You realize it's the same font slightly bolder, right? Are you sure you scaled the image 100% to compare them, and your browser didn't shrink the image down to fit in your window or something?
Good design gives you a peak of usability and aesthetics. If you need a switch to let you prefer one over the other, then I think you've done it wrong.
This seems like a compromise. Someone knew that the standard text was somewhat hard to read, so he tried to change the standard setting, but someone with more power wanted to keep it. So they implemented the larger size as an option.
If I built iOS 7, I would have created these settings specifically for the dev beta and instrumented them. Knowing that 58% of dev users turn on the extra legibility setting is good info for how heavy to make the text in the production release.
I've been waiting for blog posts like these, the ones that used to criticize everything that wasn't Apple until Apple starts to do them also, and now they're the best thing ever.
Hopefully I'm not the only one that thinks this is going to kill usability. The reason old people can figure their way around <=iOS6 is that everything that can be tapped looks like a button. A more "mature" audience isn't what apple's good at appealing to.
I'm volunteering at a center that teaches senior citizens various computer skills. One of the courses we teach is on how to use their iPhones. I'm dreading the moment that iOS7 is released: all of these people are going to have to start right back at the beginning in their understanding.
I think Apple would be happy to lose all the "silver surfers" and regain their cool with teens, tweens, and young adults. Teens don't want the same phone that their grandmother has and they don't want the same tablet they're forced to use at school.
I think it's a simple calculus: at the moment, the silver surfers don't have elsewhere to go. Worse case scenario, they'll buy a Nexus tablet that will sit on the shelf, and/or limp along with their old tech (possibly after convincing their nephew to "fix" their iPad by reverting the OS).
Meanwhile, young people are highly ripe for bailing out of iOS, now that Samsung has some cool factor, Android's software/gaming ecosystem is growing richer, and the golden manacles have been feeling tight on the tech-savviest generation. (Guess who's doing all the jailbreaking? It ain't the boomers.)
Old folks may be the bread and butter today, but I think Apple knows that iOS is at a crossroads when it comes to winning the future. (I may be futilely rooting for the open web, but I've still got my popcorn.)
I have no data on this - but IMHO losing the "silver surfers" weakens the ecosystem they're trying to build. The only reason I use Photostream since its inception is that my girlfriend's mom can use the iPad 1. FaceTime is another good example - it makes iDevices great gifts for parents & grandparents.
Also, have you seen how many elderly Asian tourists are using the iPad as the only digicam they can comfortably use? (Not sure if this is also a trend in other countries.) That's obviously the opposite of "cool", but these are $500 in revenue per user. The new lock screen and camera of iOS 7 are less discoverable.
Idunno, I think Apple is already moving a bit away from the "pure cool" targeting and are just going to grab as much as possible now... the "mini" lines are a huge compromise on this because they're obviously created to be a low-cost alternative to their flagship platforms.
Apple is the prestigious brand. Having a budget line compromises that image.
Would you mind sharing more details about why you think it's going to be painful for seniors to adjust? The answer might be obvious, but I'd love to hear more about the difficulties that you've faced teaching seniors.
I don't teach seniors per se, so I can't answer "professionally" but I have taught two of my grandparents how to use their phones (one old Motorolla flip phone, one on my old iPhone) and computers.
I found that they were very hesitant to engage with the phones, they have a preconceived notion that touching the wrong thing could break the entire device (which is generally an incorrect assumption but not completely).
The way to get around that fear, of course, is to make sure all the steps are followed in order in the way they were taught, eg: To Make a Phone Call: 1. Press the green icon with the phone on it at the bottom left 2. Press the picture of the star to bring up your favourites 3. Press on the name you want to call. 4. When you're finished, press the big red button.
In that example the four steps are largely unchanged, and every identifiable interactive element (green icon with phone, star, names, red button) has the same general description.
But everything has changed slightly - the green icon isn't the same colour, the star is a bit different, the names now have photos next to them and the red button is a big red strip.
This isn't a big deal for you or me, but it is certainly a big deal when they're looking for the clues in the interface that they are used to.
But things like "Slide the grey button to the right to unlock the phone" and "slide the green button to the right to answer the call" have changed significantly. There's no more grey or green box - there's no box to unlock and the green box is now a big green line.
My grandfather is doing pretty well with his iPhone by muscle memory, but he literally has a piece of paper in his phone case with all the steps written down in order so he can refer to them if he gets stuck.
Changes on this scale break the muscle memory that they've been trained to use, but more importantly makes the steps he's been taught incorrect. It's no small feat to have to learn everything over again. Especially so when things aren't brand new anymore and the changes are only slight.
This is honestly a valid critique. While many push flat or semi-flat as the successor of skeuomorphic/textured design (in terms of looks and use), I think in many ways it doesn't provide a completely better experience. An example for myself: it took me several minutes on the (flat) Google Maps app to figure out I could pull up the bottom card to do Street-View. Good luck non tech-savvy people!
These comments about the older generation dealing with flat design are also VERY valid. Apple hasn't gone too far into Metro territory, but it will be interesting to see how the useability end of iOS 7 goes over (never mind the criticisms of the look).
Either way, I think Apple needs to polish what they showed at WWDC. Let's start with the arrow pointing up on the lock screen lol.
I agree. I think my parents can easily use iOS 6 on the iPhone or iPad while they have trouble with other computing devices. Same goes with my toddler. I actually thought Apple purposely kept this style because they're aware of the great usability it was compared to what other manufacturers are doing.
It turns out that perhaps I was giving them too much credit.
"The title bar is white, the tab bar is white. If I blur my eyes, I don't see the distinct areas."
"The Safari icon went from something beautiful to this"
"48px roundrect? Terrible."
"Really Apple? Icons on people's heads? HAS YOUR VISUAL DESIGNER LOST THEIR SENSE OF TASTE?"
"And most of it sits on ugly rainbow puke, again."
These all seem like whiny statements of personal taste to me. I don't use my phone with blurred eyes, I have set photos of people to my phone wallpaper (covering their faces - the horror!), transparency doesn't look remotely like any puke I have ever generated, etc, etc.
If you go to the Apple Developer forums (https://developer.apple.com/devforums/ Dev account needed) the "Getting Started" sub-forum is filled with devs, from just signed up to veterans with multiple apps under their belt, asking usability questions.
I think it's telling when your own developing base has to post to forums asking simple questions like:
Where did my spotlight search go?
How do I rate songs?
Agreed - this design is very disappointing. I want to be able to glance at my phone and understand what I'm looking at as easily as possible. Another person in this thread mentioned waking up from sleep and looking at their phone - that's exactly it for me. I'm not getting AARP magazine yet (early 30s), just want using my phone to be easy.
It is certainly possible to de-clutter without making it look like complete shit. It's the odd decisions all over that just don't make sense, for example using red for primary actions or providing no contrast. Those are basic things even non-designers would know.
I think the reason for the backlash, and rightly justified, is that these seemingly capricious design decisions would seem to underpin a larger fundamental flaw with the overall direction - one that Apple historically is not known for. You can justify the goal, which is of course a good one, but there is not way in hell you can justify the implementation.
This is my issue with the redesign. I'm all for less clutter but I really don't think this is how apple should go about doing it. On the whole it looks far uglier than the previous style, and that's what most people care about. I think they have not reached a balance of minimalistic while being pleasing to the eye.
> In the field of user experience, there’s a huge and unhelpful overemphasis on similarity, familiarity, and the ability to formally reason about interfaces. People are more nuanced. We respond based not only on experience or reason, but also on emotion and intuition.
So, it's okay to sacrifice similarity and familiarity because you can force people to understand a UI through emotion and intuition? Without familiar cues, a user will have to blindly poke around the interface until they understand it, and then rely on that experience to use it in the future.
There's nothing wrong with a visual overhaul (even if it does make the system look like a cheap Android reskin), but it's not right to throw users off the deep end of the pool because they are used to interactive elements that look... interactive.
I absolutely disagree. The whole reason I'm using Apple products is that their software has always been incrementally refined, never "revolutionised", like Windows 8 or Ubuntu's Unity or whatever. OS X 10.0 and OS X 10.9 look almost the same and so do iOS 1 and iOS 6. If the form factor of my Mac changes, it does not make any app on the system look ancient, and it does not negatively affect usability.
They could have toned down the affordances and gloss without totally removing the cues. They went to far to fast IMO. The market is not techies in Silicon Valley.
"Well, to be honest, she can always sign up for One to One if she needs to learn how to interact with iOS 7's magical new interface." - Apple employee's response in a few months.
It reminds me of the Windows Phone. The specifics of the UI are different, but the philosophy behind the UI seems to be the same.
It seems inevitable, when I first saw the original WP7, I thought it made the iPhone look old and that one thing that Apple does not like is looking dated.
It's getting to be somewhat annoying how many people are whining about Windows Phone and Android similarities. Design and engineering decisions are not made in a vacuum. Android copies from iOS and vice versa - they each follow the cultural trends of smart design.
I would much rather see blog posts like this - where the author considers the iOS in its own right instead of insisting on nitpicking what's original. Now I can actually see the innovation that went into designing the iOS 7 interface. And as someone typing this comment on iOS 7 beta, I've come to a deeper appreciation of what's already in my hands.
It's not helpful to accuse large design houses and engineering teams of copying each other. That's like saying supercars aren't original because they universally use sleek, aerodynamic ("sexy") design features. No, that's just what sells and what makes sense. It's a natural maturation and trend towards intelligent design. It's just iteration.
It's true that touch interfaces no longer need to be "taught" really. We intuitively know that gestures will do things in the same way (and more efficiently) than buttons. It's all about reducing cluttered design and adding more functionality without reducing usable space. I'm glad we're moving towards this.
> It's getting to be somewhat annoying how many people are whining about Windows Phone and Android similarities. Design and engineering decisions are not made in a vacuum.
I agree, but the similarities are being pointed out precisely because Apple (and their major pundits like Marco and Gruber) makes a big deal about how others have borrowed ideas from them.
For example, the infamous "Redmond/Mountain View, start your photocopiers" lines, and Marco/Gruber's frequent quips like "Hmm, I've seen something like this before..." in regards to something Google or Samsung has done.
Apple's smugness is what's getting them, not their borrowing of ideas, itself.
Borrowing ideas is only a big deal if you're ripping on those you borrow from. Like if someone from Apple were to say "MS just can't do design right, Metro is terrible start to finish" and then they borrow from Metro, that's newsworthy.
Following current design trends and adding a splash of your own flavor to them... that's status quo, isn't it?
You're missing the whole point of my comment. Yes, that's the status quo. But Apple's (and their pundits') history of snarky comments against this is why people are dishing this criticism.
You're missing the point of the snarky comments though. Everyone copies everyone, that's a given. The snarky comments point out "Apple did it first" (eg multitouch phones, click wheel, etc) or point out "Apple did it best" (portable music player, etc). First/best are innovations.
Worse than Apple fans going ballistic on even the tiniest similarities on something that Apple was first on, Apple, let us remember, patents designs and sues people in court for similarities.
They need to be called out on this. "Everything is a remix" was brilliant in exposing Apple hypocrisy in this regard.
