Like, in some ways, the nice thing is if you just don't, you know, submit day one, even if you've done a lot of the work, you just hold back for a week or two.
00:14:52 ◼ ► Like, you know, once it gets to 26.1 is when you, you know, when a lot of the bugs get sorted out.
00:14:58 ◼ ► Like, I think that's a perfectly reasonable, valid approach because at that point, you will know if it's going to be, like, problematic.
00:15:13 ◼ ► You're going to know what the best version of liquid glass in this first phase is going to be.
00:15:23 ◼ ► And I think there's some, I think, not, like, completely putting it off and not touching it until then I think would be unwise.
00:15:33 ◼ ► If it's not a design that as you go more into, you feel more and more positive about that, like, just doing enough to understand it, doing enough to a new beta comes out, you can try it.
00:15:51 ◼ ► I think broadly, I don't love the idea of apps avoiding liquid glass and trying to go their own way.
00:15:58 ◼ ► Like, it kind of works if you have, if you need to, because you're, like, I think Spotify does it because they have their own internal brand and also because from an engineering perspective, that is a lot easier.
00:16:14 ◼ ► But for an app like your mind, like, I think my life has gotten a lot easier since I leaned fully into liquid glass because a lot of my redesign work involved just deleting tons and tons of custom code that I had written to work around weird stuff or to do designs and stuff.
00:16:30 ◼ ► Like, I use all system button styles now, like, not a single custom button style, and it looks great.
00:16:37 ◼ ► And it means that I don't have all these other things I need to manage and deal with the accessibility of those and all of these, like, there's all these things that I'm just getting for free now.
00:16:46 ◼ ► And that works well for me in a way that, like, Spotify is reinventing every control and has to maintain all of those themselves.
00:16:55 ◼ ► And if there's compatibility issues with new versions of iOS, they have to deal with that.
00:16:59 ◼ ► And so I wouldn't recommend taking on that, but it's like my instinct for you is it's like keep working on it, keep trying it, but be perfectly reasonable to hold back and make sure that before you actually go all in, before you actually hit go, that you're confident that the market state is going to be something that is conducive to this.
00:17:21 ◼ ► Because, like, the double whammy would be you don't really like it and your customers don't really like it and then no one's happy versus the version where your customers are like, hey, where's our new redesign?
00:17:37 ◼ ► It feels like a reasonable place where then at that stage you kind of, at least your customers are winning, even if you aren't in love with the app.
00:18:18 ◼ ► Seer finds the true root cause 94% of the time and can even generate merge-ready pull requests plus optional tests to prevent regressions.
00:18:28 ◼ ► The bottom line is you ship faster, your team isn't drowning in bug alerts, and instead of grinding through logs, your developers are back to building the product.
00:18:36 ◼ ► This is an awesome platform for, you know, if you want to have insights into the issues that people are actually having out in the field, and you can see, you can figure out things, trace them, whether your app's breaking, stalling, latency, etc.
00:18:50 ◼ ► The good news is new users get three months free of the team plan, which covers 150,000 errors.
00:19:03 ◼ ► That's S-E-N-T-R-Y dot I-O, and use the code RADAR or just click the link in our show notes for an easier time.
00:19:18 ◼ ► So number one, the delay option of just like the kind of like the wait and see, give it like some breathing room out in the market, wait and see what customers actually think, and how I start hearing about things before I decide to release this redesign.
00:19:34 ◼ ► That, I think, is probably what I'm going to do, if for no other reason that like I don't think the betas are going to be firm enough until then for me to really judge it for myself, honestly.
00:19:45 ◼ ► I think we're going to have, you know, animation bugs and glass frosting tweaks until late August.
00:19:52 ◼ ► I really don't think we're going to have a lot of time with like the truly final design to make those kinds of calls before it's ship time.
00:20:01 ◼ ► I do think it is probably, you know, like the rate of, the ratio of like how much negativity I will get for not adopting it on day one is probably lower than like the risk of if I do adopt it on day one and people hate it, how bad is that?
00:20:20 ◼ ► So I'm thinking maybe like another, you know, few weeks to month after, you know, maybe this might be something that's better for me to release later in the fall.
00:20:30 ◼ ► Like October, you know, maybe even November, like, you know, give it some time, see how the adoption curve is going, which could help.
00:20:37 ◼ ► Because the more I design this also, like I've been going back and forth on iOS 18 compatibility.
00:20:42 ◼ ► And, you know, if I don't adopt the design much, I can keep compatibility with 18, maybe even 17 pretty easily because I'm just not using the new stuff.
00:20:53 ◼ ► If I do use the new stuff, I'm getting into restructuring and getting into like different, you know, a whole bunch of custom Swift UI modifiers.
00:21:00 ◼ ► Like, well, if available iOS 18, I hate like the way Swift UI does compatibility is terrible.
00:21:07 ◼ ► So it's I don't I don't love, you know, that angle and it's slowing me down to try to maintain it.
00:21:14 ◼ ► And like if I if I just wait until, you know, even if even if I say October, November, if I wait until then, a lot of these considerations become either moot or I will have a lot more information to inform them.
00:21:32 ◼ ► But also the other half of what you're saying about, like, you know, how the the big company apps like Spotify there, I would be surprised if most big company apps adopted literally any of this.
00:21:45 ◼ ► I think they're all going to keep having their own kind of their own design language in most of their app, their own kind of custom everything controls because they want their apps to look the same across all the platforms.
00:21:58 ◼ ► You know, they want to know that their Android version and their iPhone version and their web version all look the same.
