alt Hacker NewsI'll play slight devil's advocate. The buttons in the toolbar are duplicative of the options in the menubar, and I don't want to learn 2 locations for every feature. You can't turn off the menubar items, so I end up turning off the toolbar. So I don't care what that part of the UI looks like, and the sidebar for formatting they added, as pointed out in the article, uses the horizontal space on screens better than options stretched out over the full width of the menu.
Now the visibility of the liquid glass stuff, that is definitely a problem. Can't recognize a UI element if it's constantly rendered differently and with very little contrast with the background elements.
Well, I guess someone is going to vibecode a decent Linux GUI or fix the driver pains there or something and we'll be free of this. Because Microsoft/Apple and to a lesser extent Google have jumped the shark with their UI these days.
When I used to use Pages frequently I just memorized all the relevant keyboard shortcuts and turned off the entire toolbar. It’s easy: for each button in the toolbar find the equivalent in the menu, and the shortcut is written on the menu item itself. That’s, however, entirely unacceptable for most users.
The sidebar for formatting they added is strictly worse than the inspector UI in old Pages ’09. The sidebar is constrained not to overlap with content, but the user can choose to overlap the inspector. It’s strictly better flexibility for users. If you are doing a lot of fine adjustments to a single text box, then of course it’s fewer mouse movement if the inspector is located right next to the text box, despite that it has obscured other irrelevant text boxes. I dearly miss Pages ’09.