Apple devices are nowhere near as playful and fun as they used to be. Source, just had to drag out and tidy my accidental collection of Macs and iPhones including my Mac classic and Powerbook 180 from the 1990s, a Titanium G4, a Powermac 8100, and there's definitely real fun, not just nostalgia, missing from the modern era.
iOS 6 on iPad is charming to use. I get that people were tired of skeuomorphism and the bright candy colours sell, but I think the muted colours and texture helped with long term use - making it functionally better.
True, but honestly I don't really miss it either. Yes, interfaces used to be whiz-bang, lickable-glossy, mega-3D, skeumorphism etc. But after the initial "wow" wears off, it's all just kind of... busy and distracting.
It took me a while to warm up to "flat design", but now I can't ever see myself (or the industry) going back. By allowing the interface to recede, you allow the content to shine. Generally you want to focus on the document, the photo, the text, the movie -- not the controls around it.
I would pay for that feature. With AI scanning the paragraph text, we might even be able to get relevant illumination images generated on the fly. I want this now, whereas five minutes ago I had never thought of it.
That's not how human works. We love non-functional things around us. I doubt that you live in a white cube.
Our minds are pretty good at focusing on important stuff. We don't need white margins for that. We can focus on important stuff even with non-white margins. And those non-white margins might actually bring some joy when you can't focus anymore, because brain focus is finite.
There's no way for industry not going back. It'll go back. It always did. We move in spiral. We just need to completely forget how good skeuomorphic interfaces were, so companies will sell those again. Probably executed much better.
Then I must be GPT model because those non-functional things are way too distracting.
Jokes aside, I hated the page animation. It was amusing for the first minute but it felt weird to interact with it. Sticky is the only word that comes to mind, but not quite that. Glad it's gone.
This supposed argument of letting the "content" shine makes no real sense, because crappy design doesn't become magically less crappy because it suddenly looks simpler and flatter.
Design is about solving human problems and helping humans accomplish things, not about how it looks.
No
I read on my iPhone which I keep in my pocket - I have that with me and don't need to carry a larger thing in a bag. But I don't use Apple's Books it just feels wrong - I used Stanza and when Amazon broke it I switched to Marvin
I do use ereaders and if I travel for some time I'll use it..
I remember the time when it was "reading books on something without paper and ink is goofy in the first place". :)
I gave up on e-ink readers a few years ago and donated a couple of them. I am reading books in eletronic format on iPhones. It's just more practical, I don't need to carry a second and usually larger device with me, and ... I don't need an external light when it's too dark to read. Plus, the newer iPhones with OLED displays are pretty good for reading.
Totally agree. The ability to read on my phone has been such a boon. My close up vision has degraded to the point where I need readers for a paperback, but readers make me ill. The OLED screen on the phone means I can read in the dark without lighting up the room, which is handy since I often read in the middle of the night if insomnia wakes me up.
Disagree specifically for the case of pre-16 Apple Books.
The ability to fiddle with page corners, half-flip pages then flip them back, that kind of thing, made it much more like reading a real book, and it was my favorite way to read ebooks, followed at a distance by e-ink readers, and then, very distantly, by every other non-e-ink way to read ebooks that wasn't Apple Books.
Not joking that the page flip animation was the thing that made the Apple version far and away my favorite way to read ebooks. The new animation doesn't just lose that quality, it's also notably bad even among the all-some-degree-of-bad animations of reader apps in general (not counting pre-16 Apple Books).
It's a bold statement, but I agree. Reading is an evening activity for me, that means the phone is put away, computer is in the office, TV is off. There will be no reading on any display that is backlit, that would defeat the purpose for me.
I understand that it's useful to sometimes have access to books on a computer, phone or table, but that's for professional use in my mind, and not a replacement for a physical book in the same sense a device with e-ink displays are.
Even if you read on the iPad, I don't fully understand why you'd want the page animations anyway. Still the complain in the article is weird, just accept it and move on, if you're waiting for Apple to switch back I feel your going to wait a very long time.
For better or worse, whimsy and playfulness are majorly out in terms of design these days. I thought the page curl was a nicely done bit of frippery in an app that is really a pain to use. for me I’m afraid are many worse things about the app than removing that animation. Search is bad, no way to open more than one book at once, the list goes on.
With Apple: complain loudly and make a case, there are countless examples of that working, including on massive initiatives.
