Material You – The next stage for Material Design
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I’m absolutely puzzled why a behemoth like Google can’t have exceptional, human design. Apple can do it, which leads me to believe the ability to pull it off is largely cultural. Something or someone in Apple demands design that is relatable, good-looking, and consistent, and Google simply doesn’t have the same driving force.
Google’s stuff isn’t bad, but it’s simply not exceptional.
(Edit: And to be clear, I mean Google’s design implementation in its entirety, especially beyond Android, including this very webpage which describes their new design.)
Google seems more loosely linked and in most things seems like the left hand doesn’t know what the right is doing.
Lets see which one of them wins out the Google political wars on the long term of Google Attention Span (TM).
PWA for ChromeOS, Flutter for Fuchsia (but yes it is multi-platform), JetPack Compose for Android (but does have some multi-platform stuff coming out).
So really it's three.
PWAs, Flutter, and Jetpack Compose.
Of which I think PWAs rightly exist alongside a native solution.
Flutter is sort of the odd one out and not sure where it will be long term. Although it's becoming more clear Fuchsia is probably going to be for IoT devices, so I could see Flutter being used as an application framework for them (which IMHO makes a lot of sense.)
I don't think the parents point is that all those are frameworks.
Rather that they have two many frameworks and platforms, with no coherent unified platform strategy (Apple's iOS, macOS, ipadOS, watchOS are all the same under the hood, and their UI frameworks are also unified or getting there fast).
Jetpack Compose is clearly a counter movement from Android team.
https://medium.com/flutter/announcing-flutter-2-2-at-google-...
https://www.press.bmwgroup.com/global/article/detail/T032861...
https://devclass.com/2020/10/29/sony-takes-a-flutter-on-embe...
https://stadia.dev/intl/es_es/blog/how-flutter-helped-us-mak... https://devblogs.microsoft.com/surface-duo/flutter-dual-scre...
And that seems more like a marketing issue, under the hood there actually are differences between macOS and iOS. Catalyst hopes to fix this but it's still pretty rocky imho. Google also did something similar with running Android apps on chromeOS.
iPadOS, iOS and watchOS would be the same for Android phones, tablets and watches. So it doesn't seem like a fair comparison here.
I don't see Apple being big in the web space as much so Google really wanting to push PWAs vs Apple's stance is different. Although Apple seems to be fine with PWAs to a degree, so it would be the same for them too.
Apple really doesn't seem to care to support things outside their ecosystem (it doesn't benefit them like it does Google.) So you probably aren't going to see a multiplatform library from them.
All the pieces are already in place (in various early stage forms) to make that move eventually from Android and Linux to Fuschia.
Additionally, I think everyone sees Flutter for web as some kind of joke right now but it seems pretty clear to me that this too is an early stage play to kill the idea of “native apps that live inside a closed garden App Store environment”.
I think we are close to seeing a world where the internet (as most people use it) is going to be moving away from the traditional document based browser approach to something a bit more app centric before long.
I find things like the Chrome team’s project Fugu suddenly make a LOT more sense when you start looking elsewhere at other things that seem unrelated at first (K8s, Fuschia and a few others come to mind).
They are all aiming to meet in the middle before long. People are already saying Safari is the new IE for example and I think that is about to become much more apparent in the next couple of years.
As far as picking practical examples, my lack of familiarity with iOS means some of these may be obsolete, but some obvious ones that come to mind:
1) Is iOS multitasking still as poor as it used to be? Eg, are split-screen apps on the iPhone still impossible?
2) Are homescreen widgets still impossible on iOS?
3) Are you still forced to open (eg) app links with lower-quality off-brand apps like Apple Maps, or can you set your preferred app the first time you open a link of a certain type?
I'm not even going very far afield here, as I'm only picking things that a) I know iOS had a feature gap in at some point and b) I would trip over at least weekly were my OS to have these issues. I'd imagine that one could do a little research and come up with more such examples (as well as examples where iOS's UI is superior to Android's).
