As I’ve been exploring iOS 13 to write the just-released Take Control of iOS 13 and iPadOS 13, I’ve become concerned about what seems to be an increasingly frequent pattern in iOS software design. What finally pushed me over the edge into writing this article was documenting Apple Card’s user interface in Wallet, because I found myself typing the same character over and over and over…
That’s right, I’m talking about the increasingly ever-present ellipsis ••• buttons in iOS (technically, we generally render a user-interface ellipsis in running text as three bullets to make them more easily seen).
At WWDC 2014, Apple railed against the hamburger menu, and ever since it’s very vogue in Apple developer circles to make fun of the hamburger menu. I guess Apple’s major, magical innovation of replacing the three lines with three dots was enough for the company to adopt the concept completely.
Of course, Apple has no taste and has no clue how to design good user interfaces these days, so they made it worse by using the button all over the place in weird locations and have it do different things in different places, but we’ll let that slide.
Too many Cooks spoil the broth. Tim is one too many. He has no taste.
Now serving MciOS burgers.
Ives is gone, I wonder if he was the last bastion standing athwart the move from insanely great to gold plated status symbol.
I didn’t like many of Job’s moves but I could appreciate him as an artist (if Ayn Rand wrote Atlas Shrugged today, she would have a character representing him because Rand was big on the aesthetics of engineering).
One criticism I had of Windows is they would do stupid things to try to copy apple, like animating everything without understanding things like the window shrunk into the taskbar so it had a reason to animate, not just some random annoying movement or scaling.
Now Apple is copying the far less meaningful but still purposeful Google UI elements badly.
You can only coast so long. Jobs said if you need a stylus you are doing it wrong. Instead of doing it right they have an expen(sive)cil. Samsung just has the Note and the Tabs. But altering the UX to allow fine pixel level control (probalby zoom) would require much research and effort to get it right. Instead, copy Samsung.
I suspect this month the latest Apple unveiling will simply show they are so threadbare as to be naked.
tomz,
Meh, steve jobs was wrong for rejecting the stylus. It is is indispensable for anyone who wants to use their mobile/tablet for content creation rather than just consumption. A stylus is at least a magnitude better than a blunt finger. Even clicking on links in text with fingers can be a pain sometimes. Good on apple for overriding the word of jobs in this case.
And wrong for rejecting more than one mouse button.. Apple has a history of rejecting useful things for no good reason, and then after a decade or a half quitely adopt it anyway and forget they were ever against it.
Carewolf,
Apple isn’t stupid. They need to follow the money. It’s the shameless shills who try to pretend they were ever against who are the problem.
I remember an Apple shill on here who praised Jobs’ rejection of bigger phones, and then praised Jobs’ acceptance of bigger phones.
There is so much you can put on a screen before running out of real estate.
Increasing resolution does not help, since there are physical dimension limitations. Also increasing the phone size only goes so far. One has to use pagination and popups to increase on-screen options. And sooner or later apps run into these limitations.
For simple tasks, there should be no need to use a menu (like making a phone call, adding a new contact, or sharing a photo). However infrequent tasks would either:
– Take up screen estate
– Require multiple screen to reach
– Or have a popup menu (hamburger or long click)
Or you can choose not to provide options (like Gnome does, which I prefer btw). And then you’d need a “gconf editor” to access the nitty-gritty details.
Everybody inevitably copies everybody else. News at 11.