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Jony Ive shrunk the OS

Started by HappyTree, May 30, 2013, 02:44:35 AM

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HappyTree

Oh God, yet another "design guru" who thinks he knows best.

"I don't like rounded or colourful things so I'm going to change the look of the most successful mobile interface of all time. Then I will have what I want and force everyone else to have it too - a flat, monochrome world of banality," opined Ive. "I also drown kittens for fun," he added with a twinkle on his eye. But not a 3D twinkle, a flat, black-and-white one of course!

What an arse.

http://9to5mac.com/2013/05/24/jony-ives-new-look-for-ios-7-black-white-and-flat-all-over/

So what do you prefer: flat or rounded?

Personally, I like the buttons to resemble real-life objects. They feel familiar, organic and friendly. The entire design of the desktop came about to simulate, well, a desk top. It's intuitive to have bits of paper spread out on a flat surface so you can look at them.

I don't hate Windows 8's flatter buttons, but I don't particularly like them either. Apparently Apple users will feel "confused" by how the notepad has a yellow paper background and other apps have blue or metal or green felt. Whoa there cowboy, the public has been saying for the last few years. We are so confused because different things look different.

Are all technology developers complete idiots or do they have to learn it somewhere? Bollocks!

Replies From View

QuoteJony Ive has inspired the iOS design team to replace many of the linen and leather textures found in iOS, such as in the iPad Calendar app, with flat white and black coloring. For instance, Apple's Notification Center drop-down panel currently has a dark linen background. In iOS 7, according to people familiar with the software, this design becomes a dark grey/black color with white text.

Cor!  Inspiring!

HappyTree

The dark linen texture is the only good thing about the pull-down notification centre. I currently have a nice brushed metal texture on my Firefox menu bar background. Textures are nice, that's why they were invented!

Ooh, let's go all minimalist. No. The Windows phone/8/Xbox flat boxes look absolute shite. Why are they now being copied by the company who has been handing MS its "ass" on a plate in this arena?

I smell a conspirathy!

mrfridge

WE FEAR CHANGE...

Ives knows his shit, presumably he's not just though 'fuck it, let's make it minimal for the sake of it'. We've not seen it so who knows, it could be bad, it could be great.

Apple have not really updated the look/ core functionality of iOS for 6 years so it probably is about time someone had a go at improving it. I'm pretty sure it's going to be more than a lick of paint, people's habits in their use of touchscreen devices is a lot more widely documented now so I suspect a lot of the interactions will have been tweaked at the very least.

As far as the flat/rounded, real/not real goes, I'm not too fussed as long as it works well. I'd probably lean more towards a minimal aesthetic but that's me.

If anyone could be described as a 'Design Guru' I'd say it would be Ive so I'm not sure why you make the assumption he's talking out of his arse. The guy's designed some of the most iconic 'things' of the last 20 years. And they're not just 'good-because-they're-popular', most Apple products objectively look amazing.

In conclusion: NO!

Zetetic

I wonder how much this will fuck over OS X.

olliebean

You know something's gone wrong when Apple start copying Microsoft.


Replies From View

I must admit, I'm not a fan of the leather look of the calendar, the wooden look of the bookshelf, etc.  The podcast application imitated a reel-to-reel tape machine (complete with animation of the tape gradually shifting from one spool to the other as they span) for a few months after iOS 6 came out, and it was a bit tacky and was removed in a recentish update.  I'm happy to lose a lot of this pointlessly "realistic" stuff, but some of the shading and animation effects are quite nice.  I'll be curious to see what the updates will involve beyond that, and how much they just seem designed to make my devices one step more obsolete.

Someone told me that the more "realistic" look of some of the iOS 6 stuff was the brainchild of the same (now fired) person responsible for Apple maps.  Haven't been arsed to look that up yet to see if it's true.