1. Yeah, still not great. 2. No, homescreen widgets now exist in iOS 3. Short answer is "kind of". There's official support for setting default web & email clients, but many (most?) apps support setting a preference for e.g. mapping providers.
All that being said, I think you're coming at things mostly from a feature angle which is perhaps a different discussion.
From a pure aesthetic consistency, polish, and end-to-end visual experience perspective Apple still does a better job than Google.
Whether or not that extra dash of visual polish makes up for feature deficiencies or ecosystem limitations is a broader question of course.
2) no, home screen widgets in iOS have been a feature for a while now
3) no, iOS asks me if I want to open in Apple Maps or Google Maps.
I think you're conflating features and design. Whether or not there's a particular feature (turn of WIFI), is not an attribute of the design. So you can fairly say the iOS feature set was too minimal, but you can't attribute that to UI design
That just makes the downvotes more ridiculous! There's no accounting for taste, and it's easy to imagine someone liking any design over another.
This is unfalsifiable, and the line of thinking that generates it is trivially rebutted with a quick look at recent history. All of the limitations I mentioned were lauded as not-actually-useful by Apple (and their partisans) until they launched me-too version, at which point everyone immediately flipped to excitement.
[EDIT] I think the fundamental problem with it is that, if an app screen deliberately presents a back button, there's nearly a 100% chance the current application will handle it in some way that makes sense for the current screen. With an always-on back button, the user has no way of knowing which of three handlers will receive it: 1) The OS, 2) The application, but not handling it in some way that makes sense for the current screen, or 3) The application, handling it sensibly for the current screen. You're rolling the dice.
If you swipe anywhere from the left edge of the display to the right, you can go to the previous screen, kind of like pages in a book.
(Doesn’t work on all apps, probably from developers than aren’t aware of the convention)
My fellow developer did not know that you can long press on mac bottom bar like for years. He observed it when i did it. I think i even noticed it after many days. That's the problem with hidden gestures. Android the same issue when you hide the bottom bar. I just keep it on, swiping is anyway difficult when palms are sweaty.
Etc, etc, I have more but I'll stop there :-/ I love my MacBook and use ios for a few professional needs, but ios feels almost unusable in comparison as an everyday device to me.
This is false, you can do the same on iOS nowadays... Long press the WiFi icon from the tray (after expanding the WiFi/airplane mode/Bluetooth widget box) and you will get to the list of networks.
A bunch of other statements are also not completely true, such as the widgets on Home Screen (or are you talking about some specific type of widgeting feature that iOS doesn't have?).
> ios notification panel has like 3 different modes all with different capabilities and purposes depending on how you open it.
Can you show me this? Can't replicate that in any of my current iOS devices, not that notifications on iOS is good but this issue with Notification Centre has been fixed for a while.
> Scrolling on ios is slower and more jittery than Android these days which surprises me.
How did you measure this? I just went to try this out, scrolled through some browser pages and apps that have infinite scrolling my iPhone 12 Pro Max and my flatmate's OnePlus 9 Pro, no idea what you mean because the experience is, for me, very similar.
> Apps look squished and busy with text with ios' UI. Not always clear what's a button, what's swipable, whether you're deeply nested in navigation or at the top, etc.
This is due to you not using iOS perhaps, I have the same issue with Android after not using it at all for 6+ years, I don't understand the interface and what is interactive or not.
> ios seems to skip loading indicators and just show empty screens, which is really frustrating.
I don't experience this and it seems to be much more a critic of apps you've experienced it rather than iOS as an OS.
I am not an Apple fan, I just use their products because they suffice my use cases, but I feel you conflated some very different issues and subjective judgment stated as facts.
Kinda amazing how all "practical examples" are being downvoted by Apple fans on this site :D
The question was probably "how modern or innovative do we want to look?" and the answer something like: "let's better lay low for the next years with all the public scrutiny and the risk of a breakup".
