I use windows phone 8. No they are not the same. The style is similar but the actual functionality is nothing like iOS 7 from what I can see.
It's really obvious on Windows Phone what is a button and what is not apart from a few shitty 3rd party apps. This is regurgitating one of the many fables about WP.
Agreed. I've heard multiple people say that iOS7 looks bad in screenshots, but you really need to use it to understand it. I'd say the exact same has always applied to WP.
Agreed - I never get those people saying that in a flat environment the user can't distinguish different elements. Both iOS 7 and Windows Phone are well done and appeal to me.
And Microsoft deserves some credit for developing their own design language and UX ideas with Metro.
The style is similar but the actual functionality is nothing like iOS 7 from what I can see.
I have two Windows Phone 8 devices and an iPad. And indeed, they are nothing alike. Live tiles are a central concept in WP and does not really have an equivalent in iOS 7.
Another use difference (although it's a bit undermined by Microsoft's Facebook app) is that iOS is app centered ("There's an app for that."), while Windows Phone centers around hubs. E.g. you wouldn't go to the Facebook app to look up e.g. the latest Facebook status updates for a person. You go to that person in the people list (or that person's live tile) where you have information of different social networks integrated.
I don't understand how people keep coming to that conclusion. IMO, iOS 7 looks nothing like WP8, and more than that - IMO it feels nothing like WP8. I don't really know how to quantify it more than that, they just still feel like radically different platforms.
The only difference is that WP Metro looks better imho, but flat has real limitations down the road. I can't see how people will adapt their logos/apps/icons to fully comply with the flat trend - i think it's impossible and you'll end up with a messy mishmash of styles.
"because it is no longer obvious what is a button and what is not." Why are you just repeating things you read in blogs? Can you not think for yourself?
ios and windows phone look and feel nothing like each other.
Honestly I cannot avoid a feel that Apple has lost its sense of taste and iOS UI was redone just because of outside pressure and nobody with enough authority having the final word.
Then maybe Jon Ive is just not very good at software design. His changes to the iOS UI seem like what an amateur designer would do (brighter colors, lots of random ugly icons, inconsistency throughout the UI, and so on). It's like this is his first ride in software design.
I installed iOS7 for the first time this morning, and it's way too early for me to tell. The colour scheme is a bit jarring, but it's also very unfamiliar so time will tell how well I get used to it. Some of the setting and new functionality seem a bit odd or confusing, but no more so than I'd expect with a new interface. The huge configurability in the camera app was a bit of a surprise.
Right now I have absolutely no idea how much I like or dislike the new design. I've been able to do everything (very few things so far to be fair) I wanted to do, and encountered some small frustrations and nice surprises. I'll see how I feel in a week or two.
I've been using iOS 7 since beta 1. My first reaction was: "wtf are these colors?". Now, after some months using it daily I'm used to it and even started to like it.
If anything exactly the reverse has happened. Previously we had some skeuomorphic and some natively digital UIs from Apple because different design groups did things their way.
IMHO a fundamental, ground-up revision of the UI was inevitable and indeed widely expected the moment Johnny Ive was put charge of UI design. I can't see him even considering taking on that job without making sure he had as much authority over that revision as he would ever need.
> The only issue is that after a while some animations start being a lot to sit through each time, especially the multitasking interface animations and app fly-in
This is what annoyed me a lot about WP7, too. Long "cool" animations that slow you down with each action you perfor, get boring very quickly, and eventually become frustrating.
On my Android phone, I've even set the animations to be faster than they normally are, precisely because I want stuff to be done fast, not watch a 1-second long animation each time I tap on the screen.
Setting animation speed is also available for jailbroken iOS devices, if anyone's interested. The Cydia app is called FakeClockUp. I like setting it to 1.4x.
I think it's interesting, but for me one of Apple's weakest points as a company is its taste in software UI. iOS 7 strikes me as catch-up - Apple is late to a party started by Google and Microsoft, and is trying hard to pretend its been there all along - hard to recognise the hint of insecurity behind their ever-slick advertising, but it's there I think. It's a new area for the company, and a good reminder that Apple has its vulnerabilities. It will be interesting to see how things play out as the design language of the big three (A, G, & M) equalises, norms emerge, and the competition begins to really heat up.
