Although I'm a perfectionist and I believe a lot of these issues should be addressed, the tumblr itself bothers me. It's the logical culmination of Fail culture where hipsters in armchairs laugh at the inadequacy of everything while producing nothing. All these things could have been constructive criticism in another context, but here they just serve to further someone's twitchy compulsion to be entertained for another 5 seconds on the internet.
I think the visual explanation here offers credence to the criticism. This certainly isn't "hipster" culture - this is design critique.
The worse thing would be if people blindly said things like "iOS7 is just not intuitive" and went on to drink their PBR and evangelize about Phonebloks - instead, these are real examples of why iOS7 could be better.
At the very least, this thread is instructive for learning designers. I know as a younger programmer and designer, when someone said that "JavaScript has the weirdest quirks", it was useless unless someone showed me the quirks. Along came Douglas Crockford's Good Parts, which, while critical of the bad parts, was very instructive. I think this can function in similar ways.
It's not just "Fail" culture rearing its stupid head - the tone is far from embarrassing to Apple, and instead is generally descriptive of legitimate design failures.
The number of obvious bugs [1] included lends a lot of weight to the impression of it being more about sniping than criticism.
[1] z-index, text overlap, mixed states, etc.
These are not questionable design choices. They're bugs. And lumping them in only detracts from the site and the many legit design gripes (problems of focus, alignment, contrast, usability, etc.)
Are bugs in the UI not themselves part of the UI? If their goal is point out "sloppiness" in the UI, why should obvious or slightly less-obvious bugs be excluded?
Because it's very likely that anything that would be seen as a "bug" will be fixed in updates; whereas things that are the result of intentional (bad) design, like lack of information hierarchy, probably won't be fixed, because they won't be seen as incorrect. (Which is, nominally, what this tumblr would be for pointing out.)
I don't think I agree with your last sentence, which seems to be the issue. The site isn't called "The Terrible Design Decisions of iOS7", it called "Sloppy UI" which I think covers both bugs and UI. Further, sometimes it can be hard to differentiate between a bug and a design decision, so I think it's hard to ask them to just stick to one or the other. May as well point out everything you see that isn't up to standards, be those design or implementation.
To me, the Tumblr is pointing out an overall lack of attention to detail. Some of these obvious bugs should have never made it past QA/testing, but somehow they did - and that's sloppy UI, regardless of whether it was an intentional "do that" directive.
I understand what you're saying, and perhaps the name of the Tumblr should change to "Issues with iOS7", but that sounds pretty boring to me. Instead, we can all agree that sloppy/bad decision-making, sloppy QA practices, etcetera can be learned from, and that there is value in identifying (and avoiding) these mistakes both in the works of others and in our own work.
I'm with 'roc' on this one. Including a bunch of obvious bugs tells me that you either a) can't distinguish between design and implementation or b) are more interested in shitting on other people's work than saying anything useful.
This is fail culture masquerading as design critique, and it isn't even doing that well.
Critique doesn't always explain reproduction. That's more like a bug report I think. Actually saying what's wrong is describing that the UI has a clear problem with z-index. I would understand if someone was trolling the Apple bug submission process, but they aren't; they are pointing out flaws with clear visual examples.
I disagree that critique must inherently describe the problem. Sometimes, the problem is fairly self descriptive, especially with what this blog provides, which is obvious issues that most of the blog's audience will immediately understand as "sloppy" - that is, I shouldn't have to explain why the z-index issue is sloppy to justify my criticism, but if you want a bug report, I can explain how I got there.
here's the thing though, If google would have released an UI as bad as this (just my oppinion as an iphone user) all the tech press and the hardcore apple fanboys would have trashed it online and offline for months. Who will be the role model from now on for "near perfection", "attention to detail"? Just look at this: http://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/hon.jpg?... and tell me how you feel about it :)
>here's the thing though, If google would have released an UI as bad as this (just my oppinion as an iphone user) all the tech press and the hardcore apple fanboys would have trashed it online and offline for months.
Google HAS produced a UI as bad as this. Actually worse. The Android UI, up until 4 was amateur hour. And still is not up there yet.
It's just held in much less scrutiny compared to Apple, because nobody expects much better.
