Designing for Liquid Glass: Outstanding Indie Apps

Hello and welcome to another episode of App Stories. I'm John Voorhees, and I've got Federico Vitici with me. Hey, Federico. Hello, John. How are you? I'm doing all right. As this comes out, we will have been through the whole Thanksgiving thing and into Black Friday on our way to Cyber Monday, which is a terrible.

Black Friday and Cyber Monday, what names? I mean, how did we end up with that, you know? I don't know. I don't know, especially Cyber Monday. It's the fault of the Americans. It definitely is. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think so. I think so. It's always Americans. It always is. We have a fun and lightweight topic this week, very topical for App Stories. We're going to talk about apps. A few days ago, we published on Mac Stories a second roundup.

of our favorite Liquid Glass app updates. And we have been intentionally... slow with these ones we wanted to live with liquid glass for a while and it's been a it's been a full couple of months at this point uh we we are now you know obviously there's 26.2 is is approaching the final release

And I think at this point we have our favorites in terms of Liquid Glass updates, how developers implemented them, and then how they iterated upon those app updates since September. So we published a roundup on Mac Stories. And we thought, why not also talk about some apps?

Yeah, absolutely. I'm glad we took it slow and we waited a little bit because not everybody had their apps out day one. Even those that did, there's really been an evolution with some of these apps that I think has really made them a lot more polished over time in fact i would say that a lot of third-party developers are doing it better they're kind of outdoing apple in a lot of ways i mean i i really appreciate some of these liquid glass designs a lot more than i do some of the you know

that's in apps on the iPhone and iPad. Yeah. Yeah. Where do you want to start? We're just going to pick a handful of apps each and we're going to talk about them. Yeah.

What's on your list? So I picked a bunch that were both on the most recent roundup we did as well as the older roundup that we did. And the first one I wanted to talk about is denim because denim to me is an example. of an app. that has really benefited from years and years of careful iteration like i remember very clearly when 1.0 came out and you could see that there was a really good idea there but it was pretty simple app at the beginning

with simple designs that could be used to replace your playlist artwork in music because music lets you do that. Now, Apple, since Denim first released, Apple has come out with a way to customize that.

directly inside the music app, but it's pretty uninspired. There's only like... i don't know six eight designs something like that and they're all kind of samey and denim is really the opposite because it has a combination of pre-built cover art, as well as a lot of ways to customize them, you know, using either artist photographs that come out of music kit.

or just changing the typography and colors and all sorts of things and with liquid glass i think that in particular what you see with denim is a really nice example of how you

take a collection of items, and in this case, it's cover art, you know, square cover art, and you display them on the screen. And I think that Denim's doing a really nice job here in a way that sometimes I don't think music... has done itself because you know the cover art for these playlists is obviously a lot like looking at album art and i really like this so i really like the gallery view in denim i'm also a big fan of the way they've implemented the animations there's a lot of nice

flowy bouncy animations as things like the close button morph into something else as you're exiting the editing screens and going back to your collection of of cover art it's just incredibly well done that way and and shows off the transparency without really getting in the way of the artwork itself and in that sense i think it's a it's a fantastic example because it does what Apple said Liquid Glass was intended to do which is to show off the content in the app.

Yeah, yeah. Denim is great. I've been using it for all of my playlist covers since it came out, really. It's been great to see how the app has grown. One of my indie favorites, for sure. Let's see. I want to mention Locally AI.

So I also wrote about this in the roundup on the site. This to me is an example of the kind of app that Apple would make if... they would make an app to install local AI models, like offline on-device AI models. So it's made by an indie, a single developer.

And it's available everywhere. iPhone, iPad, and the Mac. It's universal. And this is an app that is very polished, very Apple-like, embraces liquid glass, very minimal UI. And the whole idea is that there's a built-in gallery and it kind of... tries its best to remove all of the complexity that is usually involved with installing and choosing picking the right offline model for your device. It comes with a gallery of popular open source models like Quen3.

Have you ever heard, John, of Granite by IBM? No, I haven't, actually. It's pretty good. It's an American model. It's one of the few open source American models. Granite 4. It comes in multiple versions. You can install the tiny one on an iPhone. And I actually prefer it to QM3 small or other. It's very good. It's pretty good. You've done a pretty good job. Sounds good.

