Comment by beloch | Hacker News Reader

Comment by beloch | Hacker News Reader

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.

> 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.

> 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. :-)

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