Apple is really defined by superior design. Google is defined generally by superior engineering. A better point to make would be if Google revamped their search engine and it was meaningfully degraded experience for search. They'd be criticized and rightly so as that's what they're supposed to do better than anyone else.
Didn't that happen, back around 2009? I remember many of my searches failing to find things they had the month or two before because Google was treating my parameters more as suggestions (returning results with 1 or 2 of the 4 or 5 words I'd used, ignoring quotes for grouping, etc).
I work on Synonyms at Google. We're constantly tweaking our algorithms. It's possible that at one point one tweak made us more aggressive with replacing "verse" with "vs", but then later another tweak made it less aggressive. :-)
Agreed, I had a hard time getting the behavior described. Googling for "orange verse tangerine" finally did it. Other things that don't make as much sense to be compared, such as "giraffe verse tangerine" only produce a suggestion of "Did you mean..." but still it searched for my original query.
Seems Google does this for things that are likely comparisons (e.g. oranges and tangerines), which seems reasonable.
There is a verbatim search option now which undoes some of the damage of this. But I agree that Google search has actually degraded over the past few years from the point-of-view of the highly sophisticated searcher (it may have improved or stayed the same for the masses).
I'm sorry, not following this, the word is "versus", a verse is typically something like a unit of a song. Or is this American usage, in which case what do you call a "verse"?
Google likes to suggest alternatives to words, he does mean verse as in verse of a song or poem, but (I never saw this particular one) had some searches where google was trying to turn verse into versus or vs. What I saw, and I've either gotten used to it or it's changed, was around 2009 when my searches stopped working one day. I'd use 3-5 keywords and Google's first page would only display pages using 1-2 of them. Invariably it was not the results I wanted. Quoting sections stopped meaning anything to Google searches so searching for phrases became dicy, as the words in the phrase would get split up. So if I was searching for "phrases became dicy" and new that was a line from the page I wanted, Google would return pages with maybe all three words but they'd be scattered about the page.
Seriously where do engineering stops and design starts to make that statement work ?
Looking at Google Map, Google Search. Those "defining" application of Google, in addition of incredible engineering they redefined what a map and search engine should even look like, so design. Similarly, the iPhone, iMac, iPod were as much about engineering and than design.
In reality, Apple is defined by making money on hardware and Google on cloud software. It is a quirk that they got to clash, because they very much complemented each other.
Google get some slack with Android because they do not sell phones and the vast majority of users do not use Android UI anyway.
On the hardware side, Android world provides hundreds of models, there is at least 10 flagship model at any single time. Each get its own amount of nitpicking but eventually all get lost in the noise of other Android news (announcements, prototype, announcement of prototype, benchmark war, "megahertz" war of the day).
>Apple is really defined by superior design. Google is defined generally by superior engineering.
Wait what? When did that happen? When did Google get "superior engineering"? For search, web etc, perhaps. But as far as iOS vs Android is concerned that was never the case.
For starters, Apple design and engineered the iPhone first. Google's Android FIRST came out a whole year later. Early Android prototypes, shown by Google just before the iPhone was announced had half-size screens and physical keyboards, just like the rest of the smartphones of the day.
Since then Apple has consistenly beat Google on hardware features, from the retina display (with much better color rendition to boot) to camera innovations, the motion co-processor, a working fingerprint sensor (for a change), and 64 bit ARM (which means far more than "being able to see more memory which isn't even installed") etc. Consistently better battery life.
Well, maybe it's not a fair comparison, because Google is not a hardware engineering company. They had to buy Motorola, which wasn't the best in the business itself, anyway. But the above are still true for Samsung offerings too.
On the industrial engineering side, Apple's designs, machining, fit and polish is unsurpassed on the Android side. Including materials used.
In the software side it's the same story. The iOS Cocoa API is leaps and bounds ahead of the Android API. It was never plagued with issues with scroll lag and display latency (and also audio latency, which is why 90% of Audio/MIDI apps are for iOS). Doesn't have a nightmarish GC experience to tend to for more involved apps. More fit and polish overall. Heck, Android even gets 80%+ of all the mobile malware around.
The major points for Android devices were not better engineering per se, but stuff like bigger screens, different configurations etc. And extra features that got marginal use, like face unlock and near field communication, stuff that Apple could have if that's how they rolled.
Some good stuff Android had first was because Apple went conservative to implement them when battery life better permitted them (like background apps -- Android just unleashed them and the hell with it, Apple trying to get the juice, and hence experience, right first).