So it's got a gallery of those. It's got a gallery of vision models. So Quen3VL, if you want to analyze documents and images. And obviously it also comes with the Apple Foundation model. So if you want to have a chatbot UI for the... on-device Apple Foundation model, which is not great, but you can chat with it for very basic things. And I think what's really interesting is that all of this is obviously powered by MLX. So the developer tries to have...

the best performance possible for each model by using the MLX version of the model. There are indicators in the settings that tell you, hey, this model probably has high CPU usage or high memory usage, probably not a great fit for an iPhone. Maybe try it on... an iPad and recently they obviously they support other things like widgets

controls. Recently, they added a voice mode that is using the, like, it's like an offline on-device voice mode. And I think it's actually powered by this open source project called which is a voice model that sort of takes whatever is said by another LLM and sort of speaks it out loud. Really cool project. I think it's a locally AI.

one of the most interesting app debuts of the year, if anything, for the design work that has gone into removing the complexity from what is usually a very complex thing to manage. And so that's highly, highly recommended. Yeah, I'd really like to see more apps like that come out. I think that there's a lot of space right now for that experimentation and finding ways to present AI.

stuff to users in a way that's a little less dense and less intimidating. I'm going to go with another music app, Federico. I'm going to go with Longplay. Oh, I love Longplay. Yeah, Longplay is a fantastic app. I reviewed the Mac app. earlier this year that came out and that's the one that adopted very early on mcp with clod and still has that functionality it's evolved a little bit since then but that's that was notable on the mac this year but this fall

it got an update for Liquid Glass. And what I think is... most unique about long play is the way it focuses on the album art i really love the mosaic style view of album covers that when you open one to play it actually gets larger than the ones surrounding it so and then you have if you build up q

multiple albums you're going to play in a row, the other ones that aren't quite playing yet are going to be bigger than the ones that you're not playing, but they're going to be kind of somewhere in between. It's just a nice visual representation of what you're listening to now and what's... coming up next. And with Liquid Glass, the app essentially has three views. It has the main mosaic view, which is where you drop in when you open the app the first time, which shows all your album art.

and then you can swipe over and see your cue and some playback controls and that sort of thing and then you can swipe the other direction and get to collections that you've created either smart collections or just standard regular collections as well as settings and things like that and when you put your finger on the screen from

the main view and start swiping even a little bit, you see a little liquid glass pill show up at the bottom of the screen. And that has small indicators as to what's on those two sides. It's just like kind of a nice...

way to anchor where you are. Like, oh yeah, I'm in the middle. I need to go this way or that way to do this other thing. So I've really found that to be good. I've also... really enjoyed how it uses kind of a smoky version of liquid glass, where, for instance, at the top of the main screen,

there's a search there's a search bar and if you tap into that it'll have a drop down list of collections and unlike a lot of times in music where the artwork underneath gets in the way of reading the text i find it a lot more legible in long play because the the glass part is darkened it's tinted a little bit so it's more readable which i think is good but the last thing i guess i would mention too is i think that long play makes better use of

context menus than just about any app out there because the whole idea of this app is to show off the artwork so the controls and all the settings and all the filtering and sorting and all the things you can do are largely hidden behind these context menus that you long press on an album and they pop right up and i think that that's a perfect use for them in an app like this that is really trying to be visual when it comes to the music you're playing yeah

I'm going to cheat and pick an app from your list because I want to mention it and because I have a recent tangent, sort of a side topic that I wanted to bring up on the show. So the app is Matter, the Read Later app. Yeah. It looks fantastic on liquid glass. It really does. They've done a really good job with the glass buttons on top of text, with the collapsing top bar. They've done, I mean...

In a read later app, the focus is obviously on the text, but it helps when the navigation gets out of the way and it looks nice. You know, nice animations, very elegant. The standout feature, the reason why I keep moving between Readwise Reader and Matter is that while... I do appreciate the API of Readwise Reader, and I really do appreciate it. I have built custom plugins in TypeInMind, which we spoke about before. I really do appreciate the API. But the thing is, I realize...

These days I have less and less time to read and more and more time to listen. I listen to podcasts. Sometimes I listen to YouTube videos. I have a lot of like this sort of like... dead moments during the day where my eyes need to do something like watch my dogs, walk the dogs, cook dinner, but my ears are free. And so I can listen to stuff, you know? And so that's why I do that too. And the voice is in matter.

are so much better than Readwise Reader. I don't know which model they're using, but they definitely made the right decision in using whatever voice provider they have. Listening in Matter is like the closest to a... fake podcast that you can get. It's the absolute best text-to-speech engine in any readlator app. Now, that being said, so I had... these 174 articles in Readwise Reader that I wanted. Oh, I have thousands.