Despite their shortcomings they do indeed read everything sent to /feedback
Getting rid of the ability to export highlights has been insanely frustrating and has meant I can only use this app for reading fiction that I don’t generally highlight.
It was kinda fun in 2010 for a few minutes I guess. But it certainly isn't something worth chaining your book purchases to Apple products for. If you REALLY want this though at least Moon+ Reader on Android has it, both one mimicking Google's and Apple's!
So why is the page flipping animation missing in iOS16?
My blind guess: due to the rewrite of the iBooks app in Swift, they did not find a swift way to take over the performance critical code in Objective C for the page flipping animation.
You may already be aware of this, but it is very easy to mix Swift and ObjC in the same codebase. There’s nothing technical stopping them from plucking the ObjC page-turning transition into the Swift app.
I don't think it's what happened in this case, but extremely lazy crap makes it all the way to public releases for all the tech giants. Engineer count and cash-on-hand don't seem to have much to do with it.
The size of a team working on one product at a large company has nothing to do with the size of the company or its real estate budget.
Sure, they could put more people on any particular project, if they thought it was important. But that's not necessarily going to make a UI decision any better.
Nobody outside Apple is likely to know how these decisions were made. We just see the results.
Whether it was the choice of an individual engineer or designer, or the choice of a high-level executive to not put anyone who cared about design on the Books team, the fact remains that Apple chose not to keep this animation.
You can blame companies for making bad decisions -- you can even describe them as "lazy" -- even if you don't know the exact details of the process the company uses to make bad decisions.
If you have a monopoly over a platform, what is there to keep you from being lazy? Plenty of rich lazy fools spend lavishly, it wouldn't be an original story.
It's not a question of laziness it's a question of prioritization and opportunity cost.
The logical conclusion of your argument is Apple has lots of money therefore they should have finished everything already.
The small team assigned to port Books to iOS16 probably decided that spending a lot of effort porting the one animation is not worth the opportunity cost that could be spent on literally anything else.
I really doubt the issue is technical. The page curl rendering itself was implemented in Core Animation. The application side just set the parameters for the position of the curl. It worked well even on the original iPad.
I have no inside knowledge but I would be shocked if it was anything other than an aesthetic choice to eliminate the page curl.
Maybe that was how Apple operated under Steve Jobs (developers would work days and nights to make Steve Jobs vision work despite technical challenges) but unfortunately it does not seem to be how Apple operates anymore.
The redesign of System Preferences / Settings in macOS 13 shows that they do not care about any details any more at all. It looks like some manager said: "Make it look like on iPad", and some overworked dev changed the UI in the way that was the least amount of effort, and they shipped it without checking if the result is usable at all.
I wonder if the usability issues are a result of using Swift UI (because it's just too hard to make good UIs in SwiftUI) or because they just don't care about usability any more.
I think, as with the questionable quality of the Catalyst-created macOS apps that preceded the new System Preferences, it was a desire to show off a new framework while it is still in a semi-beta unfinished state, let alone before the best practices for these new technologies have been devised yet.
Right?? It’s absurd how I sometimes wait three seconds for it to switch the pane content after clicking another settings category, downright infuriating.
There is no way that the change was due to performance. The old page flipping animation was delightful, but in no way computationally significant on iPhones even 5 years ago.
My blind guess: The code for the page flip animation was old/complicated, and the engineer who wrote the code left the team. No one else felt comfortable maintaining the code, and Design saw this as an opportunity to simplify the UI.
> E-reader fans might say that I should be doing my reading on a dedicated device that’s not as subject to ever-changing software
Oh boy, if you think dedicated devices don't have the same problem of frustrating updates, then I got some bad news for you. I still remember how annoyed I was when Kindle update added recommendations (=ads) on my home menu.
Does that also show up in the ads free version? I’m looking at getting a kindle and that might be a deal breaker to me, I’ll have to look at alternatives
This might be a result of my Kindle being old, it's the 2012 model. It doesn't have ads.
I am concerned that it might break, because none of the newer Kindle work like the old one. It has button, a non-touch display and isn't backlit, all things I consider must have feature, or non-features. Personally I don't understand why they didn't just stop development at that point and just lowered prices as the components became less and less expensive.
Not defending the first two (physical page turn buttons are great!) but on my 2018 paperwhite, the backlight will turn off entirely at the lowest brightness setting.