There's one genuine thing Android had going for it, and that's the Intents system in my opinion. The "quick settings change panel" was also another good one. I don't think we can go much further.
Personally, I don't think Apple's getting anywhere enough credit for their in-house processor design at the moment. If that's not engineering talent I don't know what is. Just look at the Anandtech review for proof of that:
> Early Android prototypes, shown by Google just before the iPhone was announced had half-size screens and physical keyboards, just like the rest of the smartphones of the day.
The HTC G1 was also one of the early prototypes shown off. Android definitely came later, but they were already working on a large, capacitive touch phone before the iPhone came out.
> Since then Apple has consistenly beat Google on hardware features, from the retina display
Uh, no, so very much no. Apple was sooo late to the high density party. Android was shipping high density, high resolution phones a year before Apple did. Apple did leapfrog on the density front with retina, but they were definitely, unquestionably playing catch-up on this front, not leading the way.
> camera innovations, the motion co-processor, a working fingerprint sensor (for a change)
All of this was done by other companies first, and in some cases better.
> The iOS Cocoa API is leaps and bounds ahead of the Android API.
This is such a stupid statement. Both APIs have their advantages and disadvantages.
> The major points for Android devices were not better engineering per se, but stuff like bigger screens, different configurations etc.
Which was enabled due to superior engineering in some respects. True density independence, flexible layouts everywhere, architecture-neutral designs, etc...
I had a feeling that a critique on Apple would turn into a Google bash. Can you please stay on topic.
As an IOS user who is posting from his iPhone, I'm tired of Apple fans deflecting genuine criticisms at APPLE. You didn't raise or refute one thing in the article.
You sir/mam are a fanboy of the worst kind.
For the record, I feel IOS 7 lost its way. Jobsy would have shot it to pieces and buried it before it saw the light of day.
> Early Android prototypes, shown by Google just before the iPhone was announced had half-size screens and physical keyboards, just like the rest of the smartphones of the day.
And now it is clear that you don't know a shit abouit what your talking
By the way, Apple also invented the wheel and the sliced bread
I've been an Apple fanboy since around 1984, and I have to agree with you.
I very much prefer the UI of my Jelly Bean Nexus 7 to this thing they call iOS 7.
And before anyone says I don't like change -- the new UI does make iOS<=6 look very dated, but the odd icon proportions, color scheme and unbalanced use of fonts (sometimes the font is just too light, sometimes the mix just feels.. weird) don't appeal to me at all.
What I hate is when Apple apologists say "you just have to get used to" the new look. I'm already used to the new look, but I still don't like it.
>I very much prefer the UI of my Jelly Bean Nexus 7 to this thing they call iOS 7
That's kind of ironic given that the Android blogs and _some_ comments on forums (including hacker news) are all "The UI is Android ripoff" (while the Windows Phone camp is "The UI is a Windows Phone ripoff")
While I understand that some parts could be considered a "ripoff", the bulk of the new UI simply feels like a new skin over the old UI (keep in mind that I upgraded my iPhone 4, which doesn't get all the wizzy features that newer phones get).
And this new skin at times burns my eyes, especially some of the nauseating color choices.
Thank goodness I don't use Game Center. The colours for the bubbles make me want to literally throw up -- I don't know if other people are like that, but certain colours have that effect on me.
The colours might make you unwell, but have you seen game centre in iOS 6? Forcing the user to use some sort of command line interface would be less offensive.
Android since Gingerbread has had superior design for me, but I'm more of a function over form kind of guy and don't want to mess around with things looking pretty when I need to get stuff done.
design is one thing, and you know what, its pretty good, however i can't understand how google - the WW leader in indexing - is letting people use a phone that takes up to 2-4 seconds to load the contact list... that's crazy.
I'm not sure about the "ethics" of non-constructive criticism from a developer perspective, but I think it is completely justified from the customer perspective. I paid (a lot) for this phone, I am allowed to be unhappy with the direction it's going: 1. As a market signal to the creators (which serves as very useful feedback), and 2. Because realistically I have to upgrade or be forced to not get any updates for my apps either (just in case someone wants to chime in that I "could" stay on iOS 6).
That's kind of the interesting thing we're seeing here that doesn't fit your analogy: most of the people complaining this time around are the iOS people about iOS.
