I was thinking the same thing last night. But then again the OS also exists independent of apps themselves. There's a lot there to clean up. I hope to God they work on Notes next. It's an abysmal use of the iPads screen in landscape, and frankly is highly unusable by Apple's standards and is butt ugly. I'd also like iOS 7 to see Apple introduce to iPad dedicated default Calculator and Weather apps. They would be highly useful.
Good point about OS v. app. What is Apple interested in "cleaning up" first?
I am not a fan of the Win8 design. It looks pretty enough but it lacks sophistication. I am certain Ive will approach 'flattening' out OSX/IOS in a much more thoughtful and precise manner. 'Flat' is useful as a broad design category but in and of itself it does not imply 'good' or 'bad'. In my book the challenge of creating really good minimalist design is much harder than a 'realistic' approach, or one that uses skeuomorphic design elements as in OSX. There is less to hide behind and the importance of precision and subtlety is key.
"Taste" is a variable thing though. One person's "tasteful" is another person's horror.
Taste in music, yes, but taste in deciding how many buttons an interface must have and how they look is a different matter. Besides, most people with good taste have logical arguments for why they would like something a certain way.
The same analogy has been used by a few people on the forum. The Mac Pro isn't Apple's 'halo car'. A halo car is something that people with everyday cars desire and they tend to be sports cars. People with iPads, iMacs, MBPs etc don't want to have a large workstation. This was all talked about in the following threads where the Chevy was used as an example of the halo car:
Feel free to bump those. If you check out NVidia's recent presentation, you can see them using remote servers running 8 GPUs and allowing remote sessions on MBPs as well as interactive movie quality visual effects on 100+ GPUs:
That's something a single workstation can't achieve natively. The thing with halo cars is there's nothing better. Servers will always outclass a single workstation. It doesn't make them entirely irrelevant but the analogy being used doesn't hold up at all. It's just more noise about why Apple shouldn't change things.
To bring it more in line with the thread, Apple makes changes for the better whether it's hardware or software design. They rarely regress what they do. UIs have always been overly flashy, even unintentionally because UI elements have a purpose and the design tends to highlight that purpose and inadvertently makes it stand out. It's like the close/resize/minimize buttons. The colors are there to help distinguish their function but the colors make them stand out because they contrast with everything else.
Sometimes it's good, sometimes it's not. The toning down of aqua was good, the scrollbars are much nicer now. The removal of colors from the home folder icons and iTunes shortcuts was not necessarily so good because it makes it harder to quickly distinguish the folders. It does arguably look more refined though. They might make iOS look more refined and elegant at the expense of efficiency. Say they changed the red color on the delete buttons to grey. It might look more refined but it doesn't convey a sense that pressing the button is something you might want to think twice about. Colors and shapes have associations that are shared by a lot of people and without them, they can make things look nicer but take away some meaning.
I don't think they will make the decisions lightly (like 'get rid of the leather'). Some people seem to assume that Forstall was responsible for every element of bad design in iOS and Ive will right every wrong. There's no way that the entire design rested on one person so there will be elements in iOS that people don't like and that teams of people decided was ok and will continue to decide are ok.
But despite the added input, no drastic modifications to iOS are expected for the near future.
So it seems we'll have to wait for iOS 8 in 2014 to see what Ive and his colleagues have come up with. Shame really I was hoping to see the new 'flat' by Jony in iOS 7.
Shouldn't they just make iOS more like Mac OS X... for example bringing in the app switcher from Mac OS X into iOS 7 or allowing applications to be switched from left to right... heck why didn't they just combine both the UI teams from the Mac OS X and the ones that worked on iOS... Lately I haven't seen any changes to either OS, so I would think something big is going to happen (most likely a dual screen macbook with the bottom being multitouch). I predict a much better iOS because Jony Ive does know a lot about design. It just needs to be more dynamic like they did with iTunes 11. Like for instance dragging a video file would show a pane on the right side of the screen that allowed it to be transferred to another iDevice or something like that integrated with iCloud.
The same analogy has been used by a few people on the forum. The Mac Pro isn't Apple's 'halo car'. A halo car is something that people with everyday cars desire and they tend to be sports cars.
That's a good point. But his post contains many salient points and he always brings an interesting perspective.
If flat means more grayness, then god help us. I cannot stand the finder ever since the color left the icons.
A-freakin'-MEN! I can't think of any other change to the look of the OS over the years that even got my attention, much less caused me distraction, but the monochrome icons drive me NUTS!
