>It's been one of my major pet peeves on both Android and iOS: the total and utter lack of consistency. Applications - whether first party or third party - all seem to live on islands, doing their own thing, making their own design choices regarding basic UI interactions, developing their own non-standard buttons and controls. Consistency died five years ago, and nobody seems to care but me.
Yes, it's called evolution.
As the saying goes, "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds".
The consistency he asks for is that foolish consistency --where e.g buttons all look the same, all colors match, applications have a cookie cutter look, etc. I.e strictly following some platform's design guidelines.
Not only that would KILL development of new UI concept (a lot of widely adopted ideas come from some app experimenting with new look&feel ideas), it would also make any OS look drab and boring.
Consistency that should matter would be more like: drag and drop works everywhere it should, text copy/paste plays well from app to app (remember KDE/Gnome/Motif/what have you around 2005? I hope it's better nowadays), keyboard shortcuts are respected, etc. Generally, controls should MOSTLY work the same (with the provision for experimentation from the occasional app).
As for things like the color of the toolbar, the look of buttons, etc? Not so much.
Yes, it's called evolution.
As the saying goes, "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds".
The consistency he asks for is that foolish consistency --where e.g buttons all look the same, all colors match, applications have a cookie cutter look, etc. I.e strictly following some platform's design guidelines.
Not only that would KILL development of new UI concept (a lot of widely adopted ideas come from some app experimenting with new look&feel ideas), it would also make any OS look drab and boring.
Consistency that should matter would be more like: drag and drop works everywhere it should, text copy/paste plays well from app to app (remember KDE/Gnome/Motif/what have you around 2005? I hope it's better nowadays), keyboard shortcuts are respected, etc. Generally, controls should MOSTLY work the same (with the provision for experimentation from the occasional app).
As for things like the color of the toolbar, the look of buttons, etc? Not so much.