Alan Dye was brought in during the Jony Ive era when they were launching the first Apple Watch because he came from a fashion/print background. Before Apple really figured out what the Watch was going to be (a health/fitness accessory for your phone) they were going for the "luxury fashion" angle.
Somehow when Ive left, Dye got put in charge of design even though he had zero experience in software design that anyone seems to be aware of. He was criticized for the years following for a lot of bizarre design regressions that were happening across all of Apple's OSes. Then a few months after Dye himself announced Liquid Glass at WWDC last year, he blindsided Apple by accepting a poaching offer from Meta, seemingly because Zuck isn't aware of how untalented the guy is.
Now Stephen Lemay is in charge, who's been at Apple for many years and actually knows stuff about software design. It's said that within the walls of Apple, a lot of people were very happy about the change, and the first showing of design changes we got since then are looking very good for Apple.
I have no real love for Alan Dye but you should probably understand that Gruber feels it is a personal affront that someone might work for a company that is not Apple.
Gruber does not have a monopoly on disliking Alan Dye’s work. On the contrary, I never met anyone who knew UI design was a thing that liked what he did.
When you’re using a tool for 40 years and someone who really has no clue gets in charge, starts breaking basic functionality for no good reason and affecting your day to day work, it’s not hard to get infuriated.
How do you think thay worked? Alan Dye alome came up with, designed and somehow forced Liquid Glass into every platform? Lemay, who was his second in command had nothing to do with it? It was Alan Dye single-handedly doing it?
I am very, very curious how he reached, stayed that long at the top of the org chart and convinced so many people that this was a good direction to take.
If I were at Apple's leadership I'd consider that a major blindspot and focus deeply on fixing it.
On your first point, I don't know if Lemay merely agreed to keep his job or was an enthusiast of the vision. But it is a bit worrisome, if Bloomberg is to be believed.
On your second, Liquid Glass is merely the culmination of years of bad direction. Hiding essential feature on hover (notification's close icon, elapsed time on Apple Music, proxy icon, etc), poor contrast, legibility, background/foreground differentiation, was a long running process.
On your third point, I think it's possible and, if that's the case, deeply troubling.
> I don't know if Lemay merely agreed to keep his job
Again: why do you keep assigning Dye God-like powers? There wasn't just Lemay. There's no end of senior designers and senior product people, Federighi and his minions etc. at Apple.
In the end we still got Liquid Glass.
> On your second, Liquid Glass is merely the culmination of years of bad direction.
Indeed. Easily hundreds of people across several platforms saw this direction. Somehow we are led to believe that all of them were against this direction, and Dye single-handedly forced all the changes through.
He was VP of Design. That's as close to being design-god at Apple as you can get.
> Somehow we are led to believe that all of them were against this direction, and Dye single-handedly forced all the changes through.
I don't think that's a widely held belief. What's puzzling and scary to me is how so many people either stayed silent, failed to disagree or quit. How a deeply entrenched design culture can so easily crumble.
The mess he actively implemented and was an integral part of?
Why do people keep thinking that Alan Dye was the only person (apparently with God-like powers) who somehow forced and designed Liquid Glass alone, in isolation, and somehow sneaked it in to every Apple platform.
