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Apple Engineers Working Overtime on iOS 7's 'DeForstallization'

Renzatic said:
Is it easy to read? Can you find everything you need right up front without having to dig for it? Is it too crowded? Too sparse? What about the font? Do the icons work well together and present information clearly?
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Absolutely. The functionality comes first. But if it's a matter of decorating the interface to give it a familiar or more traditional feel, that shouldn't get in the way.
Renzatic said:
You can do this without making iBooks look like an actual bookshelf.
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I agree, iBooks interface is pretty dismal. But iCal, Mail, Address Book etc.. are pretty damn good IMHO.
Renzatic said:
Like it or hate it, skeumorphisms are old hat right now. No one likes them anymore.
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Really? Says who? A vote of people here on MacRumors? They're not average users. Engineers at Apple? They're not average users either.

What other small device OS has a more aesthetically pleasing interface to everyday users? Android? Hardly. Windows phone? Good grief.
 
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Larry-K said:
About time they got rid of all the cutesy-poo junk.
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I'm sure that shouldn't amuse me as much as it does...

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musio said:
Bring back Forstallllll!


Is this more media hating on him? I love the wood, the leather and the tape reels. I like the shredder in passbook. Nice touches to software that works. If I wanted a flat lifeless windows phone i would have bought one.
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Flat design doesn't necessarily mean 'boring'. One tiny example in the current iOS is the little 'refresh' gizmo (pull down at the top of the mail app) that was introduced.

It's obviously 'flat' in its appearance but it's behaviour is both instructive as to what it's doing whilst also being very tactile and enjoyable to use.

If the new iOS sees more of this sort of smart UX design then I'm all for it. In the same way that Apple products grew up from the candy coloured iMacs of the 90's, their operating systems are doing the same.
 
Karma*Police said:
Actionable notifications, yes, status bar notifications, I sincerely hope not. The status bar, even on my HTC with 4.7" of screen real estate, can only show so many icons, making it pretty useless and cluttered looking. Even worse, if I download 5 things from google play, it shows the google play icon 5 times instead of just once... really, really stupid. I find icon badges to be far more useful; even more so than the notification center itself.
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Totally agree with how Android does it, doesn't mean Apple would have to do it that way as well, they could just have a little icon with a number or something that shows how many you have, like how Bite sms does it. That way there is only one icon, and it doesn't clutter things up like Android does, I couldn't figure out why that happened for the short time I had a GS3 last year either..
 
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Jayomat said:
No offense my friend, but I've you'd know how software-engineering works, you'd know that "hire more engineers" is the best way to make your product fail big time, especially if you do it with quite some time into the project.

x*engineers = codeTime/x is not a linear equation ;)

ON-TOPIC:

just make sure there is a jailbreak in time... I'm looking at you, devteam ;) I don't think they can improve iOS by so much, that I would ditch my jailbreak tweaks....
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The topic suggested they were pulling other engineers. Are you saying more engineers would not be the best move if they're coming in with little knowledge of the project at hand? Companies move people around all the time anyway no matter how many are there.

burtba said:
I do understand to make a sleek non-over bloated OS it's probably important to minimize the code and parts that are non essential such as stitching, felt look etc, so let hope this is being to free up space to add new features
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It's meaningless unless it has to render specific blending modes and alphas. Bitmap graphics take very little overhead as someone else mentioned. Very dark backgrounds might save some battery life in terms of the energy needed to power the display.

DesertEagle said:
Brooks' law applies in particular to projects that are late in the first place.

Fortunately, software engineering has improved since then. Today, there are better methods to minimize overhead and adding new functionality rapidly. However, estimating how many working-hours a task will take to complete is the one part of software engineering which has not evolved since the 60s.
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Perhaps that would be different if results were always predictable and changes never came up.
 
Something that just came to mind on this - how much can Apple really do when most of what you see is App based? The standard rounded square icon at a set size will be a limiting factor because it will take all of the individual developers to update their own icons for any change to work. Without having the iOS looking very disjointed and messy for months they would have to keep that basic look wouldn't they? Hmm.
 
Flatter

Unless you explain what the hell it is, can you please stop using the word "Flatter" in every gd article about io7!? It is just marketing crap, there is no such thing as "flatter" design!
 
thekev said:
The topic suggested they were pulling other engineers. Are you saying more engineers would not be the best move if they're coming in with little knowledge of the project at hand? Companies move people around all the time anyway no matter how many are there.
[...]
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Yes, I'm saying that if you are behind, hiring more developers is not the way to go. Too many cooks spoil the broth. Please remember I was responding to the idea of hiring more erngineers to speed up the process. If you start a "new project", you may do that, but typically, more developers do not produce better code, nor finish sooner, if you bring them in in the middle of a project, and I'm talking about none trivial code.
 
just wanted to add my $0.02

I'm not a huge fan of overly skeuomorphic interfaces, especially those that have weak ties to the modern activity you're attempting, but I urge extreme caution with Apple on reducing this...
Apps like Garage band, newstand, game center are all "Attractive" ( in their own way ) that users *instantly* know what they are for, and how to use them *because* of the skeuomorphic design.
If you remove this, you risk truly destroying the app with a huge segment of your userbase. You will lose approachability.
 
malexandria said:
Unless you explain what the hell it is, can you please stop using the word "Flatter" in every gd article about io7!? It is just marketing crap, there is no such thing as "flatter" design!
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This.

