The long-expected MIUI 6 is finally here! Visually stunning, Stunningly Simple. It’s a new chapter for MIUI. And here is a full review for you to get a taste of it.
We believe that it takes more than just good features to create a beautiful design. From orderly workflows, clear hierarchies and fluent responses, we believe that good design exists in every tap, drag and pinch you make. Natural and intuitive, just the way it should be.This is MIUI 6. It’s visually stunning, stunningly simple. It’s the start of anew chapter.
Had you told me these were shots from some other operating system, I’d have believed you. This is shameless (via Daring Fireball).
If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Apple must be flattered than a M.F. right now!
Yeah, I think “blatant copy” is an appropriate evaluation. That said, I think they took Apple’s design ideas and actually improved on a couple of things.
Still, it’s Android and most Android apps will stick out like a sore thumb compared to the rest of the phone’s interface. That’s why when I’m using an Android device, I don’t even bother with custom themes or skins, since there’s no consistency from app to app. There’s a beautiful launcher for Android called Solo Launcher that also mimics iOS 7, and while it works well, is fast and fluid and nice to look at, when you’re in an app it simply no longer applies.
The CEO even dresses like Steve Jobs, so there is a high level of weird there
Ever seen a group of architects? They all dress like Steve Jobs. [Actually Jobs started out as a typical nerd with zero fashion style – he copied the beatnik look later on.]
Ah well let’s get this out here for the record, so we can all feel either really smug now or completely misunderstood depending on your perspective:
“Picasso had a saying — ‘good artists copy; great artists steal’ — and we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.” – Steve Jobs ’96.
“Steve had a saying.. ” – Xiaomi ’14
Edited 2014-08-17 06:45 UTC
Oh dear – that stupid trope again. It’s easy to misquote by taking a sentence out of context, and in this case the out of context sentence has become a sort of tech urban legend.
It’s the favourite quote of people, like you, who are seeking to use it out of context and to make it appear to be about something it is not. I doubt you know, without using Google, where or when Jobs said that sentence, or the sentences and thus the context that surrounded it.
The quote comes from Steve Jobs 1995. The Lost Interview
In response to the question “But how do you know what’s the right direction?” Steve Jobs said:
So the oft used quote is about about bringing parts of other disciplines, from literature, art and culture, into computer science and product design. It is not about copying other products in part or in total.
What would, to use Jobs term, ‘being very narrow’ mean in practice? Well it could mean endlessly dredging up a sentence from a Steve Jobs interview in 1995, taking it out of context, fetishising it, implying it is about one thing when it is about another, and then using it to prop up a delusional world view and a deliberately fallacious argument in defence of crass product cloners or in order to try to pretend that Apple are not innovative.
That sort sort obtuse and pedantic behaviour in pursuit of propping up fallacious arguments leaves people without a shred of intellectual dignity and should be avoided like the plague.
You only say it’s stupid because it takes you down two pegs.
It DOESN’T MATTER that it’s not about copying other products. It’s about copying other IDEAS. He’s still copying other people’s ideas, whether or not they are in the computer industry or not. Ideas don’t become original just because you add “with a computer” to the end of it. Ideas don’t become original just because you bought it off someone else and marketed it better.
Hell, you’re even on record confusing patents and copyright together because you think ideas shouldn’t be allowed to be copied. Your attempt to excuse your hypocrisy shoots yourself in the foot. You just proved Steve Jobs copies ideas, not that there needed to be any more proof.
Of course it matters that it’s not about copying products. It matters because it’s only every quoted in relation to discussion about other companies copying Apple products and is only ever used in order to diminish the crassness of the copiers by implying that Apple does the same sort of thing. That’s the only time it’s every deployed.
What Jobs was talking about was bringing a wide cultural, arts and literary hinterland to bear on the process of designing products. The Cubists developed lines that look this, can we use them to inspire the way the curves on our product are designed. Such cross fertilisation, building on the full width of previous human cultural development, is the very essence of how human innovation works. Jobs always strongly championed the widest possible cultural reference framework in developing computer products, the creating of the richest possible set of connections between computer design and the aesthetics of all of the rest of human culture.
So the full quote is about how the team that worked on the Mac were also experts and artists in many other cultural and scientific domains and that the cross references that were thus possible were immensely enriching to the design process. If you think that boils down to copying other people’s ideas then you are a fool.
The Jobs quote, as you seem to accept, had noting to do with copying other people’s products and yet twerps continue to trot it out as some sort of idiot savant defence gambit when companies copy Apple. It’s not just stupid it’s stupidity cloned.
