![]() ![]() Since that release, the company has strayed further and further from a clear sense of purpose in its design, and drifted into a kind of mid-life malaise in which nothing seems to feel, work, or look quite the way it should. But wow, the ugly stick.- Jason Santa Maria June 10, 2013 Multitasking, tabs, Control Center, AirDrop, and general interactions are looking fantastic in iOS 7. “Shouldn't there be some consistency?” While this may seem like obsessive nit-picking, these are the kinds of details that Apple in its previous incarnation would never have gotten wrong. For instance, the camera icon is a different shape in other sections of the OS, like the camera app or the lockscreen,” I wrote at the time. “It's not just that the icons on the homescreen feel and look like the work of a lesser designer. Ive converted understandable buttons into confusing rubrics (the share arrow?), clustered controls into a context-free space (Control Center), and perhaps worst of all, made some really ugly icons that have never fully recovered. Gone were the mock felt backgrounds and virtual dials of Steve Jobs’ iOS, but suddenly present was a set of gestures and layers purported to be part of a system that never quite clicked. While Ive had utterly revamped what the company had been doing thematically with its user interface - eschewing the original iPhone's tactility of skeuomorphic, real-world textures for a more purely “digital” approach - he also ignored more grounded concepts about user experience, systematic cohesion, and most surprisingly, look and feel. The product, the first piece of software overseen by Jony Ive, was confusing, amateur, and relatively unfinished upon launch. In 2013 I wrote about the confusing and visually abrasive turn Apple had made with the introduction of iOS 7, the operating system refresh that would set the stage for almost all of Apple’s recent design. Reviewers (yes, even me) fawned over designs that lovingly referenced “classic Leica” and boasted software that turned simple smartphone cameras into true photography tools. Stretching perhaps from the introduction of the first iPod in 2001, through the release of the groundbreaking iPhone 4 (and subsequent refinement with the iPhone 5), Apple was regularly lauded as best-in-class when it came to hardware and software design and the synchronicity of those elements. The work was downright elegant unheard of for an electronics company. Marrying that functionality with the groundbreaking design the company has embodied since the early Macs, it’s easy to see how Apple became the darling of designers, artists, and the rest of the creative class. Rather than requiring downloads and installations and extra memory to get things right (as often required by Windows machines), Apple made it so you could just plug in a mouse or start up a program and it would just. “Macintosh works the way people work,” read one 1992 ad. As one of the first mainstream computer companies to equally value design and technical simplicity, it upended our expectations about what PCs could be. Once upon a time, Apple could do little wrong. Quick comparison #iphonex /3o4bJQC4NB- Carlos Gavina September 12, 2017 Look better with a black background for the status bar. But it would be more accurate to describe it as the norm.Īpps that embrace the notch on the new iPhone X look bad. I would love to say that this awful design compromise is an anomaly for Apple. Plenty has been written about the mind-numbing, face-palming, irritating stupidity of the notch. It is, put plainly, a visually disgusting element. From a performance standpoint, there is hardly a differentiating factor between the iPhone X and iPhone 8 Plus beyond display size and type - the former is a flagship only because Apple wants it to be one. To wit: no one wanted or asked for Face ID, and the feature actually raises new concerns about security for users. One which undermines the core premise of the iPhone X’s design (“all screen”), and offers a feature as an excuse which is really an answer in search of a question. Yet here is this awkward blind spot cradled by two blobs of actual screenspace. The justification for the notch (the new Face ID tech, which lets you unlock the device just by looking at it) could have easily been accomplished with no visual break in the display. It is bad design, and as a result, bad for the user experience. The “notch” on the new iPhone X is not just strange, interesting, or even odd - it is bad. ![]()
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