Microsoft has employed the same strategy for years, IMO.
Apple is still slowly recovering from its iOS7 moment, so not a great example.
With all that said, it is difficult to speak purely objectively about design, so our opinions very well may differ completely reasonably. The best we can get are some large studies with statistical usability results, but, I admit, it’s easier to simply be handwavy. :)
They're good, but they used to be better. Alas.
Ive did best under Jobs. There were numerous disasters when Jobs was no longer around to keep Ive on the rails, including iOS7, the butterfly keyboard, the touch bar, and the clunky first few iterations of Watch itself.
Big Sur is more Fisher-Price than it could be. Visually it's not a classic, but it's also better that mediocre.
But the new iMacs are probably the best iMacs ever, without the backward references and very visible Design™ of the post-Jobs Ive years.
Apple just purely politically decided to reject everything they've done up to that point and bite more than they can chew, in precisely the same way Apple NEVER DOES, and other companies, like Microsoft with Vista or Windows 8 for example, often do.
This was very uncharacteristic for Apple, and yes the aftermath is still present to this day. We're at iOS15 almost, and they're still scraping bits of shit that hit the fan in iOS7.
Also macOS is turning uglier by the minute.
i was on my phone and skimmed more than half the article before giving up and admitting it's actually unreadable and that i have no idea what great new thing they were trying to present.
this is somehow baffling.
That's fine - we get used to stuff and rant when it changes in ways we don't expect. But the beta on my Android phone looks amazing and IMO better than iPadOS I have on a tablet.
I feel you're just buying way too much into the Apple marketing schtick.
There could be so many reasons why we diverge, but I suspect we’d probably disagree on what we consider a “design philosophy” or “the details” in the first place.
Maybe it’s true that I only see the “common” things (and it’s great we agree that the “common” things are consistent!), but I’m curious where you see seriously inconsistent or plainly bad visual design at the proverbial fray that doesn’t exist in other ecosystems of this scale.
esp big sur moved in a big way to a more fisher price look.
that it all seems more consistent than all the rest is just a sad statement more about them than apple...
I've experienced this recently, as a competent (DSLR) photographer trying to find out what I could do with the camera on my new iPhone Pro. I picked up more by browsing TikTok than from Apple's own material. One example was how to create long-exposure photographs from a 'live' photo. The function was actually discoverable through the iOS interface but I wouldn't have thought to try it in the way it was being used in TikTok tutorial.
(whether the long exposure effect is comparable with the equivalent from a dedicated camera is a different question)
I've used an Android phone (including 2 Nexus 5x and a Pixel 3a, my current one) my whole life and always thought it looked okay, but not great. I've had an OnCall iPhone for a few months though, and everything just looks way more polished, sane, and even comfortable. The animations are smoother. The colors are more beautiful. The content density is better. And mainly, everything looks less generic.
It's a feeling and I'm only a sample size of 1, but I don't think "you're just used to it" is the correct answer here.
The fact that I can never figure out in any given app how the back button is supposed to work (is it in the taskbar? or at the top of the screen? or am I supposed to swipe from the left?) or where the settings can be (sometimes in the app, sometimes in the Settings app) is deeply confusing.
Sometimes when the keyboard is up, swiping down from the top closes it, sometimes it scrolls. I find that I genuinely have no idea what's going to happen whenever I tap anywhere. The keyboard decides to just change words using autocorrect far more aggressively than my SwiftKey on Android.
Maybe one day I'll learn how to use iOS, but I know that it's definitely not "strikingly consistent".
All I see is "Siri Suggestions", no alpha list.
I guess you'll need to be on the last home screen... I only have 1 since this feature was introduced.
Without advertising revenue the middleman is doomed. Not true for companies, like hardware vendors, that sell products (instead of giving them away as a means to enable more collection of data about users, who will be the targets of online ads).
