Jony Ive: Brilliant hardware designer. VERY amateur software designer. Regrettably the glory days of Apple are gone forever if this is the way they are headed. The stupid decisions they have been making lately reminds me a lot of my previous employer...and they are almost dead now.
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'Slide to Unlock' Engineer Greg Christie to Depart Apple After Fallout with Jony Ive [Updated]
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Jony Ive: Brilliant hardware designer. VERY amateur software designer. Regrettably the glory days of Apple are gone forever if this is the way they are headed. The stupid decisions they have been making lately reminds me a lot of my previous employer...and they are almost dead now.
I can't believe some people prefer the look of iOS 6. I used to like it fine, but when I go back to it now it makes me barf.
In the first version of my post, I actually had a sentence saying exactly that. Well-done flat would be good and fine, but iOS 7's flat is not such an example. I guess I should have left it in.
People on here are funny. Almost none (if any) of you are designers. Almost none (if any) of you have worked for a company as big or successful as apple. NONE of you have any idea what happened between these parties at apple. Stop acting like you do. If you have an opinion please state it as such, your opinions are not facts.
To everyone who keep rambling about how apple has lost it's way and has no future, go buy some other products by google or Microsoft. It's pretty great having choice.
Having said that, I miss a lot of the skukeomorphism from iOS but I also hated some of it and I am overall happier with ios7 and mavericks than iOS 6 and Mountain Lion. I think apple has a great design language to work with going forward. I see ios 7 as more or less a blank canvas for apple to add details to over the next several years.
To everyone who keep rambling about how apple has lost it's way and has no future, go buy some other products by google or Microsoft. It's pretty great having choice.
Having said that, I miss a lot of the skukeomorphism from iOS but I also hated some of it and I am overall happier with ios7 and mavericks than iOS 6 and Mountain Lion. I think apple has a great design language to work with going forward. I see ios 7 as more or less a blank canvas for apple to add details to over the next several years.
Ios 7 was developed under Christies watch .. Ive was a design advisor on meeting only!
No way to say who affected ios7 more.. Unless you are an insider and know all the details!
The fact is that this move.. Bring Ive in full control.
Lets see what happens !
That's because it is old. iOS 6 hasn't changed since it was introduced in 2012. To be precise, it hasn't substantially changed since iOS was first released! Many of the initial design elements have endured every major update, until iOS 7 got rid of them all.
I'd wager, iOS 6 would look gorgeous with adjustable font sizes (which really does make a difference), less gloss or glass-like elements (e.g. lock screen), and less skeuomorphic screens, especially the tacky ones. iOS 6 simply needed to evolve a bit more. I would really like to know what these designers planned before Ive took over.
You too confuse usabity design and stylish design. Styles might cycle, but usability can only be better or worse. Amateur software designers (Jony Ive) fail to discern between the two and in keeping up with the latest trend (flat), fail to preserve usability advancements while making stylistic changes. So you end up with trendy designs that take a step backward in usability. An experienced designer would adopt flat correctly, i.e. only adopting the stylistic aspects of the flat trend which don't negatively impact usability.
If you are/were so smart why didn't u lead the company in the direction of your wisdom and save them from being almost dead?
Easy to be a armchair critique ha! Lol
Where do you consider usability to be negatively impacted? Because I see a whole lot of usability improvements in iOS 7.
The problem is that the question of what is "superficial" and "cosmetic" is apparently quite a subjective one. To Jony Ive,
iOS 7 does some things right (Control Center, for example), in many other ways it sure seems to be throwing out a whole lot of babies with their bath water. Certain pieces of iOS 6 went way overboard with their skeuomorphism, certainly, but it seems like the powers that be at Apple didn't realize the dangers of going too far the other way.
Don't dismiss iOS 7 skeptics so quickly. I'm a graphic designer working in UI/UX day in and day out, and while I do have some aesthetic qualms that don't affect the usability of the phone (i.e. the ugly, amateurish icons), most of the things that I gripe about very much DO impact its usability. For example, the excessive whiteness of the UI is not only hard on the eyes, but much makes the phone much less suitable for use in low-light. The best example of this is the Music app; not only does all the whiteness on the "Now Playing" screen completely drown out and ruin the visual presentation of the album art (same in the Photos app), but it's just unusable while driving at night (before iOS 7, I would, naturally, leave the screen on while the phone was mounted on my dash with music or podcasts playing, but forget about that in 7). Contrast it with the "Now Playing" version of the lock screen or the new Remote app, which both not only look BEAUTIFUL (especially the latter, with the blurred out album art in the background, setting the tone with a translucent UI — the one part of 7 I love), but are actually equally usable in any lighting condition.