That I wanted. See, I'm slightly better than you. I mean, 174 is not great, but at least it's not thousands. I have thousands. So I wanted to migrate those from Readwise Reader to Matter. And I didn't want to do that manually because he's got the time. Now, unfortunately... if you recall john matter doesn't have an api but they do have a shortcut action to bring things in though right i think

I think they do have a shortcut action. Let me double check. I don't know. It may be a one-at-a-time URL action, though. I don't remember. I haven't used it in a really long time. I mean, I can put together. Let me see. Let me check because this is interesting. Let me see if I wasted my time or not. I hope I didn't just short circuit your entire story. No, no, no. I was right. Because this shortcut action doesn't let...

you tag and doesn't let you mark anything as a favorite. But before we get to that, a few years ago, if you recall, I reverse engineered the Matter API. I found out via their Obsidian plugin. I found out which endpoint they were using. And I created a series of shortcuts to do that. That doesn't work anymore. Oh. They closed that loophole. They're doing some kind of different authentication. I don't know.

But I realized, oh, you know what? This migration that I don't want to do manually. And once again, I wanted to migrate. My two sections of Readwise Reader, Later and Shortlist. Shortlist would be like the most important articles. In Matter, they would be my favorites. And I also wanted to keep my tags. I realized, oh you know, this is a great use case for an agentic web browser. So I spent the last two days, John, surveying the field.

of agentic web browsers yeah and there is only one that has been able to migrate all of these articles and in fact if i look at my micro pro it's still ongoing several hours of work Since this morning. And you'll never guess what it was. Comet? I tried comet. I tried... Atlas. I tried Claude for Chrome. In the end, the only true agentic browser was actually a browser extension. Manus maybe?

It was Manus. Ah, I saw that they've been doing some updates lately. The only one. So Manus, Chinese company, which, hey, if you're not comfortable with it, it's your decision. They're very popular. When I first tried them a long time ago, maybe nine months ago, they weren't that great. It must have come a long way. I am sorry for putting more things on your plate. Manus is kind of incredible now. Really?

They are legit. They were actually on stage at one of the recent Microsoft 365 events. Yeah, I remember that. Like a couple of weeks ago. Like a couple of weeks ago as part of their agent, Microsoft agents, like in the Azure cloud, whatever. Yeah. So Manus started as a sort of Chinese UI on top of Claude. They were doing agents last year.

when agents were sort of becoming too. Yeah, I tried them last winter, I think, because when I first got into like the beta or something and it was like, it's okay. So get this, they now let you create these tasks. That can be long running tasks. Like I said, several hours of work. And every once in a while it stops and you've got to say continue or you've got to say keep going. I'm going to write about this on my stories, I think. What they do now is...

They have their agent with its code environment, with its sandbox, but you can also connect to remote MCP servers. So they have all the usual names, Notion, Gmail, Todoist. I haven't done that yet. But they also have a browser extension. The browser extension, kind of like Comet, Atlas, takes over your browser, creates a tab group, puts multiple tabs in a tab group.

and starts making plans and doing what you ask for. So I started this morning and it just did it. It made a plan on its own, made a list of all the Readwise Reader articles. Created separate lists for later. Did it open 174 tabs? No, it learned how to navigate Readwise Reader. Click on the menus, copy the URL, made a list of 170 URLs.

made a database for saying, okay, this URL has this tag and is a favorite or not. Moved all of my Readwise Reader articles in chronological order from oldest to newest to matter. then worked through the 70 of those articles that were actually favorites. And it's now working through tagging them with the original tags from Readwise Reader.

using matter like actually virtually interacting with matter you can see right creating the tags where they're not where they don't exist and applying them that's really impressive because especially because the thing about readwise reader is that their ui is one of those ones that only

appears when you hover over something and I know having used agents with those kinds of web apps before that it just it just drives you know agents crazy because they can't see the UI because a lot of them are using some sort of of optical you know yeah recognition and when when manus in this context is using the browser it's running locally in your browser right so you can

You have permission prompts and all those kinds of things. It creates an isolated tab group, so it only works with those tabs. Interesting. It's been the only one. that has actually been able to perform a so-called agentic long-running task. And I can tell you long-running because it started, I don't know, 10 hours ago. Wow. And it's still going. And the only downside, I burned through $100 of credits in doing this.

So keep that in mind. But this will make for a funny article on the site. Shout out to Manos and shout out to Matter. Expect to hear a lot. more from me on matter it looks great on liquid glass and it makes listening to articles a real joy yeah i've been i've been sort of playing with the idea of moving things from Readwise Reader, which I like for its organizational tools and keyboard-driven, you know.

workflows on the Mac, moving things in anticipation of like, oh, I'm going for a walk or, you know, something like that. And just moving over a handful at a time into matter and making that my listening cue. But that's, that's impressive.

perfect too because then what if you don't actually get around to listening and you want to now read it and it gets out of sync with each other but i like that i like the uh what you're doing yeah essentially essentially minus over the past year has become like a hybrid of imagine tasklet the automation service by the folks who make shortwave. It's a hybrid of that and Claude because of all the connectors and an agentic browser. All rolled together.

