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'Halide' Co-Founder Sebastiaan de With Joins Apple's Design Team

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Sebastiaan de With, co-founder of the popular iPhone camera app Halide, today announced that he has joined the Human Interface Design team at Apple.

Halide iPhones
"So excited to work with the very best team in the world on my favorite products," he said.

This marks a return to Apple for de With, who previously worked on things such as iCloud, MobileMe, and the Find My app. He has also completed design work for other companies, such as Sony, Mozilla, Oracle, HP, and EA, in the past.

de With is a well-known figure in the online Apple and photography communities.

Apple's design team is undergoing many changes. Last year, the company's former software design chief Alan Dye left for Meta, and Apple's hardware engineering chief and leading CEO candidate John Ternus was reportedly tapped to oversee the company's entire hardware and software design teams towards the end of last year.

Over the past several years, some Apple designers have left to work with Jony Ive, the legendary former Apple design chief. Ive left Apple in 2019 to start his own design firm LoveFrom, and he has been working with OpenAI on a new AI device.

In related news, Halide's parent company Lux today launched a public preview of Halide Mark III, the next-generation version of its flagship camera app.

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Top Rated Comments

C
CarAnalogy
8 months ago
Hey this is encouraging news! Great app and great designer who has been publicly and specifically vocal about the issues with Liquid Glass!

I think this is as close as Apple is going to get to publicly admitting they are trying to fix it.
Score: 34 Votes (Like | Disagree)
Z
ZeroInspo
8 months ago

Hey this is encouraging news! Great app and great designer who has been publicly and specifically vocal about the issues with Liquid Glass!

I think this is as close as Apple is going to get to publicly admitting they are trying to fix it.
Also before Liquid Glass came out he wrote that essay on what he imagined the UI would look like and his mockups are 1000x better than the crap Apple put out. I wasn’t expecting the real thing to be that good, mockups are one thing and a real UI is another, but I was so disappointed that the interface was not even close to what he envisioned. Hopefully he gets the chance to realize that vision now.

Hopefully he starts with MacOS which sorely needs it more than any of the other platforms.
Score: 22 Votes (Like | Disagree)
ProbablyDylan Avatar
ProbablyDylan
8 months ago
This guy has his work seriously cut out for him. Here's hoping he's in a position where he can somewhat right the ship.
Score: 15 Votes (Like | Disagree)
IceCool Avatar
IceCool
8 months ago
As a designer this makes me very happy.

I believe that Apple sees their design language cracking and is now truly attempting to reign it back in. With Alan Dye gone, Steve Lemay in, and now Sebastiaan de With... I am looking very forward to the future of Apple design.
Score: 14 Votes (Like | Disagree)
Eric_WVGG Avatar
Eric_WVGG
8 months ago
de With is a brilliant designer, and also a quality thinker and writer.

In this blog post ('https://www.lux.camera/physicality-the-new-age-of-ui/'), he writes about the evolution of Apple UI since Mac OS X Tiger, the Flat Design™ era, and his post-WWDC impressions of (as he put it) "living glass." (spoiler: he was very critical of Ives-era non-obvious-buttons, and saw glass as a necessary new direction)

I think overall his optimism has not panned out, but he exhibits the kind of critical thinking that the actual designers of Liquid Glass were missing.

This is outstanding news for Apple.

[edit] interview with Jon Gruber re: Halide ('https://daringfireball.net/thetalkshow/2023/10/27/ep-387')
Score: 12 Votes (Like | Disagree)
T
tipoo
8 months ago
I hope we're so back

Will probably take years for the full impact of the departure and arrival to show up, but man I hope care and attention to the HDI comes back
Score: 10 Votes (Like | Disagree)
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