More than that, though, this philosophy of "stripping away" is only helpful when the thing being stripped away is actually useless and cosmetic. But just because something is visually detailed doesn't mean it's merely cosmetic. When you reduce the icons to their simplest form (the wireframe ones along the bottoms of Apple apps, I mean) — or replace them with text, as in the Music app — and when you remove all detail from everything and your interface becomes, basically, a bunch of text on white, everything just starts to run together. The user's eyes and brain have to work harder to know what's what (to know the hierarchy of information, what's clickable and what's just text, etc.). So on the whole, the design philosophy of iOS 7 of "make everything simpler" actually makes many of the native Apple apps more complicated to use, because you have to actually think about it and read more to navigate.
Anyway, I would get more specific, but I've already rambled more than I meant to — I just wanted to get a word in, because the people who don't have a problem with the look of iOS 7 tend to always assume that the complaints the rest of us have are only cosmetic and don't impact the actual usefulness of the phone, when, at least for me, quite the opposite is true. Sure, I think the icons are hideous and the colors garish — but that's not what I'm talking about when I say iOS 7 has design problems. I mean that some of their choices make my phone more difficult to use in an appreciable way, for no better reason than to adhere to the latest design trend.
There are PLENTY of usability improvements in iOS 7 (!!!), but none that I can think of are a result of the changes in design aesthetic (Control Center, improved app switching, better settings, etc.)
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For that your post was reported and deservedly so. Go theorize about someone's life somewhere else. The rest of the garbage you posted doesn't even deserve a reply.
This forum is packed with assumptions isn't it?
No one outside of apple.. Including u Has an idea how ios 7 came to be..
Is Ive to be credited or blamed for or Christie! Who pushed what in what direction?
Facts are Christie was the head ! Ives participated in meeting as advisor. Christie reported to Craig !
Facts are there is a reason they had a fall out.. Disagreement.. But in which direction? No one outside knows!
Facts are Ives will be in full control after this change !
Too bad Ive won. iOS7 design is an atrocity compared to previous versions. I've been using it since the day it came out and still hate it.
Buttons? Gone.
Transparency of menu items? WTF why? Do I really need ugly red and blue shades of color bleeding into the text I'm trying to read?
Text? Is it a link? Is it a button? Is it a title header? Who knows. Let's take the contact screen for example:
"home" is a header, it's blue.
Send Message is a link button, it's blue.
Why, when you go to add a phone number in contacts, is the default "radio"?
Why is there tremendous amount of wasted visual padding?
Safari - why do I have to drag down to get to my menu bar? The device was already designed to be taller. Don't make it a huge pain to get to my favorites and bookmarks. Is there an easy way to go back with a swipe left-to-right? Yes, but probably 2% of users know about it because you didn't use any kind of tutorial screen.
Camera and photo apps - holy crap these are awful. The swipe left/right to change between photo/video/etc is hard to use quickly. The HDR link button is oddly placed where the title of the app should be, which makes it easy to miss for me. As for the photo gallery, I suppose it's personal preference, but the auto-sorting I just find annoying since things end up 3 levels deep.
Why isn't there consistency? In the radio app, why are all the link buttons red. WTF? IT's blue everywhere else. Red makes me think it's a delete action. Why are they sometimes putting additional actions in the top-left ("history", "store"), and other times in the top right ("edit")?
I hate the thin icon sets and fonts. What's with using the info button to contain a bunch of actions, when you already have an action button? (Apple maps)
Buttons? Gone.
Transparency of menu items? WTF why? Do I really need ugly red and blue shades of color bleeding into the text I'm trying to read?
Text? Is it a link? Is it a button? Is it a title header? Who knows. Let's take the contact screen for example:
"home" is a header, it's blue.
Send Message is a link button, it's blue.
Why, when you go to add a phone number in contacts, is the default "radio"?
Why is there tremendous amount of wasted visual padding?
Safari - why do I have to drag down to get to my menu bar? The device was already designed to be taller. Don't make it a huge pain to get to my favorites and bookmarks. Is there an easy way to go back with a swipe left-to-right? Yes, but probably 2% of users know about it because you didn't use any kind of tutorial screen.
Camera and photo apps - holy crap these are awful. The swipe left/right to change between photo/video/etc is hard to use quickly. The HDR link button is oddly placed where the title of the app should be, which makes it easy to miss for me. As for the photo gallery, I suppose it's personal preference, but the auto-sorting I just find annoying since things end up 3 levels deep.