It's not bad per se, but it looks like someone designed the cover, and someone else designed the phone, and they never tested them together, or just didn't care.
Again, this is not technically bad, but if you flaunt having a "staggering attention to detail" this is a sort of slap in the face of credibility.
Having them design a larger hole to encompass the "iPhone" logo (even while still half-covering the babble below) would have, instead, sent a very clear "we cared" message to users.
Eh. Apple has always been phoning in their accessories. They were never particularly good. I don’t see this as indicative of anything, it's just Apple being sloppy as they always are with these kinds of things.
Where it counts Apple does not typically exhibit this behaviour, as evidenced by both new iPhones.
I don't agree. Most of Apple's accessories are extremely stylish and complement their hardware: iPad smart cover, keyboards, mouses, chargers, ear buds, and monitors. I think the iPad smart cover alone demonstrates that Apple has the capability to make cases/covers for their mobile devices that are both functional and stylish. What accessories, besides the iPhone case discussed here, do you think Apple has made that are sloppy?
And still they released a phone with antenna issues. People complained just as they are now. Apple did something relatively rare and issued a "mea cuppa" in the form of a free case. Life went on.
My point was that controversies like these design hiccups, the shape of the case, etc. are not new to Apple.
In some ways the design issues are significantly less severe since they can be corrected without new hardware.
You keep implying Apple released a phone with legitimate antenna issues. My understanding is this has been pretty much shown to be false. Apple was responding to a media shitstorm and Jobs said the issue was "overblown." In other words, it was probably an extremely rare, if not completely non-existent, issue but was magnified due to the fact that it happened to a well known blogger.
Criticizing Apple for poor design is like criticizing IBM for being unreliable: rather important because that's why people chose them in the first place. I'm still hoping that iOS 7 is an elaborate prank, and will be replaced by something worthy of Apple before the majority upgrades.
Not everyone can offer constructive feedback, but most people can have the problems brought to their attention and understand them. Even if you had constructive criticism, how exactly would you go about alerting a developer at Apple?
I've only been running iOS since it GM'ed ( which wasn't too long ago) but havn't seen some of the stuff shown there. iMessages certainly do that on my 4S. The notification badge on the Applications icon is always on top. I run into the battery low notification every day and it hasn't yet disagreed between values shown at the status versus the 20% and 10% thresholds you get these alerts from.
The battery notification looks identical to that in iOS6, and probably has the same behaviour.
If you run your phone with the display off, say from 21% battery down to 11%, then it will cross the 20% reporting threshold. The next time that you unlock the phone and activate the display, you will get the notification.
It's not inconsistent; nor is it just being "optimistic" -- it may be poorly worded, but it consistently displays that same message every time you unlock the phone after the battery drains to 20%.
If the person who took that screenshot had waited another ten minutes, then the battery would probably have reached 10%, and the 10% notification would have been shown instead.
I think that it's more complicated than just criticism of a less than perfect UI. I think it's an expression of the Apple community's concern that without Steve Jobs, Apple will no longer be able to produce the highly polished products that the community has come to expect.
It probably took hours to create this tumblr and the author did not get paid. I think this tumblr is fantastic. We need more people like this. Ready to call out crap.
> We need more people like this. Ready to call out crap.
We already have plenty of people ready to call out crap. Half the discussions on this site devolve into someone arguing about perceived flaws in something.
What we actually need is people pushing up the level of discourse. A stream of pictures and pithy sarcasm isn't useful until someone else comes along and responds to it. The world needs more thoughtful analysis and advancement, we probably have enough tumblrs full of snarky images.
Crap? Really? I upgraded yesterday and think it's amazingly good, in spite of a few minor issues. Do you have any concept of what it took to imagine, develop, implement, test, and distribute something like this to 100 million devices?
Putting the "meh" UI esthetic aside, I didn't want to upgrade because my iPhone 4 had become a pig under 6, and 7 performs a hair worse than 6 in terms of speed and battery life.
There are, however, some valid reasons to upgrade in spite of iOS 7's drawbacks (don't get me started on how the new lock screen keypad makes it harder for me to unlock my phone with just my thumb).
* Call blocking has "finally" (gruber's favorite line lately) been implemented properly -- if you are one of those people who are increasingly getting more telemarketer calls on your cell number, this is a huge deal.