If you go and read the material design docs for example, this isn’t my full time area of expertise but I don’t see anything controversial in there and there is no way in hell that they haven’t tested the hell out of it from every possible angle but the outcome is honestly kind of soulless.
My actual full time area of expertise is in running A/B tests and I’ll be the first to say that the link between “good aesthetics” and what actually works is much weaker than you might expect. See Amazon for another clear example.
While people selling design languages like to pretend that they are objective, design is largely aesthetics which is largely subjective. IMO, Google is consistently far better than Apple, which consistently, at least since the iPhone era, has come off visibly trying to hard (though recently less so than in the over-the-top skeumorphism period.)
You are focusing too much on the visual aspects of design, you can't say that Google is consistently far better than Apple in overall design, you might prefer Google's aesthetics but design as a whole I can't really agree with you.
No, I’m not; aesthetic preferences are not limited to the visual, and preferences and relative importance of all the elements you identify are within the scope of subjective aesthetic preference. Though grandparent who I was responding to was focussed entirely on the visual—their whole criticism of Google design was: “...end up looking juvenile and Fisher-Price-like. On mobile, the font is too big and too ragged. The colors and shapes look like a Kleenex box aesthetic. The spacing isn’t all that great.”—so if I was focussed, even exclusively, on the visual aspects of design in my response it would have been appropriate in context.
It's sort-of usable if you set up some custom wallpaper, but that takes a while to load, and while it's loading the page glitches with the original colour scheme on grey.
The experience was fine as it was. Now it's somewhere between irritating and infuriating.
Disagree. I've repeatedly had to help my older relatives out with awful UX failures on Gmail or basic apps (think: the phone app) on their Android phones. As recently as a couple weeks ago. Usually it takes me a while to figure out what's going on. They have no chance whatsoever. One thing they consistently seem to get wrong is having god-awful visual hierarchies for UI elements, and not labeling things. That on top of "flat design" tending to make it hard to tell what the hell anything means or is.
(Apple, for their part, is getting increasingly bad on this front and have been since iOS 7, but mostly that's about discoverability for moderately-advanced functionality, not [except rarely] extremely basic UX fails that even this non-UX-expert developer recognizes as terrible)
[EDIT] it doesn't help that every time they upgrade, it seems like everything's totally different and layouts & UI paradigms have been redesigned from the ground up. This despite my steering them to fairly basic, vanilla-Android phones.
Google’s stuff isn’t bad, but it’s simply not exceptional.
IMO it's ambitious, perhaps excessively so. I work on a product that we white label and recolorize for various enterprise-scale clients who want adherence to their own color palettes, and there are often things that feel "off" when we change color palettes alone... simply because typography, whitespace, and color go hand in hand to create a brand identity. It's never as easy as swapping colors.
And then there's the underlying assumption that a user wants a single color identity to follow them across the aspects of their personal identity. I don't know about others, but I want my social apps to have a different "feel" from my corporate messaging and issue-tracking systems. As Bob Dylan puts it:
> "Red Cadillac and a black mustache... Pink petal-pushers, red blue jeans... I'm a man of contradictions, I'm a man of many moods / I contain multitudes."
If Bob Dylan is implicitly criticizing your design framework's core assumptions in his latest studio album... you're by definition not Steve Jobs.
I'm guessing but I would have thought that that would be what it would derive from solid black.
How appealing a design is is personal preference, and I think a lot of the elements advertised, say, squiggly sliders, show the flexibility of the system; it's not like all sliders will be squiggly, but it opens up the possibility while still working with the rest of the design language.
The emphasis on customization is important as well - a more flexible system means that you can customize things that look more closely to how you want them, whether this be bright and squiggly, or dark and slick.
Just my own two ¢. I'm not affiliated, fwiw.
Of course, some Android users are going to dislike the new design -- it is a design preference and it's _different_, after all!
I love the new design. There are a few rough edges (like the brightness bar!) but I assume it'll be polished over the multi-year roadmap they've given, or at least through each of the dev previews until the Pixel 6 drops.
