Some of my favorite operating system updates are ones that rethink longstanding parts of the user interface in intelligent ways, and iOS 10 seems to be shaping up into that kind of update. The lock screen has been newly modeled around TouchID, which was brand-new three years ago but practically omnipresent in iDevices today. The Today View has been broken up into a bunch of configurable widgets and merged with the Siri suggestions screen. Notifications are more versatile and pleasant to interact with. And Messages’ improvements, while they won’t be to everyone’s taste, bring Apple’s built-in app more in line with the current zeitgeist as represented by Slack or Facebook Messenger.
There are more new features in iOS 10 – improvements to core apps like Photos, Music, and Health, tweaks to how the keyboard works, Apple Pay on the web, and a bunch of other minor changes – that we’ll have more time to look at in our final review. But so far the majority of the changes are for the better. Old hardware is getting dropped, but that frees developers from worrying about actively supported devices with 512MB of RAM. The iPad isn’t getting nearly the amount of love that it got from iOS 9, but in recent years Apple has been happy to dole out feature updates throughout the year in large point releases like it did in iOS 9.3. If performance on older devices and battery life are both up to snuff in the final release, most of my complaints will end up being pretty minor.
Ars’ iOS preview – always worth a read to know what’s up with the new release.
iOS 8 notification centre had a nice Today view. It showed you the date, and in a couple sentences it told you about the weather, it told you about events and alarms that were scheduled, and it told you about traffic info. It was unobtrusive, compact, and useful, and most of all if a certain bit of information was not relevant, it was not shown.
It was information targetted to humans. It was presented in natural language and similar to how a person might tell you about what is coming up in your day. Despite pulling from multiple sources it combined it into a quick summary designed for human consumption.
Replacing it is a horrible jungle of widgets that has thrown all human considerations out the window in favour or exposing the underlying module structure (which no non-developer cares about) to the user. So instead of a nice natural language summary, we get multiple massive widgets with a bunch of chrome and borders that waste space. We get widgets that are there despite them having no place in the current context, and we get an abysmal information density.
Huge step backwards in terms of usability.
I know, right?
And if only there was some way to edit this screen to reflect your personal preferences… oh wait…
Oh wait, there isn’t. Day view is gone.