Use when building or reviewing gesture-driven web UI that must feel physical - drag/swipe/sheet interactions, spring damping and response, velocity handoff at release, momentum projection, interruptible transitions, translucent materials, rubber-banding at boundaries. Also fires on "make this feel native", "the drag feels laggy", "the sheet snaps instead of throws". Distilled from Apple's WWDC design talks and translated to CSS, Pointer Events and spring libraries. Do NOT use for native SwiftUI or UIKit work - use mobile-ios-design; for motion token systems use animation-system; for non-gestural easing picks use motion-design-principles.
> **Mirrored skill.** *Apple Design* by **Emil Kowalski** — originally
> [`apple-design`](https://github.com/emilkowalski/skills/tree/70744e3816f1d93eafb697161a8b880a7384c5ff/skills/apple-design) in
> [github.com/emilkowalski/skills](https://github.com/emilkowalski/skills). MIT licensed,
> © 2026 Emil Kowalski. Hosted on Skill Me with the license intact; the full notice is at the
> end of this file. Emil's deeper material: [animations.dev](https://animations.dev/).
>
> **Skill Me changes from the original:**
> - Frontmatter stripped; body otherwise verbatim.
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# Apple Design
How Apple builds interfaces that stop feeling like a computer and start feeling like an extension of you. This knowledge comes from Apple's WWDC design talks — chiefly *Designing Fluid Interfaces* (WWDC 2018) — distilled and translated into the web platform (CSS, Pointer Events, `requestAnimationFrame`, spring libraries like Motion/Framer Motion).
The through-line: **an interface feels alive when motion starts from the current on-screen value, inherits the user's velocity, projects momentum forward, and can be grabbed and reversed at any instant.** Springs are the tool that makes all of this natural, because they are inherently interruptible and velocity-aware.
## The Core Idea
> "When we align the interface to the way we think and move, something magical happens — it stops feeling like a computer and starts feeling like a seamless extension of us."
An interface is fluid when it behaves like the physical world: things respond instantly, move continuously, carry momentum, resist at boundaries, and can be redirected mid-motion. Everything below is a way to get closer to that.
Apple frames design as serving four human needs: **safety/predictability, understanding, achievement, and joy.** Every rule here serves one of them.
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