If you gonna say UI in general, Apple's iPhone and iPod interface were designed first before Android caught up... Microsoft is even later... just saying. If you are talking about flat UI, then yes, Android advanced it. However, I agree 5c and flat UI make the current Apple reek insecurity.
I'm not talking about UI in general, I'm talking about taste in UI - style and general good looks. I don't know how everyone else feels on this, but for me Apple has stuck far too long to simply ugly styling on both iOS and OS X to convince me that attractive UI is a part of company culture. Some of Google's efforts (Now, Maps) and where Microsoft is heading (e.g. it's new websites, Outlook, Windows 8.1) have all impressed me much more. I think Apple is clearly trying to retrofit company culture here.
But I wouldn't say Apple "reeks" of insecurity... We don't really have any knowledge about how much they have up their sleeves, and they've had a long time over the last half-decade to lay foundations for future maneuvers. Besides, if they can convince the everyman that they thought up modern design all by themselves, they could gain a massive advantage here.
I have always feel the old skeuomorphism UI is a pretty good design. It's quite unique and doesn't give me "color panic attack" because it has depth perception... I like Flat UI that are simple and clean, like few of Microsoft design these days. That's why I don't think iOS 7 gets it.
I think Apple is trying to capture low-end market using iPhone 5c (well... China), yet the production is not efficient enough to make it significantly cheaper. It's also a failure because Apple consumers are not that price sensitive. In addition to gold version of iPhone 5s (for the vain), and flat UI I upgraded last night, if their only innovation is finger print scanner, I'm not impressed at all at Apple this year.
Don't forget that the advancement of Jony Ive to oversee both software and hardware is still a relatively new development at Apple. All the design changes in iOS 7 have been done in little under a year, following the ousting of Scott Forstall.
Apple are definitely playing catch up on the software design front, but signs are that they're heading in the right direction. iOS 8 and OS X 10.10 will be interesting to watch, to see what the Apple's design team can manage with a little more breathing room in which to work.
Just because you have stupid ideas doesn't mean you're not an 'everyman'. People like you critize Apple after every one of their product annoucements while they continue to use their OS. Apple has had the best UI in the business for the past two decades. If you don't see that, you're stupid.
I assume he was talking not just about UI functionality, but UI look and feel. In that later respect, MS and Google definitely were ahead of Apple. Hell, the design trend is even called "the metro look" by some in the design community.
The 5C is a very cheap phone, where cheap is $0 on a contract. That is the pricing that Apple is talking about right now, as the North American market is overwhelmingly driven by contracts.
The 5C is built cheap. It has old, high-yield silicon, a plastic case, and a small screen. It is almost certainly cheaper to manufacture than, for instance, a Nexus 4 (which, as much as Apple wants to criticize "junk", is one hell of a well built device for $199, no contract). Where Apple needs to compete with cheap I have every belief that they will do what is necessary with the pricing of the 5C.
I said it was built cheap. That has literally nothing to do with any other Apple phone, and your counterpoints are not counterpoints at all. Many competitor phones are coming with much more expensive 5"+ 1080p IPS screens.
My counterpoints are not counterpoints. You are coming off as a double-talker. You're asserting that the 5C is _built cheap_ because it has a small screen. I'm saying the screen is the same as all the other iPhones apple currently has on sale. Thus how can the "small screen" be an indication that the 5C is built cheap when it's the same screen as the most expensive iPhone?
I'm not double-talking whatsoever. You are interpreting simple statements in your own, completely broken manner.
The 5C is built cheap as a facet of its entire construction, one part of which is the screen. Your screeds about other devices is utterly and entirely irrelevant, and is your own hangup.
Unless you're really into 'design inside baseball', these kind of comparisons are pretty moot. Sure, Nexus phones have been riding an interesting line between flat and 3 dimensional for a little while, but they've also had quite a few insecure 're-imaginings' getting there, and the Android phones %95 of people have been using are a hodge-podge of Android and Samsung/HTC/Moto too ill considered to even be worth criticism. When I say 'Android UI', absolutely nothing comes to mind because almost everyone I know uses a fairly distinct Android skin. And I don't know anyone with a Windows Phone that doesn't have a Visual Studio license.