* Safari runs faster on iOS7 than iOS6. 90% of what I do is browsing, so this can be a tradeoff that is well worth making.
2) http://sloppyui.tumblr.com/image/61439801745 (this is supposed to show "stray dropshadows" -- didn't they guy get the memo that the iOS 7 UI uses them to show a 3D layer hierarchy?)
For what it's worth, I think nearly all your examples are spot on. These are sloppy jobs that I would've personally been ashamed of releasing to the public.
That said, noticing alignment issues and font inconsistencies is not given and a lot of people won't give a damn about them.
Steve Jobs would have. And then unconsciously everyone that ever bought or buy Apple products for that perfectionism that has been inbreed in their spirit.
Jobs is definitely gone. Had he be around, you would've seen tons of cartoon boxes and pink slips delivered to One Infinite Loop. If he would've ever let update like that released into cyberspace (he wouldn't've).
IOS7 clearly shows that John Ive is lost without Jobs.
I'm with you. I think most of the entries are spot on. They're simple details, but when they add up, consciously or not, they leave a bad taste. I just can't use iOS 7.
I don't see the same inconsistency on "case". iOS7 seems to use Capitalization for verbs, "actions," whereas it uses lowercase for nouns. "Send" or "Edit" but "return".
I hadn't sent a message with my updated phone, just did to test this out. When you send a message it gets a colored talk bubble and then shifts up into position. During the shift the keyboard/text entry field stay on top. It doesn't last long, it would probably look cleaner if they'd made the talk bubble stay above the entry field (so that it doesn't get cut in half).
See, I'm inclined to call it sloppy, this would look nicer if it wasn't sloppy, the screenshot shows a state that makes no sense to a normal user.
However, if this is actually happening in some transition, then leave it. We all know that there are only so many hours. Bring some polish to this transition with a future update. I can't see dinging them on design for a slightly sloppy transition.
The blue text with red caret solves a real problem.
It might appear odd in the context in which it appears, that is with the caret at the end of the line, but consider cases where the caret is between letters in a word.
When editing a section of text where you are looking to make a mid-word modification, being able to quickly and easily identify the caret position is important.
If the caret looks even remotely like any of the text being edited you may confuse it for the text or you may find it hard to see where the caret is.
The high text to caret contrast is only one solution to the problem of making the caret easy to find and easy to tell apart from the text itself.
On my stock Android 4.2 device the caret is a mid-grey within black text. On a small screen it is not clear to me with my inadequate eyesight where the caret is from just a glance. When editing mid-word a blue tab-style arrow is applied below the caret as a visual pointer. This sometimes obscures relevant text or controls.
As far as stock Android 4.2 vs iOS is concerned, I'd say that iOS has the superior solution in this case.
I would think flashing the caret is sufficient, but I may be biased by experience and good eyesight (for now). Given the number of people responding with how they used to lose the caret before, it seems that my experience is not universal.
I may be in the minority, but I really like the red/blue difference. I think it looks pretty good, and would be useful to quickly see where the cursor is.
Most things about iOS7 seem inconsistent, and like they were rushed - which they were. I mean Johny Ive was head of UI for like 9 months only, and had to change everything in iOS in that period. These changes should've arrived in iOS8 in order to be well thought out and mature enough, but for some reason they decided to push them to iOS7.
I certainly don't know: it could well be people rushing to get their musk on iOS after the Forstall ouster, but
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-08-09/apple-loses-china-s... could have something to do with it too. Maybe after that kind of bad news Apple decided it needed to get its new China-oriented iPhone out quickly to stop the bleeding, at the cost of time to dink alignments and overlaps?
If they removed the new design, iOS7 would be a really underwhelming release for users. The background downloading would clearly be the banner feature.. but aside from that?
Personally I would much rather they just removed some of the gradients and textures and instead focused on improving things like inter-app sharing, notifications, the keyboard, widgets/live tiles etc.
They would have had time to improve existing apps and work out existing inconsistencies. iOS 6 was far from perfect, and there was plenty of room for improvement without a complete redesign.
the iPhone 5C package is a love letter to the art of graphic design. use of color, layout, typography, and form to create a device that has the soul of a printed magazine. at least, that's what i gather.
