Frosted Glass Effects — Why I switched to Android after all these years | Hacker News Reader

Frosted Glass Effects — Why I switched to Android after all these years

blog.agoeldi.com

29 pointschmars17 comments

I get the author's point, but he has decided that frosted effects have gone out of fashion and uses this as a litmus test for whether or not a platform is in decline.

The crux of this argument is that "pointless" features are a result of stalled innovation. I'm sure if the author was to look more closely at his Android phone he would see a great number of pointless features; especially in OEM skins like Touchwiz.

If the author was trying to convince me that Android is a superior platform when it comes to innovation (which it may well be) then he has failed to provided any evidence other than "because frosted effects".

But he does give more evidence than that when he reports that he was using mostly non-Apple replacements for lots of his standard apps. I'm not sure whether the apps he lists are more "innovative" on Android, but apparently he found them more comfortable to use than the iOS built-ins.

Vista isn't given enough credit. It was a huge overhaul from XP. A lot of the improvements were of the under-the-hood variety, but there were some notable improvements in UI, such as search integration. Win7 was basically Vista with intelligent defaults (and funky backgrounds) while Win8 is Vista with Aero ripped out and Metro added in.

Aero wasn't meaningless eye-candy added to Vista to distract from a lack of innovation. It was MS taking skeuomorphic design so seriously that they were willing to sacrifice a lot of performance to implement it. Aero was doomed once MS started gravitating towards flat, colorful UI's that eschew skeuomorphism, and finally decided to try to run a desktop kernel on tablet hardware.

One thing I find strange about iOS 7 is that it doesn't seem to be well suited for older hardware or budget hardware like the iPad mini or the rumored budget iPhone. Does iOS 7 perform better than this added eye candy would lead one to expect, or will it simply run in a compromised mode on weaker hardware?

I've been running the iOS 7 betas on my iPhone 4 (the oldest generation that iOS 7 will support). It definitely disables some of the features: a lot of the transparency is gone, the parallax is gone, and it's missing a lot of features like Siri and stuff. In beta 1, the performance was terrible, but it's gotten much better recently.

> Aero wasn't meaningless eye-candy added to Vista to distract from a lack of innovation. It was MS taking skeuomorphic design so seriously

I'd argue the "frosted glass effect" in iOS 7 is not skeuomorphism but is being done as user orientation cues.

I feel iOS 7 is moving into better information geography, where the spatial position of the information helps convey its organization. Less computer savvy "normals" get disoriented when tapping buttons and having screens replaced. The parallax, zoom, and translucency effects in iOS 7, give a definite impression that all this information has a coherent placement in space, offering cues for more intuitive or natural feeling navigation, making it safer to "explore" your device.

Or it could just be aero effects for the sake of looking pretty and showing off the GPU in ways that, to your point, it's hard for cheaper/older components to emulate. :-)

> Win7 was basically Vista with intelligent defaults

and some incredible performance improvements for low end hardware. The performance between Vista and 7 is night and day.

Author here :-) I'm not mad about anything in iOS 7 (yes, betas have bugs, and that's totally fine). I can live with gimmicky visual effects and useless features (Android has plenty of those). Obviously I don't literally care about frosted glass, it was just a metaphor.

The problem is not what turns me off in a platform but what turns me on. I just think that on balance iOS until recently had a stronger combination of user experience and innovative features. But that has changed, and iOS 7 doesn't show that Apple has the fundamental capabilities (particularly in online services) to keep the platform interesting going forward.

Overall, Android is right now simply the more _useful_ platform. There's almost nothing that iOS does better than Android, but plenty of areas where Android is stronger.

I'm also not trying to convince anybody. I was just stating why I switched. And I will keep my iOS devices, not least because my extended family is locked into iOS and expects me to call them on Facetime...

> A few minutes after installing the IOS 7 beta I just knew I needed to switch to Android ... [iOS 7] feels a lot like Window Vista.

Yeah, iOS Beta 1 and Beta 2 were ugly and buggy pieces of shit. Beta 3 and 4 are a lot nicer.

In my opinion, the UI still needs work but I'm willing to forgive the guys in Cupertino since it's ... you know ... a beta.

TL;DR Guy switches to Android after using pre-release operating system on his iPhone.

Yeah, having just installed an unofficial build of Cyanogenmod 10.2 for my S3... It would be a bit ridiculous for me to annouce that due to bugs that Google had forgotten how to innovate and thus I'm switch to iOS.

I think people just some time like a sea change, and look for an excuse.

I think he isn't mad about bugs, but about the gimmicky nature of the "innovation" in IOS 7... but maybe I misread him.

I couldn't tell what he was mad about, his premise seems to be an iPhone is not able to hold enough Goog-kool Aid for long trips in the car or something.

> I have found myself using more and more Google apps on my iPhone over the past 18 months or so. Google Maps ... Gmail ... Chrome ... voice search through Google’s search app ... Google's services are not only much more powerful but also very neatly integrated. The amazing Google Now is the best example for that.

> ... real progress can only be made in Internet-based services that integrate seamlessly with a smartphone OS. Google’s superiority in information services and Android’s general openness are perfect for that.

With every new iOS release consumers don't get to see the most important, innovative updates to the OS.

It's all in the developer frameworks. Just look at stuff like TypeKit this time around. Every release of iOS has great new and improved frameworks that will lead to a better generation of apps.

Once the API diffs for each new major release stop being interesting is when I'll worry for innovation on the platform.

I honestly think, and I think you should think so, too, that the point made in this article is a terrible point because...well...it just it. iOS 7 added a frosted effect, and Windows Vista had a frosted effect...so because Windows Vista was somehow a signal of a product in decline, iOS 7 must be, too? That's the case in point? Eh, it's really far-fetched and kind of a silly association to make.

I'm curious what the author thinks about Windows8 now that Windows no longer has the frosted glass effect?

Windows 8 is still gimmicky, though...

But despite it's gimmicks - Windows 8 is still a massive improvement.

Haven't tried 7, but picking up a iPhone 5 after using my Nexus 4 feels like a big leap backwards. It is what my Blackberry bold felt like after using an iPhone for the first time.

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