This is it, really. There is, IMO, nothing wrong with borrowing inspiration from what your competitors do well. I think that iOS7, on the whole, is much prettier and more modern than prior versions. I think that the platform desperately needed the refresh, and if they get some of the weaker parts worked out, it's going to be a solid across-the-board upgrade for people.
The thing is, Apple fan(atic)s (the pundits and those who echo them, really) love the "Apple innovates, never copies, only bad companies without any talent copy" routine, and here we have an example where Apple has pretty blatantly ripped design elements from their competitors. For the people riding the "everything Apple produces is unique and amazing" train, iOS7 is a deep betrayal specifically because it is so familiar to things that others did first.
> I agree, but the similarities are being pointed out precisely because Apple (and their major pundits like Marco and Gruber) makes a big deal about how others have borrowed ideas from them.
That is the primary reason I think Apple is getting so much crap. Apple claims to be the industry leading innovators; Tim Cook even said during the D11 conference "I don't like copying. It's a values thing." in reference to Samsung patent litigation. Apple partly built it's reputation on bashing the Microsoft (Switch campaign) and Android (WWDC's and MacWorlds). Now that Apple is playing catch-up in the mobile space that they essentially pioneered, they are getting the same snide back-handed remaks that they were dishing out.
It would be absurd to expect Apple not to be influenced by the rest of the industry, but the scale of the similarities by Android (compare pre- and post-iPhone Android) and especially Samsung (the Galaxy S with TouchWiz was essentially a 3GS clone) is much more than just skin deep.
While iOS 7 may look more like WP and Android, anyone who uses it can tell it still feels and works like iOS. Apple harp on about how design is more than how it looks, and it especially applies in this case as it doesn't work anything like Android or WP. But use a Samsung Galaxy S, and you can immediately tell that their apps menu is a wholesale ripoff of the iPhone's Springboard with next to no effort put into differentiating or improving the original design.
I think that is happening because Apple is usually the one to cry foul, and now everyone wants to expose them for the shameless hypocrisy. That is all.
> The thing is, we’ve grown up. We don’t require hand-holding to tell us what to click or tap. [...] iOS 7 foregoes borders, instead relying on colour to indicate interactivity
Relying on color to indicate interactivity... like we've done on the web forever? That's been a best practice since I-don't-know-when.
I disagree with the "we've grown up" idea. I'm not sure there's a Platonic ideal for UI/X, but clearly we're moving away from the idea (created by whom?) that a touchscreen phone needs to harken back to its button-clad counterparts. Think about it, we've made calls, drawn pictures, posted Facebook updates, & sent emails with our computers for ages, why is the phone interface so different?
The new design is a function of current style combined with a smidgen of better understanding about HCI. Everyone and their grandma was putting plastic shines on their buttons in 2008, now everyone is going "flat".
I'm colorblind and as long as the contrast is good (i.e., it doesn't really on red/green differences) it's not a problem per se. But the thin font might present a challenge because it reduces effective saturation.
I disagree. We reply on context and content to indicate interactivity. Color has been a pseudo indicator and is now inaccurate at best and misleading at worst. Just take a look at the header of this comment; the username timestamp and link are all the same color, yet only two of the three are actually links or clickable at all. Thus, the content and the context indicate clickability, not color. This is why UI design is harder than everyone thinks.
New design is nice. What makes me wonder is that Apple used all their resource for past 6 months for this graphical redesign and no new future came out of iOS teams. That seems inefficient.
The thin fonts and thin border icons are just ugly in my opinion. They dont represent clarity or a lighter feel; they look cheap. I like flat design. It's possible to create beautiful flat icons:
http://asianmack.com/homescreens
iOS7 just doesnt get that aesthetic right. I've only been using it for two days but I doubt I'll change my mind.
I cant believe how quickly UI and design have fallen now that Jobs is gone. Things like childish gradients and terrible icons.
Don't even get me started on the contrast -- light text on fluorescent green background and the really thin font.
I could only draw one conclusion from the comparison of iOS 6 vs 7 --- it's as if Apple has done everything possible to make it unusable.
Steve would probably have fired the tasteless "designer" who came up with this utterly broken redesign.
How are the new gradients any different than the old gradients?! Any more "childish"?! (Look at the Messages app for example.) Is there any consistency between the old Voice Memos, Apple Store, Videos, iTunes, and Stocks apps? Do these icons really strike you as fundamentally better than the new ones?
Funny, I think people who LIKE this design are nuts. People are nuts indeed!
> How are the new gradients any different than the old gradients?!
OMG?!?111 Well, it's not that the gradients are different, it's that the colors are bright and vivid and each icon has little distinction from the next. Oh, and it looks like something my 6-year-old nephew would draw with his colored pencil set.
I appreciate that you cleverly responded to my incredulity being expressed via interrobang with an internet-styled typo, but I still find your argument unconvincing.
If you look at the icons I mentioned, Voice Memos, Apple Store, Stocks, Videos, iTunes, Game Center, etc., they too are bright and vivid and have small inconsistencies. Why is the radial effect different between Apple Store and iTunes? Why is the light source for Videos different from Stocks?
The only difference between these icons and the new ones is that the old ones looked like they were designed by a self-important designer, thinking, "How much arbitrary detail can I pack in this icon?", rather than your extremely talented nephew.
Old gradients served the illusion of a glassy material with depth. And they weren't so obvious, so it looked like sun beams hitting the icon, reflecting and scattering and whatnot. The new gradients serve no purpose, they're just gradients and they're too obvious and evoke an amateurish look.
They are too simple, to the point of looking amateurish. I think they stopped somewhere in an awkward place between metro (the so called flat style that I am not a fan of) and their original style.
I was comparing to MeeGo, and the icons there look much more polished, because they smartly use gradients and shadow when needed while keeping it simple when it comes to colors and symbols. Apple just simplified everything.
Do you really think that removing the 'rich Corinthian leather' (which Steve Jobs loved) from iCal is a bad thing? If anything, I think the real world textures are more childish.
The redesign is broken, but part of the motivation was cleaning up after the felt, wood, and leather fetisch, even though Forstall somehow managed to get all the blame for that.
Steve Jobs was probably great on a more holistic design level, and that's the sense of design awareness we tend to give him credit for. It still allowed weird and outright design trends every now and then, though, but not in a way that tainted the entirety of the design.
I cant believe how quickly UI and design have fallen now that Jobs is gone. Things like childish gradients and terrible icons.
Don't even get me started on the contrast -- light text on fluorescent green background and the really thin font.
I could only draw one conclusion from the comparison of iOS 6 vs 7 --- it's as if Apple has done everything possible to make it unusable.
Steve would probably have fired the tasteless "designer" who came up with this utterly broken redesign.
That's me! I was browsing the new UI guidelines and couldn't understand what was and what wasn't a link/action in the screenshots that they used for examples! And I shouldn't need to turn on accessibility services for slight colorblindness... the design should accomodate for us.
The navigation looks lik the same color as the "Home" and "Phone" labels. Are those actions?
My experience of Windows mobile is Windows 8 on a tablet, and I had pretty much nothing but contempt for it. And failed to see anything stylish about it at all!
I want links/buttons/actions to stand out. That doesn't mean it has to look like a button. It could be text with a halo, a shadow, or an effect that comes into play as you begin to interact with the device so the controls jump out at you, or are overlayed or something. Don't just present raw text at me. Though having said that, I'm sure Apple will make it work, where others haven't.
iOS 6 looks pretty infantile by comparison, but the new screenshots and icons don't look that nice or that cohesive either.
(I was hoping that they might just drop the old school 'i' from iOS and just call it Apple mobile OS or something, it grates my ears and eyes, the name is like soo 1999.)
The thing that I notice from the stills is that the typeface appears quite weak. I had the same issue with Windows 8, my eyes just can't read it comfortably, I'm not sure why that is - and it looks more diluted now - and there is less contrast in general. Though perhaps it will look okay on a retina display.
The Metro interface works well for a phone format device. Literally everyone I know picks up my Lumia and just uses it as if they've been using it for years. It just makes sense and is really intuitive. Also, apart from a big chunk of 3rd party apps written by morons, it's 100% consistent and smooth as anything even on the shittiest of handsets.
I've had at least 4 people I know toss their iOS device in favor of a WP8 handset in the last couple of months.
Windows 8 however is a stinking turd. It doesn't work for that in the same way that your metro signs aren't 40' advertising boards. Most of the UI is empty and pointless padding resulting in no visual cues and terrible usability.
Go and play with a phone sized device for a bit and see how you get on.
When someone first described the idea of theming, as in something like CSS and HTML, I totally got it. Can't apps use a descriptive semantic language underneath and just have the OS skin most of it for you?
Swapping themes and making applications and the OS more accessible thereafter would surely be much easier. I know I'm simplifying things somewhat, but isn't this the next evolution in responsive design?
I'd find it someone hard to think that apple would eschew accessibility Perhaps high contrast mode will exist at the very least! Even Windows 8 has made a few inroads.
This is essentially what the OS does if you use the standard controls. You say "I want a title bar at the top of the screen with a back button" and iOS 6 interprets this as the shiny ones you're used to, while 7 sees this as the new version. The problem is that the amount of variation you're allowed by apple is pretty slim. You can change the tint of the bar (UINavigationBar) and the text, provide an image to be the title instead of text....and that's about it before it might start breaking when they go from one version to the next.
Because things were the same for so long (IMHO that's why anyway) we've seen a lot of devs bringing their own ui items that looked similar but slightly different to the standard elements, I assume in the attempt to stand out visually. Apps like tapBots' TweetBot will likely be OK because they most likely don't use ANY of the standard UI elements, but apps that use a little custom and a little standard stuff have a lot of work cut out for them.
Looking at examples using XScope color blind modes, the default colors, and a few different colors (such as reds and greens), iOS7 is far more legible in color blind reduced palettes than iOS6 is that I can see.
If you turn on the "thicken text" (not the actual name) in accesability, they stand out even more.
I thought about this too, but then realized it's a completely moot point unless you are black/white color blind (which virtually nobody is).
Differing colors are NOT being used to indicate differing actions. They're just being used to indicate interactivity in general, and it doesn't matter if you see that indicator as red or green (the most common form of colorblindness).
You hint at it, but there are more flavors of color blindness than red/green. When I learned that my (former) boss was color-blind, I spend an hour on wikipedia and learned way more about color blindness than I had realized there was to know.
As someone who is colour blind, I don't see this being much of an issue. If the colours are strong and stark enough (which it looks like they are) the vast majority of people who are colour-blind won't have any issues.
There is a high contrast mode. And the entire web mainly uses color to differentiate between links and normal text ie. many omit the underlining. So not sure what makes iOS so different in this regard.
Not underlining links is a web anti-pattern, a concession made in the name of looking nice while at the same time being more confusing. Looking nice is very important for web designers at this time, so usability is neglected...
"the entire web mainly uses color to differentiate between links and normal text"
I sense hyperbole, but would love to know what the actual proportion is. I suspect the majority of text links (as opposed to, e.g. menu navigation) are underlined.
Looking at examples using XScope color blind modes, the default colors, and a few different colors (such as reds and greens), iOS7 is far more legible in color blind reduced palettes than iOS6 is that I can see.