So far it sounds like they did. The main criticisms of iOS 7 are, as usual with new Apple products, from the edges of the digerati. I'll see what my wife says when she gets it on her new 5S.
The "no return key in the twitter compose view" is intentional. That is a keyboard style option, and Twitter it using it to discourage users entering return characters in tweets. This is not even Apple's app.
A lot of these "sloppy UI" examples are in non-Apple apps, intentional, or otherwise misleading from the screenshot.
Apple's idea behind their App Store is that every app is reviewed to make sure it's up to their standards. They also provide a myriad of built-in UI elements and a Human Interface Guide that is supposed to direct developers in the design of their app interfaces.
One could postulate that Apple can fix third party apps by altering the available UI elements and interface guidelines. In fact, this type of alteration was done for iOS7 to guide developers into updating their app aesthetics to match iOS7.
Good collection. iOS7 is an obvious improvement over previous iOS versions (perhaps with the exception of the icons) and has done a good job of bringing iOS up to date visually. Worth remembering that there are a lot of inconsistencies in Android, a good article is here:
Don't get me wrong, I much, much prefer Android and can't ever see myself moving back to iOS, but always good to measure things in balance, nothing is perfect.
I'm the same way. I love Android, and will probably never move back to iOS, but after having seen an actual phone with iOS 7 all my scepticism about the new UI disappeared. It's a very beautiful UI. I was right there though laughing at the ugly icons (which I still think are ugly) thinking iOS 7 was a disaster until I actually looked at a phone and swiped around.
It's weird. The iPhone 5s seems to be without a doubt the overall best phone out there. The low light camera, the processor, all that stuff blows me away, but yet I don't want one. I think the iPhone is like a really fancy and nice race car, that I can do nothing but admire, but all I want is a truck. Android is my truck.
I'm sure you won't have to wait too long for those hardware improvements to come to the Android platform. The rapid iteration of the Android platform means that hardware advantages are generally short-lived.
It's perhaps because they pushed a whole UI redesign out in the matter of a few months. And it's multilingual. And it cannot take into account 3rd-party apps and their inconsistent designs.
I'd love to see a similar set of "'iOS 7-updated' apps running on iOS 6 or earlier."
Before I upgraded yesterday, there were a couple of apps I saw (I think it was Shazam) where they must have emulated the iOS 7 feel, rather than using system-native widgets, so the result was a "business in front, party in the back" mishmash of UI on the same screen.
The whole iOS7 UI is not intuitive at all. Look, I love flat UI but when I became and engineer and founder, started talking to customers, I realized that customers are simply not as aware as the people that designed and made software. They don't know what to click, they sometimes don't even know they can click something, and they often get lost. When you go to a Microsoft store and see people playing with Windows 8, you see this and it really hits you. People are lost, randomly clicking on text thinking it is a button. While Windows 8 and iOS7 look good in many ways, I think this release is a step backwards for people who might not be very tech savvy.
It is worse in touch devices. At least in a desktop webapp you have the option of waving your mouse cursor over suspect areas and can get some kind of feedback (a balloon text or some change in the status bar etc.) On a touch device, you won't know until you touch!
That site is hilarious. What blows my mind is how autocorrect so often defaults to lewd and totally inappropriate statements. It's like it's trying to cause amusement.
Great examples. I hope you're sending these to Apple!
One I noticed is a very slight difference in weight between the carrier text and the data status.
It's so slight, almost the difference between "sharp" and "strong" in Photoshop.
Also, people, easy on the "way to criticize but not offer any constructive criticism!" OP is effectively filing a ton of bug reports, which is a good thing.
Personally I think that it's a bit misleading to lump bugs and questionable design choices under the same 'sloppy' banner.
Good quality criticism regarding choices developers and designers have made have lead to some of the best debate and discussion I've seen on HN. Conversations that focus on criticizing execution (for example the UI bugs in the tumblr) have been some of the worst.
As a developer I would get huge value out of having a nuanced discussion about the pros and cons of iOS 7's language, particular as we begin (or have begun) redesigning our apps - hopefully that is something this tumblr can evolve into eventually.
I didn't buy the "Go easy! It's still only beta!" stuff. The changes that happen in beta are along the lines of "Apps no longer crash while activating the radio while audio is playing." not "Complete icon redesign".
