iOS 7 before and after screenshots • Hacker News Board

Re: iOS 7 before and after screenshots

#101

Post by kyriee » Tue, Sep 17, 2013, 10:07 PM UTC

pavlov wrote: post #4

The "after" screenshots don't seem to have anything in common anymore. Some of the apps look like Android, some look like Windows Phone, some look like Palm webOS. The previous iterations at least shared a few button styles and navigation bar styles, but now it seems like everyone has taken the opportunity to reinvent those too. It's certainly ok by me that app developers are taking more liberties in making their app…

How do you get to that? The UI is basically the same, but flatter. In addition, iOS 7 is not about aesthetics, it's about depth and movement...

Re: iOS 7 before and after screenshots

#102

Post by coldtea » Tue, Sep 17, 2013, 10:11 PM UTC

petercooper wrote: post #48

jjcm wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair it's a new style language. It's going to take time for people to normalize on designs. Eventually I think that there will be a more homogeneous experience, but right now everyone is trying to feel it out and explore. Design follows trends, but right now there aren't any trends to follow in ios7.

Previously, wasn't it just follow Apple's style guide or go home? If so, what's happened in iOS 7? Are Apple just being far more lax in enforcing a style guide or is the style guide out of the window now?

>Previously, wasn't it just follow Apple's style guide or go home?

No, it never was that way. In fact, Apple has even given Awards to third party apps with totally unique UIs.

Re: iOS 7 before and after screenshots

#103

Post by vxNsr » Tue, Sep 17, 2013, 10:24 PM UTC

All I saw was a lot of bright white, something I try to avoid because it makes my eyes hurt. I kinda annoyed at apple for messing up an interface I really liked, I'm gonna have a hard time recommending it to un-tech savvy friends and family because (in my opinion) all this flatness makes it harder to use...

Up until this point I always recommended the iphone to anyone who just wanted a phone that worked, and didn't want to have to worry about bugs, or confusing UI (even though personally I'm a windows phone guy, I can't recommend the OS because it doesn't yet match the full feature set of iOS or Android).

Re: iOS 7 before and after screenshots

#104

Post by _random_ » Tue, Sep 17, 2013, 10:25 PM UTC

pavlov wrote: post #4

The "after" screenshots don't seem to have anything in common anymore. Some of the apps look like Android, some look like Windows Phone, some look like Palm webOS. The previous iterations at least shared a few button styles and navigation bar styles, but now it seems like everyone has taken the opportunity to reinvent those too. It's certainly ok by me that app developers are taking more liberties in making their app…

I guess the biggest take away is that industrial design is not same as GUI design. I hope Johnny Ive will be strong enough to hire those Microsoft UX designers (Zune, XBOX etc) for iOS 8.

Re: iOS 7 before and after screenshots

#105

Post by auganov » Tue, Sep 17, 2013, 10:26 PM UTC

teaneedz wrote: post #64

crazygringo wrote: post #42

Wow. Hipmunk is a great example, in my opinion, of how flat can be bad by removing so many visual cues. The old one is easy to see, understand, and instantaneously "grok", because of the depth cues and shading. The new one is a mess of plain colored boxes, where you have to spend time figuring out what is a header, what is a row, etc. -- it's not instantly obvious. The prices are clearly clickable on the left, on the…

Hipmunk really makes the problems of flat design stand out. There is a common belief that simpler design means better UE. The things that are being tossed out in flat design are the things that often made good designs intuitive in the first place though. Many designers are reaching incorrect conclusions about simplicity and the whole KISS principle. The whole KISS principle doesn't require throwing out pixels and pro…

The problem seems to be some people tend to do more than flatten their designs dimensionally (as in gradients, bevels, specular highlights etc). They also 'flatten' the design as in reducing contrast, reducing lines/borders and other ways of separating and organizing information/data. That's the problematic part to me. Hipmunk did that here.

SeatGeek is an example of almost pure dimensional flattening. It's pretty much the same. Just feels a bit cleaner and more elegant. Especially notice how they replaced the shadow with a grey border. The shadow played the role of a separator. Thus they replaced it with a flat separator. What the other kind of a 'flattener' might do is just throw away the separator completely. And that is where you can screw up.

Re: iOS 7 before and after screenshots

#106

Post by bitcrusher » Tue, Sep 17, 2013, 10:30 PM UTC

One thing to keep in mind is that things 'feel' different on the phone than they do in screen shots. I was pretty 'meh' about iOS7 until I installed the GM on my phone. It still has some weird spots, but over all it looks a hell of a lot better 'live' than it does in pictures. The transitions effects are nice, the removal of skeuomorphism is awesome and the operation is nice. It is not 'revolutionary' but it is a nice evolution from iOS6

Re: iOS 7 before and after screenshots

#107

Post by xxdesmus » Tue, Sep 17, 2013, 10:30 PM UTC

Apple certainly was influenced by Windows Phone. Regardless of the source of that inspiration -- it's definitely an improvement.

Re: iOS 7 before and after screenshots

#108

Post by soulclap » Tue, Sep 17, 2013, 10:30 PM UTC

Steve Jobs is turning in his grave. All of these look so random and interchangeable to me that it could probably even have effects on the common 'iOS first' mentality. What was so special about the iPhone again?

Re: iOS 7 before and after screenshots

#109

Post by mlchild » Tue, Sep 17, 2013, 10:33 PM UTC

gfodor wrote: post #96

iOS 7 is less about how it looks and more about how it feels. Hence screenshots are a poor medium for criticism compared to iOS 6.

Yes, agreed, having used it for 3 months on now, it replaces the visual affordances of shadows, shading, and textures with physics and animation. My key learning so far from building something iOS7-native is that the closer you can make it to feeling like a real object, the better.

Re: iOS 7 before and after screenshots

#110

Post by cube13 » Tue, Sep 17, 2013, 10:40 PM UTC

udfalkso wrote: post #9

untog wrote: post #6

Few of these look better, IMO. And I'm definitely not seeing a lot of consistency in design. That said, many of them weren't great in the first place anyway. One clear trend: getting rid of the bottom tab bar. I will mourn that loss - the top left corner is the least accessible place on the screen, and Apple saw fit to put the most important button (Back) there. The bottom bar was a very accessible shortcut in many a…

iOS7 has a swipe from the left gesture that will trigger the back event, for apps that support it. Long overdue imo and it helps some with what you're describing.

Back events as a whole are problematic. Android's OS back button behavior is application defined up until you're at the base "level" of the app, at which point the behavior is OS defined and it takes you to the home screen. That kind of state management isn't intuitive, and even though you should be able to just hit the app icon to go back(assuming a properly coded app), it's still an inconvenience if you fat finger the button one too many times. Discovery of what the button does for each app is also an annoying process as well.

The change to a swipe might reduce the accidental fat finger, but discovery is a nightmare for both the gesture itself and application specific behaviors for the back event.

I prefer an application button in both cases, especially because it makes it clear that this is something that will only effect the app, and will not have a weird OS interaction, taking me out of the app.