It's not a simple slide transition, it is some sort of odd slide-out-and-reveal-slide-in-underneath animation that has no analogue to any existing reading experience. A plain sliding transition (like reading a physical scroll) would be an improvement over what they did.
They also "broke" the ability to set/remove a bookmark by double-tapping the page. The more Books degrades to become like Kindle, the less incentive I have to buy books from the Apple store.
I highly recommend not to tie your personal happiness to a particular UI/UX choice, in a single App, from a technology provider who does not know you and does not care about you as a person, on a device that you probably shouldn’t spend much time on anyway. Instead, I think it’s more productive to diligently look for alternatives.
That's... bizarre. They didn't make the animation non-skeuomorphic, they just switched to a different and very weird skeuomorphism that has nothing to do with how actual books work. It's worse than if they had just made it completely flat.
I'm gonna shill for apple and say that this is probably an oversight. Something that has been around for years and everyone expects to work as such that fell out of QA testing. Hopefully they bring it back after realizing their slipup.
That being said, I've used Kindle for years because it's online etc. They have had this same feature for years on their mobile versions so I don't get how this was a killer feature of Books.
The Apple Books version wasn't just a static animation—you could partially flip the page, flip it back, make just the corner flip up a little then push it back in place, et c., all with smooth and responsive enough operation that it was close-enough to feeling like a real, physical thing. The "back" of the page, as it flipped, showed the text from the front as if it were showing through thin paper, it wasn't just blank. Lots of apps have page flip animations but most of them are both non-interactive and bad. Apple's was interactive and good. Dunno if Kindle's is as good—I used it long ago and my recollection was a slow, ugly, non-interactive page flip animation, but it may have changed since then.
[EDIT] Two key real-book-reading behaviors this enabled, that a non-interactive page flip animation (which I personally find a ton worse than no animation) does not:
1) You could "play" with the corner and edge of the page while reading. Great for fidgeters, and analogous to what some of us do when reading real books.
2) You could start to flip the page as you were nearing the end of the current page.
Kindle's animation is pretty good, and I did that fidgeting thing with it all the time. I've never experienced the stuttering on Android that the OP has on iOS. It also shows the text bleeding through the back side of the page.
But the animation is disabled by default and lately I've stuck with the regular sliding animation because it's faster and much less obtrusive. It also lets you start turning the page as you're reading the last line.
I disagree that something like this could have been an oversight. A designer spent time coming up with the new animation, it was approved by somebody in a project management role, and engineers had to spend time implementing the new feature.
Apple has an intense culture of dogfooding, so it would surprise me very much if someone in a leadership position didn't experience the new page-flipping animation, much less explicitly approve its design.
That’s not really a change you miss if you do any QA of that app at all. And if it was missed that’s even worse for Apple than if it was a conscious choice.
My shill for Apple here is that the simple sliding animation is much better. I never liked that book animation. It felt heavy and distracting and out of place like most skeuomorphism.
It wasn't just skeuomorphic, it had a functional component. It helped you keep your place and maintain context as you turned the page, just as you'd do with your finger while reading a real book.
No one has ever designed a physical book that works anything like the new page-turning approach, and you have to believe there's a reason for that.
But what I could imagine is that it fell out of product oversight and an engineer just came along and said "well that's a really complicated piece of code, I don't want to maintain that, I'll replace it with something simple", and nobody pushed back because this isn't a high-priority feature any more
I wish they would tone down and or remove all skeuomorphic and animations across all of macOS iOS and iPadOS. They are distracting to me and I usually turn them off in the accessibility settings.
Sounds like Apple gave you a way to solve your problem. Personally, I like the animations, but I'm glad users have the option to turn them on and off as they wish.
The problem is that switch is global on iOS. I don't want to remove all animations, just some of them. Android has the same problem here: I want to disable many animations because I find them annoying and intrusive, but some critical animations like loading spinners break when animations are disabled, so I do the next best thing and increase the speed.
At least iOS lets you change the font size for each application independently, which is a feature that I make heavy use of. I like larger fonts, but sometimes this results in text being truncated too early, and being able to selectively reduce the font size makes it feasible to have a larger default font size. For whatever reason this is not possible on Android, and changing the font size takes several seconds to kick in, so even manually boosting the font size for certain cases via a shortcut or automation is annoying.
I think it makes sense to have the page turn process take a little time and have a little bit of visual transition. Our visual processing system isn't great at knowing whether a new screen of text has been loaded, especially, if we're blinking when it happens. Having a brief animation helps us know that yes, you did just tap the edge of the screen, and accordingly the page has been turned.