All that to say, for all intensive purposes, iOS 7 will be the mainstream's introduction to flat UI elements. My guess is that Samsung will actually drag Android kicking and screaming further into iOS 7's "flat 3-d" model than Matthias Duarte would like.
Siri's search result UI is a game changer and has a real chance of disrupting Google imo. Siri's UI is customized for a mobile device, no ads, and it uses search results from Bing, Twitter, Wikipedia, Yelp and Wolfram Alpha. Missing from the list is Google.
All they need to do is somehow figure out how to add web search to Spotlight, use the exact same UI and Google's in big trouble.
I don't get the hype over flat design. The original iPhone UI was gaudy and overbearing, but the solution ain't a complete 180. Android strikes the right balance between clean looks with just the right amount of shading to lend affordance to the UI.
I posted my experience installing ios7 on my ipad 3 yesterday but deleted it thinking I should give it more time in order to be fair.
I continue to feel it's not an overall positive - glitchy, stuttery and slow animations, degraded battery life, UI inconsistencies, touch lag and inaccuracies ( never thought I would say that about iOS ) are all significant downsides for what is essentially a paint job and a one that I happen to not like very much.
But then maybe it works better on newer hardware. This would be the second time in Apple's update history that older devices got a poor update experience.
Curious what new features people like enough to offset the downsides.
I have iOS 7 on an iPod Touch 5th generation and a iPad 3rd generation, and I will say that it absolutely brought a little bit of Android (well, to be fair earlier generations of Android as this isn't really an issue anymore) to iOS -- touch lag all over the place, often a second+ before the keyboard starts accepting inputs, etc.
My iPad 3 works fine. That said, it's still unacceptable that yours doesn't run well, but at least the experience of others with a similar device suggests that there's a chance you can fix it. Spotlight indexing could be the culprit.
It's gotten little better overnight but the keyboard input lag is still there - I type a bit fast in any text area and characters appears slowly - some time after multiple key presses. So are the slower animations. Lot of people are saying to DFU and reinstall to fix it - I am reluctant as I have to restore a bunch of things - PDFs, iTunesU stuff, music and videos manually.
BTW, restoring fresh to iOS7 did not fix it for me. Text kept appearing slowly in the text input areas - long after keypresses. So I restored back to 6.1.3 and all is well again.
Having installed it on my iPad 2, I'm not noticing anything by way of glitches. battery life seems the same and there's no lag. Extended transition times are likely to get dull quite soon, I suspect and I dislike the icon designs. But overall, positive.
It seems like people are disagreeing with you, but i've installed it on my 4S and the animations are stuttery and slow every now and then. Often enough for it to be annoying and noticeable.
I did a restore using recovery mode to iOS 7 - nothing got better. Then I did a DFU restore to 6.1.3 and boy I am happy. The thing works admirably well. This seals it for me - at least in its current state iOS7 isn't something that is usable on older hardware. (People with iPhone 4 also seem to have similar experiences.)
So much talk about the flat design. People, if the only experience you had with iOS7 is looking at screenshots, then you are not really in position to say anything.
As a tech enthusiast, I've spent the last several months watching the iOS7 design arguments play out online, and I've read a few reviews with interest this week.
So it was with interest that I observed my wife and MIL's reactions to the upgrade on their iPads, which was really no big deal at all.
A cogent reminder to me that there's a vast difference between us and them.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 110 ms ] threadI think they are both less than ideal for this reason, because it is no longer obvious what is a button and what is not.
But it's pretty.
It's really obvious on Windows Phone what is a button and what is not apart from a few shitty 3rd party apps. This is regurgitating one of the many fables about WP.
Thanks for being rational - you are spot on.
And Microsoft deserves some credit for developing their own design language and UX ideas with Metro.
I have two Windows Phone 8 devices and an iPad. And indeed, they are nothing alike. Live tiles are a central concept in WP and does not really have an equivalent in iOS 7.