I feel he focuses on the best parts of iOS 7, which I admit are quite nice. But there are definitely a few things that, to me, don't meet the old Apple standards of great usability.
Just a few things I noticed:
The confusing unlock and initial welcome screen. They lack clear indication on which way to swipe or that you're even supposed to swipe at all (welcome screen). It's a subtle and momentary weakness that is addressed the moment you figure it out, but truly excellent design should avoid such issues; minimalism doesn't mean zeroing things out.
The month view being useless for showing upcoming events in the calendar app (the previous version would show you a scroll of upcoming events for the currently selected month).
Spotlight is summoned via a downward swipe, but is dismissed by an asymmetric action (either x out your search field to clear your search results, or hit the physical home key).
All minor quips, but it's the difference between UI designed by, say, your avg coder who trivializes the UX domain, and UI designed by a truly talented UX guy. But I'm hopeful since it's only the first beta.
Man, iOS 7 feedback is incredibly frustrating for no reason that actually matters.
I feel like I spent the past few years falling in love with flat design, on mobile and on the web -- and I read article after article from historically pro-Apple bloggers/authors explaining that no, flat design was fundamentally a bad move: the strongest metaphor is that of the phone as a tool -- that we needed skeumorphism, we need hints for interactivity, we needed polish.
And now iOS 7 is out! And I'm excited, because the flat (okay, 'mature') design philosophy that I've been told is a bad idea is finally here -- and now it's suddenly a great leap forward because Apple decided to do it? When Microsoft decided that the average consumer understood what a smartphone was for and no longer needed the physical cues, they were wrong and fools -- but when Ive decides it, its because its time to move to mature and modern?
Here's the thing, though: I think iOS 7, on the whole, looks worse than iOS 6. The stock icons look outright ugly; interfaces like the call-answer screen and the calculator look poorly designed, and everything has the sense that it just needs another run or two through the review process. Not that it's irreversibly bad, but I don't think it's executing as well as WP or MIUI are. (With exceptions, of course: I think the translucency paradigm looks great, as well as the changes to the UI Kit.)
(People arguing 'its just a beta, it'll obviously change over time': what happened to Apple's relentless pursuit of quality before introducing something to the public? What's the point of secrecy if you're showing off v0.8 and not v1.0?)
I imagine actually using the new iOS won't be bad at all. It's just reading about it that frustrates me, which is definitely a sign I should be doing less of it.
Most people are saying the same things about Apple as they said about Microsoft with the flat design stuff. This is one of the few positive articles I've seen on HN about iOS 7. I don't understand why you are frustrated reading about this OS when the vast majority of what's been written so far essentially agrees with what you've said. You'd prefer no dissenting articles rather than a handful?
Anyway, even if Apple were broadly being lauded for it now, that would be expected. Microsoft pioneered this look in the mobile space. Obviously they were going to catch more flak for it. The first one to try something new always gets criticism from the essentially conservative press and public.
I don't understand why you are frustrated reading about this OS when the vast majority of what's been written so far essentially agrees with what you've said.
Perhaps our browsing history is different: I've read negative feedback about iOS 7 but it's mainly from the Dribbble crowd. I'd say the majority of the feedback from the tech press/blogosphere has been gushing.
Anyway, even if Apple were broadly being lauded for it now, that would be expected. Microsoft pioneered this look in the mobile space. Obviously they were going to catch more flak for it. The first one to try something new always gets criticism from the essentially conservative press and public.
I completely agree, but this is what frustrates me so much.
The "dribble crowd" isn't going to like the new iOS because it's going to make their role in app development mostly obsolete. Developing apps is going to require much more programatic design, instead of chopping up photoshop comps.
The new visual language means design is more important. You can't hide bad design with gloss and shadows. This is obviously bad for the Dribble crowd who often seem to favour style over substance, making the common mistake that design is about making something look good.
Design is how it works and functions, yes. But visual design is a major facet of that too. A large part of app design is the visual aesthetics. It's what helps make people download your app. It's most of what keeps them coming back for more. It matters too.
> I'd say the majority of the feedback from the tech press/blogosphere has been gushing.
I've only talked to programmer-ish, long-term Apple fans about iOS 7 and they aren't gushing about the interface at all (new APIs are a different story).
In fact, I felt that iOS 7 was trying to woo the "Dribbble crowd" if there is one - I have never seen another website that was so obsessed with weather apps & widgets. It felt like a parody of designer narcissism when the iOS 7 weather app was demoed, and feedback about that bit has been positive.
This is not a fair response to the industry in my opinion.
iOS 7 is not just "flat" - at the risk of sounding like a fanboy, it's so much more than that. You're judging it based on the most obvious first impression - the icons and such.
Those can be improved, yes (especially Safari's...) but you're not reviewing the actual interface. I'm typing this comment on iOS 7 and I assure you it feels smoother. There are kinks to be worked out but the operating system's interface is more intuitive, which allows for more usable space and memory dedicated to features.
You sound kind of bitter about bloggers being fickle; getting past that, I think the design's interface actually looks very polished. It's "smarter" and only has a very small learning curve. Even apps like news:yc (what I'm using now) feel faster and "lighter" despite not yet being optimized for the iOS yet.
The whole thing feels like a more lightweight, versatile experience. I encourage you to download iOS 7's beta and try it out if you can.
The list of known issues with Apple's own apps is available along with the DMG. I only reverted because one third-party app I depend on was totally FUBAR.
The liberal use of fluorescent colours makes it an eyesore. Apply (or Ive) simply does not understand graphic design anymore. It's a disaster of epic proportions.
I don't think it's the color, I think it's the backgrounds. With less spacing between elements on the home-screen, putting a background - even a simple gradient - makes it insanely busy. Spots where they show a more elaborate background are cringeworthy. There's a reason WP switched to solid colors.
I think the bright elaborate icons would look fine on a jet-black or solid white background.
Going back to Vista, Microsoft initially pushed the translucent window chrome with its Aero theme. The borders were increased to provide larger targets for resizing, and the translucency made the window feel lighter.
Even with the blurring that provided a frosted glass feel, it made everything feel busier. Windows 8 backtracked on the looks of Vista and Windows 7 by de-emphasizing the glass. This was done to make desktop apps feel more like Windows 8 apps, to reduce battery use (although they still use a 3d compositing engine, so I don't know that there is actually much of a difference in power use between glass and no glass), and to declutter the experience.
iOS 7 doesn't feel de-cluttered to me. It actually seems to borrow most of the things I disliked about Windows Vista and 7 in terms of visual distraction when they use transparency. And then they flatten the UI so that elements like buttons have less visual distinction from static content.
For flat UI done better, look at Windows Whistler (Windows XP betas) running the Watercolor theme. http://mirror.stisitelkom.ac.id/files/PC%20Media%20Repositor...
While some things have been improved over the past decade, it's interesting to see UI design return to some of the visual feel of this abandoned theme, but with more clutter. I'm not going to say that Watercolor is perfect, but its strength was clarity, something that seems abandoned in most "modern" designs.
It appears that I'm not the only one who sees the similarity... http://fc06.deviantart.net/fs71/f/2011/046/9/d/windows_phone...
Your use of the word 'epic' was juvenile exaggeration, or illiteracy. Appealing to 'informal usage' when trying to express criticism is also juvenile or illiterate. And WTF is the free dictionary? The only source you could find to echo your mangling of English?
So no then. In fact you don't actually know what you are talking about at all. Whilst you are more than entitled to your opinions on any given subject, saying something like "Apply[sic] (or Ive) simply does not understand graphic design anymore." isn't at all constructive. It's worse than that actually. Casting an aspersion like that is entirely vapid, and no amount of snide logical twists are going to change that.
I really have to agree with this. As a 30 something male, I feel like Aple has made something my 12 year old daughter will love but that leaves me very much out in the cold.
I was hoping that some UX issues would be addressed in 7 but alas, it's fonts and colours that seem most important to I've and co.
I'm literally shopping round for an Android after using only iPhones since 2007.
Experia Z seems like the front runner at the moment.
It's a common mistake on the web to take entire groups of individuals, with varied and nuanced individual opinions, and to group them together and then complain about inconsistency and hypocrisy.
People say things like, apple users are foo or the new york times is bar or americans are baz. Well, of course any large group of people with divergent opinions will be self-conflicting when examined as a whole.
I understand why we do it; our brains pattern-match people into camps and construct narratives on our behalf to make sense of the world.
But, in general, I think it's a waste of everyone's time to complain that Apple bloggers all hated flat design before Apple decided to use flat design. Instead, perhaps you could show an example of an individual who has frustrated you in their inconsistency.
2) We want to call out people who were wrong (huge thing on the internet is not ever being wrong; nothing is worse than changing your mind), but it's too hard to keep track of everyone you disagree with, and worse you can't as easily get away with calling out an individual as you can a group.
I don't think those are the reasons, but rather the negative side effects. I think the reason we stereotype is because historically is has been extremely advantageous, biologically/sociologically speaking, to be able to predict certains things based on someone's appearance or background.
Thank you for explaining exactly what the parent's comment made me feel better than I could. If you read a bunch of different people's opinions, then you shouldn't be surprised that what you get is a bunch of different opinions.
Furthermore, why is the parent so interested in this idea of "Apple Users" as a group, anyway? There isn't really any such group (or, to the extent that there is, it's a very small group).
There was a significant group of vocal "Apple Users" who have spent a great deal of time over the last couple of years slagging off WP and Android for "bad design" and "stealing". It's to be expected that when Apple borrowed so heavily from WP and Android in this release that there are going to be strong reactions.
It's perfectly normal for companies to be inspired by eachother and to incorporate the best elements of rival platforms (and Apple have done a good job in many respects, particularly the default apps), but Apple's litigation and the comments of the most vocal Apple supporters meant that they really have invited this backlash.
Maybe I don't spend enough time in the forums, but I don't think I've ever seen anyone say anything bad about windows phone, other than the lack of apps, which really isn't the fault of the OS. I've seen pretty universal praise.
I've seen nothing but acclaim for the advances made by WP to the design language used on Mobile Devices. Gruber, TheVerge, MG Siegler - some pro-apple pundits, all seemed to really like WP7/8.
Can you point me to any prominent individual (pro apple or otherwise) who cast any dispersion on Windows Phone?
The only interesting criticism I've seen of Windows Phone's design language is that by eschewing most forms of visual affordance, it erases a lot of distinctions between actionable and non-actionable elements onscreen. I don't personally see this as a good or bad thing, though; it just requires a different set of conceptual tools to build affordance.
Here's an example of inconsistency from the the very article under discussion:
Why did Android and Windows Phone move away from photorealistic buttons? "partly just for differentiation’s sake".
Why did Apple (eventually) do the same:
"... we’ve grown up. We don’t require hand-holding to tell us what to click or tap. Interactivity is a matter of invitation, and physical cues are only one specific type. iOS 7 is an iOS for a more mature consumer, who understands that digital surfaces are interactive, and who doesn’t want anything getting in the way of their content."
Got that, this is the way forward, it's the right thing to do, it's better than what iOS < 7 was doing, and it broadly reflects design trends in other fields like the web but we can't quite bring ourselves to admit that the competition might actually be able to hire a random interface designer that is aware of this. No, they have to accidentally stumble into a better way to do interfaces just because they were trying so hard to look different from iOS6.