Are you retarded? “Copying products” is a subset of “copying ideas”. The quote has ALWAYS, I repeat, ALWAYS, been used to highlight that Jobs copies IDEAS. Your attempts to deny this results in a strawman.
No it isn’t. Do think there is no difference between someone making an copy of Pablo Picasso’s painting ‘Figure dans un Fauteuil (Seated Nude, Femme nue assise’ and Jean Metzinger painting La Femme au Cheval because he had been inspired by the ideas of Picasso?
Is copying the same as being inspired by other peoples ideas to create something of your own?
Is taking ideas someone else has expressed and using them to create something new the same as copying the other persons work?
All of human culture is about building on top of what came before, sometimes incrementally, sometimes in large leaps. The progress of human culture depends on using what came before to create something new. Is all of human culture simply copying?
The idea that copying successful products in order to ride on the coattails of other people’s work is the same as taking ideas from many other fields of human creativity and bringing them to bear upon the process of designing something new, that they are essentially the same sort of thing, that they are merely (not very different) steps along a simple continuum, is just absurd.
The Steve Jobs quote about ‘stealing’ is always repeated out of context, nobody ever deploys it in the context of the short paragraph in which it is embedded and which renders it’s true meaning. Why? In order to deceive and distort. In order to pretend that Jobs was talking about something akin to copying other people’s products. It’s just cheap sophistry.
I won’t even bother with the rest of that nonsense.
No, it has never been repeated out of context. You are arguing a strawman. The quote has always been used to argue he copies IDEAS, not products. It’s used to highlight the arrogance of Jobs and people like you to claim OWNERSHIP of an idea that appeared in other fields which was incorporated into Apple products (and often not the first in the field).
Remember how Apple tried to claim ownership of the WIMP idea, even though they merely bought it off Xerox PARC? I hesitate to call that a product, but it was close enough to blur the lines between copying a product and an idea.
I’ve read the quote over and over during the several last years and I do not see what you’re saying in it. I only see Jobs saying that he isn’t ashamed of implementing things that others have implemented if he deems them worth it.
Also, I’m going to have to ask how do you define copying an idea and copying a product? I mean, what if the idea is to use certain kinds of colours and general aesthetics that someone else also uses, are you then copying the idea or copying the product? What if the idea revolves around how to prevent accidental use of the device by way of “locking” the input-device and requiring the user to make a simple gesture to “unlock” it? Or what if it revolves around how to market the device? Or what materials to use so it’d appeal to people?
Basically, everything is an idea. Yes, literally everything. You can’t say something copies another product without it copying ideas, they are not separable properties, nor can you say that someone/something copies ideas from another product without copying the product.
Sure, but Jobs and the Lisa team still totally stole WIMP from Xerox, and Xerox slightly less stole it (via. graduate students) from Doug Engelbart.
This is Steve Jobs saying:
“We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.”
“Good artists copy; great artists steal.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CW0DUg63lqU
This is Steve Jobs, after visiting Xerox, saying: ‘I was so blinded’
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdrKWArr3XY
The interviews to Steve Jobs come from a documentary called “Triumph of the Nerds” which chronicles the rise of the PC beginning in the 1970s and continues through the IBM PC and Apple Macintosh.
TIC – This Is China, get used to it.
In the 18th and 19th century Europeans were making cheap and inferior copies of Chinese goods such as porcelain and lacquerware.
Edited 2014-08-18 03:53 UTC
Correct. Not only copying but owning everything they think is valuable.[offtopic]And they’ve gone overboard as claiming all the entire China Sea because they owned them since ancient times(they used this as evidence)[/offtopic]
And now they are back with a vengeance of copying everything. Virtually everything is Made in China.
The only thing that’s crossing my mind with this UI is: “Apple lawsuit in 3… 2… 1…”
Of course Apple adopted a lot of ideas from WinPhone – this is the nature of fashion in design.
A bit too flat in my taste, but each to their own i guess.
Me, I like the use of colour and the general visuals they’ve got going there, it looks quite pleasant. Orange just looks so damn nice against white and black as an accent colour. I have no experience with iOS so I don’t know if they’re copying it or not, but then again, I don’t even care.
One thing that irks me, though, is the icons; I can’t quite put my finger on what it is exactly that makes them look somehow out-of-place and irksome, but they just don’t look right.
Yes. Personally I see as much Metro as there is Apple imitating.
