# iOS7 Dev Preview Reactions?



## Glisterspeck (Jun 11, 2013)

Anyone else have the dev beta release? i get the flat design aesthetic, but I wish the icons weren't so... they're garish really. And the animations aren't quite as tight as before, particularly the pop in from the springboard. Ugh. Hope they tone it down some before general release.


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## Lenny (Jun 11, 2013)

Heh. I was going to make a new thread to discuss the design tomorrow. Looks like you've saved me the trouble!

I'm a very happy Android user, and won't be switching to Apple anytime soon, but I had hoped that Apple would really knock the redesign out of the park - when Apple does something great, everyone else ups their game.

Unfortunately, Jony Ive has, in my mind, disappointed.

I spent a couple of hours this evening reading iOS7 articles, and watching the WWDC video, and this is what I had to say to one of my friends:

The use of different icon styles across the system is terribly inconsistent, the faux glass effect looks silly (and also Windows Vista-esque), and the bare white gives it a stark, unfinished look. There are some good parts (the new calendar app is very pretty), but mostly they're few and far between.

With a bit more polish, a different colour palette (I don't mind the colours, it's the fact that they're all sickly pastelle), and fewer strong design ideas (like one icon style for app shortcuts, one style for interactive elements in apps, and one style for settings), it could be very nice.

As a whole, iOS7 does not impress, and I actually kind of prefer old, skeuomorphic iOS.

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I find it interesting the Apple has taken a few design cues from webOS (multi-tasking cards), and Android (the confirmation dialogs are Androids, with rounded corners), and added them to an iOS that has been put through the Windows Phone design wringer. Yet altogether, it comes off as an amateurish imitation, rather than a slick, new design.


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## Lenny (Jun 12, 2013)

ZDNet has put together a nice gallery of the new interface:

http://www.zdnet.com/apples-ios-7-hands-on-in-pictures-gallery-7000016263/

After going through the gallery, I've realised that another of my problems with the new design is that the icons and typography all seem a bit big, and give an overall impression that everything has been squeezed in.


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## Brian G Turner (Jun 12, 2013)

Cool! My iPhone will soon look like an Android phone!

Just when I finally started to feel like I might be getting used to it. 

But, hey ho, Apple are going to take a page out of Microsoft's book by releasing an "OS upgrade" that nobody wants, that confuses users, and makes them wish for the previous version.

It's probably no accident that OS 7 and Windows 7 are both the same number, and look how well that OS has done for MS!


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## Glisterspeck (Jun 12, 2013)

So, I've been living with it since Monday evening now, and, for the most part, I'm finding myself just down on the icons. They're not consistent enough, except in color. And the color is too vibrant. Neon, really. I had to change my background image to something with primary colors, just to make it work, visually.

The labels are in a very thin Helvetica derivative and tend to get lost against backgrounds. For instance, the clock on the lock screen is not easy to see against most of the images I tried because it is a light stroke font, and they've removed the dark shaded bar they used to use to pop it out.

Same with the status at the top: the battery icon, time and connectivity indicators all sit directly against the background image, without a shaded bar to set them off. Also, I don't see any UX benefit of moving away from the standard connection strength bars.

The apple apps I use the most, messages, mail, calendar are all improved. Mail and calendar, vastly so. I'll probably ditch Mailbox App going forward, as Mail now has "close enough" functionality and works with Exchange. (Mail has been my favorite reworked app.) Photos and Safari I'm less taken with, but use the iPad for both, really, and think they'll be better on there.

Anyway, a few details still seem a little half baked, which is understandable, given Forstall wasn't axed until the very end of October. On the generous side, we can assume Ive had six months duration, of which he'd lose 20% or so to QA, at a minimum. So it's a strong effort: I'm just surprised that the most obviously wrong details are UI elements, not even UX really.