Blumf

Quote from: syntaxerror on May 30, 2013, 12:58:13 PM
http://www.gizmodo.co.uk/2013/05/what-is-flat-design/ Worth a read

QuoteSkeuomorphism in digital space dates back to Apple's first consumer GUI, from 1984, which introduced the concept of a "desktop" and icons that looked like folders and pieces of paper

<cough>Xerox<cough>1970s<cough>Doug Engelbart<cough>1960s<cough>

Bloody Mac fanboys! Otherwise okay article, I guess.

Still Not George

Quote from: mrfridge on May 30, 2013, 09:05:03 AM
If anyone could be described as a 'Design Guru' I'd say it would be Ive so I'm not sure why you make the assumption he's talking out of his arse. The guy's designed some of the most iconic 'things' of the last 20 years. And they're not just 'good-because-they're-popular', most Apple products objectively look amazing.
I highlighted the word that demonstrates why you're an idiot. You can thank me later.

mrfridge

Quote from: Still Not George on May 30, 2013, 04:39:56 PM
I highlighted the word that demonstrates why you're an idiot. You can thank me later.

Not sure what I did. Explain for the stupid person please.

Still Not George

Aesthetic qualities are inherently subjective. One man's "glorious perfect iconography" is another man's "try-hard nonsense designed for idiots".

mobias

Quote from: Still Not George on May 30, 2013, 05:06:54 PM
Aesthetic qualities are inherently subjective. One man's "glorious perfect iconography" is another man's "try-hard nonsense designed for idiots".

You're not fooling anyone SNG. We all know you'll be camping outside your local Apple store to be the first to get this when its released on the new iPhone. My theory is you have somewhere between and 15 and 20 Apple devices that sit around your home relatively unused. You just love to sit and look at them and marvel at their beauty.


biggytitbo

IOS does look awfully dated these days and I think a redesign is long overdue. Compared to the slickness of android 4.1 all those bevels and rounded corners look like something from the early 2000s.  I have less of a problem with the skeuomorphism though, I think they could keep that and just ditch the horrible bevels.

HappyTree

On the left, a bevelled button with glass effect. On the right, a plain green square of colour.

Oh I'm so confused! In fact I'm going to sand everything down around me and cover all surfaces with non-reflective paint so I don't get confused in real life too. How have I been coping all these years? :-D

Zetetic

I suppose 'skeuomorphism' conflates two quite different aspects of UI/UX design. On the one hand you've got stuff like the reel-to-reel animation, and on the other you've got the attempts to make regions you're expected to poke (either with a finger or a cursor) look a bit like real buttons. The former is mostly a matter of prettiness (with a slightly dubious veneer of communication), while the other is much more arguably useful in leading you around the interface (all the more so with touch interfaces rather than mouse-driven ones and the like).

Abandoning the latter involves finding some new visual vocabulary to describe what you're meant to do with stuff - which isn't a novel problem and after all we cope with hyperlinks being mostly marked out by being underlined and blue (and context), and 'buttons' only very slightly resembling anything real (border and different background colour).

Personally my worry is that this won't really be done very well and the more esoteric and less readable (from real interactions or previous virtual ones) - which seems a plausible outcome of a aggressive reaction against 'skeuomorphism' - then the more that people won't conform to it anyway, wilfully or otherwise.

(And increasing inconsistency that we've seen on Apple's systems over the last 5 years or so at least anyway, resulting from an this opposing infatuation with wood textures and the like leading anyone developing for a system to think that custom look-and-feel is tolerable for every fucking application. It's not as bad as Windows yet, because at least there's some attempt at polish and some sort of very vague unifying understanding behind it still[nb]Or so it seems to me. Similar to how various *nix interfaces, while often different enough to annoy the hell out of you, still feel that they're designed by people from a shared culture.[/nb].)

biggytitbo

The advantage Apple have is the vast majority of people using IOS7 will have a certain level of sophistication with using a mobile OS so it's not really necessary to ram home the point that something is clickable by giving it a great ugly bevel.

Zetetic

#17
As I thought I made clear - I don't have a fundamental problem with adopting a new approach (or grammar or vocabulary) to communicating interactivity and the like.

