falconeight
Guest
Why are you stating nothing useful? Either make a point or don't post. Android is terrible, there is my point. What are you talking about anyway?
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Why did Apple remove design from iOS 7?
- Thread starter darkgoob
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
- Status
Why are you stating nothing useful? Either make a point or don't post. Android is terrible, there is my point. What are you talking about anyway?
teknikal90
macrumors 68040
iOS 5 was the greatest iOS made yet.
I have to agree with you. Look at OS X's design language. Sure fashion comes and goes. And with it brushed aluminium. But the character of OS X stayed. Why? Because it worked and it made its identity. One look at it and although assets have changed, you know it's OS X. Like BMW's dual grille. It stayed constant and timeless. Non-essential design quirks can be changed around it.
iOS did not need that drastic a change. OS 7's change was change for the sake of change - it's not functionally better in a lot of way to make the change in direction a clear step in the right direction.
I do feel you, I think it went from Great to just okay, whilst giving away that Apple charm and identity that had taken 5 years to be established. That look had the potential to be timeless, much like OS X's look.
2 years from now when people find plain minimalist design to be out of fashion, what are they going to do? There isn't anything iconic with iOS 7's design.
I have to agree with you. Look at OS X's design language. Sure fashion comes and goes. And with it brushed aluminium. But the character of OS X stayed. Why? Because it worked and it made its identity. One look at it and although assets have changed, you know it's OS X. Like BMW's dual grille. It stayed constant and timeless. Non-essential design quirks can be changed around it.
iOS did not need that drastic a change. OS 7's change was change for the sake of change - it's not functionally better in a lot of way to make the change in direction a clear step in the right direction.
I do feel you, I think it went from Great to just okay, whilst giving away that Apple charm and identity that had taken 5 years to be established. That look had the potential to be timeless, much like OS X's look.
2 years from now when people find plain minimalist design to be out of fashion, what are they going to do? There isn't anything iconic with iOS 7's design.
redbeard331
Suspended
Exactly, you don't see Porsche radically altering the look of the 911, they just keep refining it over time, and it's worked beautifully for them. It would be a mammoth mistake for them to throw away the classic design language and give the world something entirely new.
Exactly. Because a Porsche, or better yet, Lamborghini, are all fantastically designed. They set the trends, not follow them.
I heard a funny story. A teacher who is teaching a summer class on app design to kids showed the iOS 7 beta to her class. One of the kids was like, "Why did they DO that?!"
Exactly what I wanted to know. I watched some of the videos and it's just a bunch of stuff like, "we started from a blank slate and only added back what was necessary." Yeah, but WHY DO THAT IN THE FIRST PLACE? It didn't need to be done, did it?
I was just thinking today about how much I like the design of the current Notes app. When you are using it, you know you're using Apple Notes. It has character. And whether I'm on OS X or iOS it looks the same. The yellow background of it is pleasing to the eyes and I rather enjoy the faux leather notebook on the Mac side. It shows they put effort and care into the design.
I disagree with the notion that we no longer need skeuomorphic design. I think you'll find the iOS 7 notes is equally skeuomorphic -- it has letterpress text and a subtle paper texture. They've merely gone with a different, less aesthetically pleasing skeuomorphic analogy: one of snooty, bright white "art house" paper as opposed to a well-worn, tried-and-true legal pad designed for action and coffee stains.
There is a saying in the Matrix that "your mind makes it real," and I think that iOS's designers knew this, and made a system that is based on that. Skeuomorphism works because EVERYTHING is a skeuomorph: a "real" legal pad is no more real than the one in Notes app. They're both just memes. One is based on light entering your eyes, and so is other. Your brain makes it real, in either case.
So why not take advantage of all these glorious, retina pixels, and use some flair and imagination in a design, like Grafio does? Like Garage Band? Like iOS 6? Why un-design everything, creating an anti-design that feels more like an experiment by a first-timer than the true successor to iOS?
iOS 7 does have potential, and under the hood there are a LOT of great improvements to the APIs. I want it to succeed. I am just struggling with the UI changes, understanding them. The issue of buttons was a big one for me.
My app is nothing special, it's just a UISlider, a UIPicker, a UISegmentedControl, and an info button, with a bunch of colored UILabels and a sub-view showing a graph. The info button takes you to a flipside view controller screen which has eight UIButtons, some of which correspond to text fields to enter custom values for the graph, and others of which lead to a database table view, a help view, back to the main view, to the rate this app page, and to an email support link.
I laid it out for iOS 7, and sans borders, it's pretty hard to tell that they are supposed to be buttons, just from the color of the text. Obviously you can just touch it and find out, but I really didn't think removing the design of buttons helped my app in any way.
