- I was listening to my usual tech podcasts over the summer with all the criticism of Liquid Glass, so I was expecting to not like it. But I actually have the opposite opinion, I like it a lot! I love the fact that buttons look like buttons! Not Plato’s ideal of a button that is just plain text and looks exactly like the content of the webpage or app you are using. Good riddance Jony Ive!
- I also love the floating toolbars and the animations that are all over the interface.
- I thought I’d like the new multitasking features before I used them and I like them even more than I thought! I turned off Stage Manager and I’m just using “Windowed App” mode exclusively. To me Stage Manager was a limitation of the previous multitasking experiments, allowing only 4 apps at a time and I don’t see the point now that I can have as many apps as I want. Maybe I’ll come back to it after I get used to the new UI.
- Having a menu bar is also very handy. I think it works a lot better than the previous system of holding down the Command key. Especially because it works when I don’t have my keyboard attached.
- I also love Expose, I use it all the time on the Mac and feel right at home with it on the iPad. With the keyboard, Globe Key-Arrow Up activates it and Globe Key->Arrow Down shows App Expose, which shows all the open windows of an app and allows you to quickly open another window for that app.
- Flicking windows to each side of the window is also a fun gesture which I’ve been using quite often
- The Preview app is also great. I’m glad I can stop paying for PDF Expert now. I was able to read a 2626 page pdf in Preview and it had no problems. It was able to scroll and jump to pages without a hitch.
- The improvements in Files are also welcome. I’ve put three folders I use all the time in the Dock now. I also enjoy being able to pick the app that can open a file type. This doesn’t seem to work for markdown files. I’ve set it to open with iA Writer, but it always opens in Preview for some reason. When I set it to Pages it works. I guess iA Writer needs to update for this to work properly?
- Another awesome feature I discovered in an OS review is that in Photos, if you go to an event like a concert or baseball game, it uses some event database and can tell you about the event. For the baseball and football games I’ve attended in 2025, it was able to accurately identify the opponents and even gives you the final score! I was wondering how far back this goes and it seems to stop around 2021. There is also less details about the games in the past, but still a great feature for all the events I plan to attend in the future.
I’m picking up my new iPhone 17 Pro tomorrow. After living with it for a week, I’ll write my impressions about that too and how I like Liquid Glass on a phone sized device.