This has been bugging me for a while – definitely since iOS 11 was unveiled last June and probably before then. I have no clue what Apple’s strategy is with their iOS app icon sets, other than to resign myself to the truth that there isn’t one. For simplicity, I’m focusing on just the share icon in this post (what Apple formally calls the ‘action’ button) but these criticisms apply much more widely.
iOS is, indeed, an inconsistent mess when it comes to user interface design. Every application looks and feels different, which trips me up all the time. Android is a little bit better in this regard thanks to Material Design, but that’s really not saying much.
And you know what? I’d rather have misaligned ports I never see at the bottom of my phone than inconsistent UI design I look at multiple times a day.
One of the benefits of the touch screen interface Steve Jobs described during the iPhone launch in 2007 was the ability for apps to look and behave differently. So, I think, we are seeing an intended behavior. Not all UI’s need to work and behave the same way. Microsoft Word and Excel can’t behave like each other, so there will be inconsistencies.
This idea of wanting an exacting UI is just false hope and not looking at the bigger picture.
Yeah, when you get worked up over something as insignificant as whether icons are curved or not, you should probably think about getting outside more. Esp. if you actually write an article to rant about it.
Edited 2018-05-07 14:31 UTC
I fail to see how that’s any different from a desktop PC being able to draw custom GUI elements.
Apple seemed to do pretty well with consistency before Jobs came back and they started ignoring their own HIG in some apps but not others in OSX.
Edited 2018-05-07 14:56 UTC
As someone who has that hint of OCD that actually makes me care about trivial little alignment details, I still have to agree. Give me UI consistency over nitpicks like this any day.
(eg. I go out of my way to kick Electron and GTK+ 3.x-based apps off my KDE desktop because QGtkStyle can only unify theming between Qt and GTK+ 2.x and I don’t like the working GTK+ 3.x themes that are available… though that may change now that it has a stable theming interface.)
As for the thrust of the article and that Jobs Sr. quote, I see that and raise you this:
https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=PC_Boa…
Andy Hertzfeld’s site is full of great stuff. For example, one from 1981 showing the ancestry of Apple’s “remove the headphone jack and seal the battery in” approach to simplicity and planned obsolescence.
https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Diagno…
I’d say he’s my #2 choice after Raymond Chen (The Old New Thing) for tales from inside the tech giants.
Edited 2018-05-07 14:53 UTC
I still don’t why people keep saying that Apple started the “remove the headphone jack” trend. HP first removed it on the HP Veer, so they were the ones starting the trend. OF COURSE, I totally understand that Apple is more popular, but it’s a fact that HP started it, not Apple.
I agree with most of your other points though.
Edited 2018-05-08 11:57 UTC
I never said Apple started it. I just said that Apple did it.
(That said, it is very irritating when such an influencer of consumer expectations does something like that.)
Edited 2018-05-08 15:01 UTC
Remove the battery , think different.
Wow, you learn something new every day. I had no idea that “misaligned” ports is a thing.
So now i have looked at my S7 Edge misaligned ports, and yes, they are not aligned in a straight centered line. I would like to say it doesn’t bother me at all, but the tiny microphone port at the bottom looks out of place. I think it would look out of place if everything was centered too, there clearly need to be 2 microphone holes to align with the speaker, so maybe add a fake hole. An alternative could be to center align everything but the microphone, but instead align that with one of the rows of the speaker. That the speaker, usb and jack plug does not align i think is fine, but that damn microphone port….
No, i don’t really care. (argh, maybe just a tiiiny bit) Same feeling toward the app inconsistencies. I wonder what people who are not in the geeks with slight OCD tendencies category think about the subject. I believe this is one of those areas where there is a lot of purely academic speculation going on, while what really subject should be if anyone is having problems figuring out how to use it.
Now the inside traces underneath the capped CPU. Thats where the beauty is. If the CPU traces aren’t a clear recreation of a Van Goah, when viewed on a Scanning electron microscope, the what the hell are they doing? Obviously they just don’t care about good design or the arts.
Now I know there will be some people who think I’m insane and mailed my own ear to my lover, but things like this matter to those of us to dare to think different.
I remember back when Apple made all these UI changes, before those changes were made, pundits and tech writers were all over Apple for being old-fashioned, decrying skeumorphism as ancient, lame, tired and old-fashioned, screaming that Apple should be more like Android, have a “modern look” with its one-pixel fonts, huge areas of blank space, and icons that did not look like actionable buttons even though they were (and were quite confusing as well).
Now this author is all over Apple for being too abstract and using pixel-wide fonts, etc etc etc. What do these people want? They asked Apple to make changes and they did, now all they want to do is complain about the changes Apple made. Amazing.
Edited 2018-05-07 21:18 UTC