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iBooks and iTunes U Updated With iOS 7 Redesigns

redscull said:
Yes, we have amazing retina displays capable of showing more detail per square inch than anything in history, and we use them to show vast spaces of pure white with an occasional gradient or single colored word. There are literally no details whatsoever to benefit from retina except very crisp text. Even rounded corners, which could finally look truly curved, have been replaced by sharp corners.

Now, when our devices could finally look the most alive, the most tactile and interactive, the most real and inviting ever, we have completely detached and disassociated them from anything our brains instinctively recognize and want to look at or touch.
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I actually agree with this in parts iOS 7 is a work in progress but some of the changes have been ordinary, this latest change is quite horrible putting it mildly, iBooks and Newstand were the only two designs I wouldn't have changed, and I don't like the the iCloud and the other symbols on Safari either.

I updated this morning and was appalled at what greeted me, I have never felt like that about anything Apple have done.

I am all for plain but add a bit of colour or let us tweek it
 
redscull said:
No, you are not. iOS 7, strictly speaking from the standpoint of proper user interface design, is a complete embarrassment. It's like Apple put a hardware guy in charge of software without any real previous experience in software. Or maybe put print ad marketers in charge, who focus purely on aesthetic and not digital interaction. Oh wait, I'm pretty sure they did precisely both of those.

I literally cringe every time I see an app get updated for iOS 7. My iOS devices are quickly become sterile, bland, and cluttered-looking.

I doubt I'll ever buy another iBook again. I cannot immerse myself in the reading experience using Windows 95 Notepad for hours on end. I no longer find any pleasure in staring at my bookshelf reminiscing. Because it's ***** ugly now.
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This is BS. I just opened a book on the new iBooks app and everything looks mostly the same including the sepia colored background, the font, and even the page flipping effect!
 
MacDevil7334 said:
Yuck. This was one app where the skeuomorphic look really worked. Leaving the page turn animation in is nice and all. But, for me at least, the effect loses much of its magic since the app no longer looks like a book. I'll definitely be rolling back to the old version when I get home.
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Yep, I downloaded the update blindly, not expecting it to gut the app as it did. While the new bookshelf is ugly, I could still live with that, but upon seeing that they'd replaced the actual in-book aesthetic with that of a plain text document, I immediately deleted the new iBooks and reinstalled the old one.

Part of the reason I like reading books on my iPad is that the iBooks experience provided much of the look and feel of reading a physical book (particularly in landscape mode). Replacing the existing "realistic" appearance with that of a flat text document did a great job of making the experience less compelling, and more sterile. The new version just feels soulless.
 
Moongrass said:
Yep, I downloaded the update blindly, not expecting it to gut the app as it did. While the new bookshelf is ugly, I could still live with that, but upon seeing that they'd replaced the actual in-book aesthetic with that of a plain text document, I immediately deleted the new iBooks and reinstalled the old one.

Part of the reason I like reading books on my iPad is that the iBooks experience provided much of the look and feel of reading a physical book (particularly in landscape mode). Replacing the existing "realistic" appearance with that of a flat text document did a great job of making the experience less compelling, and more sterile. The new version just feels soulless.
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Tap the Aa button on top right, choose Sepia as the background colour and bam it looks like a book again. It wasn't that good before though, as I read in some review of the previous iBooks app, that no matter how many "pages" you've read, it always show the same "no. of pages" left/read on the sides. So it didn't make sense for the old versions too.
 
ibooks_ios_7.jpg


A popover on an iPhone?

Shame on you, Apple - once again breaking your own UI guidelines. 3rd-party developers aren't allowed to use popovers on the iPhone (unless they build them themselves).
 
haruhiko said:
Tap the Aa button on top right, choose Sepia as the background colour and bam it looks like a book again.
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No, it doesn't: it looks like a sepia-toned text file. The previous version of iBooks made each book look like an actual one, complete with page edges, gutter, and cover. This made the experience much more engaging and less sterile, which is why I went back to it.
 
springsup said:
Image

A popover on an iPhone?

Shame on you, Apple - once again breaking your own UI guidelines. 3rd-party developers aren't allowed to use popovers on the iPhone (unless they build them themselves).
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1) iBooks is made by Apple, not a third party developer. They can add what they want.

2) That "popover" has been there in all versions of iBooks. It's not new, even for the iPhone.
 
John.B said:
While they're ditching skeumorphism, I do wish Apple would allow the iBooks app scroll through PDFs vertically.
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I was hoping they would add a 2-page view for PDFs in this update. No such luck, though.