Nah, flat is the new black.
What it don’t like is that orange/brown colour. Far too close to that abmoination of Linux called Ubuntu.
Green Gecko’s are far more to my taste.
Bashing Ubuntu because of the color is cool,.
Bashing Ubuntu because of their behaviour is cool.
Bashing Ubuntu is cool.
Edited 2014-08-18 05:43 UTC
Ever since I learned that good design is more than just something that looks pretty I have not been able to see what is appealing about UIs like this. At first glance, yes it might look inviting but you know once you start messing around with it you’ll (perhaps subconsiously) notice the small imperfections where maybe one application behaves slightly different from another either through design, colorscheme, responsiveness or something else and this will leave you with a feeling of disguist in the back your head that is hard to pinpoint but you know it is there.
Besides that, the video was awful. It felt like an infomercial from the 90s and it just showcased all the applications the user will seldom use anyway.
I don’t know. These days it seems to be about making things as ugly and/or bland as possible and bullshit about it enough to change people’s perceptions. It doesn’t even have to be functional.
Human Computer Interaction and actual UI design was thrown out the window decades ago, when companies realised it was simply much cheaper, easier and flashier to hire graphic designers instead.
What do you mean? What is the difference of a Graphic Artist/designer and a UI designer?
That question alone neatly highlights the problem…
HCI involves a degree of psychology and sociology, and is based on experimentation and data.
Graphic Design is making things look nice.
UI designers design user interfaces, graphics designers design graphics. Those two aren’t even remotely the same.
Nailed it. There’s a huge difference between UI designers and graphic designers. Most of the basic, low-level work on Apple products is heavily influenced by UI designers. Early UI design is done on paper, storyboarded, and things like targeting, click counts, and total cursor movement is recorded and improved. I design interfaces for vertical market apps and while not perfect, you can usually look to Apple as a case study in UI.
There’s a big difference between a fixed menu bar with fixed targets on the edge of the screen and floating menu bars. There’s a big difference between using depth, shadows, and light refraction to show layering properly and just throwing drop shadows on everything. There’s a big difference between consistent, system-wide keyboard shortcuts and random four-fingered commands. There’s a big difference between giving the user a clear action path and 3 layers of tabs with an OK button.
A lot of this science crosses onto itself, that is to say there is no formula for the perfect UI. But Apple has shown since 1983 (at least) that graphic designers usually come second to UI designers. With Jon Ivey they’ve elevated the physical (case) designer to the top ranks, and since already running a solid Unix OS, they are top of their class designs.
And i’ll reply to myself by saying the “skeumorphism” that Jobs was pushing before his death did seem like graphic designers outranking UI designers. But most of that is gone now and iOS under Jon Ivey has improved greatly.
To me, this looks to be Material influenced rather than a cupertiny original.
Only if you are completely blind!
The icons for a start are straight out of the Apple playbook. Android icons don’t tend to have the square border (with the rounded corners) around the graphic.
They have even removed the app drawers to make the whole UI work more like iOS. This is as blatant as it gets. And frankly, for a company that even apes Steve Jobs legendary product introductions, right down to the “One more thing” http://techcrunch.com/2014/07/30/xiaomis-one-more-thing/ (which by the way, was the only slide in English), this isn’t even a argument.
It’s blatant, and they could not make it more clear if they tried.
I should add that I am actually quite impressed by them. They are the one Android maker that seems to genuinely care enough to make a nice looking phone.
The app drawer has been missing since forever in MIUI…
Designers (and architects ) are all trained in groupthink. They all dress the same and follow whatever aesthetic (fad) is currently popular. They very rarely have an original design idea.
One of my friends collects modern art. He once told me that most famous artists have practically zero creativity – they just do hundreds of versions of the same painting.
Go and look at some actual art before saying silly things about it in public.
EVERY artist, writer. musician, architect etc has a distinctive style. They typically develop this style early in their career. Their subsequent works are recycled versions of the original theme. [This habit was skillfully parodied in the Brady Bunch movie where architect Mike Brady submits almost exactly the same design for every commission.]
Apple designs rectangles with rounded corners, Vivaldi wrote hundreds of very similar pieces and Picasso spent the last 50 years of his life creating thousands of surrealist paintings using the same techniques and motifs.
I forgot to mention that my friend has a masters degree in art appreciation and one of the most valuable private modern art collections in Australia. He’s been collecting art for 25 years and he knows what he’s talking about.
