iOS 7 As Defense
marco.org
marco.org
As has been stated by others, none of the animations are so GPU-heavy that they are impossible to implement on other devices, but they are not all terribly desirable, either.
The parallax effect, in particular, was already available as a live wallpaper app on Android and sales of that app did skyrocket after WWDC, which really only means that most Android users had that feature available and in use before most iPhone users did. I tried it out myself, and after the gimmick wore off I went back to one of my many other wallpaper options.
A variety of other effects and animations are already in use by the many replacement launcher applications available on Android, and in many cases they are customizable by the user for optimal speed and performance.
These iOS 7 articles really should be focusing on the features that will be making a real difference in this OS, like the task switcher, control center, improved notifications, etc. Those are the things that will continue to provide value to the user once the "new and shiny" lustre has worn off. I don't care if they're copies or rehashes or interpretations of features other phone OSes have had for years, they are what will make a real difference to the user.
And for the love of god, implement an Intents feature already.
Er, "Flat" is a visual style.
It's not something that you "imitate" (any more than anybody making an action movie is "imitating" a previous action movie director), it's guidelines to implement your design on.
Such styles come and go with design fashion. The trend has swing towards flatter styles, and Apple obliged. Like when in 2004-5, with Delicious Library et al, the trend swung towards ornaments and skeuomorphism and Apple again obliged (and even snatched D.L's designer).
Plus, none of the above UIs made even a dent on the market. So not really inviting to "imitate" a success point of view.
(With the exception of the "Windows Desktop OS". But that sold because it's the "next version of windows", not for it's flat facade, which was universally hated so much by desktop users that MS is reverting in 8.1 to let you have a start menu and boot directly to the classic Windows desktop view).
http://www.icharts.net/chartchannel/worldwide-smartphone-os-...
It's a small dent, but if you look really closely you can see Android in dark blue.
- Most high end apps already have custom views, they're not relying on standard UIKit elements: Evernote, Tweetbot, Fantastical, Spotify, Audible, Alien Blue, etc.
- Web apps can skimp a bit on the transitions without feeling useless and out of place and they won't have any trouble reskinning. Especially for the standard blog template he mentions.
- As far as the 1 pixel lines, maybe it's a stylistic element that android can't copy easily but I don't see this as a huge advantage
<View android:layout_height="1px" />
>Most Android phones have high-DPI screens, too, but their feature-checklist battles have actually driven many of them to have too-dense resolutions for 1-pixel lines to be useful.
Seriously, what? They're not that much higher-DPI than the retina screens.
I don't think there's ever been a design brief at Apple that has focused on the competition or this sort of flash over substance. I don't think Ive would have accepted the mission to make it different, well, just to be different.
I think the goal at Apple is ALWAYS the same: to delight. To create "wonder" as they like to say. Is this UI as successful as the previous UI with that objective? Ultimately, that's the only criteria by which iOS7 will be judged. I see subtle genius in places, a lot of rough edges, and some genuine missteps.
He's somehow managed to convince himself that the iOS7 UI is the one that others will try and copy.
Backwards.
I've used iOS7 for a bit now and it is actually a pain to use. Slow, clunky, disorganized, limited. It no longer feels "premium". When I first picked up the original iPhone, there was a sense of "wow" and "this is wonderful". That feeling is not there in iOS7 and frankly hasn't been there in quite a while...
I hear 6 years later how everyone absolutely loved the first iPhone, but frankly I didn't think it was that great(slow, touches seemed off a lot, typing was awful, no 3G), and very few people actually bought the damn thing. It wasn't until the 3G and 3Gs that it actually took off.
Jesus, do people actually buy into this crap? The iPhone UI was never anything special; the mobile UI metaphor has remained pretty much unchanged since long before Apple got into the game.
And somehow Samsung phones did not have that interface prior to 2007.
What's your point? This is not to say that the industry wasn't heavily influenced by Apple's success, but imitating a paradigm that has been around for decades doesn't make one an Apple copy-cat. This is in the same vein as claiming anything with a solid black rectangular bezel is an Apple rip-off.
A screen with icons in a grid?
Yes, you really convinced me how this is totally the same as the iOS UI.
I mean, it also uses icons in a grid no?
What's there to differentiate them? I mean, apart from a totally different visual look, different behaviors, different affordances, gestures and the employment of touch (and much more: multitouch), etc etc.