Why isn't there consistency? In the radio app, why are all the link buttons red. WTF? IT's blue everywhere else. Red makes me think it's a delete action. Why are they sometimes putting additional actions in the top-left ("history", "store"), and other times in the top right ("edit")?
I hate the thin icon sets and fonts. What's with using the info button to contain a bunch of actions, when you already have an action button? (Apple maps)
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GOOD!!!!!!!
Because iOS7 in MY opinion is an utter design disaster, horrible.
With any luck this will make Apple sit up and take note, Ive hasn't got a CLUE about OS interface design in my personal opinion.
iOS6 actually had icons that made sense and were self explanatory, iOS7 just has random wierd shapes.
iOS7 was THE reason I dropped the iPhone.
Because iOS7 in MY opinion is an utter design disaster, horrible.
With any luck this will make Apple sit up and take note, Ive hasn't got a CLUE about OS interface design in my personal opinion.
iOS6 actually had icons that made sense and were self explanatory, iOS7 just has random wierd shapes.
iOS7 was THE reason I dropped the iPhone.
LOL, I'm always amused at the length people will go to argue over the look of an app, or an OS. Guess there is nothing else to worry about in this big old world?
Personally, I like the look of IOS. Since 2008 its been getting better every year.
Keep the improvements coming apple!
Personally, I like the look of IOS. Since 2008 its been getting better every year.
Keep the improvements coming apple!
swingerofbirch
macrumors 68040
I don't know what is in store for Mac users like myself. Already the quality of OS X in terms of bugs/stability has gone down ever since Lion, in my experience. 10.3 and 10.4 were the most stable in my opinion, followed by 10.6. I experience bugs every day in OS X, and the problem is Apple doesn't even care about OS X when it has a smartphone holy war to fight and internal wars about who designs for the smartphone. It seems like they're going to have no one left in charge after a while except for a fashion designer, who admittedly is good at making beautiful hardware. What has happened to innovation in the desktop OS? Or just quality? I saw this happening years ago, but of course Apple isn't going to listen to feedback when it's the world's most successful, popular company. But the power and niche users see these things before the crowd does. I don't begrudge Apple at all for having a smaller screen iPhone. I don't care about that. I don't care that other phones have more widgets. Apple is going for marketshare, which means they're going to keep following trends. I think they could do better software when they only people they had to please were the loyal people who had stuck with them. Now they have to go after every person who ever bought a phone because it was the newest Motorola RAZR or the new LG Chocolate. These are the same people now who are Apple's demographic.
It's hilarious how people come across as knowing the ins and outs of this situation and blaming Ive for this and everything wrong with ios 7...
For all we know it could have gone like this:
Ive: Greg, we need to talk about these icons
Greg: what? They are perfect, people love them
Ive: They suck, the colour pallet is all over the place!
Greg: Jony, they are staying...
I've: ok. (pops into tim's office) Greg needs to go.
We will have to wait until ios 9 until we get an idea of who was responsible for what in ios 7
For all we know it could have gone like this:
Ive: Greg, we need to talk about these icons
Greg: what? They are perfect, people love them
Ive: They suck, the colour pallet is all over the place!
Greg: Jony, they are staying...
I've: ok. (pops into tim's office) Greg needs to go.
We will have to wait until ios 9 until we get an idea of who was responsible for what in ios 7
I agree with most of what you stated!
Except i dont know where the credit and the blame go?
Christie was the head. Ives participated in meeting as advisor. Christie reported to Craig!
Ive and christie obviously had disagreements.. But about what and who pushed what ?
No one outside of apple knows!
Ive will have full control now. Lets see how things progress!
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The designs of iOS7 make perfect sense now. They look like a typical developer or amateur's attempt at software UI by simply slapping text and lines everywhere.
oh god. The man is dead. Please let him rest in peace. Please don't assume to know him all to keep quoting him: 'Steve would never do this', 'Steve would never allow this'....
Please understand that Jobs was a fan of Skeuomorphism. Ive is a fan of Flat and Simple. However, don't assume that he won't change his mind later on. Remember Steve Jobs flatly rejected 7" tablet and declared it's DOA, but later on he changed his mind to produce iPad Mini
It's not the look, its also usability (e.g. buttons are buttons, they look like buttons, and they have a clear visual border). But even the icons had DETAIL to them. Now you can do the equivalent of iOS 7's icons with Microsoft Office.
Ive rambles on about hierarchy in iOS 7, but making everything flat contradicts his statement.