The iOS 7 Thread

iOS 7 has been announced, and hoo boy did they bust out the 1000-grit sandpaper.

Some side-by-side’s from fastco’s article here.

Weather - Looks great, tons of whitespace. It’s also less legible than the earlier version and loses visual heirarchy in the bottom half.

Stocks - They only go up. The full-bleed looks much better.

Home Screen - In my opinion, the least successful part. I understand wanting to cut down on the candy, but it’s not like it was interfering with legibility here. Now everything is too big (icon, fillets, inner circles), and too colorful. It feels toyish. That safari icon is just… ugh.

I’m excited for the new functionality, it’ll be interesting to see if the UI changes much before release.

Your thoughts?

Agree with you. I didn’t mind the skeumorphism but it nice without all the frames and rounds. I really hate that new homescreen though. Compare that to the weather-screen… wth… it’s bipolar.

This is just getting rave reviews over here for pushing out the skeuomorphisms.

Summing it up under Ives gets rid of the “middle class” look that the old Ios had
to achieve a new coherence between his minimalist hardware and the software.

And this in the best read mass market tabloid “Der Spiegel”, which really pushes
industrial (interface) design and the decisions which are to be made to the forefront.

Amazing PR for our Profession. Thank you Jonny !

mo-i

P.S.: I’ll wait with my critical views until I experienced it on my phone. (December?)

Looks like I won’t be using my Yahoo weather app anymore.

Also, thanks for teasing me with AirDrop, Apple, only to yank it out form under me by limiting it to the iphone5. Jerks.

I’d like to see how the homescreen looks with a darker background, the white text is harder to read in this comparison. I’m still looking forward to updating from my iphone 4 at some point.

Overall I like it. There is a huge discrepancy is design language though. The Game Center vs Camera icon is particularly glaring. Some of the overlays look cool.

For a 7 months project it does feel like certain things got the Ive treatment and others didn’t. The keyboard and Safari look especially clean. The camera does too.

Can I light the powder keg here…?

The phone’s interface details seem directly…“inspired by”…Android and even Windows Phone.
Windows undeniably started the flattened colors trend, and were frequently ridiculed for it. The iOS 7 lock screen/weather/stocks apps are as Android as can be. Full-bleed weather app is actually, shockingly, very much like Bing weather.

No offense to Apple’s design team, but personally I’m yawning at this new stuff.

The enemy of my enemy is my friend.

I’m sort with you hatts, though I didn’t really think Windows. “The flat design” has been around for iphone and andriod apps for a while now. My initial thought was that this is cut and paste from some of the more innovative apps from 3. party developers in Apple’s app store, combined with some google/android influences.

iOS (and the mess that OS X have developed into even more so) needed a little house keeping (dropping the skeuomorphisms that went out of control especially with Lion), but this is disappointing. Apple’s playing catch up instead of leading on, and I find that kinda sad to witness. (I realise this is early days to judge the design, and maybe hands on experience will make me warm some towards it… but so far, not so good in my book)

You guys all know the joke is on us, right? Jony Ive makes more than the entire membership of this forum combined. He could poop in a bag and Apple fanatics would go nuts for it. And he’s still design chief. I’m looking forward to the change, and I don’t care if it was inspire by, stolen from, influenced by, or whatever. It’s beautiful and it does the best thing you could ever imagine for a product. It makes an existing product look entirely new. That’s the real trick and magic of all this.

I don’t put much stock in ‘it looks too much like X’ complaints. Sometimes similarity is from imitation, sometimes it’s just logic. Apple doesn’t strike me as doing a whole lot of ‘different for the sake of different’, but in the mobile UI space, they’ve never been in a position to have to. Anyway, it’s not going to ‘feel’ like android in use, and that’s what counts.

I’m pumped to see the 3D-parallax homescreen in person when it comes out.

You make good points in this comment, but the difference is that Apple continuously claims, and is given credit for, its “innovation” and “pioneering” and “game-changing” etc. The first iPhone, original OSX, first iPad, every new iMac, first unibody Macbook, retina display, first Mac Pro…these are innovations. Derivative, minor facelifts are not.

I just can´t believe the design of some of the app-icons… game center/photos/weather app / music… it just looks like a little kid played with MS paint.
I guess what I am lacking is a kind of sophistication communicated through the icons. I got to admit that windows phone is the good example for me in this case, since they have an extremely consistent look (not sayign that it is the greatest solution but at least the simplicity approach works like that).

Now I am just waiting to see the new Iphones in matching neon colors.

Definitely. Before, the functionality was so far ahead of the competition that they could write the rules for how it looks, and the competition had to differentiate when they caught up. They don’t have that luxury anymore, and it’s starting to show.

With the new update I embrace many of the features it brings with it. Items like the unified search bar in safari, easy to access settings, and an increased visual interaction for navigating multitasking were all highly needed and long overdue.

Aside from the graphics I do think that the software is starting to become a little bloated and overly complicated. Keeping it simple was the advantage Apple had on its competitors in the past. Sure Instagram has become very popular but do we really need the filters built right into the OS? Is it absolutely necessary to have direct integration with Facebook?

I’m sure some users will think differently on this but I’d rather start out with a stripped down version of the OS with the ability to tailor it to my needs and use later.

The graphics are an entirely another matter. I think its great Apple took the leap to make such a drastic change however I think there is still a lot than can be done. I don’ t think the UI is “too simple” but I do think it lacks refinement and a that professional polish we’ve become accustomed to seeing from them.