This childish sophistry is SOP for Apple blogs, it's the number one reason I (someone who adopted OSX and iPods as soon as they were available) think the Apple-sphere is mentally diseased and worth distancing yourself from.
Thats's really not fair to Gemmell. If you read the augmented paper article he links (from a year ago), you'll find him very positive about this stuff in Metro and much more sympathetic to the design motivations behind it (and Android).
I agree that the snarky comment you quoted isn't that helpful, but it's clearly an aside, tucked away in parenthesis, not his main thoughts on other platforms' aesthetics.
Fwiw, most of what I imagine you mean by the 'Apple-sphere' (Gruber, Gemmell, Marco, etc) have been generally positive about Microsoft's new design ethos. Criticisms have tended to focus on its implementation, not the design itself.
I just assumed they didn't feel threatened by it due to its paltry sales, and if anything hoped it would distract potential Android customers.
But I've been reading this stuff for so long I remember when Gruber was railing against Mac OS X for straying from Aqua and embracing brushed metal, now apparently we're not allowed to criticize iOS 7 because, unlike Mac OS X, even though that's the cited precedent they give for their argument, it's guaranteed to simply get better with no potential for mis-steps along the way.
what happened to Apple's relentless pursuit of quality before introducing something to the public?
I has never existed.
The secret is to not focus on versions. In time the quirks will get sorted out and if your users don't know when or at what version it became better they will assume that it has always been working well.
First OS X? Terrible, barely usable even if there had been any applications for it. Current OS X? Decent. But since they have the same name it has always been decent because people can't even distinguish between them. At best they know the code name for the up and coming version or the previous one but definitely no more than that.
Remember Vista? Yeah, people still believe windows 7 was a big leap and Vista was just some candy on top on XP. But only because you can refer to it as Vista people remember it as a failure. If windows 7 would have been a service pack to Vista (which it, compared to the XP-Vista leap, kind of was) people wouldn't have so strong feelings about it.
I agree, that Of course, Apple doesn't have a "Relentless pursuit of quality" before introducing something to the public. They ship Operating Systems fast, and fix problems as they discover them.
I'm still stuck on OS X 10.7.5 because of how screwed up my Operating Environment became when I (idiotically) upgraded from a wonderfully stable 10.6.8 to 10.7.0. So traumatized was I by the six months of kernel panics, hard freezes, and application problems (Mail, Finder, Spotlight - you name it) that were only mostly resolved by 10.7.4, and now, with only about 3 exceptions, 10.7.5, that I won't even consider upgrading to a new OS X until it's been out for at least 6-9 months AND has had a 90 day window with no major reports of problems. The 90 day clock just started for 10.8.4 on June 3rd - I'll consider upgrading in September.
I disagree, because clearly the versions "10.6.8", "10.7.0" and "10.7.5" are burned into my poor traumatized brain, and I continue to be nervous about 10.8.x - though there are a number of features I'm looking forward to (Better Exchange Support, iCloud support, messages, syncing with reminders (which I use quite a bit on my iPhone), Safari Syncing with my iPhone, etc...)
It's been true of their second-Jobs-era mobile gadgets though. The first iPod and iPhone both delivered a polished experience from day 1, and their successors did too. The same was true of most Apple products since Jobs' return, including the Mac hardware. OS X was the big exception, but that was partly because Apple didn't have the luxury of time: it had to get out OS X as quickly as possible, while also continuing to patch up MacOS, in order to save the company.
You were doing great until the last sentence. Why is a lot of the criticism jumping to attack the corporate entity behind the design, instead of the design itself?
As somebody who's been using Windows Phone for the past year or two, I like it. I think it works as a best-of-both-worlds between iOS and WP7. Android is going to look incredibly antiquated in a year or two (especially since tilting homescreen and lockscreen widgets, while useful, made it ugly), and I'm a complete Android fanboy.
When I look compare WP8 and iOS 7 the thing that's the biggest difference is that iOS 7 seems to be much busier. WP8 apps definitely take a "Metro" approach and keep it simple: squares on simple backgrounds, rectangles around buttons that do things, and the buttons that are icons enclosed in circles.
I was on the Montréal metro this weekend and really like the flat design they use which WP8 really took to heart. It will be interesting to see if the way iOS does it leads to more confusion for users or if skeuomorphism was the way to go.
I think it's the backgrounds everywhere that make iOS 7 look so busy, especially the home screen. The screens that are simple text-on-background or boxes-on-background look fine, and the chatbox retains a pure simple white background.
In cases where the white background exists, the stylistic similarities to WP7/8 look more obvious. WP7/8 make very limited use of elaborate backgrounds, preferring to go with jet-black. There's an option to invert the WP7 colors and go with black text on white background... it makes iOS7 look like a complete clone there.
>> "(People arguing 'its just a beta, it'll obviously change over time': what happened to Apple's relentless pursuit of quality before introducing something to the public? What's the point of secrecy if you're showing off v0.8 and not v1.0?)
"
They haven't really introduced it to the public. They introduced it to developers at a developer conference so they can prepare their software for it. Every single iOS release has been like this. Buggy as hell for the first few betas with several feature changes along the way. When it's released 4 months down the line it's usually solid (excluding Maps).
Agreed, folks are far too critical for a beta release that has yet to evolve. Of course, there are still major improvements that need to be addressed, but people need to understand that Apple will not ship anything shitty when it comes time to release it to the general public.
How are complaints about the new Safari icon different from complaints about leather iCal in its time, or even Ping? This is not a leaked alpha version, this is what Apple is publicly marketing, and I don't see where they have a record of ever backtracking (in less than two major releases).
Err. They also have placed imagery and video of it all over their (general, not developer) pages for iOS. They've provided high res imagery and video for the media. It's effectively introduced.
And I say that as someone now running iOS 7 and OSX 10.9. I see a lot of potential in both, but iOS needs a fair amount of polishing.
What are the default apps like in OSX 10.9? I absolutely hated the calendar, notes etc apps in 10.8, have they improved as much (visually) as the iOS default apps?
Calendar.app in OS X now looks pretty much exactly like it does in iOS 7. Same color scheme, same typeface, etc... Notes is still yellow, but the top bar is now polished grey to match in with the rest of the UI, so it really isn't that bad. Game Center looks like it does in iOS 7 as well, and Reminders... haven't checked that out yet.
I read there are still a huge number of show-stopping bugs in iOS7. Things like using a date picker causing a kernel panic. How are you running it? On a tertiary device or on your phone? Just curious.
I'm not FireBeyond but I've been using iOS 7 effectively all day yesterday (I'm in Australia) on my primary phone (iPhone 5) and it's crashed to reboot maybe twice, that's all. The majority of apps I use work perfectly or have tiny things that don't and some visual aberrations. Date picker, for example, has been fine in the instances I've used it. It's very stable and there is little lag. There's a ton of small bugs around the place like music controls and the time on the lock screen sometimes overlapping and they'll be fixed in time.
How does 'crashed to reboot twice in a day' convert to 'it's very stable'?
It's this wilful disregard of negatives that bugs me about Apple culture. The good things are lauded, the bad things are ignored, unless they're bad things in other OSes, then they're highlighted as why Apple stuff is better.
It's like at my last workplace, the Apple fan who was always getting another box from Foxconn telling me that Android was crap because he occasionally saw me swipe twice on my phone - ignoring that he was doing the same on his iphone. He didn't realise it until I pointed it out to him that he was doing it. It's a really odd cultural phenomenon.
Seriously? This is the earliest beta of this release. Only bricking twice a day sounds "pretty stable" to me.
I've had an iPhone5 since it came out and I've had one instance of needing to hard-reboot the device. Can't remember the details.
OTOH, My previous phone, a Galaxy S2, had far more issues. Multiple times in my ownership -- at least 4 that I can remember -- I literally had to remove the battery to restart the device.
In many ways I wish I had a hybrid device. The fit and finish of the hardware itself is much better from Apple. Some OS features and especially Google-provided web services are much better on Android. (Speech-to-text for one..) But having owned an Android for 2 years and an iPhone for 8 months, the iPhone is definitely, definitely more stable.
In some ways it seems like Apple v Microsoft on the desktop again. Apple controls the OS and the hardware so yes it BETTER be more stable. And it is.
We seem to be speaking a different language. To me, 'bricking' means you've hosed the system and it can't be recovered without low-level tools. A reboot crash is not 'bricking'.
My pedantometer also suggests that 'pretty stable' and 'very stable' are not the same thing. :)
Can't speak for FireBeyond or dorian-graph but I too am running it on my regular, everyday iPhone 5 and have found it surprisingly stable.
Any actual crashes seem to be a result of doing too many things at once, particularly during an animation (eg: close out of an app and double-click for multitasking before the animation is finished). The crashes seem to cause a restart of the Springbord app rather than a complete system reboot, so it comes back within 10 seconds and hasn't lost any data (it even keeps the same song playing in the background).
Before I had an iPhone 5 I used a Samsung Galaxy S which crashed much more frequently on stable versions of Android. I had to remove the battery at some points too to get it to start. I've never owned a Windows Phone so I can't comment on them.
I'm not apart of the Apple culture—I've had an iPhone for about 6 months and before that I used Android for ~ 2 years and had never owned any Apple products aside from a MbP—and I am not disregarding bad things. You've read a single comment of mine which was made in the context of using iOS 7 Beta 1 as a daily user. I've only made comments on iOS in 2 locations on the internet, once on this HN story and once in an invite-only forum. In the forum I listed many things that I don't like at the moment and feel needs polishing.
What's hilarious about your comment is that by a couple of ultra-geeks at uni I was called an Android fanboy because I used my SGS a lot, modded it, etc., haha. It would be hard for you to have been more wrong in your assumption, in regards to me. You will forever find in every group/culture people that ignore bad things and laud the good things, I've seen the same when I used Android regularly and elsewhere.
It would be hard for you to have been more wrong in your assumption, in regards to me.
Speaking of assumptions, I didn't call you a fanboy. I said it was a peculiarity of Apple culture. Given that I only have "a single comment of mine" on which to evaluate, it sounded like so many other comments on Apple equipment, where failures are papered over.
And given that it's a beta, not an alpha, two reboot crashes in one day is still definitely not what I'd characterise as "very stable". I'd even be wary of using that for an alpha - a "very" stable software suite simply shouldn't be crashing that often, regardless of where it is in the cycle.
>People arguing 'its just a beta, it'll obviously change over time': what happened to Apple's relentless pursuit of quality before introducing something to the public?
Nothing. They were always pragmatic about it, not "relentless".
And it's not a beta. The final version is coming in very short time, so it will be 98% the same. What it is is a FIRST version (iteration) of the new design. It will improve in iOS 8 and later versions.
People always go crazy when discussing Apple and forget basic facts.
Like, the original iPhone, and ALL subsequent models, where chastised for this pain point or the other. And all pain points (from lack of third party apps, to multitasking, to copy/paste, to the 4's antenna etc) where addressed, in a satisfying matter, in later versions.
People also forget how OS X went from barely usable (10.1) to highly capable and mature (10.4 and forward) functionality wise, or how the UI changed from "lickable candy buttons, heavy stripes and metal windows" to the subdued 10.8 look we now have.