Now, how exactly "mobile UI metaphor has remained pretty much unchanged since long before Apple" and yet, all the phones pre-iPhone were non touch crap, with small screens, keyboards and BS, slow interfaces, and all the phones post-iPhone followed it's UI guidance (either directly, as Android, or in a flat facade, as Windows Phone), is a mystery.
(Not to mention that the Newton --or even '80s Apple stuff, from prototypes to finished products-- already had icons in a grid, if that was that mattered).
I like the progress iOS and Android have made over the last few years. I've tried both and enjoyed features that each had to offer. I have also enjoyed reading posts from Marco's blog in the past.
However, I am frankly tired of all this flurry of blog posts going gaga over iOS 7 and failing to make a point.
The more laughable notion is that Android would want to copy iOS 7. Samsung's shenangians aside, Android now has a cohesive UI in Holo that most new apps are using. There's no incentive to mimic iOS.
Also, there has been plenty of copying in all directions. And not just iOS7, Apple have already copied Android's notification bar piecemeal. And that's fine, of course.
I'm hoping they try to copy iOS 7 in their next devices - then maybe their devices will look as nice as AOSP.
http://techplore.com/technology/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/s...
Stopped reading.
The worst of all of this is, is that nobody seems to mention this but when it happens in the other direction (the competition imitating Apple), it will cause serious outrage.
Occam's razor, anyone?
Thinking that Apple's design is made to do something Android can't do and to make devs rewrite their apps is an incredibly cynical view of what Apple does.
I think Apple is trying to really move their platform forward for their customers. They aren't fighting android, they are building better products for their paying customers.
I guess the idea is that the permalink will last for an infinite amount of time. I personally think its pretty clever.
This is all quite funny regardless. Samsung had parallax and accelerometer (later gyroscope) based interfaces for years in their TouchWiz shizzle, just as Google heavily pushed 3D interfaces (see RenderScript). I would never argue that it is identical to what Apple has introduced, but once against from the zeitgeist of Apple fanatics you would believe this is the next step brought to us from Apple.
> effects like layered blurring or transluency are an
> absolute laugh for any modern GPU, even on very low-end
> devices
Instead it's a UI-thread issue and composition hindrances like stop-the-world garbage collection (or synchronous load-on-demand UI rudiments that halt or significantly impede UI interactions). If it were a simple GPU issue we would have quickly moved past it (GPUs now are dramatically more powerful than a few short years ago), but alas, it is not.
I don't think the (sane) argument is that Android can't match. Or that the hardware to match is unavailable/expensive. I think there's a valid point about Android having different priorities that often see it ignoring this area and the manufacturers of cheap devices generally just not caring to try. [1]
So inasmuch as iOS6-class performance was in reach of even the 'don't really care' class of Android manufacturers, iOS7 does present a higher bar (that they are likely to continue not really caring about), meaning tens-to-hundreds of millions of devices that don't (regardless of whether they could) match on visuals. Until the inexorable march of performance-per-watt brings them brute force solutions.
[1] Is Google even going to think it's worth the resources to chase blur effects at the expense of other features? And if they don't, would Samsung? And as the maker of its own 'cheaper' devices, would Samsung filter that higher-end look to its cheaper devices out of the gate? Or retain it as a differentiator to push people into buying new Galaxy kit, instead of the lower-end devices?
It's also worth giving some perspective on those rampant "cheap" devices: The most common Android handset in use in the US of A is the Galaxy S3. Other very powerful devices fill the top echelon of deployments. Any notion that assumes that it's legions of bottom tier devices just isn't accurate. And the great thing about GPU shaders is that they're eminently scalable. Again, assuming that this notion that Android will chase iOS is true, these things are the most easily toggled, and having better effects on top tier devices that scale back on lower devices is trivial.
All of this (the submission I mean, and related articles) is just conjecture. Apple did what Apple felt was right for iOS to improve the operating system. Framing everything in an Android context is just speculation.
Guessing you don't use Android or at least haven't in awhile? I've been Android user now since the release of 4.0 and it seems much more responsive now than my wife's iPhone 5 in almost every category from web browsing to gaming. I was very aware of the lag pre-4.0 and that was the main reason I never switched (was an iPhone user before that). Now it's as smooth as can be.
It has gotten much better, most certainly, via things like concurrent and partial garbage collections (and the improvements in the integer-units in the CPUs, simply brute forcing through these UI thread impediments), and other core improvements, but it's still most certainly behind iOS (where UI priority was a core architectural concern from day one).
