Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

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

Wow I LOVE iOS skeuomorphic design. When I look at Google and Windows mobile, flat, BORING designs, I'm always delighted to see the awesome Apple designed apps.

I really hope iOS doesn't turn into the crap that Google and Windows is putting out. That is some of the lamest UI and UX i've ever seen.
 
ITT: Armchair quarterbacks that have no clue about project management, software development, or business in general.

:rolleyes:

Relax. It is going to be fine.
 
ps45 said:
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.
Click to expand...
Doesn't matter how hard the graphic designers work if the marketing people ruin their work, which is, an all too common occurrence.
 
keysofanxiety said:
Yes, because throwing money at a problem solves it quicker!

You're a genius. How are you not CEO of Apple yet? :rolleyes:
Click to expand...

He is genius....Apple is doing exaclty what he said....they brought more people on iOS project. The problem is, because Apple is busy giving loads of money to some new executives, they don't want to spend money on bigger developer team.
 
Orlandoech.com said:
For the love of God, hire more damn engineers and stop being so greedy with your damn cash reserves.

So annoying.
Click to expand...

There's sort of a rule that at a certain point, adding another engineer would actually decrease productivity.

it's like, if you were to have a team of 8 engineers build a calculator vs. 100 engineers build a calculator, chances are, the 100 engineers would take longer to build it due to the overhead of communication/collaboration.

but in this case, most likely Apple hasn't reached that point yet.
 
Undecided said:
Wrong approach. As Steve Jobs aptly put it, Microsoft just throws more and more people at projects and still produce junk. There's a limit of how many people can effectively work on one tech project, and once you exceed that you have rapidly diminishing returns, if not outright declines in productivity and/or quality.
Click to expand...

MS Office suit is still miles ahead of Apples iWork....so Steve's comment is flawed.
 
ezhilk said:
As Aristotle once said, nine women cannot make a baby in one month :cool:
Click to expand...

But we are not asking for 1 baby. Rather we are asking for several, and having one woman producing them at 9 month intervals won't get us many babies. In this case we need more women.
 
komodrone said:
There's sort of a rule that at a certain point, adding another engineer would actually decrease productivity.

it's like, if you were to have a team of 8 engineers build a calculator vs. 100 engineers build a calculator, chances are, the 100 engineers would take longer to build it due to the overhead of communication/collaboration.

but in this case, most likely Apple hasn't reached that point yet.
Click to expand...

True, sorry. Im just angry! lol and... ignorant!
 
This overhaul can't come soon enough. These two images alone are perfect examples of why they need to do away with pretty much all of the skeumorphism junk.

The Notepad app actually doesn't look awful...but there is something weird about having that realistic looking notepad, with a completely mismatching keyboard taking up half of its space. Also, the felt marker/rounded edge text doesn't really streamline well with the regular "character by character" text input. It just looks fragmented and tacky.

The Gamecenter speaks for itself. It is far and away one of the ugliest apps I have seen...including 3rd party apps. The primary reason I avoid going into the Gamecenter app at all costs is the appearance...it's a complete eye sore. How does a green felt "poker" style table represent "games"? I get why they might think that...but it really is a terrible implementation of the idea. It looks tacky and antiquated and the whole theme does not play well at all with most of the game/app icons. Seeing a sharp looking Angry Birds or Fruit Ninja app icon against the theme in Gamecenter...it looks terrible.

These are only two of many examples of what is wrong with the skeumorphism execution in iOS.
 
iisdan said:
So iOS is going to look bland and boring. Awesome.
Click to expand...

This! I don't mind Ive cleaning things up a bit, but I hope he's not going to take it too far (i.e. the flat, bland, cartoony "WP7" route with rigid animations). IMO, the iOS Notes and Game Center apps are examples of clean, unobtrusive, skeuomorphism done right.
 
I don't see the big deal here. If there are no useful tweaks and just the UI overhaul (Color, texture) I am not sure I care. I don't want just another skin to iOS.
 
komodrone said:
There's sort of a rule that at a certain point, adding another engineer would actually decrease productivity.
Click to expand...

Yes, one of them is Brooks' law.

Existing devs in the project have to spend time on teaching the new devs about the work done this far, until the new devs can contribute properly. Some of the new devs might also introduce bugs, delaying the project even more. Don't even get me started on communication overheads.
 
I worry that no matter what they come out with a lot of people are going to complain, if they just tone down the skeoumorphic some people will say they wimped out, if they replace it completely some people will say its boring and characterless or copy of google/windows
 
Orlandoech.com said:
For the love of God, hire more damn engineers and stop being so greedy with your damn cash reserves.

So annoying.
Click to expand...

Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.

Brooks law.

Edit: ah, I see I wasn't the first to point that out.
 
Completely agree it needs an over haul, but I sure as hell hope its not just the look. The look is NOT the most important part missing or requiring updating, it's the features that other OS's having been coming out with, like fast access to WiFi, BT on/off, better multitasking, multiple user accounts etc etc, these are the most desired new features by peeps, not stitching or no stitching. 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
 
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
Click to expand...

They might be trimming down the code, but like I said before, the skeu..mop...skoo..er...fake UI bling what looks like other stuff from IRL is just a bitmap image. A softly shaded blue bar on top of your calender app will eat up about the same amount of resources as one that looks like stitched leather.

Redesigning everything will probably take awhile, but removing the fake UI bling what looks like other stuff from IRL won't do much in the way of performance.
 
eponym said:
Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.

Brooks law.

Edit: ah, I see I wasn't the first to point that out.
Click to expand...

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.
 
BRLawyer said:
Nope, it's gonna look like a real, innovative OS again.

Let's just hope the move against iOSification is even more pronounced in OS X.
Click to expand...

Until people get bored again and change it to a more flashy design and have people cheer about it not being boring. It really does not seem to matter what design they use as over time anything gets boring.
 
eponym said:
Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.

Brooks law.

Edit: ah, I see I wasn't the first to point that out.
Click to expand...

Agreed, but if something always comes up and work never gets completed there is a management problem and perhaps it's time to hire more people since the current team obviously can't handle all the demand.

I'm not going to list all the long standing issues, but there are a bunch of things that have been incredibly slow to progress and work properly. iCloud and iWork are two examples. Quicktime X and OpenGL are another. A lot of us are growing increasingly impatient with the minor updates these issues always get in each new OS version. It's nice to see these incremental improvements, but it is time to get everything working properly once and for all.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back