I used to instinctively click the appropriate one automatically, now it seems like I have to stop, look and choose every time. It's not a matter of caring how it looks, it's a constant disruption of my Thomas-the-Train-of-thought. Apparently my so-called brain responds better to coloured shapes than monochromatic ones.
In general I agree with the concept you put forward. I do find one aspect you pointed out to actually be useful though.
In the image above the shadowing gives the impression that the top and bottom panels are fixed in space above a scrolling list below. To my slowpoke brain, that kind of visual cue helps me quickly and intuitively understand the controls -- the top and bottom and stay put, while the "layer" below them scrolls underneath them.
In that case the skeumorphism is not just about appearance, it's a functional part of the interface.
I hope Ivy doesn't change too much with the os, honestly I like it the way it is. I don't want to see drastic change and hopefully they don't implement widgets and live wallpapers and a bunch of software features that nobody will use anyways. I like ios the way it is and they shouldn't change what their core beliefs are.
Still, there are aspect of it that could be changed to enhance ease-of-use. For example, I've seen several posts on this forum about the nuisance of having to drill down through settings menus to get at commonly changed switches like WiFi and Bluetooth. The addition of some kind of "macro" icon would allow those people to be happier and more productive while not having any affect whatsoever on those who don't care.
Comments
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ireland
I was thinking the same thing last night. But then again the OS also exists independent of apps themselves. There's a lot there to clean up. I hope to God they work on Notes next. It's an abysmal use of the iPads screen in landscape, and frankly is highly unusable by Apple's standards and is butt ugly. I'd also like iOS 7 to see Apple introduce to iPad dedicated default Calculator and Weather apps. They would be highly useful.
Good point about OS v. app. What is Apple interested in "cleaning up" first?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Pendergast
And the Podcast app features skeumoorphism.
It can be done right.
The update does? Where?
Quote:
Originally Posted by paxman
I am not a fan of the Win8 design. It looks pretty enough but it lacks sophistication. I am certain Ive will approach 'flattening' out OSX/IOS in a much more thoughtful and precise manner. 'Flat' is useful as a broad design category but in and of itself it does not imply 'good' or 'bad'. In my book the challenge of creating really good minimalist design is much harder than a 'realistic' approach, or one that uses skeuomorphic design elements as in OSX. There is less to hide behind and the importance of precision and subtlety is key.
Spot on.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Gazoobee
"Taste" is a variable thing though. One person's "tasteful" is another person's horror.
Taste in music, yes, but taste in deciding how many buttons an interface must have and how they look is a different matter. Besides, most people with good taste have logical arguments for why they would like something a certain way.
The same analogy has been used by a few people on the forum. The Mac Pro isn't Apple's 'halo car'. A halo car is something that people with everyday cars desire and they tend to be sports cars. People with iPads, iMacs, MBPs etc don't want to have a large workstation. This was all talked about in the following threads where the Chevy was used as an example of the halo car:
http://forums.appleinsider.com/t/152825/future-of-mac-pro/80
http://forums.appleinsider.com/t/156051/mac-pro-no-longer-available-from-european-online-apple-stores/40
Feel free to bump those. If you check out NVidia's recent presentation, you can see them using remote servers running 8 GPUs and allowing remote sessions on MBPs as well as interactive movie quality visual effects on 100+ GPUs:
That's something a single workstation can't achieve natively. The thing with halo cars is there's nothing better. Servers will always outclass a single workstation. It doesn't make them entirely irrelevant but the analogy being used doesn't hold up at all. It's just more noise about why Apple shouldn't change things.
To bring it more in line with the thread, Apple makes changes for the better whether it's hardware or software design. They rarely regress what they do. UIs have always been overly flashy, even unintentionally because UI elements have a purpose and the design tends to highlight that purpose and inadvertently makes it stand out. It's like the close/resize/minimize buttons. The colors are there to help distinguish their function but the colors make them stand out because they contrast with everything else.
Sometimes it's good, sometimes it's not. The toning down of aqua was good, the scrollbars are much nicer now. The removal of colors from the home folder icons and iTunes shortcuts was not necessarily so good because it makes it harder to quickly distinguish the folders. It does arguably look more refined though. They might make iOS look more refined and elegant at the expense of efficiency. Say they changed the red color on the delete buttons to grey. It might look more refined but it doesn't convey a sense that pressing the button is something you might want to think twice about. Colors and shapes have associations that are shared by a lot of people and without them, they can make things look nicer but take away some meaning.
