251–260 of 335 posts
I think there's a few layers to this: 1) Forstall apparently wants to be CEO, and run the company. That puts him at odds with Cook (the CEO), and Ive (who wants to drive Apple's design decisions). 2) He's divisive. There's claims that neither Jonny Ive nor Bob Mansfield would talk to him without Tim Cook mediating. There's also claims that he "managed up" (showed off to the boss) better than he "managed down", and st…
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Metro is defined by flat background colors, square corners and no shading. You can have a non-skeumorphic interface without any of those features, and given Apple's history of interface design, it would surprise me if they adopted any of them. Apple loves rounded rectangles, gradient backgrounds and shading to indicate depth, though shine and real-like textures may be on the way out.
Shading and round corners are skeuomorphic, as is indicating depth on a piece of glass. What Apple loves is irrelevant (if one is willing to ascribe emotional states to corporations). Daimler-Benz loved steering tillers. Ford loved hand throttles. Think about the way in which the interfaces of automobiles changed over the first forty years as they went from horseless carriages to widespread adoption. That's what we'r…
I think one of the worst examples of UI design by Apple is the iCloud website. It's just so slow and clunky. I can't believe more people aren't complaining about it.
Meanwhile, I saw a Microsoft Surface demo at the mall yesterday and their approach to photo sharing via "SkyDrive" is FAR simpler and easier to use than Apple's. You know you're in trouble when MS has better usability than you. Not a good sign.
Anyone who A) likes Apple and B) has ever been in a Dixons store in the UK will be overjoyed with the other departure, Browett (head of retail and previous Dixons CEO) who is leaving immediately (compared to Forstall's year long "transition" departure). Dixons is everything that Apple should never be; terrible customer service, clueless minimum wage staff, horrible retail experience, and generally used only by people…
>> Anyone who A) likes Apple and B) has ever been in a Dixon's store in the UK will be overjoyed with the other departure, Browett (head of retail) who is leaving immediately (compared to Forstall's year long "transition" departure). Dixon's is everything that Apple should never be; terrible customer service, clueless minimum wage staff, horrible retail experience, and generally used only by people who desperately ne…
Does anyone but me here listen incessantly to podcasts? The latest Podcasts App from iTunes is a skeuomorphic mess. It has a superfluous animation of a reel-to-reel player of course. But it utterly fails at its most basic task: playing a goddamn podcast. But don't take my word for it, it has a 1.5 star rating on iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/podcasts/id525463029 Not to mention crashes... Apple used to make…
The Podcast app and the iPad Music app are both a mess, and both happened under Forstall as I understand it. Trade away the lyric and podcast show info displays for kitsch wood veneer? And a reel-to-reel tape recorder simulator? Move seek controls to weird locations? Replace the easy-to-spot seek knob with a radio needle? Why? So many small steps backward, even if no single one was a deal breaker... negative trajecto…
I had many situations in which the auto-hidden scrollbars made it impossible to tell that there was more to discover in a scroll view. The CAPS SIDEBAR HEADERS have no triangle indicator anymore, it is impossible to tell without hovering if a section is closed or open & empty. The monochrome sidebars made Finder and iTunes noticeably less efficient in my usage. Many new-style toolbars like Xcode's are not customizable anymore. etc...
And all these things are in line with Apple's hardware design (where I enjoy the simplicity a lot more).
Does anyone but me here listen incessantly to podcasts? The latest Podcasts App from iTunes is a skeuomorphic mess. It has a superfluous animation of a reel-to-reel player of course. But it utterly fails at its most basic task: playing a goddamn podcast. But don't take my word for it, it has a 1.5 star rating on iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/podcasts/id525463029 Not to mention crashes... Apple used to make…
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Indicating depth in a digital button is a clear affordance.
But likewise, indicating "tape reels" in a recording app is a clear affordance that you can record audio. This is a slippery slope. There's no hard boundary between skeumorphism and visual affordance, even though you'd like there to be.
The difference between skeumorphism and visual affordance is the difference between "intuitive" and intuitive. One makes a reference to past experience, and is built on natural affordances. The other is not.
That said, I think what you're getting at is it might be impossible to completely eliminate skeumorphism. I agree with that. There's going to be at least a sliver left in almost any interface. That's just one of the byproducts of our having a culture.
Here are the major changes announced: 1. Jony Ive's role is expanded from Industrial Design to Industrial Design AND Human Interface. In other words, Ive is the new Design chief for hardware and software. This is huge. 2. Scott Forstall is out (after an interim advising role to Tim Cook). iOS goes to Craig Federighi who already oversees Mac OS. So, now iOS and Mac OS are overseen by the same person. 3. Eddy Cue's rol…
Important to mention (you did already, but just to emphasize) that Scott Forstall will be "advisor to CEO Tim Cook in the interim". Interim meaning more specifically 6 months, till April 2013.
This should allow him to cash in some thousands of stock options, which will serve as a natural non-competitive package. Which would be very fair, given his role in re-shaping Apple over all these years.