People only remember "relentless pursuit of quality". But they forget that that "pursuit" comes in iterations and years, not just on every first version they introduce.
Actually, a decade old advice among Apple faithfuls, at least with regards to hardware, is: avoid buying a 1st iteration Apple product -- it will likely have some issue to be fixed in later versions or production runs.
>Wait, you're saying a beta release of ios7 isn't beta? Even if it is mostly the same for gA that doesn't discount it being beta software right now
Sure, it's beta, as in "buggy, still under development, and not released yet".
What I mean it's not beta in the way the parent mentioned it (and some people use it): that there is any chance in hell it will change in any substantial way.
They might fix some bugs and add/remove a few things, but 99% of what you see now will be there in the fall release.
OS X/iOS betas shown in WWDC are not like some website or app beta that iterates between point releases and can be very different by the time it comes out. They are pretty much baked.
To me, this feels like OS X Public Beta all over again. Aqua was polarizing and many of the changes were met with elation, hostility, or utter despair. The stability and UNIX features were welcomed but everything else was shunned.
In about a year when the final release shipped, many things were fixed and polished, but people were still polarized, and many refused to budge from OS 9. About a year later, Jaguar was released, and OS X began coming into its own.
What Apple bloggers have you been reading? John Gruber, who is arguably the most famous Apple blogger of all, has always been a proponent of the Metro look, as well as an opponent of the kitschy skeuomorphic elements in iOS. I mean, he's been anticipating the "flattening" of iOS7 ever since Forestall went out the door!
And personally, I love the way iOS7 looks and feels from the videos, way more than my current iOS6. (Except for Game Center, don't know what's up with those bubbles.)
Out of all the 'historically pro-Apple bloggers/authors' John Siracusa stands out as an exception: on the [recent episode of the ATP podcast](http://atp.fm/episodes/17-cant-innovate-anymore) (starts at 34:55) he gave proper credit to Windows Phone for paving the way — even though he's a confessed Microsoft hater.
Matt Gemmell's continual dismissal of the Microsoft designers who created Metro is incredibly disrespectful. He's repeatedly made snide remarks about Metro as merely change for the sake of being different. Given the [sweat, blood and tears](http://mashable.com/2012/03/29/microsoft-metro-is-a-philosop...) that it for the Metro UI folk to convince the execs at Microsoft to take design seriously, it's dispiriting to see a loud voice in the community like Gemmell be so snarky and flippant.
I don't think that's what Gemmell has been saying at all. He has been dismissive of the Windows 8 "No Compromises" approach, but Metro, as found on Windows Phone and the Surface (not Surface Pro), he has always seemed rather positive to me. Some examples:
"It’s not quite minimalist, though; it’s more like finding yourself living inside an infographic. The presentation is flat and high-contrast, but there’s little that’s familiar in the surroundings. It eschews skeuomorphism utterly. It’s hip, razor-edged and as modern as it can be without surrendering to the whims of futurism.
It’s almost perfectly digital, and is focused on information and content above all. Metro presents the device as little more than a viewport into a digital information space – indeed, the idea is immediately shown to the user via the concept of the horizontally moving viewport.
If there’s a current mobile user experience that should most appeal to Star Trek’s LCARS apologists like myself, then it’s surely Metro rather than iOS."
http://mattgemmell.com/2012/04/13/augmented-paper/
"Much of the lavishness of iOS (and its imitator, Android) feels like an artefact of the desktop era; a time when we were all still learning how to think about computing devices. By contrast, Windows Phone leaps to the other extreme, being as different as possible for the sake of it. Clear boundaries, sleek lines, and a kind of overt zen futurism."
http://mattgemmell.com/2013/05/12/tail-wagging/
That second one may seem like it's supporting your point, but Gemmell is deliberately contrasting the iOS style as "an arteface of the desktop era", whilst Metro gets "Clear", "sleek" and "zen" as its adjectives. In other words, Metro is clearly the approach getting the thumbs up here.
Yes, but you see that's why I gave you the link, so you could read the words in context and not have to take my word for it that they were intended as positive. If you do read the linked articles, you would see for example that "little that's familiar" is considered a positive, a foil to the over the top skeumorphism of its competitors.
This article gives a lot more context about the icons:
"many of the new icons were primarily designed by members of Apple’s marketing and communications department, not the app design teams. From what we’ve heard, SVP of Design Jony Ive (also now Apple’s head of Human Interaction) brought the print and web marketing design team in to set the look and color palette of the stock app icons. They then handed those off to the app design teams who did their own work on the ‘interiors’, with those palettes as a guide."
My impression was that people responded favorably to flat design. Look at the web as a whole and you can see that much if not most of it is embracing flat design. Sure there was backlash for it, but skeumorphism also had tons of backlash as well.
The thing that I have noticed about the iOS 7 feedback is that people think that Apple implemented a flat design in a very ugly way. Maybe it's because they're behind the curve because they're late to the party. Maybe it'll get better, but everything I've heard so far is about the poor use of colors, gradients, and unnecessarily noisy effects, not about flat design being bad.
This has less to do with flat design than it does with mismanagement and communication issues. Type flat design in on dribbble and you will be hard pressed to find generic rainbow-barf gradients, and helvetica neue ultra light. iOS 7's default icons were "designed" by Apple's marketing team.This is what happens when you put an industrial designer and marketers in charge of designing an OS.
As some one said(I forgot the reference ), it's not Flat design, it's flatter than previous version.
I agreed with "I think iOS 7, on the whole, looks worse than iOS 6." The icons look weird, and most of all, harder to be recognized than pre-version, that's why they lose their elegant.
I prefer to say, Flat design does not mean a flat element, flat appearance, flat interface. We should feel flat, the interactive should be flat, not just only our eyes see it is flat.
You clicked on the iOS7 article, read it fully an then made a huge comment about it. Every opinion about the design is so subjective that we can't really discuss it. You don't like the design? Well then don't upgrade or buy an Android phone. Lots of people are pleased with it, complaining about it isn't really going to help.
Why do you think that iPhone users were still happy with the design of iOS6. I heard lots of users complaining about how tired they were of the green playfield and that the address book doesn't really have to have the rings in them to know that it's an address book. This was an early trend, now flat design is a trend. Will you then also make a post about how happy people were with the flat design and that they should stick with it instead of upgrading it?
Every app of them is re-written, as a developer I understand the amount of work they had to put in to achieve this, to align every app for the new design, to think about every app. Really I understand the effort they put in to achieve this, but now you want all this with the latest design and you want it without a single bug?
I didn't have the same experience you did. I saw a lot of dislike for the skeumorphism in earlier versions of iOS both online and in real life, even among Apple enthusiasts. Speaking for myself, I was really impressed with Windows Phone when I first saw it, and I'm glad to see Apple moving more in that direction.
I completely agree that the new icons look much worse than their predecessors. Even if they wanted to embrace Flat Design they could have done a much better job. For example, this designer seems to have nailed it: http://www.behance.net/gallery/iOS-7-Redesign/9271243
Flat vs. Skeumorphism aside -- I agree, those iOS 7 looks like someone's overzealous puke from last night's binge drinking.
I would not mind it as much if they let me tweak some of the colors so I can have dark background.
In any case, eventually, the flat-UI proponents will realize that flat design is a subtle skeumorphism, one harking back to the days when graphics hardware were not capable of rendering more realistic images.
Must be annoying to be Google or Microsoft right now. There's something odd about all these platitudes for features and design decisions that were lifted from competing platforms.
Where were all these posts when Windows Phone or Android introduced these UI/UX ideas?
I run primarily in iOS dev circles and everyone I know who has played with a Windows phone has gushed about it. I've always thought it was better than iOS in a lot of ways. For a while I had considered switching phones, but I couldn't deal with the lack of apps (at that time).
I am usually a fan of Jony Ive's design, but this seems to exhibit a lot of windows-envy. When did Apple start copying design from Microsoft?
The home-screen icons are probably the worst part of the design. There are certainly good parts as well. But Apple's skeumorphic borders and backgrounds were always distinctively Apple, and contributed to make people love the brand, now the iOS just looks like everything else. Android is flat. Windows is flat. And as people pointed out, what about the colorblind?
>iOS 7 is a decluttering of the most exciting, profitable, desirable mobile operating system available. It’s a shift away from artefact, and back to essence. It indicates a clarity of vision, and a continued willingness to pursue simplicity ruthlessly.
>The new iOS is designed for a different environment, and a different maturity of mobile user: one who recognises simplicity for what Jony Ive believes it is. Not something as pedestrian as familiarity or consistency for its own sake, but rather focus and clarity.
Then why does the homescreen look like a high resolution version with garish colors of this from >20 years ago?
If you really want to see "a continued willingness to pursue simplicity ruthlessly." compare the homescreens of Windows Phone with all other mobile platforms including iOS, Android, Blackberry, Jolla, UbuntuOS, Symbian.
For example of a real transition, see Windows Mobile to Windows Phone.
>Too many interfaces run immediately to the well-worn toolbox of simulation and explicitness, imposing a cognitive straitjacket not only on the user, but also the designer. We too easily forget that the only thing that matters to people are their goals: their own tasks, and content. With limited attention, we want to devote our focus to what’s important, rather than distractions and artifice masquerading as design traditions.
I thought "Content over chrome" and "Authentically digital" were Microsoft's buzzwords.
>Apple’s philosophy – and particular genius – has always been in sieving the demands of users, technologies and the cultural zeitgeist, and finding the right hundred things to remove for every one thing to keep.
It's all hardware design guru Ive's genius, indeed, to come up to speed with state-of-the-art UI design in just 7 months and come out with this, which looks like Android fonts and Metro UI had a baby that was dipped in fluorescent colors.
Sure, Android and Windows phone copied a whole lot from iPhone, but I don't see the blogosphere give them credit for, say the one click app installs, and calling them geniuses for doing so.
You will, however, probably find that it feels more fluid, responsive and modern.
Sounds like someone who hasn't actually installed it yet. Perhaps it will feel more fluid and responsive when it ships, but that is not the case today.
Look in the dev forum there's a reason for it, not really a fix yet, but at least it's narrowed down. Also, it's a beta and these issues are to be expected at this time.
True, and I'm not bitter about it. I think I got it sorted out by eliminating the background updates for stocks and weather, and aggressively killing any apps I'm not using.
283 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 149 ms ] threadAuthor of the blog: an interesting and insightful read, thank you.
This article seems to sum up some of my other complaints fairly well: http://wolfslittlestore.be/tasteless/
Meanwhile, young people are highly ripe for bailing out of iOS, now that Samsung has some cool factor, Android's software/gaming ecosystem is growing richer, and the golden manacles have been feeling tight on the tech-savviest generation. (Guess who's doing all the jailbreaking? It ain't the boomers.)
Old folks may be the bread and butter today, but I think Apple knows that iOS is at a crossroads when it comes to winning the future. (I may be futilely rooting for the open web, but I've still got my popcorn.)
Also, have you seen how many elderly Asian tourists are using the iPad as the only digicam they can comfortably use? (Not sure if this is also a trend in other countries.) That's obviously the opposite of "cool", but these are $500 in revenue per user. The new lock screen and camera of iOS 7 are less discoverable.