Also removal of the design from UISegmentedControl, and forcing it to be a single block color, just kinda looks gaudy and badly designed. It does not look professionally designed, it looks like it was not designed at all. Just kind of, "made."
The UIPicker, on the the other hand, looks kinda cool if put against a black background with its own background set to another color. (If they're both black, since you can't change the text color, then it becomes invisible.) But mostly Apple uses it white against a white background, so all you see are the letters. I think this looks really bad because it removes the design of the background, which looks cool.
Ultimately you are right—some people will like iOS 7 better, maybe even two out of five will prefer it. The same kind of people who don't like graffitti or bumper stickers, who don't like pets or trees or refrigerator magnets.
Because hipsters have decided that ugly and flat is the current buzzword. Just bunker down and try and weather out the storm; hopefully it won't be long before all they all get distracted with the next latest fad.
Unfortunately, Apple felt the need to get on board because Internet users, who probably don't even have a stake in iOS, complained loudly because that's what they do. :\
Unfortunately, Apple felt the need to get on board because Internet users, who probably don't even have a stake in iOS, complained loudly because that's what they do. :\
Am3r1ca16
Suspended
Rogifan
macrumors Penryn
Yeah because faux leather, felt and linen isn't ugly.
All these people complaining about "flat" (a word Apple has never used to describe iOS 7 btw) probably hated aqua too when OS X came out.
At least it made the calendar and other apps feel like what they were.
How exciting and fun is a notes app that's pretty much just plain white? And this isn't limited to Apple because Google's Calendar and Notes app is pretty bad, too.
The current notes and calendar apps are pretty nice; I don't see the point in making them completely BORING.
After reading thru old threads in this forum with the introduction of the iphone 4 (or the biggest leak ever in Apple history I should say), and reactions to the original iPad, I will never take a negative comment here about an Apple product seriously. It was so hilarious, "this is gonna flop, I'm going back to the 3gs blah ba blah blah blah." Those are the same people who flocked towards both the 4 and 4s. Not until they have actually used the final release version will I believe anyone when they say, "it sucks". And I know this is different, people actually have the software in their hands. But I feel like something about a beta simply takes the charm away from the product, especially considering how unstable they can be.
Tamagotchi
macrumors 6502
LOL.
Ive has no taste when it comes to interface design. In the olden days Steve filtered / chose the changes and implementations - with taste. I bet he probably had 100 different design proposals from Ive (from wacky hardware desings to the nice ones we see know in the current MBA, MBP. iPhone, etc). Jony now does whatever he wants and probably needs a boss to tell him: "Your design is **** to the majority of users, whilst others praise it. Still, we cannot have customers divided and hating each other as a consequence of your design."
They should just roll out the design changes gradually with each release of iOS, not everything in one go. Facebook for example rolls out their changes in design gradually - they've learnt this the hard way.
Nonetheless, Android is looking very attractive to me. I'm waiting for the realease of Nexus 5 😀 - I can't take the direction Apple is heading.
Casiotone
macrumors 6502a
Maybe it will become clearer when Apple releases a 4.85" iPhone and a 5.7" phablet, along with split-screen multi-tasking on iPads.
Microsoft and Google did not decide to use a "flatter" textureless design for Windows 8 Metro and Android just because they thought it looked cool and different. They did it because they knew they would have to support a wide range of screen sizes.
Ensuring that a texture-rich interface can adapt to arbitrary screen sizes means a lot of work and potential glitches to deal with.
iOS could afford to use all of these highly textured navigation bars because of the very limited number of screen sizes it supported (before the iP5, there were essentially only 2 screen sizes to deal with).
A textureless design will make supporting auto-layout APIs a lot easier for devs (which is highly encouraged by Apple to facilitate the transition to iOS 7) and will help iOS free itself from its fixed screen paradigm, enabling things like a bigger iPhone, phablet and split-screen multitasking.
Microsoft and Google did not decide to use a "flatter" textureless design for Windows 8 Metro and Android just because they thought it looked cool and different. They did it because they knew they would have to support a wide range of screen sizes.
Ensuring that a texture-rich interface can adapt to arbitrary screen sizes means a lot of work and potential glitches to deal with.
iOS could afford to use all of these highly textured navigation bars because of the very limited number of screen sizes it supported (before the iP5, there were essentially only 2 screen sizes to deal with).
A textureless design will make supporting auto-layout APIs a lot easier for devs (which is highly encouraged by Apple to facilitate the transition to iOS 7) and will help iOS free itself from its fixed screen paradigm, enabling things like a bigger iPhone, phablet and split-screen multitasking.
