Interesting site that compares iOS 6 applications to their iOS 7 counterparts.
A few things stand out. First, while I dislike the look of iOS 6 applications, they at least look a lot less confusing than their iOS 7 counterparts – easier to read, clearer buttons, better contrast in the colour palette, that sort of thing. Second, many of them, like iOS 7 itself, are quite bright. I’m used to the darker colours of Windows Phone and Android, and iOS 7 is a heck of a lot brighter. Three, there’s a lot of Holo and Metro influences in there.
I have actually played with several of the iOS 7 betas, and found none of them particularly convincing. This look has a lot of growing up to do.
M$ reinvent the wheel. Innovation, for those who doesn’t know windows 3.1 and his powerfull 16 colors palette. Human stupidity is limitless. And later, the hell freezes over : Apple copy the M$ stupidity ¡
Sorry for my bad English.
Unfortunately your English is not the issue.
To each his own but I think the simpler interface of 7 is much better. It’s cleaner and brighter.
I’ll agree that it’s brighter… but we’ll have to disagree on whether that’s better.
As for cleaner, that’s a mixed bag. I agree that some of those iOS6 apps abuse gradients or use messy layouts, but many of the iOS 7 apps remove so much stuff that it becomes hard to differentiate UI zones.
Some of that “clutter” is needed visually group elements for efficient scanning by the user.
Here are some more specific examples:
1. The header and Sort/Filter buttons in Instapaper are so washed out that they’re hard to recognize as more than randomly-placed bits of text.
2. The old Hipmunk look requires less thought to recognize which cells are row/column headers and which cells are data.
3. The way the Standard/Hybrid/Satellite buttons on the new Photo Investigator use transparency makes them unreadable beyond belief and I’m not even sure a cheap Chinese knock-off would look so bad. (Not to mention that using that shade of light red is a very strange choice for that use)
4. Braille Writer’s switch from white on dark gray header icons to blue on mid gray header icons pointlessly lowers their contrast in an application where it could conceivably be more harmful than usual.
5. The new Auphonic header’s use of a larger font for the “< Productions” button ellipsizes the title at fewer characters and, without even faint vertical lines to divide the “< Productions” from the “Auphonic…” from the pen icon, makes it feel unbalanced.
6. The new Reeder just feels like someone wrote a potentially decent app and applied a “reduce contrast” filter.
7. I have no problem with making Goodgame flat and I won’t judge the outlined buttons, but it’d look more polished with dividers… even if they were very faint.
Fancy, Should iRun Perth, Brown Dwarf Converter, Eat at USC, Audiobox, Amount, Splyce, and Gift Suggester all look better in the iOS 7 version… but only because the iOS 6 version had flaws that could be present or absent in either design aesthetic. (Poor contrast, bad layouts, etc.)
Edited 2013-09-18 01:08 UTC
From the perspective of generalized design ethos, I see some things I like, and some things I don’t…
Likes
1. Less gradients – they were getting tedious.
2. Less use of bold fonts when there is no reason.
3. More whitespace, less use of borders to break up listings.
Dislikes
1. Buttons are becoming harder to visually discern, all pretense of a system button “style” seems gone now.
2. The blurred multi-color background effect is going to quickly replace gradients on my tedious list.
3. The color scheme used for system apps is an invitation for tasteless developers to go nutz with some truly awful retina scarring choices…
Sacrilege…
The status bar! It is supposed to be black. At the very least it should be the same color everywhere. WTF? That seems to me to be a very uncharacteristic choice for Apple, they have historically treated the system menu/status bar like it was a temple. Now developers can just smear it with any old color they want?
I get the whole “chromeless” thing and all that, but that is going to far. It was black so that it looked like part of the bezel. That was the point. Why make it look like part of the app when it in fact isn’t??? You could already hide the status bar if you really wanted to go chromeless, so why?
The menu bar of OSX has been translucent since 10.5 so iOS isn’t the first Apple OS to do such frivolous things to the menu bar.
Good point… I forgot about that, I disabled it way back when that added it. But still, translucent is not the same thing as completely transparent. And at least it is consistent in OSX, it doesn’t change colors when I switched between apps (if I actually used it) since it is the wallpaper that bleeds through. Regardless though, it was and is an awful idea – but in iOS 7 it is 10x worse.
Edited 2013-09-18 10:15 UTC
all of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again
WINDOWS PHONE IOS7
The look of iOS7 is something else. I swear it was designed by unicorns or pixie tweens. If you read the iOS7 fine print, it probably says male users must remove their testicles to complete the installation.
If your “manhood” depends on color palettes, perhaps the issue may be with your insecurity?