Aside from a still not silky smooth experience, Android still has an endemic problem with completely non-responsive interactions -- you click or do something and everything just stops with absolutely no hints or feedback....and then three seconds later a result appears.
... with one glaring exception: on my Android phone, at least, pressing the home button very often takes a good 1-2 seconds (sometimes more!) to take you to the home screen, with no visual feedback that it's doing anything. A second with no feedback is an eternity in GUI time. iPhones (and iPads), on the other hand, respond pretty much instantaneously to the home button.
I'm pretty used to this behavior, so I know to just wait, but it's still pretty annoying (one hits the home button quite frequently in typical usage).... Even if there's some property of the Android software that makes it challenging to do the switch itself quickly for some reason, couldn't they have at least provided a little visual feedback that it's doing something...?!
has very little to say about what the bulk of Android devices are, given that something like 80% of Android activations are outside the USA. Further, the discussion isn't just about cheap/underpowered hardware, but even adequate hardware that suffers for lack of effort/support. Hardware superior to Nexus builds routinely perform worse than Nexus builds. This is a consideration larger than what Android or the hardware in a given device can do.
> "Apple did what Apple felt was right for iOS to improve the operating system."
This I very much agree with. I think it's fine to say plenty of Android device makers will continue to release devices with much less thought to performance than Apple, or even Google, and these devices won't look or perform like iOS7, or even stock jelly bean on a Nexus device.
But I doubt very much that anyone at Apple spent any real time planning UI performance/feature tuning as a competitive advantage. This situation is very much like Apple tweaking the UI performance of the very first iPhone until animations could match the speed of touch-response. And they did this solely so that "dragging" an object appeared more 'real' -- to reinforce the concept with visuals and visual performance.
And they did that without regard to what hardware competitors might ship, or even what priorities competitors might have -- as there really were no competitors for the device they were building, when they were building it.
This blur and transparency is no different. It's there to reinforce the UI concept. This is more a story about Apple continuing to devote non-trivial time and effort tuning hardware -- and giving up general performance and battery life -- in the pursuit of a level of UI polish they are internally satisfied with.
>Presumably, Apple has a few new patents for iOS 7’s interface and behavior. As we’ve seen, this won’t prevent copying, but it can at least increase the cost. Any efforts to copy the new UI are going to have a dark cloud of potential litigation hanging over them.
This is strange.
Lets see the design principles behind Metro:
1) Content over Chrome
2) Authentically digital
3) Concentration on beautiful typography (see how it caused Google and Apple to talk about fonts in their Holo and iOS7 UI overhauls)
4) Removal of faux realistic and 3d elements
5) Flat look
6) Tasteful, subtle animations during transitions.
See the image on the left here.
http://www.redmondpie.com/ios-7-vs-ios-6-side-by-side-visual...
Apply the above principles to it in your mind.
See how similar it is to the image on the right. Ask someone else to take their opinion.
In fact to me it appears that Apple has in some places gone more overboard with the above principles than even Microsoft.
From DHH's article http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3536-apple-the-organizational...
>As we watched Apple unveil iOS7, the 37signals Campfire room quickly turned to awe of what they had achieved. A redesign so shocking and deep bestowed upon a product so popular left many mouths agape. Whether you happened to like the final product wasn’t as relevant as marveling at the vision, drive, and sheer determination to pull it off.
>Apple has a way of making people feel like that.
>But what followed next is at least as interesting: We all sought to explain just how they did it. Is it all Ive’s eye? Is it that they explore more ideas than anyone else? Is it never accepting “good enough”? Forgoing customer input and trusting their own instinct? Hundreds of triple-A designers and developers?
I needn't even quote Gruber.
This is not to say there's nothing new or no innovation in iOS 7(there is), or even that Apple is wrong to copy(it is not) or that I think it's an exact copy(it's not), but it makes me feel Microsoft's designers(who DHH implies are F level) are basically chopped liver who are destined to live in obscurity. There isn't even a passing mention of them!
Can you imagine the reactions of the above writers if the situation was reversed? Remember "Redmond, start your photocopiers."?
I am not sure if I am missing something here, someone new to their leanings might even mistake it to be parody or sarcasm.
Your quotes from the 37 Signals blog are so breathless that I'm surprised the author didn't suffocate during the keynote. Absolutely nauseating stuff.