You must be talking half-truth. Does your friend go to http://blenderartists.org, AI forums, CorelDraw forums and have not seen any creativity there? I am talking about digital art. Of course physical painting and digital painting might be different in some respects, but creativity is the same. Although you mentioned popular artists, it must be also applicable up to the bottom.
You must be misquoting your friend or both of you are talking half-truth which is worst than a plain lie.
All the silly things about modern art are already said by modern artists and their worshippers.
I’ve been looking at documentaries about modern art, and it’s mostly “it’s a reaction to this, or a reaction to that”. And they all end up looking the same. The only difference is what bullshit they come up with to justify doing nothing.
http://blinchiki.wordpress.com/2013/01/28/modern-art-is-bullshit/
All the silly things about modern art are already said by modern artists and their worshippers.
I’ve been looking at documentaries about modern art, and it’s mostly “it’s a reaction to this, or a reaction to that”. And they all end up looking the same. The only difference is what bullshit they come up with to justify doing nothing.
http://blinchiki.wordpress.com/2013/01/28/modern-art-is-bullshit/ [/q]
Misguided, simplistic notions of egalitarianism have effectively made the concept of “art” meaningless. It used to be safe to assume that if something was considered “art,” then at a bare-minimum it was an example of some unique artistic skill (AKA artistry). But nowadays, that’s an “elitist” mentality that discriminates against those who lack the basic artistic skills to express their idea – and we can’t have THAT!
Has no-one ever warned you two about the dangers of circular links? How do you expect your articles to get garbage collected now?
You’ve discovered the reason why so much garbage exists on the internet and continues to lurk about.
It’s called circle jerking.
Also called Infinite Loop in Apple-speak.
Well if Apple ass-licker jackass Gruber says so, it must be!
“Apple designs rectangles with rounded corners”
Look at every Video monitor ever created before there was an Apple Inc.
To be fair…the “RoundRect” as a design element in GUI’s truly was a unique and non-obvious design element invented by Bill Atkinson. Until then, every GUI (not that there were many of them), were proper squares or rectangles.
http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Round_Rects_Are_Everywhe…
There is nothing unique about Rectangles with rounded corner. It is an obvious evolution of design.
The “GUI” is the key bit here.
MIUI: “U mad, apple?” http://i.imgur.com/wJpNkIp.jpg
Postception.
I kind of liked that MIUI was not totally flat.
Add the blatant iOS styling and its a big bag of meh to me.
I kinda hoped that MIUI was the OS for people that liked the Apple approach, but wanted full control. It just looks like a Goophone i5 now.
Unfortunately the design of MIUI is only skin deep. MIUI is much, much slower than stock ROM, it has multitude of apps running in the background that either can’t be turned off or uninstalled. MIUI screens can’t be customized fully, as you can’t remove any system/MIUI shortcut. The OS has become “The Bloat itself” and that is unfortunate as it looks lovely.
Last week I spent time posting how so much of the Android universe has lived in the “iOS knockoff” zone, and of course I was ridiculed and attacked as being just another mac idiot.
To me, Windows Phone is more appealing than Android, because it is original and it is private. I just hate knockoffs and I never trust advertising companies.
I hate when something comes out that does XYZ in a certain way, finds success, then a few months later along comes several more products that all of a sudden do XYZ the same way, plus more! They simultaneously praise the original by copying it directly and then market against it with insulting ads and comments about the original users.
And the real rub is that usually the copycats miss something important and don’t actually do XYZ as well. It sometimes pays to be original and take chances, but in the business world most companies are total copy cats.
When you make your money from advertising there’s really no point in being original. Follow the trends, look similar, and be as much to as many people as possible.
As if there is anything original how the iOS looks.
There are similar looking interfaces made for pocket computers that have applications in icon grid that predate iOS almost 10 years.
Some of them also look lot better than the iOS now.
oh please, these were research only, or things that barely made it to market. apple was all over early pocket computers, designing & selling one of the first handheld platforms to a mainstream market in what, 1990?
when apple inc. restricted the newton team and ultimately killed it, many of it’s original engineers went onto palm and other smaller handheld projects. apple is all over the DNA of handhelds, way before google existed, way before samsung was in consumer space, and way before OSNews even existed.
Well there’s always http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GRiDPad manufactured by Samsung in 1989… also, “Jeff Hawkins went on to use the GRiDPad as a predecessor for his best known-invention, the Palm Pilot.”
(and what does it have to do with the existence of OSNews? You seem to have a strange train of thought while defending Apple…)
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