Not liking literally fruity colors for a cell phone UI translates to insecurity for you? You have far deeper issues in play than my personal UI preferences.
My big hairy balls love those colors!
I think OS7 does not look like IOs anymore. This is a good thing, because the IOs look we awed to was looking now rather dated, with its rotating drum selectors and bas-relief buttons. Android introduced their much more elegant Holo flat abstract look, and I have the feeling that the much vaunted Jony Yves has copied it shamelessly. Or shamefully, whatever, who cares, it is not astrophysics now, just as it was not astrophysics then.
Surely, what I find much more elegant today will feel tacky, boring and dated in a few years time, and designers will bring again a less severe look, and we will all be pepped up again. Who will be first? Does it matter?
It’s all like pants and skirts shrinking or growing, sagging or tightening as time goes by, for no particular reason, with the current option at any time being the only imaginably cool one, and any others being unspeakably vulgar. And possibly also with once-in-history aberrations like sagging, show-your-undies pants.
It takes a few minutes to get adjusted to and figure stuff out. If you watch the Apple keynotes where they demo stuff you know how most stuff works already.
I’ve been running it for a week now and it’s great. It didn’t slow my iPhone down, in fact it seems a bit faster.
It doesn’t bother me if apps get an iOS 7 look or not.
Is this just my opinion or iOS apps now try to mimic Android counter part.
Especially the menu button is identical to Android.
The irony is that in the beginning it was the other way around, using custom buttons and other GUI elements just to mimic iOS on Android.
This is what all the pundits were clamoring for, this site included, for months and months with the articles of how iOS has gotten stale, is no longer “modern” or up to date like Android or WindowsPhone8, so buck up and get over it. No more skeuomorphism. No more felt. No more leather. No more stitching. No more buttons. No more “buttons” that look like buttons or that look like something you would automatically click on. No more visual clues as to what you can click on or what might happen if you do click on something. Flat. No textures. Abstract icons that no longer look like what they do when touched. The hue & cry is going to be enormous from everyone who has been calling for this wholesale change and it’s going to be fun to watch.
Point me to a single article – or even a comment – from someone who argued that Apple should turn iOS into a carbon copy of WP, just with a lighter palette. Instead of toning down the ugly, amateurish look of iOS, they just ripped out most of the ugly shit and didn’t bother replacing it with anything.
As bad as the old iOS UI was, at least it didn’t make Apple look like lazy trend-chasers.
…and no more hideous faux-wood textures that look like they were ripped straight from the side panels of a 1970s station wagon. *Sob*!
Translation: even a dedicated Apple apologist like yourself can’t pretend that the iOS 7 UI is any good. That must be an unpleasant experience – lapsing into honest critical thought can be disconcerting when you’re unaccustomed to it. Quick, better find some lazy spin & do some mental gymnastics so you can blame iOS 7’s problems on someone, anyone, other than Apple. Phew, crisis averted!
So are any iOS haters looking down this list of app screenshots still thinking iOS is just for toys?
Look at all those powerful apps. All touch and thumb friendly. All updated regularly to add new features and fix bugs. If I was on any other platform that would have been a painful look at what iOS has.
So many people will literally never own a PC or laptop because mobile OS’s are becoming so powerful. In fact I think simply owning of a laptop or desktop will imply a certain nerdiness in the future. It will say “I’m a producer and/or developer” as opposed to “I’m a modern person that needs internet”, like now.
Considering how tiny the fraction of these “powerful” apps which does more than a modern website is, I think I’ll keep my stereotypes about apps on any mobile platform, iOS included
Edited 2013-09-19 04:59 UTC
Apple design team, go home you are drunk.
(Oh my ..)
I am not an OSX or IOS user, even though I learned enough of it on my work to even support some users.
I saw the evolution of their interfaces with envy. Visual cues without exaggeration is a fine art which all new versions of Apple GUI advanced. I really wanted my beloved KDE to have that level of interface polish-ness (sans blue acqua stuff – I liked milk) and even made it resemble Apple interfaces sometimes. But I always fell for the power stuff that KDE makes available so, never made a transition.
For years Apple had impressive icons and, besides little imperfections here and there, a pleasant cheerful GUI to delight its users. People used to get around just to show me how it was well thought out.
If this is what Apple users are going to have on new versions of OSX and IOS, well, that would be a hard proof that Steve Jobs was really the special master wizard they all talked about. The magic is gone and I am not happy about that.
Edited 2013-09-18 17:32 UTC
The new UI style makes iOS apps look like WordPress blogs.
Amazing how most of those apps look like they are in Metro UI!