I'm surprised Tasklet has been relatively low profile so far. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. Manus is really popular. Like I didn't know they had like 200,000 followers on social media or something like that. They have a lot of ratings on the app store. Didn't know that it was this popular, but it's pretty legit. They were an early mover, which helps a lot, I think. I mean, they were doing this before anyone else was. Yeah.

Anyway, sorry for the... That's all right. That's very interesting. I'm going to have to check out Manus again over the holidays. Here we go. I have an endless supply of experiments and projects to do right now. I don't think I have. I think I need an extra holiday break, probably. Yeah, some of them become podcast segments. Some of them become articles. Yeah. Because, you know, shout out to an all-timer, App Stories episode, everything is research.

everything is research everything is research absolutely everything is research i was doing that last night on the couch all right let's move back to our app favorites and one of the mine is everybody knows i think by now i'm a big fan of gentler streak i think it's a great approach to tracking your health and wellness. And it's the kind of app that just looks great with liquid glass because it was already a very colorful app.

with graphs and animated characters and all sorts of things like that that now just stretch more to the edge of the screen than ever before because they you know they they continue underneath the controls as well uh it's you know there's not a lot really to say about it besides that except that there are more data heavy pages than probably gentler streak had

maybe a year or two ago, you know, graphs and things like that. And that I think really has, it's really helped the liquid, the liquid glass approach has really helped those views because you get a much more complete feel for the continuity of the graphs as you're scrolling through a screen that there's more there to look at. Even if, you know, some of it's a little bit obscured, but it makes it feel a little bit more organic, which I like a lot.

The last one in my list is Unread, the RSS reader. Now, Unread is an interesting implementation of liquid glass in that... There's actually no liquid glass. The UI is very custom, but I want to give it a shout out because of the work that the developer John Brayton has done on the iPad.

reworking all of the custom keyboard shortcuts to account for the new keyboard shortcuts of iPadOS 26. Yes. Supporting iPadOS 26 multi-windowing and supporting the menu bar. And Unread has a really cool implementation of the menu bar. that it's the first menu bar that I've seen where if you enable custom actions in unread, usually like custom actions to share articles with third-party apps, you actually get a menu.

with the colored icons for those apps in the menu bar. Usually the menu bar is like monochrome and translucent. Here you actually get the icons of Matter or Readwise Reader or any box. It's very nice looking. That's true on the iPhone too, but I didn't know that that was possible in that context on the iPad. That's really nice. I've been using Unread ever since Reader went to the new style.

and became classic reader and i've been really happy with it i've been using it on the iphone the ipad and the mac so it's been it's been my go-to ever since uh ever since that transition

I guess I'll close out real briefly, Federico, by mentioning Todoist because, you know, Todoist is one of those apps that I don't really consider an indie app so much anymore. You know, it's a smallish team, I suppose. Yeah. it's cross-platform, and so you don't always expect those kinds of apps to pay attention right away.

to the new designs on any particular platform but they have on on apple platforms with liquid glass and you know it's i think what's tough with text heavy apps like a task manager or matter for instance is that you have to account for the fact that your liquid glass might interfere with the legibility of the text that the user's trying to read. And what Todoist I think has done a very nice job of using sort of that frosted glass approach and look.

so that as you're scrolling, you're really not obscuring the icons and the other text and things on the buttons in any kind of meaningful way, which I really appreciate. It also does... A nice job with the shrinking tab bar where the tab bar shrinks into the search button. Is it music that does that on the iPhone?

right it's it's music yeah so it's it's a lot like that you know your tab bar shrinks over to the side And I was a little concerned about whether that was going to make certain buttons undiscoverable.

But I've gotten used to it very quickly, and I haven't heard too many complaints from people either. And I think it's a nice way to handle something like that where you really want to get the controls out of the way as much as possible as you're scrolling through a list of things you have to get done. So, yeah, I think Todoist has done it.

a super nice job yeah yeah i love to do this and i'm glad glad you mentioned it again yeah yeah absolutely absolutely well federico i think that that might be it for now yes We have been going through the liquid glass. Hope everybody enjoyed the... articles that we wrote, the roundups, we will have more app coverage in the coming weeks. Thanks for joining us today on App Stories. You can find the two of us over at MacStories.net. And of course...

We are on social media where Federico is at Faticci. That's V-I-T-I-C-C-I. And I'm at John Voorhees. J-O-H-N-V-O-R-H-E-S. Talk to you later, Federico. Ciao, John.