"iOS is stagnant"
iOS only seems stagnant because they don't have to trumpet every year about how they've finally gotten rid of ui lag or completely overhauled the system appearance. These are points in it's favor to most people.
iOS only seems stagnant because they don't have to trumpet every year about how they've finally gotten rid of ui lag or completely overhauled the system appearance. These are points in it's favor to most people.
Or another evolutionary analogy: crocodiles have more or less been around forever -- they don't have to trumpet about solving calorie intake problems, or overheating in the summer, but it took mammals to invent fire and get to the moon.
Saying more or less "iOS is fine" is also saying "we're not interested in pushing the envelope anymore".
I acknowledge that that's not necessarily an entirely worthy goal in and of itself, but keeping a design focused product fresh does have its merits.
Here's iOS 1 and 5 side by side
http://pocketnow.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/ios1ios5.png
Other than the obvious lack of a wallpaper I'm not really sure that there's been any fundamental work on improving the user interaction and look & feel of the thing in 5 years.
I find it unbelievable that there's nothing that could be done better and that iOS was launched with perfect interaction design, fully formed from the heads of the designers, or perfect visual design, reverently propagated to the modern day and on into the future.
Is this really the penultimate in volume slider design? There's no more work to be done here?
http://www.uiparade.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/clean-ios...
I think this recent shakeup is Apple signaling that it's time to evolve again and that excites me much more than the last 2 or 3 product launches have.
If anybody can put out a new way of pushing electrons around and making it "just work" it's going to be Apple and I want to see what they come up with.
Don't get me wrong, it's not that I think it can't be improved, because I can think of a few needed improvements myself. But I hear people continue to say this about Apple -- "They aren't innovating lately." -- without saying what needs to change.
So, without just comparing iOS1 vs. iOS6, what about the current state of iOS needs to change?
I have both an iPhone and Nexus 7, and I keep forgetting on N7 that sharing to Evernote doesn't require laborious app switching and cut and pasting. It's a very real, important piece of the puzzle that Apple hasn't even bothered trying to attempt.
Then there are a ton of stupid UI issues they have, like when I open a new tab in mobile Safari, I don't want it to gain focus.
I'd like to be able to update the software on it without needing to rearrange apps into the order I want them yet again, I don't have any idea if that is possible or not.
I suppose you could put Favourites as a folder on the home screen, but that would defeat the purpose since you're back to two taps for a call.
http://dribbble.s3.amazonaws.com/users/3331/screenshots/1108...
is getting old (OS X is even worse)
I'm not a visual designer so I'm not sure I'm entirely qualified to offer suggestions, but there are other button styles, even completely new ones that would work.
Some ideas:
How about some variation on the one in the upper right here?
http://www.colourbox.com/preview/2584456-712013-exit-beautif...
VST interfaces are usually choking with ideas
https://www.google.com/search?q=beautiful+buttons&hl=en&...
Or why buttons at all? I should just be able to interact with the direct metaphor of what I want.
Or a pop-up circular button system like in Palantir? http://www.palantir.com/wp-content/static/techblog/2007/08/s...
The interface looks like candy, instead of trying to outshiny the competition, maybe it should be matte? Then use shiny bits sparingly.
http://remodelista.com/img/sub/uimg/Janet_Images/suga-black-...
etc. etc. etc.
Let's not go for shiny kitsch, let's go for expensive sports car with a matte paint job.
Other than that, cross app communications (intents) and resolution independent layouts as an option would be nice and get Apple out of this weird resolution multiplier lock it seems to be trying to bust out of (with the exception of the iPhone 5).
How about other interface bits? There's a button and the screen, how about capacitive edges that can be used for interface sliders or other things? I love capacitive buttons on Android phones (when they had them).
Or let's get crazy, a completely disappearing product all together. Jam the guts into a watch, and a small wireless earpiece, or maybe ear/eyepiece and voice controls and a capacitive touch panel on the watch, don't make it look gaudy like Google Glass, get top eyewear designers to pump out different headpieces (lots of upsale potential there) etc. etc. and top watch designers to design the handpiece and turn computing into ubiquitous wearable fashion driven computing (with sales cycles as fast as the fashion industry -- seasons) and people will buy 4 sets of devices a year instead of one every two years.
The only cars I see with matte paint jobs are car modder's econoboxes, which look pretty kitsch.
> How about some variation on the one in the upper right here? http://www.colourbox.com/preview/2584456-712013-exit-beautif....
Yup, the 90's want their design inspiration back
(A) Probably can't tell because iOS 6 is on all the phones, zing!
(B) If he's trying to cut and paste he can tell. iOS 2 won't let him do it, iOS 3+ will force him to copy the entire body text randomly, iOS 5+ will randomly offer a handful of options that generally do not include the one the user is looking for.
(C) Ok, so it's visually stagnant. I guess I'll agree here. Turns out, there's usually less to disagreements than first glance might indicate.
"any fundamental work on improving the user interaction and look & feel of the thing in 5 years."
There are certainly new gestures and there's voice. There's new functionality in the buttons and from the lock screen. I would not say this is totally accurate.
"I find it unbelievable that there's nothing that could be done better and that iOS was launched with perfect interaction design, fully formed from the heads of the designers, or perfect visual design, reverently propagated to the modern day and on into the future."