It is trendy right now to add superfluous animation to delight the user. In this case, they decided to slide in the next page at a different rate than the previous page. It is worse than before because we can't really start reading until we fully turn the page.
One wonders if Forstall would be the Jobs type figure to return to on the back of a white horse aquihire should Apple ever fall into dire straits again.
I don’t think he’s actually working anywhere that could be bought, though.
It’s not skeuomorphic to books but it does replicate (sort of) what it might look like if a book were printed out a stack on index cards. The shading and the motion is definitely meant to make it feel like a physical object moving.
> it does replicate (sort of) what it might look like if a book were printed out a stack on index cards.
Except with a stack of cards (or pages) the bottom page would not be moving. The visual is more reminiscent of some sort of assembly / processing line.
I actually prefer it the other way around myself. I find pdf that technical books to be better since the equation typesetting, and any other similar things, can be done with a single page size and font in mind. I find that really suffers from trying to reflow when you change the eBooks font size.
I was surprised to see how many people are using the paged view too! Scrolling with dark mode is the only way I read ebooks. Works well in any indoor lighting, and it’s great for reading in bed too.
I didn't even realize they had a paginated view, I haven't used that (on Apple Books or Kindle either one) in forever. Scroll view is much better.
My only complaint with the iOS 16 version of Books is that it's way, way too easy to double tap a bookmark into existence. I've gotten good at ignoring it. Kinda like it's too easy to create a section of highlighted text on the Kindle app. Both of these are probably just a case of 'holding it wrong' but whatever.
Not crazy at all. It reduces all the clutter and just the most seamless implementation ever. They have even removed the page numbers they had on the left side of text in last iOS version
“Customer research shows that digital natives have low attention spans, so we introduced a persistent reminder of the title of the book they are reading in between page slides.”
This happens to me, too! If I read a physical book I can easily recall the author and the title months and even years later. But when I read digital books I often struggle to remember a book’s name and have to look it up if I want to recommend it to someone.
My guess is it's mostly because the physical book's cover's always visible in your environment, even when you're not reading, so you see the title and author's name a lot more. Some e-readers put the cover on when in sleep mode, but that's small, black-n-white, only on one side (no spine) so it's easily covered up, et c.
Books also often put some or all of that info at the top of every page or every other page, while many reader apps hide it most of the time, I suppose to save space for body text.
OneAd free Kindles (can) display the cover of the book you're currently reading during idle mode. I love it because I used to leave a book on a coffee table or my desk as a kind of physical invitation to read (instead of watching TV or playing video games or derping on my phone).
Such a tiny feature, but since I've turned it on it has nudged me to read hours more each week.
I like it. Not only do I think it looks pretty nice, it makes sense visually since it would be weird to scroll away the book title only to scroll it back in for the next page.
It would look a lot less jarring if the underlying body text didn’t move as well. Even in digital media, animations still work best when they model the physical world, which our brains evolved to understand. This is why even simple transitions look best when using spring physics vs linear easing functions.
This new animation breaks even the basic the mental model of a “page”. If the goal is to do away with skeuomorphism, I’d much rather have a simple push/slide animation without any shadow or fancy transition . Want the title permanently in view, put it in a top bar or floating element.
It feels like I was looking at a pile of cards, and then magical scissors cut a window out of the top one just before it moves.
But then the window doesn't move with the card that it was cut from, so I realize I was mistaken. There is no window or magical scissors. Instead, I have momentarily acquired x-ray vision but it only works on part of the card.
also annoying how when you "sample" a book the title of the book is displayed over every single page. certainly makes me want to buy it just to get rid of that annoying view... the update just sucks.
I never got accustomed to reading book on my iPhone It never felt quite right despite (or maybe because of) the skeuomorphism attempt.
Am I the only one thinking the new animation actually looks better? The page seem to quickly fade away with less distractions and might enable to focus more on the text flow.
If anything knowing the interface evolved is actually encouraging me to give it another go.
The old animation was a must-have for those of us who fiddle with edges of pages when reading physical books. Only method of ebook reading I've seen that satisfied that particular I-suspect-uncommon-but-not-rare book-reading behavior. Not the same as running a finger over the corner of the whole block of pages, but close enough.
However during the transition the text is sometimes obfuscated by a huge white space that doesn't exist on a real book that is indeed recto/verso printed.