It kind of reminds me of when Duarte took over UX for over Android. It took him two good releases to get to a proper UX experience with ICS. (Which the OEMs still continue to screw up with their proprietary UX overlays: I really hoped Google buying Motorola would at least kill Motoblur, but unfortunately, no. And it still overwrites default buttons in my apps! Ugh.)

The frosted glass actually has many precedents in osX's Aqua UI. The docks, up through the move to 3D (blech), the top menu bar and menus, the earliest releases had similar transparency effects on the windows also, all of which predated Vista. Vista ran with the look though, turning everything up to 11. My favorite use of the frosted in iOS7 is the new folders for the Springboard. I may actually start using them now.

The app switching is almost identical to WebOS, which for me, is awesome. Underpowered though it was, WebOS was amazing from a UX perspective, thanks to Duarte, who designed it. The guy knows his stuff.

Personally, I would have liked to see more Metro influence, but oh well. The typography has a Zune feel to it, but without the outsized scaling of the fonts (which I thought was a nice touch on Zune).


The best bit of iOS7 though is the death of skeuomorphism. It'll take another iteration before it's completely flushed out, but the stitching department in Cupertino is closed. (Even if they haven't expunged it from their HIG yet. http://developer.apple.com/library/...ileHIG/UEBestPractices/UEBestPractices.html#/ )

Brian, just saw your post. For better or worse, it won't look much like Android. Also, the basic mechanisms of the UI are all intact, the changes are almost entirely superficial, so you'll be able to use the device without issues. Where the changes are not superficial is in the first party apps, which are now consistently simple and elegant. The problem with Forstall, I always believed, was that he was incapable of delivering a user experience deserving of the amazing hardware. The reason I feel somewhat let down is because I don't think Jony Ive got there either. BUT - I do think he's put a foundation in place that will allow it. (Probably the best phone hardware out there at the moment, the HTC One, has a similar issue of having a disappointing user experience; namely, HTC's proprietary Sense UX overlay.)


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## Lenny (Jun 13, 2013)

So the iOS7 look and colour palette is apparently attributed to Apple's marketing and communications department, which each app team used as a guide (with no communication between the teams):



> First of all, many of the new icons were primarily designed by members of Apple’s marketing and communications department, not the app design teams. From what we’ve heard, SVP of Design Jony Ive (also now Apple’s head of Human Interaction) brought the print and web marketing design team in to set the look and color palette of the stock app icons. They then handed those off to the app design teams who did their own work on the ‘interiors’, with those palettes as a guide.
> 
> We’ve also been hearing that there wasn’t a whole lot of communication between the various teams behind say, Mail and Safari. And that there were multiple teams inside each group that were competing with various designs, leading to what some see as inconsistencies in icon design. Those may well be hammered out in days ahead.



Whilst I'm baffled that Apple apparently doesn't have a dedicated design team who dictate the design language the other teams have to follow, it's good to hear that this initial design is a mish-mash of many individual designs, rather than the result of Ive's vision. So hopefully, everything will be smoothed out in future updates.

http://thenextweb.com/apple/2013/06/12/why-does-the-design-of-ios-7-look-so-different/

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Regarding the HTC One, have you seen the HTC One Nexus Experience variation coming out at the end of the month? Vanilla Android with tweaks from HTC to make its hardware work (so vanilla with Beats Audio and, I think, drivers for the nifty camera).

Alternatively, of course, you can just install a new Launcher to remove the Sensification (in some ways, it's a terrible shame that Duarte worked his magic, but Sense was the bomb back in the Hero days). Or you can go the whole hog and install a custom ROM.


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## Glisterspeck (Jun 13, 2013)

Thanks for the article, Lenny. Very informative. Hopefully, the inconsistencies get sorted out before release.

The One without Sense would be awesome! We develop for both platforms, so I have a lot of exposure to Android. However, in my non-professional life, I'm deep in the iOS ecosystem, so I probably won't change unless Apple hardware continues to lag. With the One and the upcoming Moto X, Apple's going to need to step it up in that regard.


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