Apple is the prestigious brand. Having a budget line compromises that image.
Go to a Mercedes dealership. You can buy a $32k C-Class or a $132k CL.
For that matter, go to an Apple Store. You can get a $400 iPod or a $90 Shuffle.
Or a $3000 Mac Pro or a $600 Mac Mini.
I found that they were very hesitant to engage with the phones, they have a preconceived notion that touching the wrong thing could break the entire device (which is generally an incorrect assumption but not completely).
The way to get around that fear, of course, is to make sure all the steps are followed in order in the way they were taught, eg: To Make a Phone Call: 1. Press the green icon with the phone on it at the bottom left 2. Press the picture of the star to bring up your favourites 3. Press on the name you want to call. 4. When you're finished, press the big red button.
In that example the four steps are largely unchanged, and every identifiable interactive element (green icon with phone, star, names, red button) has the same general description.
But everything has changed slightly - the green icon isn't the same colour, the star is a bit different, the names now have photos next to them and the red button is a big red strip.
This isn't a big deal for you or me, but it is certainly a big deal when they're looking for the clues in the interface that they are used to.
But things like "Slide the grey button to the right to unlock the phone" and "slide the green button to the right to answer the call" have changed significantly. There's no more grey or green box - there's no box to unlock and the green box is now a big green line.
My grandfather is doing pretty well with his iPhone by muscle memory, but he literally has a piece of paper in his phone case with all the steps written down in order so he can refer to them if he gets stuck.
Changes on this scale break the muscle memory that they've been trained to use, but more importantly makes the steps he's been taught incorrect. It's no small feat to have to learn everything over again. Especially so when things aren't brand new anymore and the changes are only slight.
Does that answer your question?
These comments about the older generation dealing with flat design are also VERY valid. Apple hasn't gone too far into Metro territory, but it will be interesting to see how the useability end of iOS 7 goes over (never mind the criticisms of the look).
Either way, I think Apple needs to polish what they showed at WWDC. Let's start with the arrow pointing up on the lock screen lol.
It turns out that perhaps I was giving them too much credit.
I'm sorry I just don't see why many of these things are so terrible. It's like every designer thinks their personal taste is an objective standard...
"The title bar is white, the tab bar is white. If I blur my eyes, I don't see the distinct areas."
"The Safari icon went from something beautiful to this"
"48px roundrect? Terrible."
"Really Apple? Icons on people's heads? HAS YOUR VISUAL DESIGNER LOST THEIR SENSE OF TASTE?"
"And most of it sits on ugly rainbow puke, again."
These all seem like whiny statements of personal taste to me. I don't use my phone with blurred eyes, I have set photos of people to my phone wallpaper (covering their faces - the horror!), transparency doesn't look remotely like any puke I have ever generated, etc, etc.
I think it's telling when your own developing base has to post to forums asking simple questions like:
For me usability is probably the best way to substantiate a design criticism.
The only thing 'telling' is that somehow you're surprised by this.
I think the reason for the backlash, and rightly justified, is that these seemingly capricious design decisions would seem to underpin a larger fundamental flaw with the overall direction - one that Apple historically is not known for. You can justify the goal, which is of course a good one, but there is not way in hell you can justify the implementation.
Of course we went from old and tired, to ugly and nearly unusable so...
So, it's okay to sacrifice similarity and familiarity because you can force people to understand a UI through emotion and intuition? Without familiar cues, a user will have to blindly poke around the interface until they understand it, and then rely on that experience to use it in the future.
There's nothing wrong with a visual overhaul (even if it does make the system look like a cheap Android reskin), but it's not right to throw users off the deep end of the pool because they are used to interactive elements that look... interactive.
I'm being facetious of course, but really, Apple changes their designs up on the regular, even if it isn't "broken". See: the iMac product line.
Old people love ornamentation. My 91 year old grandmother can barely distinguish buttons on her iPhone 4, I pity how she'll use iOS 7.
It seems inevitable, when I first saw the original WP7, I thought it made the iPhone look old and that one thing that Apple does not like is looking dated.
It's getting to be somewhat annoying how many people are whining about Windows Phone and Android similarities. Design and engineering decisions are not made in a vacuum. Android copies from iOS and vice versa - they each follow the cultural trends of smart design.
I would much rather see blog posts like this - where the author considers the iOS in its own right instead of insisting on nitpicking what's original. Now I can actually see the innovation that went into designing the iOS 7 interface. And as someone typing this comment on iOS 7 beta, I've come to a deeper appreciation of what's already in my hands.
It's not helpful to accuse large design houses and engineering teams of copying each other. That's like saying supercars aren't original because they universally use sleek, aerodynamic ("sexy") design features. No, that's just what sells and what makes sense. It's a natural maturation and trend towards intelligent design. It's just iteration.
It's true that touch interfaces no longer need to be "taught" really. We intuitively know that gestures will do things in the same way (and more efficiently) than buttons. It's all about reducing cluttered design and adding more functionality without reducing usable space. I'm glad we're moving towards this.
I agree, but the similarities are being pointed out precisely because Apple (and their major pundits like Marco and Gruber) makes a big deal about how others have borrowed ideas from them.
For example, the infamous "Redmond/Mountain View, start your photocopiers" lines, and Marco/Gruber's frequent quips like "Hmm, I've seen something like this before..." in regards to something Google or Samsung has done.
Apple's smugness is what's getting them, not their borrowing of ideas, itself.
Following current design trends and adding a splash of your own flavor to them... that's status quo, isn't it?
"Some of their own medicine" as it were.
They need to be called out on this. "Everything is a remix" was brilliant in exposing Apple hypocrisy in this regard.
The thing is, Apple fan(atic)s (the pundits and those who echo them, really) love the "Apple innovates, never copies, only bad companies without any talent copy" routine, and here we have an example where Apple has pretty blatantly ripped design elements from their competitors. For the people riding the "everything Apple produces is unique and amazing" train, iOS7 is a deep betrayal specifically because it is so familiar to things that others did first.
That is the primary reason I think Apple is getting so much crap. Apple claims to be the industry leading innovators; Tim Cook even said during the D11 conference "I don't like copying. It's a values thing." in reference to Samsung patent litigation. Apple partly built it's reputation on bashing the Microsoft (Switch campaign) and Android (WWDC's and MacWorlds). Now that Apple is playing catch-up in the mobile space that they essentially pioneered, they are getting the same snide back-handed remaks that they were dishing out.
While iOS 7 may look more like WP and Android, anyone who uses it can tell it still feels and works like iOS. Apple harp on about how design is more than how it looks, and it especially applies in this case as it doesn't work anything like Android or WP. But use a Samsung Galaxy S, and you can immediately tell that their apps menu is a wholesale ripoff of the iPhone's Springboard with next to no effort put into differentiating or improving the original design.
The old Safari icon reminded me of the Netscape Navigator 2.0 splash screen.
Relying on color to indicate interactivity... like we've done on the web forever? That's been a best practice since I-don't-know-when.
I disagree with the "we've grown up" idea. I'm not sure there's a Platonic ideal for UI/X, but clearly we're moving away from the idea (created by whom?) that a touchscreen phone needs to harken back to its button-clad counterparts. Think about it, we've made calls, drawn pictures, posted Facebook updates, & sent emails with our computers for ages, why is the phone interface so different?
The new design is a function of current style combined with a smidgen of better understanding about HCI. Everyone and their grandma was putting plastic shines on their buttons in 2008, now everyone is going "flat".
I guess screw color-blind people then.
I disagree. We reply on context and content to indicate interactivity. Color has been a pseudo indicator and is now inaccurate at best and misleading at worst. Just take a look at the header of this comment; the username timestamp and link are all the same color, yet only two of the three are actually links or clickable at all. Thus, the content and the context indicate clickability, not color. This is why UI design is harder than everyone thinks.
iOS7 just doesnt get that aesthetic right. I've only been using it for two days but I doubt I'll change my mind.
Every time I see a Glass/iPhone/WindowsPhone/etc article nowadays, I prepare myself for a deluge of shitty YouTube-caliber posts.
Embarrassing.
Steve would probably have fired the tasteless "designer" who came up with this utterly broken redesign.
How are the new gradients any different than the old gradients?! Any more "childish"?! (Look at the Messages app for example.) Is there any consistency between the old Voice Memos, Apple Store, Videos, iTunes, and Stocks apps? Do these icons really strike you as fundamentally better than the new ones?
Funny, I think people who LIKE this design are nuts. People are nuts indeed!
> How are the new gradients any different than the old gradients?!
OMG?!?111 Well, it's not that the gradients are different, it's that the colors are bright and vivid and each icon has little distinction from the next. Oh, and it looks like something my 6-year-old nephew would draw with his colored pencil set.
If you look at the icons I mentioned, Voice Memos, Apple Store, Stocks, Videos, iTunes, Game Center, etc., they too are bright and vivid and have small inconsistencies. Why is the radial effect different between Apple Store and iTunes? Why is the light source for Videos different from Stocks?
The only difference between these icons and the new ones is that the old ones looked like they were designed by a self-important designer, thinking, "How much arbitrary detail can I pack in this icon?", rather than your extremely talented nephew.
I was comparing to MeeGo, and the icons there look much more polished, because they smartly use gradients and shadow when needed while keeping it simple when it comes to colors and symbols. Apple just simplified everything.
Steve Jobs was probably great on a more holistic design level, and that's the sense of design awareness we tend to give him credit for. It still allowed weird and outright design trends every now and then, though, but not in a way that tainted the entirety of the design.
Steve would probably have fired the tasteless "designer" who came up with this utterly broken redesign.
Good thing there aren't people out there who are color-blind, then...
Oh, wait.
The navigation looks lik the same color as the "Home" and "Phone" labels. Are those actions?
My experience of Windows mobile is Windows 8 on a tablet, and I had pretty much nothing but contempt for it. And failed to see anything stylish about it at all!
I want links/buttons/actions to stand out. That doesn't mean it has to look like a button. It could be text with a halo, a shadow, or an effect that comes into play as you begin to interact with the device so the controls jump out at you, or are overlayed or something. Don't just present raw text at me. Though having said that, I'm sure Apple will make it work, where others haven't.
iOS 6 looks pretty infantile by comparison, but the new screenshots and icons don't look that nice or that cohesive either.
(I was hoping that they might just drop the old school 'i' from iOS and just call it Apple mobile OS or something, it grates my ears and eyes, the name is like soo 1999.)
The thing that I notice from the stills is that the typeface appears quite weak. I had the same issue with Windows 8, my eyes just can't read it comfortably, I'm not sure why that is - and it looks more diluted now - and there is less contrast in general. Though perhaps it will look okay on a retina display.
I've had at least 4 people I know toss their iOS device in favor of a WP8 handset in the last couple of months.
Windows 8 however is a stinking turd. It doesn't work for that in the same way that your metro signs aren't 40' advertising boards. Most of the UI is empty and pointless padding resulting in no visual cues and terrible usability.
Go and play with a phone sized device for a bit and see how you get on.
When someone first described the idea of theming, as in something like CSS and HTML, I totally got it. Can't apps use a descriptive semantic language underneath and just have the OS skin most of it for you?
Swapping themes and making applications and the OS more accessible thereafter would surely be much easier. I know I'm simplifying things somewhat, but isn't this the next evolution in responsive design?