00:22:03 ◼ ► I think there's going to be a stark difference between apps using stock controls and, you know, apps doing custom stuff like a more stark difference than we've had in a while.
00:22:14 ◼ ► And I'm not sure that being on the Apple side of that is a guaranteed win with everybody.
00:22:19 ◼ ► Like it in the past, if you used only stock controls, you looked old or you looked basic or you looked cheap.
00:22:28 ◼ ► And apps with custom controls looked more polished, more high end, you know, more reliable, more reputable.
00:22:39 ◼ ► I mean, I'm sure it'll be, you know, for the people who like it, I'm sure it'll be cool for a little bit.
00:22:42 ◼ ► But then, you know, once the novelty wears off after, you know, a few months or whatever, will using all the stock stuff make your app look boring and not stand out enough?
00:22:51 ◼ ► I'm actually questioning, like, is it valuable for my app to match Apple's styles very closely?
00:23:12 ◼ ► When I like look at my redesigns of like, you know, Podomber++, like I really love the redesign of Podomber++.
00:23:33 ◼ ► Is there other parts of this that are going to be, and I think it's, I'm so reminded in a weird way of like, I feel like conversations we had before the launch of the Vision Pro, like, and the challenge, just, I mean, this is just like a challenge in life of obviously like, we don't know the future.
00:23:51 ◼ ► And like, in retrospect, it would have been great to know that the platform wouldn't have really taken off.
00:23:57 ◼ ► And, you know, in terms of the Vision Pro and like, it was a lot of time and effort that didn't ultimately, I mean, it amounts to like personal development.
00:24:05 ◼ ► Like I learned some new skills, but it wasn't massively impactful from a like platform perspective.
00:24:11 ◼ ► And it's, it's, you know, it's like, I wish I knew the answer to like, well, how this is going to go.
00:24:17 ◼ ► Like that would be so helpful in making a better and, you know, better informed decisions about something like this.
00:24:23 ◼ ► And like, we just, all we have, I guess at some level is we can just guess and find like the path that feels.
00:24:31 ◼ ► And maybe it's weird to say, but like, sometimes I feel like my opt, my, my development strategy is to do whatever is going to make me feel motivated.
00:24:40 ◼ ► Because ultimately my apps are at their best when I'm motivated to work on them and to do good work on them.
00:24:47 ◼ ► Like, and whatever form that takes is almost certainly going to be the thing that is going to have the longest term benefit to the app.
00:24:56 ◼ ► Because time and time again, what has happened is if I try and work on something that I don't care about, or I don't like, or isn't something I use myself, like it will be, be mediocre work that I keep procrastinating on and sort of not doing.
00:25:15 ◼ ► And like, that's, that, that, that feeling like at its core, that's the thing that I makes me most nervous about the path you're on right now.
00:25:23 ◼ ► Where like, I think doing an unenthusiastic liquid glass design is much more likely to be problematic than not doing one at all.
00:25:45 ◼ ► It works really well that I've been really enjoying this and it's been very exciting and motivating.
00:25:49 ◼ ► And I've been, some of the more productive, you know, parts of my year have been the last few, I guess the last month and a half, whatever it is since WBDC.
00:25:57 ◼ ► Like it's been super productive and engaging because I've been enjoying it and like that motivation is what I think has allowed me to push through the challenges and the difficulties and the things that have been challenging in that.
00:26:13 ◼ ► Like that motivation and excitement is something that is sort of there or it isn't to some degree.
00:26:19 ◼ ► And so like, I think that's where, I think if you're not feeling it and you're not excited about it, I think it's worth continuing to make sure you fully understand, like do enough of the work to make sure that you understand it, to make sure that it's a choice that you're making with from an informed basis.
00:26:38 ◼ ► But if through that process of understanding and really getting to know it, like you've given it the proper genuine try and it's not there, like at that point, I think it's perfectly reasonable to say, hey, you know, like let's, let's hold back on this a little bit.
00:26:51 ◼ ► Like Apple made your life a lot easier this year than a lot of them where you can, you know, set the P list flag that the UI won't change, but you could still use the new APIs like other features in iOS 26 that you want to use.
00:27:04 ◼ ► Like there may be more things because the thing that's funny too, that's hard to lose track of is how iOS 26 is more than just liquid glass.
00:27:15 ◼ ► And so if this particular side of it is not really, you know, being exciting now, but there are other features, if there's, you know, other iOS 26 APIs that are exciting, like find the fall of that excitement.
00:27:36 ◼ ► I mean, and that's, you know, some of the other API stuff is, has been exciting and that's what I have been working on.
00:27:44 ◼ ► But this is, I guess I'm in a bad place right now because I'm just seeing, I'm not getting that motivation from the new design language.
00:27:56 ◼ ► You know, I, I still don't know what I'm going to do yet, but this, this gives me a lot more kind of, you know, a lot more tools to evaluate what's going on as, as I keep working through this and figure out what to do next.
00:28:10 ◼ ► I think there's an honesty in understanding, in questioning, making these questions because the answers aren't obvious.
00:28:17 ◼ ► Like it is perfectly reasonable to be like, I don't really know if this is worth doing.
00:28:25 ◼ ► And so like just pretending that everything's fine because that's the status quo is not particularly helpful.
00:28:32 ◼ ► And I would say, yeah, just try it enough to make sure that you understand it when the new betas come out, keep trying it.
00:28:40 ◼ ► But if there's some other thing that would be super motivating and encouraging and you would like, you know, like really get you going and motivated and productive, like follow that energy, follow that motivation.