It’s hard to overstate quite how revolutionary and smooth this flow is until you had it for multiple years before having it taken away. Nothing on the market — even over a decade later — is this good at meeting you where you are and not interrupting your flow.

Especially that book example. My Lord. When Aperture was discontinued (well, when it stopped working properly after an OS update or two) I moved over to Adobe Lightroom (now Lightroom Classic) which had separate modules for file management, editing, and books — switching modules was such a slow and clunky processes, I swear nearly threw my computer out the window trying to colour match photos on a book page.

However, when it gets to the point where we as humans need to use our computers as tools to get stuff done, I think we have stagnated over the past few years. When preparing for this post I was excited to fire up Aperture and experience it again, but after less than ten minutes of using it I was getting grumpy — here I am, sitting at a thirteen-year old computer, and I’m flying through my photos faster than I ever do on modern machines. Why is this not possible now?

Aperture’s technical brilliance is remarkable in how quiet it is. There’s no BEHOLD RAINBOW SPARKLE ANIMATIONS WHILE THE AI MAKES AUNT JANICE LOOK LIKE AN ANTHROPOMORPHISED CARROT, just an understated dedication to making the tool you’re using work for you in exactly the way you want to work.

Source: Daniel Kennett - A Lament For Aperture, The App We’ll Never Get Over Losing

Aperture truly was one of the best applications I have used. That is why Liquid Glass, and the broader direction of Apple’s current design language, feels like such a disaster to me.

On Liquid Glass, this part stood out:

In other words, Apple was about to walk into its biggest software event of the year — WWDC 2025 — with virtually no compelling AI story. Aside from a pale imitation of Google Translate and a set of on-device AI models for third-party apps with limited appeal, the company couldn’t really demonstrate that it was part of the historic shift to generative artificial intelligence.

But Apple had a wild card that could serve as a major distraction — and help buy the company time until the new Siri and broader AI changes were ready in 2026. That trick was a sweeping redesign of its operating systems built around a new software interface called Liquid Glass. Knowing what it was up against, Apple went all in on marketing the new look of iOS 26, macOS 26 and its other updates.

Source: Bloomberg - Power On

Liquid Glass looks half-baked. It also makes me wonder how much of that team’s real vision survived contact with launch, given how much always gets scoped down to ship.

That said, Dye still could have protected the team long enough to let it cook. For now, all I can hope is that the harebrained choices that cut against Apple’s own HIG for the Mac either have a better modern answer behind them, or get fixed.