However, some of these (Z-Index? What?) should've absolutely been fixed before GM.
Some I definitely agree with (mixed font casing), some I don't, and some are plain bugs which are annoying but not a question of sloppy UI. There's a lot slipped through that it's slightly inconsistent, but there was plenty of inconsistent design through iOS1-6 as well and with OS X.x in it's various releases.
Design over a large product like iOS or OS X is hard, it takes time to get all the edges smoothed down and given that iOS 7 is probably the result of a year to two years of work it's not a surprised it's rough. If it's a bug (or a UI niggle) report it to Apple, they may or may not be listening but it's a better solution to highlight it with them directly, as well as on Tumblr.
Funny, because I thought that the whole point of buying an Apple product is that even if you lose features and interoperability, it's incredibly well polished and thought out.
Seems they're losing that attribute without gaining the others.
>Funny, because I thought that the whole point of buying an Apple product is that even if you lose features and interoperability, it's incredibly well polished and thought out.
Actually you only lose features you wouldn't want in the first place and would drag the whole thing down (less battery life, bulkier, etc). Not having FM radio for example is like not having a floppy disk drive an modern PCs.
As for "incredibly well polished and thought out" it still is. For one, there's much more to a mobile OS than graphic design. How it works and feels is much more important than how it looks ("design is how it works").
Second, most of those are some guy's pet peeves, not genuine problems. If he cannot understand why a red carret matches blue text, that doesn't make it into a genuine problem. Same if he didn't get the memo that drop shadows are used to add a depth to the UI layers and thinks they are stray leftovers.
>And why I wouldn't want them? Are you deciding what I want or not?
No, Apple's deciding and the market votes with his wallet (and judging from their actually buying stuff --and at the quite expensive end of the market at that--, it has voted much in favor of those decisions for a decade or so).
There's always some people, call them sui generis, or mavericks, or loonies, that do want a floppy drive in their laptop, and not even because they have a specific business needs. They just love these flexible plastic suckers. Others can't live without physical Blue-Ray disks (just as some people swore by Betamax or quad cassetes).
And in the case of phones, some just got to have a 440 dpi screen (despite not seeing much different from 300), near field communication, wireless charging, 4G support in 2009 when it would burn through batteries of the era in 1 hour, and what have you. It's their choice. Just not a very popular one, or what most people would call sane, especially going forward.
So, feel free to use whatever, just don't complain if it's not what the era you live in deems relevant.
> No, Apple's deciding and the market votes with his wallet (and judging from their actually buying stuff --and at the quite expensive end of the market at that--, it has voted much in favor of those decisions for a decade or so).
So, when Apple said that the MINIMUM screen size for tablets was 10" people talked with their wallet and this was the right size.
When Apple released iPad Mini people talked with their wallet and this was a right size along the regular iPad?
> There's always some people, call them sui generis, or mavericks, or loonies, that do want a floppy drive in their laptop
Really, do you have top put a nonsensical analogy to try to defend the indefensible?
>So, when Apple said that the MINIMUM screen size for tablets was 10" people talked with their wallet and this was the right size.
When Apple released iPad Mini people talked with their wallet and this was a right size along the regular iPad?
Is there even a question here?
Nobody said "10 was the one and perfect size until Apple added 7". Just that Apple releasing a 10" only, for the first versions of the iPad, was a wild success.
Apple had decided to release a 10, and then they decided to add a 7 to that line. Both were mass bought. So clearly both were good market decisions.
Other vendors had a 7 even before -- their sales were 1/10 the iPad 10 available at the time or less.
>Really, do you have top put a nonsensical analogy to try to defend the indefensible?
The "indefensible" being a company offering a specific feature set of their choice and not every possible feature desired by some users or offered by some competitor?
If the resulting products sell well, then surely, they didn't make a mistake in ommiting stuff.
I don't know how you can defend the contrary. Based on some unalienable right to get what you like in a specific product from a specific brand?
>Tell that to my mother, who used her phone's built in FM radio daily until her retirement.
An older woman close on retirement is not exactly having her finger on the pulse of what's current, does she now?
I mean, I'm giving an example of a similar obsolete feature ("like not having a floppy disk drive an modern PCs") and your counter-argument is what a retiree does?
Might as well have replied "well, my grandfather rocks floppy disks on his 286 just fine".
