How utterly uninspiring and boring compared to the designs of talented Winamp skinners of yore. Look, I get it. Corporate design today "needs" to be safe, consistent, and accessible to a broad audience.
The Winamp skinning era represented something fundamentally different from today's design philosophy. It was about personal expression, creativity, and making your tools reflect your personality rather than conforming to a universal aesthetic. When users could fundamentally alter their software's appearance, they became co-creators rather than passive consumers. That's a very different relationship with technology than what we have now, and I hate it.
I don't entirely agree with other commenters saying it's uninspired. It is neutral, but many functional considerations go into making a UI framework, and neutrality serves an important purpose.
However, given Material's popularity, I think it's inevitable that poorly designed/unergonomic apps will cheapen M3 a lot in the coming years. Same as it happened with Material 2. It used to be associated with clean, professionally developed apps; then it became associated with the worst of the worst and a lot of mediocre stuff, too. Sturgeon's Law is not kind to these things.
I like it. I’m happy with my iPhone but this is a rare moment where I wish I got to play around with some Android UI components.
How to spend millions on an incremental change -- looks flat and uninspiring as ever...
Just when you thought you've seen every variation of a flat roundish bubble...
Oh man, squircles are back in fashion big time. They just waste so much space with their large border radiuses, it frustrates me.
I miss skeuomorphism more and more.
I really wish there was a good demo section where I could try out the elements.
I feel they really missed the mark on this UI design system. I have absolutely no interest in adopting it.
And I still can't tell if this particular rectangle is a button or not. In the example renders I can't tell for approximately half of the widgets, what will happen if I click them.
I will continue to think mobile UI peaked around Android 4.0.
MAHA - Make Android Holo Again because screen space is an awful thing to waste, because the 'trans pride colour scheme' is unappealing (I assume the colour scheme is configurable, yes?), because mobile devices are not soft fluffy baby toys, because it just looks better - probably subjective but so be it. Just like Fisher-Z declared in "One Voice" there's a new generation that's sick of (the UI equivalent of) "Blowing in the wind". Be gone, squircly bubbles, you're not welcome anymore.
Wish there was non-emotional UI design system called Material R - Rational.
Google is churning out new Material versions so fast, that their developers cannot keep up building a decent implementation of web components for current, nor for previous version of design.
I guess shades of pink and lavender make a UI "more emotional?"
Is anyone excited about this, or are we just reacting to the words "Google" and "Material"? Can someone articulate what they're looking forwards to and with what metric?
I think using gigantic components with squiggly animations for emphasis is silly, but it looks functional, I guess.
Well done to the team for good documentation and sneaking in many good UX lessons, too.
For example:
> Notifications should: Be about the user, not the product [..] Give users easy controls to opt out, Not be used to send unsolicited ads
... is really good advice lots of tech companies should use.
Ah, emotional.
The love, the fear, the despair in our hearts. Our disgust for ourselves, our pride in what we make.
The admiration you have for your child. The worst you’ve ever been hurt in your life. Feeding the birds out of your hand. Near death experiences. The best mistake in your relationship.
It’s a crowning achievement, being able to fit all this into a button; into the rounded corners; into the reloading animation.
What are stories for anyway?
What the heck is with the blurred image into 2 second load stutter before I'm allowed to see each image? Just an artifact of design on gigabit fiber with and M3 Macbook Pro?
Closely related discussion from eight days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43975352.