The drones on this web board are basing all their assumptions off a report from someone who obviously did not have access to a thesaurus when he needed it most. Ive's not perfect, but I trust him to get it right. Apple (normally) doesn't make dramatic changes to existing software, I expect a nice smooth evolutionary design in iOS7 with the Forstall designs disappearing and new ones blending in seamlessly with the rest of the apps, to the point you won't notice what's different. The hallmark of good design.

musio said:
Bring back Forstallllll!
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Forstall was by all accounts an ***hole to work for. Or even worse, an ***hole wanna-be, because he thought being an ***hole is how you advance in the corporate world. Do you really want someone like that in charge at Apple? I don't, it's a sure-fire way to get good employees to leave in droves. I don't care if his designs were good or bad, he was a cancer that needed removed from the company.
 
BRLawyer said:
The only thing remotely innovative/exciting I can remember over the last 18 months is Fusion Drive. Does this answer your question?
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Now this is really stupid.

Firstly, can your recall how long of a time span it took between the iPod and iPhone? A heck of a load more than 18 months, don't you think?

Also, you seem to forget about the extremely high resolution displays that they you in their tablets and laptops. But anyways, I'd you thi k that the products lack innovation, it might help to at least read up on a simple article or use common sense. Those products were Jobs' products. They were in the pipeline under Jobs. But no, blame tim cook on all of it. He should rush out something in one and a half years. He's to blame for the products Steve jobs did.

Absolutely pathetic.
 
Well the idea of icons on a desktop is from 1984.

I'm not massively bothered by the Skeuomorphism, for all the novice users of iOS it's probably quite approachable and friendly to see wood veneer and leather.

Anyway, it's time Apple sorted out the keyboard. Either allow thirdparties to offer alternatives or make a new one. Generic Text editing on iOS is terrible. It's about the only thing Android seriously beats them with.
 
alephnull12 said:
Whatever. It's not really relevant to my post anyway, which was really 99% about skeumorphism.

OK, I edited it. Doesn't change anything important that I had to say.

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Also true.

Although, I have to think that Maps is not as bad as people seem to say it is.

The taller iphone seems silly to me. My wife has one. I see no reason to upgrade.

I don't really see the benefit of the lightning connector. The old one is very durable. Lightning just seems to break compatibility with people's currently held chargers and peripheral equipment and make it more likely for someone upgrading to move to a difference brand of phone.

Ditto for Magsafe 2. Seems to be an unwise decision, provides no serious benefits that I can think of, and penalizes people for brand loyalty.

These are not good improvements and seem to be change for the sake of change with few if any real-world benefits.

Unless there are real features / innovations, it also hearkens back to the bad old days of the 90's when there were upgrades to UI for Mac OS 7.x 8.x 9.x etc.. with little change to the underlying technology.

OSX appearance has been pretty stable, consistent, and selling well for years and years. If it's not boke, why fix it?
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If my understanding is correct, lightning is apple's plan to future proof their connector for the next decade. 30-pin simply supported too many interfaces, some of which were long obsolete. Lightning does away with the redundant ones and consolidates the rest into a smaller, slimmer form factor.

Also, because lightning cables apparently contain their own active circuitry, this lets apple push firmware updates to them via the iOS device, which theoretically let them support whatever new standard gets released in future.

I am not getting the full picture, but it sounds very clever.
 
JDee said:
To be honest I don't see what the big deal over getting rid of this 'skeuomorphism' is. I don't mind it. They can make other changes to make iOS 7 radically different.
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Apple didn't just make mobile devices, it made artistically-rendered mobile devices, right down to the leather and felt look-and-feel of a game scoreboard (which would've looked better as a bookie chalkboard, but who am I to judge?).
 
Mr Fusion said:
Forstall was by all accounts an ***hole to work for. Or even worse, an ***hole wanna-be, because he thought being an ***hole is how you advance in the corporate world. Do you really want someone like that in charge at Apple? I don't, it's a sure-fire way to get good employees to leave in droves. I don't care if his designs were good or bad, he was a cancer that needed removed from the company.
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It's obvious that the schism created by his love for skeuomorphism, split the design team at Apple.
It makes him a weak leader, but how does it make him an ***hole?
 
Mr Fusion said:
Forstall was by all accounts an ***hole to work for. Or even worse, an ***hole wanna-be, because he thought being an ***hole is how you advance in the corporate world. Do you really want someone like that in charge at Apple? I don't, it's a sure-fire way to get good employees to leave in droves. I don't care if his designs were good or bad, he was a cancer that needed removed from the company.
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I was under the impression Jobs was an ****** too to work for....
 
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