Reminds me of the Cranky Geeks podcast with John C. Dvorak
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John Gruber Shares Scathing Commentary About Apple's Departing Software Design Chief
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More than half of those years were before iOS 7, so I have some hope.
Now I’m really looking forward to iOS27 Snow Leopard.
The Liquid Glass image in the article shows one of the many reasons why it's a terrible UI. Everything just looks blurry. Apple has spent decades designing and hyping the razor-sharp screens on their devices, now let's make everything blurry because of reasons.
But Tim uses every Apple product every single day. Surely he must be approving design decisions that he finds "good." 🤣
A folder hierarchy containing aliases in ~/Applications, then drop the top level into the right side of the Dock and set it to your preferred style.
This is a report from 2015;
Apple’s newly appointed design execs report to Cook, not Ive
Part of Ive’s transition to a more hands-off role
www.theverge.com
"Newly updated corporate bios for Apple's design team show that the company's new vice presidents of user interface design (Alan Dye) and industrial design (Richard Howarth) will report to CEO Tim Cook — not Jony Ive. The change is part of Ive's transition to a new, more hands-off role as Apple's Chief Design Officer and was announced earlier this year, with the British designer explaining in a profile for the UK's Daily Telegraph that the role "frees [him] up from some of the administrative and management work."
When Jony Ive left, Alan Dye's and Hankey's teams reported to Jeff Williams. Now that Williams is retired, The design teams now report to Tim Cook, again.
In the article Gruber states that almost everyone in the user interface industry agrees Dye was terrible, so there's that...
There are a lot of user interface designers in the world. The ones he knows personally think Dye is terrible? Probably.
Perfect example of such a scenario is Ford Motor 1978/9.
The insecure scion, grandson of founder, a decade into his personal midlife crisis, and creeping up on retirement as CEO, had set the company on a path to flirt with bankruptcy, through his fear of repeating his own previous mistakes, despite the successes handed him by his lieutenant, fired the product genius beneath that lieutenant, and a year later fired the marketing genius lieutenant.
The first (Sperlich) was a year into building the foundation for a resurrected Chrysler, who coaxed the latter (Iacocca) to come over.
Together at Chrysler, these two began draining the brains out of Ford.
As a result, Chrysler launched the successful K-Platform off which the high volume garagable minivan was born (an idea developed by these two at Ford which the insecure Scion, Henry Ford II had shot down again and again).
Even though the board forced HFII into retirement after a disastrous 1978/9 financial year, set the stage for a flirt with bankruptcy, the new management took a decade to present an appropriate competitor (Windstar) after a decent in its own right but failed direct competitor (Aerostar).
HFII personality driven blunder set the stage for Chrysler which would have gone bankrupt without Steve Miller (ex-Ford) the genius behind the federally backed consortium of bank loans, and Iacocca who sold this to congress, and then Sperlich, Jerry Greenwald, and later Lutz, and lesser known others, like Warburton running operational things like logistics, and who saved, reinvigorated and took business out of Ford’s own hide.
Without this fortuitous chain of events, Chrysler would have failed and Ford would have picked up nearly half its customers).
So, long story short, yes, even though the situation is different, let’s watch where the executive departees go and who follows in their wake. This will confirm how many have faith in the departed leader to make a jump from Apple to wherever.
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Design has subjective elements, but there are many objective aspects of design. It’s not all opinion.
Gruber has all but ceased reviewing tech products on his site. The 2025 iPhone lineup is entering its third month and he’s barely acknowledged it. The center of gravity has shifted, for better or worse, to younger tech enthusiasts.
So Gruber, in a bid to remain relevant and keep the ad dollars flowing, has taken to posting increasingly incendiary commentary. The other day he called for the head of Warner Bros to be jailed because he didn’t like
The way Mad Men was recently remastered on HBO Max.
So Gruber, in a bid to remain relevant and keep the ad dollars flowing, has taken to posting increasingly incendiary commentary. The other day he called for the head of Warner Bros to be jailed because he didn’t like
The way Mad Men was recently remastered on HBO Max.
Hmm…so are ex-Apple employees who now work for LoveFrom/io little birdies whispering into Gruber’s ear? How is it that they’ve been able to poach so many Apple employees (including hardware engineers)? Seems to me this is a bigger issue than Dye. Especially considering he was allowed to stay in that role as long as he did.
Not a huge Gruber reader, but this writeup of his brought me great joy. Shame he was too scared to say this all sooner.
Does Apple really hurt from not having designers who left to go work on a device with no screen? Those are the slackers who should definitely go where they can get paid to not design a UI.
I could probably figure out what this means (thanks for tip btw) and do it but why should I have to? After all the dragging and dropping to set up those folders as I had done on my iPhone it was working great got the last decade.
Then some boxing blew it up and replaced it with dysfunctional crap.
gotta wonder why Gruber is trashing the guy in public - obviously because he has an ax to grind. His comments thus are meaningless.