There seems to be a huge amount of positive feedback, both from media and Android users, so it's not an unpopular opinion at all. It seems to mostly be unpopular opinion between existing iOS users :)
Here's the problem: "We built upon this insight to generate unique Material palettes for everyone, derived from a personal signal—wallpaper—that can be applied to their entire experience."
I like my wallpapers to be striking, geometric, interesting, but ultimately distinctive from the rest of my phone, where I do want colours.
So I hope there will be another way to generate signals for the phone colour pallette.
I thought they were really onto something but every few years they now just seem to change it to fit with the fashion, maybe I was too naivete.
I've started to wonder if it's even possible to develop a stable form of design that can last, stay up to date and be good looking.
I'll be dead and buried before I give up my Athena widgets.
Today? Android UI changes are starting to feel more like fashion than design. A trend to change every year, constantly changing for the sake of change to keep the consumerism going. Not because it solves a new problem in a new way or it is better for people, but because they just need to stir the pot a little bit more because they're out of new ideas but still need to justify charging flagship phone money.
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/corporate-memphis-design-tec...
What the fuck do vanishing points have to do with time?
For a mortgage company, you don't have a ton of flexibility with your rates— there's a little wiggle room but for the most part your rates will be correlated with the Federal Reserve's interest rates. However, you can control the distance, which lets you alter the logo's perception of time.
The poster above had a question about the relationship between distance traveled and elapsed time. There's a simple mathematical relationship between the two- when your rate is fixed they're directly proportional. A distance that is 2x as far will take twice as long to traverse.
EDIT: To give a bit more context, in 3D geometry, isometric (and other orthographic projections) are just projections which do not apply a perspective divide. No time component anywhere.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17269686/why-do-we-need-...
Probably comes down to personal aesthetics, but I find it looks so much nicer!
For users on Windows, I recommend setting up an AutoHotKey script to convert the string "==-" to "–", and "===-" to "—".
Easy to type, very intuitive (typing more characters gives a longer-width dash), and gives your carefully crafted email missives a lingering, hard-to-describe dash of style!
WinCompose does look like an interesting general option. There's also an open issue asking about adding the idea to the applicable Windows PowerToy: https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys/issues/6976
:y: => thumbs up emoji
::): => smiley
:endash: => –
:emdash: => —
I don't know why I hadn't thought of using :--: and :---:, I'm setting that up now, thanks!
I recommend WinCompose: https://github.com/samhocevar/wincompose
"The design system is built React first. We also support core parts of the system in vanilla JS, Angular, Vue, and Svelte. If you’re using a different framework, you can still build components by following our guidelines for other frameworks."
(I'm not affiliated)
Flat design intentionally avoids including any of these depth cues that would take advantage of this functionality. It is one of the best examples of form over function I can think of.
Also a lot of smaller companies rarely update theming for apps so I don't see them doing it either (I doubt my banking app cares.) I have a feeling few apps will actually update to this leading to fragmentation. Anyways we will see.
So definitely a possibility for a return to something that looks more like real objects in the future.
edit: Are you scrolling with a janky mouse wheel or multi-touch trackpad that might be triggering up events accidentally? It looks like your page jerks up a teeny bit from momentum when you stop--that's probably the issue.
Scrolling up gets it to pop out for me, but I need to scroll up a lot more than you do in order to replicate this (scrolling down normally looks fine on Linux/Chrome). Sounds like it might be possible they haven't noticed it and would appreciate a bug report. :)
Links are not links. Buttons are not buttons: https://grumpy.website/post/0Ra93yy33 The current design still suffers from this.
Fonts in pictures: https://grumpy.website/post/0TEKUvqDX
Contrast: https://grumpy.website/post/0TEJkwzPA
Get a bunch of grey boxes.
Let's take Gmail or Youtube for example.
Reminding the customer of their materialistic nature while simultaneously ripping off the apple "i" schtick.
A lot of corporate bull without any tangible result.