The FM radio is the feature I value most on my Samsung phone. But it depends on where you live perhaps. Public service radio where I live is very good and its much easier to use than any podcast when the things they broadcast live is on air.
EDIT: actually I value most the web browser and the internet connection, but as an app, it is close to the top
I haven't listened to the radio since I got a smart phone and know many in the same position. My crappy anecdata isn't any kind of data point but radio listeners must surely be in decline - podcasts are my replacement. If I wanted non stop adverts I'd watch TV.
>> Actually you only lose features you wouldn't want in the first place and would drag the whole thing down (less battery life, bulkier, etc).
>> How it works and feels is much more important than how it looks ("design is how it works").
As an iPhone 4 user who upgraded to iOS 7, I would have loved the option to turn off all those extraneous animations that force me to wait for them to finish running before I can do anything.
In other words, I want to lose some "how it looks" features because they drag the whole thing down ("how it works") for me on my phone.
>Not having FM radio for example is like not having a floppy disk drive an modern PCs.
FYI: The iphone wireless chipset (BCM4334) already contains an FM radio. Apple has chosen to ship the phone with the functionality disabled. Presumably to push people towards itunes offerings.
Another one, if you go to the timer app from the slide up control center, the "pause" is 2 pixels out of being centered. You can just about tell with the naked eye but if you open it in photoshop it's 2 pixels out.
It's not a big deal but I thought Apple would be well on top of stuff like this
The major built-in apps in iOS 6 are just as 'boring' as the major OS X apps are. Safari, Music, Mail, Photos, Camera, Settings, Contacts, Messages - light grey chrome around content.
The average iOS 6 app did not look like Game Center or Find My Friends (which was not even built-in). But I guess that's how it will be remembered now. =/
To clarify things, we just posted this on the web site:
We love Apple.
We think this is the best way to point out what's not up to their standards so they can fix it.
It's all about intellectual honesty, not trolling.
How many of these failures are due to insufficient testing on i18n?
IMHO, using texts to replace icon based buttons is clever to simplify the working of screen resolution adaption, however, it does increase the possibility of inconsistency between different locales. I still remember NYTimes.app for iPad displayed ugly aligned date texts which is just too long to fit into the space left for them, only in Chinese locales, which they do not officially support, and I doubt that they really did testing on it.
Anyone know how many UI bugs were reported or seen with previous iOS versions? I'm just wondering if this is a usual part of each major iOS rollout, or a unique instance.
Many of the problems with consistency (capitalization, placement, return key on keyboard, etc) seem to be in specific apps. In those cases it's the designers and programmers of the company that make the app that are at fault. It's important to be familiar enough with the iOS SDK that you know which bugs are OS territory and which ones are app territory. I'm not trying to dis their eye for bugs, I'm just trying to shrink the surface bugs live on.
Maybe? I don't tend to read about iOS vs Android often. I'd say that's a problem for any company that maintains an app store. I'm sure those inconsistencies exist on iOS6 as well :(
I don't understand how changing the design adds to functionality. Instead of giving a new half baked look, Apple could have concentrated on adding features to its existing look. Flat design is good but like most things its just a phase. Why not add background downloading etc. to the current design. From design point if view iOS 6 is fairly good and very consistent.
What will probably happen is a quick 7.1 release to fix most small alignment bugs, and then iOS 8 will refine everything. I'm guessing iOS 9 will be the polished version of this UI design. Not making excuses, just postulating what might happen.
My only issue is that this is an OS that's been in beta for a few months, and yeah, the betas were pretty horrible in some ways. The OS has been live to the public for a day. How do I know what version these screenshots came from?
Half of these are from Beta versions and do no longer occur... But nice catches, there are definitely somethings that could be improved, but others are just up to personal preference and interpretation.
Most of these are pretty good points, some are just taste differences. In a different world, if these things were fixed, they'd belong on a "Subtle UI Greatness" tumblr.
Without Apple Radar numbers next to each and every one of these pictures, this is just unnecessary, mean-spirited trolling. "Hey, look, iOS 7 has bugs! LOLOLOL."
I agree with some of the reviews here: nothing is perfect, and I do think most of these are bugs. For example, the issue on facebook settings doesn't show up on my i5. Get a life, or show me what kind of non-sloppy you are able to produce.
Yes I'm getting surly in my old age.