It's fun for fidgeting but I personally find it way more visually distracting than the new behavior.
Kindle added this animation style to their app, and I love using the app more because of it. It was one thing I lived about Apple’s eBooks that I didn’t get on Kindle (but the catalogue and other features made up for it).
I suspect we’ll see a return of the page turn animation before the next full release. It doesn’t make sense for them to leave such a basic feature behind, especially since iBooks is a front end to a revenue stream.
> It doesn’t make sense for them to leave such a basic feature behind, especially since iBooks is a front end to a revenue stream.
The basic features they butchered/implemented for the "front end to revenue stream":
- jarring animation that cannot be turned off
- scrolling is now relegated to a weird small control in settings that has no relation to the actual book you're reading
- "lock orientation" locks orientation in portrait mode
- accessing table of contents is now three taps
- accessing font settings is now three taps
- table of contents + scrolling + searchig + themes + scroll lock + bookmarks ... all of that is accessed through a tiny gray icon that is nearly indistinguishable from surrounding text. Also, this icon is unique, and has never been used anywhere in iOS or MacOS
- closing a book is now a tiny gray x that is almost indistinguishable from the text
All this passed design -> design approval -> engineering managers -> programmers -> qa -> launch check lists.
By the way, when it launched in iOS 16, the close icon and the "kitchen sink" icon would always pe present, they only fixed it a month or two later.
Yup. This is the state of a "frontend to the revenue stream". Done and approved by people who have never read a single book on iOS (and MacOS where it was also butchered), or perhaps have never read a single book in their life, period.
Edit: their animation is also "least effort" attempt: they hide page numbers when animation, then it takes up to two seconds for them to reappear.
> But it genuinely was a feature that made me choose to buy e-books on Apple’s platform instead of anyone else’s — and given how same-y most book stores and reading apps are in the broad strokes, it really is the details that get you locked into an ecosystem.
Although I've used Macs for decades and iPhones since day one, I typically purchase ebooks on third-party platforms. If I buy an Android tablet, a non-Apple computer, or some other device that hasn't been invented yet, I don't want to be locked out of my prior purchases.
You can stay on iOS 15. Nobody shoves iOS 16 down your throat. Apple even backports fixes for most dangerous vulnerabilities for quite some time.
What you can't do is downgrade once you've found that you're not happy with upgrade. That's the most bizarre Apple thing. Unless you can jailbreak. Not sure if it works nowadays, back in days I was very happy to downgrade to iOS 6 with jailbreak on my iPhone 4S.
Not sure exactly what you mean, but I assume customization in this context is the choice to pick what updates are implemented in your session/device.
I like it in theory but supporting it can be unwieldy, especially for design-led orgs that like to tinker and introduce changes a lot (not dissing, just not my preference). Like how many versions and combinations do you support? I've worked in an app company once, and supporting web, iOS, and Android was somewhat annoying enough. Can't imagine adding in support for old versions.
OTOH it could force more deliberation and discipline on the part of product teams before going all-in on whatever shiny new object caught their eye this month
yeah. this was disappointing. I hope to get used to it, but for the moment it really detracts from my very enjoyable little stolen dad moments here and there reading Ian McKuen on my phone at a bar. feels like I'm reading a xeroxed copy of a book.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 273 ms ] threadIt took me a while to warm up to "flat design", but now I can't ever see myself (or the industry) going back. By allowing the interface to recede, you allow the content to shine. Generally you want to focus on the document, the photo, the text, the movie -- not the controls around it.
But a simile comes to mind: The whizz-bang interfaces were like illuminated manuscripts. Beautiful. Works of art. Literal human artistic treasures.
But when I’m reading an email, I do not need dragons curled around drop caps.
I might actually bother to read such an email.
Our minds are pretty good at focusing on important stuff. We don't need white margins for that. We can focus on important stuff even with non-white margins. And those non-white margins might actually bring some joy when you can't focus anymore, because brain focus is finite.
There's no way for industry not going back. It'll go back. It always did. We move in spiral. We just need to completely forget how good skeuomorphic interfaces were, so companies will sell those again. Probably executed much better.
Then I must be GPT model because those non-functional things are way too distracting.
Jokes aside, I hated the page animation. It was amusing for the first minute but it felt weird to interact with it. Sticky is the only word that comes to mind, but not quite that. Glad it's gone.