I don't see anyone claiming it's perfect but there's a good argument to be made that Good Enough + Consistent > Better. Which is to say that Apple users, who do get updated to the latest patch, might be jarred if Apple constantly yanked the UI here and there for the sake of slight benefits or "keeping the look fresh".
Though your point is clear. Mac OS X is very clearly reminiscent of this interface.
https://www.google.com/search?q=android+home+screen&qscr...
you'll get a cacaphony of different interfaces. Android may be "converging" on the right design, a potentially better design, but meanwhile people are suffering through all sorts of inconsistencies. For the vast majority of people who want their phones to "just work", Apple's approach is better [design it right, up front, in a way that can be used for years].
What matters is the quality of the directions, not that they are marketed with a lower case "i".
This would also be a smart move for Apple as de-privileging Twitter & Facebook would mean that they wouldn't be helping support the lockin for those services – if Google Plus came back from the dead and started eating Facebook's marketshare, Apple would benefit without changing a line of code.
Home screen and notification center widgets don't interest me. But if you could put something like widgets/live tiles/google now-ish space on the lock screen? Particularly with the increased vertical space? That'd be slick.
And intents/services are overdue. Particularly now that they're basically "in" with twitter/Facebook integration. I'm all for having more app store approval scrutiny for third party "services" submissions. But it needs to be in.
while we're asking, it wouldn't hurt to add the "taller"/redesigned task switcher UI that made the rounds recently.
I'd call that all a decent update.
That's not our job to think about what Apple could do to improve our lives. Personally, I've loved Don't Disturb Me since it came out but it sure wasn't an iOS-exclusive feature. Neither has been turn-by-turn navigation.
I don't want iOS to play the keep-up game. I want it to continue being the industry leader, the game changer, the OS everyone else looks up to.
And surely, you cannot disagree that iOS has kind of lost that status since iOS 4.x.
What's amazing is that an original iPhone and iPhone 5 look and feel largely identical for basic uses, even though the latter is a far more capable device. That's a testament to the strength of the original design.
this is the same thing thats spouted by fans of the iphone. We don't need a smaller ipad 10" is the perfect size. We don't need a bigger phone screen, this fits the perfect size for all hands. All this is said till Apple actually does it.
The only "bad" design elements, in my opinion, were notifications and Siri. They fixed notifications but I had to turn Siri off.
And I think Apple is betting on a "conservative" majority that does not want change for the sake of change (I'm certainly part of it) - just observe how similar all the iPhones look, or all the laptops, displays... The only exception I can think of are the cheaper iPods.
(1) Maps is probably the biggest thing they've done since the original phone's launch;
(2) they are moving more and more of the interaction to voice every year;
(3) they are moving more and more of the users' data to the cloud every year.
Since the very sentence I was responding too was about apps ("iOS is stagnant, reviews of recent Apple designed skeuo-heavy apps bemone the lack of functionality") I fail to see how talking about app functionality is some huge leap of logic on my part.
"he was talking about visual design and interaction. None of the things you list here are in that domain"
How is voice control not about interaction?
1 - replaced what they already had and then moved it up to feature parity with the competitors
2 - pioneered it then let it sit, is Siri really that much better and personally assisting me today then at launch?
3 - which appears to be only a response to the competition's great cloud integration
perhaps stagnation is too strong a word... tread-milling perhaps?
Most people, though, just want to use technology to accomplish other things. For them, radical interface changes reduce rather than improve value.
Sure, there's more precise releases than it's competitors, but that doesn't negate the fact that Windows has a more functional-looking (whether or not it is, is an entirely different matter) phone.
The Notification centre was a step in the right direction, but people are wanting data quicker more and more, and the notificiations aren't great for every app. After all, a big reason people cite for going for Android is customisation.
When the iPhone was released it was the absolute leader in mobile iOS among other things. Now it's a solid competer but it lacks the originality it once had.
By contrast Microsoft have some interesting design ideas but they abandon them in the very next major version in favour of trying something else, which is jarring for users and doesn't inspire trust.
Android was listing screen capture as a new feature not long ago which hardly suggests a breakneck pace of change across the board.
Windows phone tiles are interesting but they don't feel game changing.
Is this an iOS thing or wider than that? Genuine question because if it was iOS alone then surely it would be eating Android's dust right now and that doesn't feel like it's the case, it feels like they're pretty much on a par.
(Just say I'm not wild about the word stagnant given that this is a market that has gone from nought to sixty in about the same time as it takes MS to get a version of Windows out, but it does feel like that pace has somewhat plateaued in the last 12 months or so).
Windows Phone 8 has a totally different and new paradigm going with merging start screen and "notifications bar" with the live tiles. Rooms with its "all sharing feature". Kids stuff. Lockscreen apps. All of these are a totally new approach to the mobile platform.
I feel the "new Microsoft" is really innovating(i hate that word) atm.
Kids corner I would love on my iPhone but it's a more polished version of what I can do with restrictions so I'm not really sold on it being that revolutionary.
You might not notice it, but, there is an eighth-of-a-second-ish delay between when you tap on most buttons and when the action occurs. An obvious (to me) example is when you tap on the back button on a navigation controller, and it takes a split second before anything happens..
It isn't much, but it is consistent across the OS, and it drives me crazy.
I'm not perceiving much lag between touch up and animation start on the back button of the UINavigationController.