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

ChrisA said:
Mac OS, the iWork suite and the iLife suite, Aperture and Logic have just sat there doing nothing for years now. Only tiny incremental updates.
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Maybe they should put a ribbon interface on it, ya know, to shake things up a bit.
 
Should look something like this.....???

1671459-slide-1280-ios-86-photo1.jpg
 
First of all some of you need to chill out, you haven't even seen iOS 7 yet and you already know that it's gonna be boring and a ripoff of this and that. Second Notes and Game Center look awful, extremely dated and painful to the eye so I'm all for it, it's 2013 not 1996 and things look a certain way nowadays (take a look at the new Yahoo weather app to see what I'm talking about). Third they seem like they are ready to finally introduce more ways to get to the content you want, which was getting kind of ridiculous (the lack of it). App blocks was cool for 2009 but we need to evolve. I was very skeptical about where Apple was going with iPhone and iOS now I'm holding breath to see what they are working on.
 
They are likely moving to design that is more capable of accepting theme customizations.

Skeumorphic design would probably cause difficulties when allowing for customization of colors and such.
 
Before *everyone* piles on against skeumorphic interfaces, remember why they exist. With a visual theme they communicate the purpose of an app or a process, in a way that is analagous to objects and processes one uses off-computer to do similar tasks. I cite "notepad". It looks and acts like one, "plus the computer benefits". Just by seeing it you already know how to use it and what to expect!

It is a good thing.

Rocketman

OBTW, "flatter iOS7" in some sense means "more like Windows 8".
 
ChrisA said:
It used to be that Apple did stuff that mattered. Now they simply change some colors and call it "new". They need to think about what is UNDER the color scheme.

The BIG thing they need is to shake up the infrastructure and market dynamics of the App Store. It is filled with a bizzilion trivial apps. I predicted this long ago. With a race to lower prices no one wants to invest development effort so you get "junk" times a million. Who would want to invest $20 million in an App? Only a few like Apple, Microsoft, Google and so on. They need to give developers a good reason to invest in larger more sophisticated apps.

But that would required more than simply changing the color scheme.
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What's with all of the false choices I'm hearing? If Ive flattens out iOS, it will become Windows? If they change the look and feel, they can't also improve the services? (BTW, that's probably Eddy Cue's department, not Ive)

I trust Jony Ive's design sense 100% - perhaps even more than Steve Jobs'. If people are curious where a "flatter" Apple look may take us, I think that the redesigned lockscreen music controls, iTunes 11, Music app, and Phone keypad are good indicators.

12 years on, I think we can put Aqua behind us, can't we? :D
 
I'm glad the skeuomorphic design is going, but I'm hoping they've got their graphic designers working overtime on the new look rather than the engineers.

That said, I'm also hoping that they do have a few engineers busy on reversing some of the regressive functionality such as the page flip between months on Calendar. Touchscreens allow us freedom from such hindrances, so only a fool would faithfully recreate them.
 
Bloomberg is wha?

Re-read this like 10 times.... "According to a report from Bloomberg earlier today, Apple has been forced to delay its internal timelines for iOS 7"

TRANSLATION - Bloomberg Meeting Minutes with staff, "The upside folks, if we're wrong, no one could ever know! Apple never reveals it's internal timeline stuff anyway!!!!"
 
I, personally, am looking forward to the adults being back in charge at Apple.

The way things are going I am leaning toward the view that despite Ive being close to Jobs, his respect for the late apple leader made him let Jobs lead apple down the wrong road from a design standpoint.

Now that Ive has more responsibility and the authority wield the power that comes with it Apple's visuals are going to mature like the rest of the industry has.

If you don't like it then dont let the door hit you in the ass on your way over to Windows or Android.
 
I agree some of the real world look is overdone, but I really hope they don't remove it all. Notes looks cool and kind of iconic.

I'm just hoping they don't make it "cold" and Android like. That is all I can think of when I hear they are removing the skeuomorphic design features.

Kind of excited to see iOS7 if that's the os version that all this change happens in.

EDIT:

Hoping for this style:


TXiPhone4 said:
Image
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Tastic Bycrom said:
Just throwing more engineers at a problem is almost never the solution. Quality work from an engineer requires time to learn and expand on the design as well as being a good fit for the team. I'll take right over fast any day of the week... as long as I get rumors to entertain me.
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I think Apple keeps their teams a little too lean at times.

I know what they say about too many cooks in the kitchen, and this is true, but they could have support teams for these moments.
 
Orlandoech.com said:
Not once did I say I could do better, but since Cook has taken over, lots has gone down hill and more users will agree to that than not.
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Tim Cook has to be who he is, a specialist of logistics who appreciates the panache of design/technology.

Those that expect him to be Jobs are both unrealistic and unfair. Jobs is not coming back from the dead, and you cannot expect Cook to be someone that he is not.

Jobs picked Cook. At the least, Jobs understood what that would mean for the future direction of the company. He did not select Forstall or Ive to be the CEO.

Quit superimposing analyst paranoia onto Cook's decisions and let the man lead. Let Ive supervise the development of iOS and let us all wait and see what they produce.
 
Jonathan, iCloud.com also desperately needs your design magic make over, please! Can't wait for an updated platform/system wide unified look. Thanks mate. Cheers! :)
 
supermarino said:
I'm surprised no one else seems concerned that they're taking Engineers from OS X 10.9 to work on iOS 7. I hope this means that 10.9 is in a good place, and not that their focus in general is more on iOS... because the second one would make me pretty sad.
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Well, they are doing it because whatever they lose on the OS X side, they feel like they have more to gain on iOS. It isn't always about being in a "good place" or not, but what effort is considered more valuable at that point in time. Apple is losing something in 10.9 to do this shift if it is happening, features or otherwise.

pubwvj said:
This just looks like a battle between Ives and Forstall. Now that Ives is in power he is doing all he can to deface Forstall's work. What a waste of time and effort. I wish that instead Apple would focus on real useful innovations like making cross platform compatibility between all iOS/OSX/Classic/etc so that all applications could run on all devices. They have the computing power and shouldn't be wasting human resources on the DeForstallization while there is real work to be done. This just points out how Apple is too much of a monopoly. Sad.
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Uhhh... a lot of the design work isn't done by engineers these days. It's done by designers. There's usually some work on the engineering end to integrate, but that's minor to the actual design work that'd be going on. As an engineer myself, I am not inconvenienced if my design counterparts go ahead and want to re-do icons, textures and the like. With both Visual Studio / Expression and XCode, you have tools to do a good chunk of this work without touching a line of code as well.

And to be fair, there's a lot of cross-platform compatibility between iOS and OS X already. And they have been converging the APIs as they do. The difference is that the OS X uses AppKit for UI/Event-level work, and iOS uses UIKit which is still somewhat similar, although not identical. I can share a lot of code between the Mac and iOS if I engineer things correctly.

iOS has brought more developers to the Mac platform because of this. It just isn't instant because ironically, doing UI layout for two different platforms that behave completely differently, and have different input mechanisms is ironically the expensive part of developing for desktop vs mobile.

Microsoft is simply betting that by offering up a tablet UI on the desktop, everyone will target that, despite how annoying the UI is on the desktop.
 
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