Design is about solving human problems and helping humans accomplish things, not about how it looks.
I do use ereaders and if I travel for some time I'll use it..
I gave up on e-ink readers a few years ago and donated a couple of them. I am reading books in eletronic format on iPhones. It's just more practical, I don't need to carry a second and usually larger device with me, and ... I don't need an external light when it's too dark to read. Plus, the newer iPhones with OLED displays are pretty good for reading.
The ability to fiddle with page corners, half-flip pages then flip them back, that kind of thing, made it much more like reading a real book, and it was my favorite way to read ebooks, followed at a distance by e-ink readers, and then, very distantly, by every other non-e-ink way to read ebooks that wasn't Apple Books.
Not joking that the page flip animation was the thing that made the Apple version far and away my favorite way to read ebooks. The new animation doesn't just lose that quality, it's also notably bad even among the all-some-degree-of-bad animations of reader apps in general (not counting pre-16 Apple Books).
I understand that it's useful to sometimes have access to books on a computer, phone or table, but that's for professional use in my mind, and not a replacement for a physical book in the same sense a device with e-ink displays are.
Even if you read on the iPad, I don't fully understand why you'd want the page animations anyway. Still the complain in the article is weird, just accept it and move on, if you're waiting for Apple to switch back I feel your going to wait a very long time.
My blind guess: due to the rewrite of the iBooks app in Swift, they did not find a swift way to take over the performance critical code in Objective C for the page flipping animation.
Is it technically possible? Yes. is it easy? Maybe not.
1 https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2020/06/apple-reveals-lineup-...
2 https://www.weetas.com/article/apple-spaceship/
Sure, they could put more people on any particular project, if they thought it was important. But that's not necessarily going to make a UI decision any better.
Nobody outside Apple is likely to know how these decisions were made. We just see the results.
You can blame companies for making bad decisions -- you can even describe them as "lazy" -- even if you don't know the exact details of the process the company uses to make bad decisions.
The logical conclusion of your argument is Apple has lots of money therefore they should have finished everything already.
The small team assigned to port Books to iOS16 probably decided that spending a lot of effort porting the one animation is not worth the opportunity cost that could be spent on literally anything else.
It's pretty easy and basically required to do anything useful if you need to support iOS 14, or god forbid, iOS 13
I have no inside knowledge but I would be shocked if it was anything other than an aesthetic choice to eliminate the page curl.
The redesign of System Preferences / Settings in macOS 13 shows that they do not care about any details any more at all. It looks like some manager said: "Make it look like on iPad", and some overworked dev changed the UI in the way that was the least amount of effort, and they shipped it without checking if the result is usable at all.
Every browser nowadays can imitate page flip with CSS only.
Oh boy, if you think dedicated devices don't have the same problem of frustrating updates, then I got some bad news for you. I still remember how annoyed I was when Kindle update added recommendations (=ads) on my home menu.
I am concerned that it might break, because none of the newer Kindle work like the old one. It has button, a non-touch display and isn't backlit, all things I consider must have feature, or non-features. Personally I don't understand why they didn't just stop development at that point and just lowered prices as the components became less and less expensive.
That being said, I've used Kindle for years because it's online etc. They have had this same feature for years on their mobile versions so I don't get how this was a killer feature of Books.
[EDIT] Two key real-book-reading behaviors this enabled, that a non-interactive page flip animation (which I personally find a ton worse than no animation) does not:
1) You could "play" with the corner and edge of the page while reading. Great for fidgeters, and analogous to what some of us do when reading real books.
2) You could start to flip the page as you were nearing the end of the current page.
But the animation is disabled by default and lately I've stuck with the regular sliding animation because it's faster and much less obtrusive. It also lets you start turning the page as you're reading the last line.
Apple has an intense culture of dogfooding, so it would surprise me very much if someone in a leadership position didn't experience the new page-flipping animation, much less explicitly approve its design.
That’s not really a change you miss if you do any QA of that app at all. And if it was missed that’s even worse for Apple than if it was a conscious choice.
No one has ever designed a physical book that works anything like the new page-turning approach, and you have to believe there's a reason for that.
But what I could imagine is that it fell out of product oversight and an engineer just came along and said "well that's a really complicated piece of code, I don't want to maintain that, I'll replace it with something simple", and nobody pushed back because this isn't a high-priority feature any more
At least iOS lets you change the font size for each application independently, which is a feature that I make heavy use of. I like larger fonts, but sometimes this results in text being truncated too early, and being able to selectively reduce the font size makes it feasible to have a larger default font size. For whatever reason this is not possible on Android, and changing the font size takes several seconds to kick in, so even manually boosting the font size for certain cases via a shortcut or automation is annoying.