If you are using the Notes app because it's fun and exciting you are doing something wrong.
Night Spring
macrumors P6
falconeight
Guest
So basically what you are saying is that there is not much difference between the 3.5 inch iPhone 4S, 8 inch iPad mini, or 9.7 inch iPad? Ok makes sense
teknikal90
macrumors 68040
I don't know you but I would bet that you're new to being an apple fan.
What the op is describing and what a lot of people here are saying is that the new redesign doesn't feel right, the way apple has felt right in the past.
Remember when tiger came out sans redesign and yet vista has had to come out with something new to replace the win xp theme? That's because aqua was truly great, it's iconic and it's timeless. When it first came out it felt right - it had an identity and you could see it being an iconic design. Guess what? OS X mavericks a decade later, and it still looks fundamentally the same! Os 7 does not look fundementally the same as ios 1
The same sort of thing happened with the sunflower iMac. White. Iconic. Guess what? Still here decade later. Timeless.
Ios 7 just doesn't have to feel to it. It feels like a fad...it's not different (how many people have you heard say that it looks like an android now?), and it feels like it has an expiry date (2 years when this whole flat design thin fades away)
Casiotone
macrumors 6502a
I did not say that, don't put words in my mouth. I don't see why Apple would not continue to encourage devs to make tablet specific interfaces.
Let me start out by saying that I still think iOS 6 looks great. I think iOS 7 looks great as well.
Sorry you don't feel the same way about iOS 7, but you as a developer are in a unique position to influence the design language of iOS. Case in point- pull to refresh. An independent developer came up with the idea, and now Apple includes the basic mechanics of it in iOS. Come up with your own solutions to what you feel is ailing iOS 7, and it just might be good enough for other developers to take note, include it in their apps (hopefully with your permission!), and who knows- Apple just might find it worthy enough to be included in a future release of iOS.
I know it's not quite that simple to just "come up" with interface solutions, but if you do... don't hesitate to do things your own way instead of the way Apple is telling you to do it. As long as it follows the iOS HIG, you should be good!
One last thing that should make you feel better- take a look at OS X 10.0 and compare it to 10.6-10.9. Same general approach, but with TONS of refinement to make it look amazing. I can see iOS following the same path but at a quicker speed.
Didn't say that was the only reason but when you remove the charm and design from an app, you remove any difference to any other app. If it's just a blank white screen where you enter words, what's the point. It just becomes another task to do and there's no excitement or energy toward the product.
It's the same thing with iBooks. While I prefer actual books, the look and feel of the app was enough to give it a second look to consider it. Now that it's lost all of that, why bother with it? I'd rather stick with my (infinitely better) actual books.
(And, again, this is not necessarily a problem with JUST Apple since all of the companies are doing this; aside from Gmail, most of Google's products are just as boring lately).
I've never been excited by a notepad, real or virtual.
As for iBooks, the shear convenience of digital books stands on its own vs. actual books. The design of the app is a fraction of a fraction of a selling point.
The OS and interface should get out of the way and let you enjoy the content.
SpyderBite
macrumors 65816
Night Spring
macrumors P6
But the point is, some of us feel that visual effects such as the page turn animation in iBooks enhanced our enjoyment of content without getting in the way.
Also, if enhancement of content wasn't important, why bother with visual effects like Parallax and the new zooming in and out effect when entering and existing apps?
falconeight
Guest
iOS 1 and iOS 7 are not that different. All your talking about is design of icons and the colors. Other than that its the same add command center and notification center. Flat or uncluttered doesn't fade it is the choice of many if not all people with some class. People with money eat at restaurants that are basically flat in design when they want to relax. Ever been on vacation to a resort? Other than Disney land they are all pretty contemporary and flat. Have you ever seen a luxury or expensive sports car? They are also contemporary and flat. Have you seen the mac? Its pretty flat uncluttered and contemporary. Have you ever watch tennis or golf. Both are very classy sports and both are pretty flat/contemporary. If you want to eat at mcdonalds everyday and use android cool go for it. Let iOS and all mac products be classy and modern. And last I am no apple fan(have no idea why you people have to call names) I am a fan of good tech. WP8 is a better OS with a terrible eco system. Android is garbage it might change but right now its garbage.
Look at this video of HTC. Not only do they copy apple products they find a guy to copy apple's Jony Ive. Should apple patent its employee's? I would. I had no idea HTC created the CNC process. Hmm you learn something everyday.
Your app isn't going to go far if it isn't a pleasure to open and look at while you're using it....
- Status