I'd find it someone hard to think that apple would eschew accessibility Perhaps high contrast mode will exist at the very least! Even Windows 8 has made a few inroads.
Because things were the same for so long (IMHO that's why anyway) we've seen a lot of devs bringing their own ui items that looked similar but slightly different to the standard elements, I assume in the attempt to stand out visually. Apps like tapBots' TweetBot will likely be OK because they most likely don't use ANY of the standard UI elements, but apps that use a little custom and a little standard stuff have a lot of work cut out for them.
If you turn on the "thicken text" (not the actual name) in accesability, they stand out even more.
Differing colors are NOT being used to indicate differing actions. They're just being used to indicate interactivity in general, and it doesn't matter if you see that indicator as red or green (the most common form of colorblindness).
I sense hyperbole, but would love to know what the actual proportion is. I suspect the majority of text links (as opposed to, e.g. menu navigation) are underlined.
We'll see how this pans out but maybe this is that "the iPad is just a big iPod Touch" thing all over.
Just a few things I noticed: The confusing unlock and initial welcome screen. They lack clear indication on which way to swipe or that you're even supposed to swipe at all (welcome screen). It's a subtle and momentary weakness that is addressed the moment you figure it out, but truly excellent design should avoid such issues; minimalism doesn't mean zeroing things out.
The month view being useless for showing upcoming events in the calendar app (the previous version would show you a scroll of upcoming events for the currently selected month).
Spotlight is summoned via a downward swipe, but is dismissed by an asymmetric action (either x out your search field to clear your search results, or hit the physical home key).
All minor quips, but it's the difference between UI designed by, say, your avg coder who trivializes the UX domain, and UI designed by a truly talented UX guy. But I'm hopeful since it's only the first beta.
I feel like I spent the past few years falling in love with flat design, on mobile and on the web -- and I read article after article from historically pro-Apple bloggers/authors explaining that no, flat design was fundamentally a bad move: the strongest metaphor is that of the phone as a tool -- that we needed skeumorphism, we need hints for interactivity, we needed polish.
And now iOS 7 is out! And I'm excited, because the flat (okay, 'mature') design philosophy that I've been told is a bad idea is finally here -- and now it's suddenly a great leap forward because Apple decided to do it? When Microsoft decided that the average consumer understood what a smartphone was for and no longer needed the physical cues, they were wrong and fools -- but when Ive decides it, its because its time to move to mature and modern?
Here's the thing, though: I think iOS 7, on the whole, looks worse than iOS 6. The stock icons look outright ugly; interfaces like the call-answer screen and the calculator look poorly designed, and everything has the sense that it just needs another run or two through the review process. Not that it's irreversibly bad, but I don't think it's executing as well as WP or MIUI are. (With exceptions, of course: I think the translucency paradigm looks great, as well as the changes to the UI Kit.)
(People arguing 'its just a beta, it'll obviously change over time': what happened to Apple's relentless pursuit of quality before introducing something to the public? What's the point of secrecy if you're showing off v0.8 and not v1.0?)
I imagine actually using the new iOS won't be bad at all. It's just reading about it that frustrates me, which is definitely a sign I should be doing less of it.
(I own an iPad, iPhone, and MBA.)
Anyway, even if Apple were broadly being lauded for it now, that would be expected. Microsoft pioneered this look in the mobile space. Obviously they were going to catch more flak for it. The first one to try something new always gets criticism from the essentially conservative press and public.
Perhaps our browsing history is different: I've read negative feedback about iOS 7 but it's mainly from the Dribbble crowd. I'd say the majority of the feedback from the tech press/blogosphere has been gushing.
Anyway, even if Apple were broadly being lauded for it now, that would be expected. Microsoft pioneered this look in the mobile space. Obviously they were going to catch more flak for it. The first one to try something new always gets criticism from the essentially conservative press and public.
I completely agree, but this is what frustrates me so much.
Design is how it works and functions, yes. But visual design is a major facet of that too. A large part of app design is the visual aesthetics. It's what helps make people download your app. It's most of what keeps them coming back for more. It matters too.
I've only talked to programmer-ish, long-term Apple fans about iOS 7 and they aren't gushing about the interface at all (new APIs are a different story).
In fact, I felt that iOS 7 was trying to woo the "Dribbble crowd" if there is one - I have never seen another website that was so obsessed with weather apps & widgets. It felt like a parody of designer narcissism when the iOS 7 weather app was demoed, and feedback about that bit has been positive.
iOS 7 is not just "flat" - at the risk of sounding like a fanboy, it's so much more than that. You're judging it based on the most obvious first impression - the icons and such.
Those can be improved, yes (especially Safari's...) but you're not reviewing the actual interface. I'm typing this comment on iOS 7 and I assure you it feels smoother. There are kinks to be worked out but the operating system's interface is more intuitive, which allows for more usable space and memory dedicated to features.
You sound kind of bitter about bloggers being fickle; getting past that, I think the design's interface actually looks very polished. It's "smarter" and only has a very small learning curve. Even apps like news:yc (what I'm using now) feel faster and "lighter" despite not yet being optimized for the iOS yet.
The whole thing feels like a more lightweight, versatile experience. I encourage you to download iOS 7's beta and try it out if you can.
I wouldn't be encouraging anyone to do that unless they are a developer, need to do it, and have a spare, non production device to do it on.
I think the bright elaborate icons would look fine on a jet-black or solid white background.
Things that are not: fucking betas of mobile telephone software
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/disaster
I take it that you are a world authority on graphic design to cast such aspersions. Up there with the likes of Vigelli, Brody and Müller-Brockmann?
"It's a disaster of epic proportions."
No, it really isn't.
I was hoping that some UX issues would be addressed in 7 but alas, it's fonts and colours that seem most important to I've and co.
I'm literally shopping round for an Android after using only iPhones since 2007.
Experia Z seems like the front runner at the moment.
People say things like, apple users are foo or the new york times is bar or americans are baz. Well, of course any large group of people with divergent opinions will be self-conflicting when examined as a whole.
I understand why we do it; our brains pattern-match people into camps and construct narratives on our behalf to make sense of the world.
But, in general, I think it's a waste of everyone's time to complain that Apple bloggers all hated flat design before Apple decided to use flat design. Instead, perhaps you could show an example of an individual who has frustrated you in their inconsistency.
1) We want to broadly dismiss a group of people.
2) We want to call out people who were wrong (huge thing on the internet is not ever being wrong; nothing is worse than changing your mind), but it's too hard to keep track of everyone you disagree with, and worse you can't as easily get away with calling out an individual as you can a group.
Furthermore, why is the parent so interested in this idea of "Apple Users" as a group, anyway? There isn't really any such group (or, to the extent that there is, it's a very small group).
It's perfectly normal for companies to be inspired by eachother and to incorporate the best elements of rival platforms (and Apple have done a good job in many respects, particularly the default apps), but Apple's litigation and the comments of the most vocal Apple supporters meant that they really have invited this backlash.
Can you point me to any prominent individual (pro apple or otherwise) who cast any dispersion on Windows Phone?
The only interesting criticism I've seen of Windows Phone's design language is that by eschewing most forms of visual affordance, it erases a lot of distinctions between actionable and non-actionable elements onscreen. I don't personally see this as a good or bad thing, though; it just requires a different set of conceptual tools to build affordance.
Why did Android and Windows Phone move away from photorealistic buttons? "partly just for differentiation’s sake".
Why did Apple (eventually) do the same:
"... we’ve grown up. We don’t require hand-holding to tell us what to click or tap. Interactivity is a matter of invitation, and physical cues are only one specific type. iOS 7 is an iOS for a more mature consumer, who understands that digital surfaces are interactive, and who doesn’t want anything getting in the way of their content."
Got that, this is the way forward, it's the right thing to do, it's better than what iOS < 7 was doing, and it broadly reflects design trends in other fields like the web but we can't quite bring ourselves to admit that the competition might actually be able to hire a random interface designer that is aware of this. No, they have to accidentally stumble into a better way to do interfaces just because they were trying so hard to look different from iOS6.
This childish sophistry is SOP for Apple blogs, it's the number one reason I (someone who adopted OSX and iPods as soon as they were available) think the Apple-sphere is mentally diseased and worth distancing yourself from.
I agree that the snarky comment you quoted isn't that helpful, but it's clearly an aside, tucked away in parenthesis, not his main thoughts on other platforms' aesthetics.
Fwiw, most of what I imagine you mean by the 'Apple-sphere' (Gruber, Gemmell, Marco, etc) have been generally positive about Microsoft's new design ethos. Criticisms have tended to focus on its implementation, not the design itself.
But I've been reading this stuff for so long I remember when Gruber was railing against Mac OS X for straying from Aqua and embracing brushed metal, now apparently we're not allowed to criticize iOS 7 because, unlike Mac OS X, even though that's the cited precedent they give for their argument, it's guaranteed to simply get better with no potential for mis-steps along the way.
You just get jaded by this stuff after a while.
I has never existed.
The secret is to not focus on versions. In time the quirks will get sorted out and if your users don't know when or at what version it became better they will assume that it has always been working well.
First OS X? Terrible, barely usable even if there had been any applications for it. Current OS X? Decent. But since they have the same name it has always been decent because people can't even distinguish between them. At best they know the code name for the up and coming version or the previous one but definitely no more than that.
Remember Vista? Yeah, people still believe windows 7 was a big leap and Vista was just some candy on top on XP. But only because you can refer to it as Vista people remember it as a failure. If windows 7 would have been a service pack to Vista (which it, compared to the XP-Vista leap, kind of was) people wouldn't have so strong feelings about it.
I agree, that Of course, Apple doesn't have a "Relentless pursuit of quality" before introducing something to the public. They ship Operating Systems fast, and fix problems as they discover them.
I'm still stuck on OS X 10.7.5 because of how screwed up my Operating Environment became when I (idiotically) upgraded from a wonderfully stable 10.6.8 to 10.7.0. So traumatized was I by the six months of kernel panics, hard freezes, and application problems (Mail, Finder, Spotlight - you name it) that were only mostly resolved by 10.7.4, and now, with only about 3 exceptions, 10.7.5, that I won't even consider upgrading to a new OS X until it's been out for at least 6-9 months AND has had a 90 day window with no major reports of problems. The 90 day clock just started for 10.8.4 on June 3rd - I'll consider upgrading in September.
I disagree, because clearly the versions "10.6.8", "10.7.0" and "10.7.5" are burned into my poor traumatized brain, and I continue to be nervous about 10.8.x - though there are a number of features I'm looking forward to (Better Exchange Support, iCloud support, messages, syncing with reminders (which I use quite a bit on my iPhone), Safari Syncing with my iPhone, etc...)
I don't know why people think flat is about not having layers. Did Apple just start this bizarre thinking?
I was on the Montréal metro this weekend and really like the flat design they use which WP8 really took to heart. It will be interesting to see if the way iOS does it leads to more confusion for users or if skeuomorphism was the way to go.
In cases where the white background exists, the stylistic similarities to WP7/8 look more obvious. WP7/8 make very limited use of elaborate backgrounds, preferring to go with jet-black. There's an option to invert the WP7 colors and go with black text on white background... it makes iOS7 look like a complete clone there.