----------

Overall, I like the update. It is consistent with other apps that have been redesigned for iOS 7. But I agree that the background is a bit stark. There needs to be some sort of division between the toolbar and content areas, and the gradients seem tacky to me. Same applies to the Newsstand redesign.
 
Design Elements

I like the new page marker at top right and the progress crawl at the bottom.

Keeping the page marker and page-flip animation but ditching any reference to a bookshelf shows the limitations of the anti-skeumorph design approach. There's nothing un-aesthetic about a page marker that looks like a bookmark and page flipping that looks like physical page flipping, but those are both plainly skeumorphic design elements.

The new white background is too stark, and I miss having some reference to physical books (beyond the book cover) -- even as minimal as a light brown background.

Apple's designers have obviously had to engage in some line-drawing on when skeumorphs are OK and when they're not, but it's unnecessarily arbitrary to ditch a design element if the result is worse.
 
Just for the record, and it's late I know, but: IOS 7 is hideous. It looks like something a 7 year old would come up with. What a pity we can't move back to 6.
 
This is a bit disappointing, in terms of pure blandness. Very sterile feeling; as many have said, iBooks was one case where skeumorphism actually worked fairly well (though bordered on tacky, in its previous incarnation).

The vein I'd really like to see Apple explore much further is blurred transparency. It's ideal, in that it manages to accentuate and adapt to any content without having 'design' distract from it. The new Remote app is absolutely the sexiest thing on an iOS device ever. Seriously, go take another look: the way the coloration of cover art pokes through every single element of the UI, even the background, is gorgeous -- it's like the interface is pure chameleon, adapting itself wholly to your content, rather than whatever the designers felt like when building the app.
 
Millah said:
If you are an actual developer, and you have access to the WWDC 2013 session videos, I would suggest watching some of them. The Apple designers get on stage and talk about their thought process behind the design, why they did it, what they did, etc. They go through app-by-app talking about visual design, structural design, interaction design, and even psychological design, and explain exactly why they did these things and why they MAKE SENSE.
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I appreciate the "back to basics" design approach, but it is not always obvious on first glance. (I'll save the "ugly icons" argument for another day.)
As an example, once again, consider the progress indicator used when you download an app from the App Store. In previous versions of iOS, it was a black and blue progress bar. In iOS 7, it took me a long time to figure out that the lighter-circle-that-turns-into-a-thicker-circle is designed around a stop button. What was wrong with the linear progress bar?
 
Glad it's a separate update

I'm happy that this update wasn't bundled with anything else since I like the book shelves and don't want to update. I can live without the rest of the skeuomorphism, but I really like the way the book shelves look. So I guess I'll keep it until having the little update badge on my phone drives me nuts.:p
 
I would ditch my kindle in order to just own one tablet device.
I had hopes for ibooks and they failed hard.
Magazines and comics are brilliant on iPad air.
Reading books is downright awful.
How does an assumed top notch design team get away with essentially a non- design?
 
Please listen Apple! Please.

I was setting up an old Windows XP computer for a person who cannot afford anything else. It was set to the old Win 95-98 theme and I said to myself, "Self, this looks familiar! Where have I seen this recently? Oh, wait, iOS 7."

I am not a troll, nor a fanboy. Just a lowly user that discovered Apple devices to be amazing. What once excited me, surprised me, and felt way more classy than anyone else's hardware and software is fading fast.

Please listen Apple. Your users are speaking.
 
How can I go back to the previous version?

Moongrass said:
Yep, I downloaded the update blindly, not expecting it to gut the app as it did. While the new bookshelf is ugly, I could still live with that, but upon seeing that they'd replaced the actual in-book aesthetic with that of a plain text document, I immediately deleted the new iBooks and reinstalled the old one.

----MoonGrass, How do I get the old version back? Will I lose all of my PDF's?
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redscull said:
Yes, we have amazing retina displays capable of showing more detail per square inch than anything in history, and we use them to show vast spaces of pure white with an occasional gradient or single colored word. There are literally no details whatsoever to benefit from retina except very crisp text.
Now, when our devices could finally look the most alive, the most tactile and interactive, the most real and inviting ever, we have completely detached and disassociated them from anything our brains instinctively recognize and want to look at or touch.
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EXACTLY!!! Very well said!!
 
Matilda77 said:
MoonGrass, How do I get the old version back? Will I lose all of my PDF's?
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I had the previous version of iBooks backed up on my computer, so I just deleted the new version off my iPad and reinstalled the old one. All my books and PDF files remained installed, but I had to put the various series back in their proper order.
 
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