I don't think they will make the decisions lightly (like 'get rid of the leather'). Some people seem to assume that Forstall was responsible for every element of bad design in iOS and Ive will right every wrong. There's no way that the entire design rested on one person so there will be elements in iOS that people don't like and that teams of people decided was ok and will continue to decide are ok.
So it seems we'll have to wait for iOS 8 in 2014 to see what Ive and his colleagues have come up with. Shame really I was hoping to see the new 'flat' by Jony in iOS 7.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ireland
Gruber might be clever, but Siracusa is a genius!
That's using the term genius rather lightly, with all due respect to Siracusa.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ireland
Gruber might be clever, but Siracusa is a genius!
That's using the term genius rather lightly, with all due respect to Siracusa.
Shouldn't they just make iOS more like Mac OS X... for example bringing in the app switcher from Mac OS X into iOS 7 or allowing applications to be switched from left to right... heck why didn't they just combine both the UI teams from the Mac OS X and the ones that worked on iOS... Lately I haven't seen any changes to either OS, so I would think something big is going to happen (most likely a dual screen macbook with the bottom being multitouch). I predict a much better iOS because Jony Ive does know a lot about design. It just needs to be more dynamic like they did with iTunes 11. Like for instance dragging a video file would show a pane on the right side of the screen that allowed it to be transferred to another iDevice or something like that integrated with iCloud.
@Ireland
If the tiles had transparency I bet they would have sold a lot better. Oh and if they had a Metro On/Off Switch built in and advertised it as well.
There's so much to fix:
My full list is here.
Quote:
Originally Posted by stelligent
Good point about OS v. app. What is Apple interested in "cleaning up" first?
Well, you spend more time in the apps, so my direction to them would be to take the worst apps and do those first.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Marvin
The same analogy has been used by a few people on the forum. The Mac Pro isn't Apple's 'halo car'. A halo car is something that people with everyday cars desire and they tend to be sports cars.
That's a good point. But his post contains many salient points and he always brings an interesting perspective.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ankleskater
That's using the term genius rather lightly, with all due respect to Siracusa.
Do you know what the word means? I'm not being sarcastic. Look up the dictionary definition.
Quote:
Originally Posted by darkdefender
@Ireland
If the tiles had transparency I bet they would have sold a lot better. Oh and if they had a Metro On/Off Switch built in and advertised it as well.
Are you talking to me? I'm confused.
Quote:
Originally Posted by DarenDino
Never mind pissballing about with this, where is my effing Mac Pro?????
Seriously. I cant believe its taking this long. Good thing my 2006 Intel-Mac Pro is still kicking so much ass.
Quote:
Originally Posted by techno
If flat means more grayness, then god help us. I cannot stand the finder ever since the color left the icons.
A-freakin'-MEN! I can't think of any other change to the look of the OS over the years that even got my attention, much less caused me distraction, but the monochrome icons drive me NUTS!
I used to instinctively click the appropriate one automatically, now it seems like I have to stop, look and choose every time. It's not a matter of caring how it looks, it's a constant disruption of my Thomas-the-Train-of-thought. Apparently my so-called brain responds better to coloured shapes than monochromatic ones.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ClemyNX
In general I agree with the concept you put forward. I do find one aspect you pointed out to actually be useful though.
In the image above the shadowing gives the impression that the top and bottom panels are fixed in space above a scrolling list below. To my slowpoke brain, that kind of visual cue helps me quickly and intuitively understand the controls -- the top and bottom and stay put, while the "layer" below them scrolls underneath them.
In that case the skeumorphism is not just about appearance, it's a functional part of the interface.
Quote:
Originally Posted by quest01
I hope Ivy doesn't change too much with the os, honestly I like it the way it is. I don't want to see drastic change and hopefully they don't implement widgets and live wallpapers and a bunch of software features that nobody will use anyways. I like ios the way it is and they shouldn't change what their core beliefs are.
Still, there are aspect of it that could be changed to enhance ease-of-use. For example, I've seen several posts on this forum about the nuisance of having to drill down through settings menus to get at commonly changed switches like WiFi and Bluetooth. The addition of some kind of "macro" icon would allow those people to be happier and more productive while not having any affect whatsoever on those who don't care.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Rogifan
[...] But Ive told the BBC in an interview that the design he practices is "part fine art, part engineering".
You have? When did you do that?
What? Oh.
Sorry, I just assume that I'm the only one who still uses apostrophes.