They haven't really introduced it to the public. They introduced it to developers at a developer conference so they can prepare their software for it. Every single iOS release has been like this. Buggy as hell for the first few betas with several feature changes along the way. When it's released 4 months down the line it's usually solid (excluding Maps).
The apologists said this about Apple Maps as well
And I say that as someone now running iOS 7 and OSX 10.9. I see a lot of potential in both, but iOS needs a fair amount of polishing.
It's been perfectly usable as my primary device.
It's this wilful disregard of negatives that bugs me about Apple culture. The good things are lauded, the bad things are ignored, unless they're bad things in other OSes, then they're highlighted as why Apple stuff is better.
It's like at my last workplace, the Apple fan who was always getting another box from Foxconn telling me that Android was crap because he occasionally saw me swipe twice on my phone - ignoring that he was doing the same on his iphone. He didn't realise it until I pointed it out to him that he was doing it. It's a really odd cultural phenomenon.
I've had an iPhone5 since it came out and I've had one instance of needing to hard-reboot the device. Can't remember the details.
OTOH, My previous phone, a Galaxy S2, had far more issues. Multiple times in my ownership -- at least 4 that I can remember -- I literally had to remove the battery to restart the device.
In many ways I wish I had a hybrid device. The fit and finish of the hardware itself is much better from Apple. Some OS features and especially Google-provided web services are much better on Android. (Speech-to-text for one..) But having owned an Android for 2 years and an iPhone for 8 months, the iPhone is definitely, definitely more stable.
In some ways it seems like Apple v Microsoft on the desktop again. Apple controls the OS and the hardware so yes it BETTER be more stable. And it is.
My pedantometer also suggests that 'pretty stable' and 'very stable' are not the same thing. :)
Any actual crashes seem to be a result of doing too many things at once, particularly during an animation (eg: close out of an app and double-click for multitasking before the animation is finished). The crashes seem to cause a restart of the Springbord app rather than a complete system reboot, so it comes back within 10 seconds and hasn't lost any data (it even keeps the same song playing in the background).
I'm not apart of the Apple culture—I've had an iPhone for about 6 months and before that I used Android for ~ 2 years and had never owned any Apple products aside from a MbP—and I am not disregarding bad things. You've read a single comment of mine which was made in the context of using iOS 7 Beta 1 as a daily user. I've only made comments on iOS in 2 locations on the internet, once on this HN story and once in an invite-only forum. In the forum I listed many things that I don't like at the moment and feel needs polishing.
What's hilarious about your comment is that by a couple of ultra-geeks at uni I was called an Android fanboy because I used my SGS a lot, modded it, etc., haha. It would be hard for you to have been more wrong in your assumption, in regards to me. You will forever find in every group/culture people that ignore bad things and laud the good things, I've seen the same when I used Android regularly and elsewhere.
Speaking of assumptions, I didn't call you a fanboy. I said it was a peculiarity of Apple culture. Given that I only have "a single comment of mine" on which to evaluate, it sounded like so many other comments on Apple equipment, where failures are papered over.
And given that it's a beta, not an alpha, two reboot crashes in one day is still definitely not what I'd characterise as "very stable". I'd even be wary of using that for an alpha - a "very" stable software suite simply shouldn't be crashing that often, regardless of where it is in the cycle.
Nothing. They were always pragmatic about it, not "relentless".
And it's not a beta. The final version is coming in very short time, so it will be 98% the same. What it is is a FIRST version (iteration) of the new design. It will improve in iOS 8 and later versions.
People always go crazy when discussing Apple and forget basic facts.
Like, the original iPhone, and ALL subsequent models, where chastised for this pain point or the other. And all pain points (from lack of third party apps, to multitasking, to copy/paste, to the 4's antenna etc) where addressed, in a satisfying matter, in later versions.
People also forget how OS X went from barely usable (10.1) to highly capable and mature (10.4 and forward) functionality wise, or how the UI changed from "lickable candy buttons, heavy stripes and metal windows" to the subdued 10.8 look we now have.
People only remember "relentless pursuit of quality". But they forget that that "pursuit" comes in iterations and years, not just on every first version they introduce.
Actually, a decade old advice among Apple faithfuls, at least with regards to hardware, is: avoid buying a 1st iteration Apple product -- it will likely have some issue to be fixed in later versions or production runs.
Sure, it's beta, as in "buggy, still under development, and not released yet".
What I mean it's not beta in the way the parent mentioned it (and some people use it): that there is any chance in hell it will change in any substantial way.
They might fix some bugs and add/remove a few things, but 99% of what you see now will be there in the fall release.
OS X/iOS betas shown in WWDC are not like some website or app beta that iterates between point releases and can be very different by the time it comes out. They are pretty much baked.
RC would be a better name for it.
In about a year when the final release shipped, many things were fixed and polished, but people were still polarized, and many refused to budge from OS 9. About a year later, Jaguar was released, and OS X began coming into its own.
I predict the same thing will happen with iOS 7.
And personally, I love the way iOS7 looks and feels from the videos, way more than my current iOS6. (Except for Game Center, don't know what's up with those bubbles.)
Matt Gemmell's continual dismissal of the Microsoft designers who created Metro is incredibly disrespectful. He's repeatedly made snide remarks about Metro as merely change for the sake of being different. Given the [sweat, blood and tears](http://mashable.com/2012/03/29/microsoft-metro-is-a-philosop...) that it for the Metro UI folk to convince the execs at Microsoft to take design seriously, it's dispiriting to see a loud voice in the community like Gemmell be so snarky and flippant.
"It’s not quite minimalist, though; it’s more like finding yourself living inside an infographic. The presentation is flat and high-contrast, but there’s little that’s familiar in the surroundings. It eschews skeuomorphism utterly. It’s hip, razor-edged and as modern as it can be without surrendering to the whims of futurism.
It’s almost perfectly digital, and is focused on information and content above all. Metro presents the device as little more than a viewport into a digital information space – indeed, the idea is immediately shown to the user via the concept of the horizontally moving viewport. If there’s a current mobile user experience that should most appeal to Star Trek’s LCARS apologists like myself, then it’s surely Metro rather than iOS." http://mattgemmell.com/2012/04/13/augmented-paper/
"Much of the lavishness of iOS (and its imitator, Android) feels like an artefact of the desktop era; a time when we were all still learning how to think about computing devices. By contrast, Windows Phone leaps to the other extreme, being as different as possible for the sake of it. Clear boundaries, sleek lines, and a kind of overt zen futurism." http://mattgemmell.com/2013/05/12/tail-wagging/
That second one may seem like it's supporting your point, but Gemmell is deliberately contrasting the iOS style as "an arteface of the desktop era", whilst Metro gets "Clear", "sleek" and "zen" as its adjectives. In other words, Metro is clearly the approach getting the thumbs up here.
... living inside an infographic.
but .. little that's familiar
[OT: iOS (and its imitator, Android) -- snide for the sake of it]
WP leaps to the other extreme, ... different .. for the sake of it.
"many of the new icons were primarily designed by members of Apple’s marketing and communications department, not the app design teams. From what we’ve heard, SVP of Design Jony Ive (also now Apple’s head of Human Interaction) brought the print and web marketing design team in to set the look and color palette of the stock app icons. They then handed those off to the app design teams who did their own work on the ‘interiors’, with those palettes as a guide."
http://thenextweb.com/apple/2013/06/12/why-does-the-design-o...
The thing that I have noticed about the iOS 7 feedback is that people think that Apple implemented a flat design in a very ugly way. Maybe it's because they're behind the curve because they're late to the party. Maybe it'll get better, but everything I've heard so far is about the poor use of colors, gradients, and unnecessarily noisy effects, not about flat design being bad.
http://www.macrumors.com/2013/06/12/jony-ive-put-apples-mark...
http://thenextweb.com/apple/2013/06/12/why-does-the-design-o...
I agreed with "I think iOS 7, on the whole, looks worse than iOS 6." The icons look weird, and most of all, harder to be recognized than pre-version, that's why they lose their elegant.
I prefer to say, Flat design does not mean a flat element, flat appearance, flat interface. We should feel flat, the interactive should be flat, not just only our eyes see it is flat.
You clicked on the iOS7 article, read it fully an then made a huge comment about it. Every opinion about the design is so subjective that we can't really discuss it. You don't like the design? Well then don't upgrade or buy an Android phone. Lots of people are pleased with it, complaining about it isn't really going to help.
Why do you think that iPhone users were still happy with the design of iOS6. I heard lots of users complaining about how tired they were of the green playfield and that the address book doesn't really have to have the rings in them to know that it's an address book. This was an early trend, now flat design is a trend. Will you then also make a post about how happy people were with the flat design and that they should stick with it instead of upgrading it?
Every app of them is re-written, as a developer I understand the amount of work they had to put in to achieve this, to align every app for the new design, to think about every app. Really I understand the effort they put in to achieve this, but now you want all this with the latest design and you want it without a single bug?
I would not mind it as much if they let me tweak some of the colors so I can have dark background.
In any case, eventually, the flat-UI proponents will realize that flat design is a subtle skeumorphism, one harking back to the days when graphics hardware were not capable of rendering more realistic images.
Where were all these posts when Windows Phone or Android introduced these UI/UX ideas?
The home-screen icons are probably the worst part of the design. There are certainly good parts as well. But Apple's skeumorphic borders and backgrounds were always distinctively Apple, and contributed to make people love the brand, now the iOS just looks like everything else. Android is flat. Windows is flat. And as people pointed out, what about the colorblind?
>The new iOS is designed for a different environment, and a different maturity of mobile user: one who recognises simplicity for what Jony Ive believes it is. Not something as pedestrian as familiarity or consistency for its own sake, but rather focus and clarity.
Then why does the homescreen look like a high resolution version with garish colors of this from >20 years ago?
http://images.yourdictionary.com/images/computer/_PROGMAN.GI...
If you really want to see "a continued willingness to pursue simplicity ruthlessly." compare the homescreens of Windows Phone with all other mobile platforms including iOS, Android, Blackberry, Jolla, UbuntuOS, Symbian.
For example of a real transition, see Windows Mobile to Windows Phone.
>Too many interfaces run immediately to the well-worn toolbox of simulation and explicitness, imposing a cognitive straitjacket not only on the user, but also the designer. We too easily forget that the only thing that matters to people are their goals: their own tasks, and content. With limited attention, we want to devote our focus to what’s important, rather than distractions and artifice masquerading as design traditions.
I thought "Content over chrome" and "Authentically digital" were Microsoft's buzzwords.
>Apple’s philosophy – and particular genius – has always been in sieving the demands of users, technologies and the cultural zeitgeist, and finding the right hundred things to remove for every one thing to keep.
It's all hardware design guru Ive's genius, indeed, to come up to speed with state-of-the-art UI design in just 7 months and come out with this, which looks like Android fonts and Metro UI had a baby that was dipped in fluorescent colors.
Sure, Android and Windows phone copied a whole lot from iPhone, but I don't see the blogosphere give them credit for, say the one click app installs, and calling them geniuses for doing so.
Sounds like someone who hasn't actually installed it yet. Perhaps it will feel more fluid and responsive when it ships, but that is not the case today.