Why I loathe the new app switcher in iOS 11
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Why I loathe the new app switcher in iOS 11
1–10 of 62 posts
Re: Why I loathe the new app switcher in iOS 11
#2It’s pretty bad on iPad. Still fine on iPhone though.
Re: Why I loathe the new app switcher in iOS 11
#3>> In my opinion, this new design doesn’t work for the young, the old, the millenial, the seasoned pro, the able, the dis, the hawkeyed, or the near blind.
My absolute favorite change with iOS 11 was the removal of unnecessary labels. As a young millennial who has been using iOS for almost half of my life those tiny little blips of text scattered everywhere are completely redundant and simply add noise to an otherwise clean looking OS. You could replace every icon with a blank oval and I could navigate my phone just from the locations of the buttons.
Re: Why I loathe the new app switcher in iOS 11
#4The Control Center's little control panel (reminiscent of the one in macOS 1, by the by) is an accelerator—a bunch of non-canonical secondary ways to reach items that have canonical locations in Preferences. Accelerators are about recall, not recognition. They're intended for touch-typing, not discoverability.
The app close buttons are indeed too small, though. Maybe they only tested them on the iPad Pro with the Pencil? (Or they're trying to discourage people from closing apps, so as to put the pressure back on developers to make sure their apps aren't bringing the system to a crawl even when in the background.)
Re: Why I loathe the new app switcher in iOS 11
#5[deleted]
Re: Why I loathe the new app switcher in iOS 11
#6The Control Center's little control panel (reminiscent of the one in macOS 1, by the by) is an accelerator —a bunch of non-canonical secondary ways to reach items that have canonical locations in Preferences. Accelerators are about recall, not recognition. They're intended for touch-typing, not discoverability. The app close buttons are indeed too small, though. Maybe they only tested them on the iPad Pro with the Pe…
eh, the X's are the same as the "delete" icons on the Springboard. I like the conceptual and design consistency.
Really I like everything about this change.
Re: Why I loathe the new app switcher in iOS 11
#7FWIW, haven't beta tested since iOS 7...Control Center swipe-up on lock screen or in-app is awfully inaccurate in general, coupled with being left-handed and equally non-dexterous on mobile with either hand as a touch screen isn't a mouse which I have used right-handed for over a decade.
I welcome the double home-tap to bring all that crap to foreground. Swiping left or right from there (even on iPhone SE) I welcome wholeheartedly but honestly I rarely "kill" an app from there anyway unless network changes.
Flipping back and forth from this writing, every grievance can be supplemented with "if you're natively right-handed" I guess. And that last sentence, much like my comment; why even fucking write this...
Re: Why I loathe the new app switcher in iOS 11
#8The stacked-card app switcher in iOS is the worst thing ever. It scrolls to the side instead of flinging an app "up" and closing it. You can see maybe a fraction of the most recent app, and barely any of another two, and then you have to scroll through a list of apps that have been open since I last rebooted my phone.
How anyone can think the iOS app switcher is the pinnacle of design baffles me.
Re: Why I loathe the new app switcher in iOS 11
#9Why compare the iPad interface to the iPhone interface?
Re: Why I loathe the new app switcher in iOS 11
#10I wonder if this is a reaction to the belief that you need to keep on killing apps as soon as your phone is perceived to be running slowly? iOS will background kill apps under memory pressure but leaves an screenshot of the interface up in the task list. As people rarely need to manually kill apps and presumably rarely use the task switcher to jump back in the history more than a few places, having easy access to killing them is likely an antipattern.