inessential: That About Wraps It Up for Stock Mac UI

A longtime Mac developer argues that the latest macOS's Liquid Glass design (full-height sidebars, translucent toolbar buttons) falls short, and that popular 'Mac-like' apps such as Things actually avoid stock UI components like NSToolbar. The piece questions the traditional rationale for sticking with stock Mac UI: users don't notice or care whether an app uses standard controls, and stock UI didn't save development effort — the author's own app, NetNewsWire, required significant work to adopt Liquid Glass while Things appeared to do less. The author then experiments on a branch, stripping Liquid Glass elements from NetNewsWire at the cost of abandoning NSToolbar, sharing early screenshots as a possible direction for the app's future.

Source: https://inessential.com/2026/09/22/that-about-wraps-it-up-for.html. 8 Sync News only summarizes and links out; content copyright belongs to the authors and original sources.