My fear is more about obviousness and immediate intelligibility - not so much for end users, because we're capable of learning to read interfaces very quickly - but for designers. The more aggressively we move away from stuff that's influenced by existing visual languages - including that which follows from the real world -, the more difficult it is for designers (particularly poor designers, as the majority are) to be consistent and at all coherent.

Edit: Clearly if everyone plays nicely at the start then perhaps all will be well. Given how little attention people do pay to UI guidelines and the like, I'm not optimistic.

HappyTree

It's hardly massively inconvenient, but one example from the other day: Yahoo Mail has now decided to adopt this less immediately informative minimalist style in their input box toolbar. To insert an emoticon there used to be a little yellow emoticon. What could be more indicative and easy to spot in a row of functions than a button that is actually exactly the same as the thing it's designed to insert? And it being yellow made it stand out.

Now it's dark grey line art on light grey background.

Exhibit A:



Ok, it's not the most difficult thing in the world to click on, but before I didn't even really need to focus on anything, I just went for the yellow splodge. Now it's all flat and Metro-sexual. Bollocks. If I liked minimalist functionality I'd go and live in Milton Keynes.

That's what you get for using emoticons.



;-)

Blumf

Similar complaints have been levelled at MS Visual Studio 2012:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/08/28/visual_studio_2012_review/
http://www.i-programmer.info/news/177-windows-8/4324-microsoft-ignores-usability-and-users-vs-2012-keeps-all-cap-menus.html

There's a lot of not very talented or intelligent graphic designers infecting the software industry. Web 2.0 blow-out.

Zetetic

Quote from: HappyTree on June 01, 2013, 07:24:47 PM
It's hardly massively inconvenient, but one example from the other day...
Similarly Apple has actually formalised a move away from being able to discriminate toolbar buttons based on broad outline or by overall colour. Which seems crazy to me. Is there a good reason for this?

olliebean

It's the new paradigm in UI design, isn't it? GMail's redesign last year was along the same lines.

Jerzy Bondov

Quote from: Blumf on June 01, 2013, 08:55:44 PM
Similar complaints have been levelled at MS Visual Studio 2012:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/08/28/visual_studio_2012_review/
http://www.i-programmer.info/news/177-windows-8/4324-microsoft-ignores-usability-and-users-vs-2012-keeps-all-cap-menus.html

There's a lot of not very talented or intelligent graphic designers infecting the software industry. Web 2.0 blow-out.
The fucking all caps menus in the newest Office are an absolute abomination. Revolting stuff. How many people must have been involved in that decision, and why did nobody say 'this is an abomination'?

Blumf

I noticed the Windows 8 calender app whilst wandering through a shop:



That's awful; no space for items to breath, washed out colours making it hard to snap your vision to things like day or date. For a 'minimalist' design it's horribly cluttered and messy.

Zetetic

Quote from: olliebean on June 01, 2013, 10:38:01 PM
It's the new paradigm in UI design, isn't it?
That's just restating the facts, that's not a reason.

olliebean

Quote from: Zetetic on June 02, 2013, 09:06:08 AM
That's just restating the facts, that's not a reason.

It's the reason why everyone's jumping on the bandwagon. It's not the reason why the bandwagon is going in that particular direction in the first place.

biggytitbo

I think it's quit nice - http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-ios-7-photos-2013-6


Just as nice as it was when Windows phone and Android first designed it.

Pseudopath

Quote from: biggytitbo on June 10, 2013, 10:37:07 PM
Just as nice as it was when Windows phone and Android first designed it.

Fucking hell. They've even ripped off the Roboto font from ICS/Jelly Bean.

Zetetic

I think this is the first time in years that I've completely missed the WWDC until the Keynote was actually happening[nb]Putting it on a par with Cheltenham Science Week and The Hay Festival[/nb]. Hmm.

From the few screenshots, which are hard to judge from, I don't find it entirely easy to 'read' and it doesn't - judging by inspection here and now - seem trivial to learn to read properly either.