https://inessential.com/2026/09/22/that-about-wraps-it-up-for.html
I talk about moving away from stock Mac UI and present some playing-around screenshots of NetNewsWire. Not to be taken as a promise for a Liquid-Glass-free future, but as showing what I’m thinking about.
But my app NetNewsWire has a very stock Mac UI, and Liquid Glass adoption last year was a lot of work. Using stock Mac UI didn’t save us much — in fact, we had more work to do compared to the apps with more custom UI.
Not sure I agree with this. From memory, macOS was just a rebuild with the new Xcode, iOS was the time sink (moving to collection view, etc).
Dear Brent,
First, thank you very much for your work. Netnewswire is a great app, maybe the one I use the most, on both MacOS ans iOS. For me, the excellence of Netnewswire is the very classy Mac and iPhone integration, for the UI as the engine. The Liquid Glass integration is a clever one, and I love how it feels native when I open it. I don’t see the point of having an old UI, to my mind it would really diminish the feeling of a native and modern app.
Thank you again for all your work,
A.
My point isn’t to make an old UI — it’s to avoid the parts of Liquid Glass on macOS that I think are bad for the app. (That are, really, bad in general.)
I started my explorations by rewinding to when the Mac UI was still pretty great. But of course. But just because I’m messing around doesn’t mean I’m about to ship some version of the app designed to look old.
Of course you might look at this and think “Blech! Looks so old! Spare me!” Totally fair!
Let me correct that.
Looks so clean.
You have my vote, if you do it. A bit of colour would be useful, I find I use colour cues quite a lot (boy, do I miss them in the finder).
Rob