Then it is non-skeuomorphic.
And they have been removing it bit by bit since they kicked out Scott Forstall.
I don’t think he’s actually working anywhere that could be bought, though.
Except with a stack of cards (or pages) the bottom page would not be moving. The visual is more reminiscent of some sort of assembly / processing line.
The old page flip animation was always distracting to me. I haven’t used the new one.
My only complaint with the iOS 16 version of Books is that it's way, way too easy to double tap a bookmark into existence. I've gotten good at ignoring it. Kinda like it's too easy to create a section of highlighted text on the Kindle app. Both of these are probably just a case of 'holding it wrong' but whatever.
That or crank the font size way app.
That being said. It’s beyond me why the mac version only allows for a paginated view.
- Internal Apple design presentation
/s
Books also often put some or all of that info at the top of every page or every other page, while many reader apps hide it most of the time, I suppose to save space for body text.
Such a tiny feature, but since I've turned it on it has nudged me to read hours more each week.
Apple doesn't even allow this kind of transition in their own slide decks, at least they didn't when I worked there.
This new animation breaks even the basic the mental model of a “page”. If the goal is to do away with skeuomorphism, I’d much rather have a simple push/slide animation without any shadow or fancy transition . Want the title permanently in view, put it in a top bar or floating element.
But then the window doesn't move with the card that it was cut from, so I realize I was mistaken. There is no window or magical scissors. Instead, I have momentarily acquired x-ray vision but it only works on part of the card.
Am I the only one thinking the new animation actually looks better? The page seem to quickly fade away with less distractions and might enable to focus more on the text flow.
If anything knowing the interface evolved is actually encouraging me to give it another go.
It's fun for fidgeting but I personally find it way more visually distracting than the new behavior.
This is what a monoculture gets us. We need more competition, and hardware to be open so we can get even more competition (also free competition).
The basic features they butchered/implemented for the "front end to revenue stream":
- jarring animation that cannot be turned off
- scrolling is now relegated to a weird small control in settings that has no relation to the actual book you're reading
- "lock orientation" locks orientation in portrait mode
- accessing table of contents is now three taps
- accessing font settings is now three taps
- table of contents + scrolling + searchig + themes + scroll lock + bookmarks ... all of that is accessed through a tiny gray icon that is nearly indistinguishable from surrounding text. Also, this icon is unique, and has never been used anywhere in iOS or MacOS
- closing a book is now a tiny gray x that is almost indistinguishable from the text
All this passed design -> design approval -> engineering managers -> programmers -> qa -> launch check lists.
By the way, when it launched in iOS 16, the close icon and the "kitchen sink" icon would always pe present, they only fixed it a month or two later.
Yup. This is the state of a "frontend to the revenue stream". Done and approved by people who have never read a single book on iOS (and MacOS where it was also butchered), or perhaps have never read a single book in their life, period.
Edit: their animation is also "least effort" attempt: they hide page numbers when animation, then it takes up to two seconds for them to reappear.
Although I've used Macs for decades and iPhones since day one, I typically purchase ebooks on third-party platforms. If I buy an Android tablet, a non-Apple computer, or some other device that hasn't been invented yet, I don't want to be locked out of my prior purchases.
Lord I wish we could go back to the days of pay a flat one time fee and own the dang software so I don't get "improvements" shoved down my throat
Old man rant over
What you can't do is downgrade once you've found that you're not happy with upgrade. That's the most bizarre Apple thing. Unless you can jailbreak. Not sure if it works nowadays, back in days I was very happy to downgrade to iOS 6 with jailbreak on my iPhone 4S.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/12/apple-releases-ios-1...
Ideally, there should be a system where security patches are installed, but anythingv what is optional and reversible
I like it in theory but supporting it can be unwieldy, especially for design-led orgs that like to tinker and introduce changes a lot (not dissing, just not my preference). Like how many versions and combinations do you support? I've worked in an app company once, and supporting web, iOS, and Android was somewhat annoying enough. Can't imagine adding in support for old versions.
OTOH it could force more deliberation and discipline on the part of product teams before going all-in on whatever shiny new object caught their eye this month