The year is 2013. Normal people know how to use a computer and they know the rows of things along the top and the bottom of the screen do stuff. The future has no need for the level of demarcation between content and UI that was previously there. Now if YOU need a button to have a box around it, a drop shadow, a clashing color, and a little arrow pointing to it with a label saying "you can click here" that's fine. Maybe you could make a Linux skin for that? The vast majority of present smartphone users, and all future generations, no longer need ties to the physical world. Apple has always designed for where the puck is going and it bodes very well that they have continued. You can choose to turn your back tot he play and stare at the whole where the puck used to be for as long as you want. Times have changed and the principles of UI design have changed with them.
I "flatly" disagree. There will never be a lack of need for physical representation of objects in a virtual world because (most of us) live and interact with objects
in the physical world. You just cannot beat a physical button, knob, etc. At best, you can
represent it in the virtual space.
How you represent it is what matters. Jony Ive failed here.
The reason iOS was intuitive
depended on that physical to virtual connection. You didn't need to know something already, you didn't need to experience it beforehand. For example, if represented in the virtual space as it exists in the physical space properly, I can tell a circular button from a circular knob without thinking. I
know one is
pressed, the other
turned. But with iOS 7, Mr. Ive has given us a plain-text circle instead, and leaving it to us to decipher whether I should push or turn.
My point is, why
remove the intuitiveness that was already there? How does this improve the usability of a device? Your attitude appears to be a bit smug: "everyone in 2013
should know how to use an electronic device". That sounds just like every Windows PC fan I've ever encountered, at the height of the Apple vs PC "wars". You just cannot assume that everyone knows how to do something. The idea is to make it so that
no one needs to know anything ahead of time before they use your device. And iOS 6, design taste quibbles aside, had this. A very young child could (and do) use it.
This is a troublesome paradigm shift at Apple, where aesthetics and design have
completely taken over without regard for the user experience. I mean, they went from a "let's design our products as if the user was new to computing" to "people are
used to putting their finger on glass" pretty ***** fast. What. The. Hell.
Apple used to "skate to where the puck was going to be" successfully
under Steve Jobs. They are still riding that wave, since Steve had (reportedly) a queue of products lined up well after his death. But it was the supposedly "annoying" skeuomorphic Apple software (specifically iOS) that drove's Apple's success into the stratosphere, where it remains now. To assume that the iPhone's recent sales are attributed to iOS 7 may be a bit premature; Apple's hardware may have more of an impact, as it's always been spectacular. Folks that just wanted to try iOS 7 out (hey, it's new) are screwed and cannot go back even if they wanted to, and many (myself included) do. So all the "iOS adoption rate success" crap is just that, BS.
Looks like Jony Ive is nothing without Steve. He has no one to give him "a million no's for every yes". I also think getting rid of Forstall was a mistake; you just don't get rid of the guy that led the design of the software that pretty much changed the industry.
Not sure who the winning bids were from.