Another use difference (although it's a bit undermined by Microsoft's Facebook app) is that iOS is app centered ("There's an app for that."), while Windows Phone centers around hubs. E.g. you wouldn't go to the Facebook app to look up e.g. the latest Facebook status updates for a person. You go to that person in the people list (or that person's live tile) where you have information of different social networks integrated.
WP8 and iOS7 are about as different as you could possibly get.
http://www.droid-life.com/2013/06/10/ios7-vs-android-a-quick...
"because it is no longer obvious what is a button and what is not." Why are you just repeating things you read in blogs? Can you not think for yourself?
ios and windows phone look and feel nothing like each other.
Right now I have absolutely no idea how much I like or dislike the new design. I've been able to do everything (very few things so far to be fair) I wanted to do, and encountered some small frustrations and nice surprises. I'll see how I feel in a week or two.
How long have you been using iOS 7 for?
IMHO a fundamental, ground-up revision of the UI was inevitable and indeed widely expected the moment Johnny Ive was put charge of UI design. I can't see him even considering taking on that job without making sure he had as much authority over that revision as he would ever need.
This is what annoyed me a lot about WP7, too. Long "cool" animations that slow you down with each action you perfor, get boring very quickly, and eventually become frustrating.
On my Android phone, I've even set the animations to be faster than they normally are, precisely because I want stuff to be done fast, not watch a 1-second long animation each time I tap on the screen.
But I wouldn't say Apple "reeks" of insecurity... We don't really have any knowledge about how much they have up their sleeves, and they've had a long time over the last half-decade to lay foundations for future maneuvers. Besides, if they can convince the everyman that they thought up modern design all by themselves, they could gain a massive advantage here.
I think Apple is trying to capture low-end market using iPhone 5c (well... China), yet the production is not efficient enough to make it significantly cheaper. It's also a failure because Apple consumers are not that price sensitive. In addition to gold version of iPhone 5s (for the vain), and flat UI I upgraded last night, if their only innovation is finger print scanner, I'm not impressed at all at Apple this year.
Apple are definitely playing catch up on the software design front, but signs are that they're heading in the right direction. iOS 8 and OS X 10.10 will be interesting to watch, to see what the Apple's design team can manage with a little more breathing room in which to work.
But instead Apple chose to price it the same as the previous iPhone 5 and expand their margins.
The 5C is built cheap. It has old, high-yield silicon, a plastic case, and a small screen. It is almost certainly cheaper to manufacture than, for instance, a Nexus 4 (which, as much as Apple wants to criticize "junk", is one hell of a well built device for $199, no contract). Where Apple needs to compete with cheap I have every belief that they will do what is necessary with the pricing of the 5C.
The 5c has the same size screen as every other Apple phone.
The 5C is built cheap as a facet of its entire construction, one part of which is the screen. Your screeds about other devices is utterly and entirely irrelevant, and is your own hangup.
All that to say, for all intensive purposes, iOS 7 will be the mainstream's introduction to flat UI elements. My guess is that Samsung will actually drag Android kicking and screaming further into iOS 7's "flat 3-d" model than Matthias Duarte would like.
That might be the stupidest thing anyone has every said.
All they need to do is somehow figure out how to add web search to Spotlight, use the exact same UI and Google's in big trouble.
Also: Helvetica Neue? What were they thinking?
I continue to feel it's not an overall positive - glitchy, stuttery and slow animations, degraded battery life, UI inconsistencies, touch lag and inaccuracies ( never thought I would say that about iOS ) are all significant downsides for what is essentially a paint job and a one that I happen to not like very much.
But then maybe it works better on newer hardware. This would be the second time in Apple's update history that older devices got a poor update experience.
Curious what new features people like enough to offset the downsides.
i have iOS 7 on an iPhone 5, iPad 2, iPad 3 and iPad mini. no touch lag, "slow animation" or "inaccuracies" so far.
I suspect it has something to do with auto correct/spell check but I haven't tested anything yet.
It's a pita, but it helped me in this situation.
So it was with interest that I observed my wife and MIL's reactions to the upgrade on their iPads, which was really no big deal at all.
A cogent reminder to me that there's a vast difference between us and them.