The biggest problem with the new iOS 7 design seems to be the icons. Despite the sculptural beauty of what Ive & Co. have wrought, many designers have found the actual graphic design of the thing lacking. Jason Santa Maria, an incredibly talented typographic designer with excellent taste, praised the overall design then exclaimed, "but wow, the ugly stick."
Brooklyn designer and illustrator Frank Chimero quipped, "it freaks me out how much iOS looks like nail art Tumblrs," before writing a well-considered assessment that concludes, "I’m not a fan of how iOS looks right now, but I have hope for its future. iOS has one thing that can’t be denied: it lacks nuance, but it has courage."
Many designers have taken it upon themselves to quickly redesign the home screen in an attempt to reclaim the degree of sophisticated flatness that they had assumed was going to be there. Young Parisian designer Leo Drapeau did a very tasteful redesign (see image above) that removed some of the fussy detail from Apple's icons and retuned the proportions in visually pleasing ways. He posted it on the portfolio site Dribbble and has gotten almost 100,000 views.
One issue that Drapeau's redesign raises in terms of the design of the icons is whether the grid system that Ive's team used to "harmonize" the diverse images actually led to some infelicitous proportions and created rational justifications for decisions that don't actually look so great. Generally, use of grids and guidelines has to be balanced by optical adjustments. Heterogenous contents can overwhelm the most elegant grid system, rendering it irrelevant or brutal. The eye is, after all, the final judge of things visual.
It's a shame that the Ive design has been received with so much surface criticism. It aims to be an unobtrusive interface that elevates content. Its hallmarks are translucency, levity, expansiveness, fluidity and surprising depth. Despite myriad inconsistencies that Chimero ascribes to the tight 7-month deadline that Ive was working with (as opposed to the idea that the designers at Apple just don't know any better!) he allows that iOS 7 contains "a lot of practical changes that will make the experience of using the phone have less friction."
With this kind of assessment in mind, here are my thoughts on some of the major features and components of the new design:
Control Center: Instead of hunting for a little icon, you can now access all of your mission-critical controls by swiping up from the bottom of the screen. The panel itself mimics light frosted glassand the underlying screen is dimmed to create a priority for the control center. Along with the standard preferences, you can now access AirPlay and the new AirDrop file sharing service and even turn the camera flash on as a flashlight.
Notification Center: Perhaps in response to innovations that jailbreakers have long enjoyed, Apple has really built out the variety of notification you can receive on the lock screen without even unlocking your phone. The other obvious target is Google Now. iOS now tells you the date, the weather and what event you have next on your calendar before scrolling your other calendar events, email, phone and text messages, Facebook and Twitter updates, Game Center push notifications and new shared photos.
Multitasking: Craig Federighi,
iTunes Radio: Apple's Eddy Cue, senior vice president of Internet Software and Services, framed the rumored "iRadio" as primarily about music discovery, and then proceeded to make a Led Zepplin "station" for himself. "Whole Lotta Love" followed by a Rolling Stones song. This is discovery? Seriously, this seems like a pandora knock-off with e-commerce links into your iTunes account. Not revolutionary stuff, but probably the best they could do in the timeframe. The important point is that it enables you to have a customized music experience anywhere you have your phone and an internet connection. And it will "just work" right out of the box, if you don't mind the ads. The smartest news is that it will be part of Apple TV. Now if they could open that TV App Store...
Photos: The Photos app now organizes your photos automatically into moments, and those moment collections can be viewed as grids of tap and scrubbable thumbnail images by month or even year. You can create shared photostreams in iCloud and you can now share video with iCloud video sharing. The Photos app now uses a light theme for the user interface like all of the content apps, iTunes, Mail, Safari and iMessages.
AirDrop: Sending an email to a person standing right next to you makes no sense. AirDrop lets you push a photo, video, message or contact information (like Bump) over peer-to-peer wifi or Bluetooth to a person who is nearby with AirDrop enabled. This is bound to be fun at parties and it is easy to see games that could build on top of it. And strangely, wonderfully, it is a digital thing that rewards physical proximity.
Camera: The biggest news is that the built-in camera app now supports different still image formats: standard, square and panoramic and live filters (take that, Instagram!) On the one hand, Apple is competing with existing camera apps in its App Store, but on the other, it has given developers new device capabilities to hook into. The additional complexity of format choices at the bottom of the screen has been balanced out by a more prominent capture button.
Safari Mobile: Like all of the new content apps, Safari pushes for an edge-to-edge feel, even though the actual viewport is slightly narrower than before. By reducing the browser "chrome" to a minimum and switching to a light theme, the new web browsing experience feels less obtrusive. The biggest changes, though are navigation. You can access your history from the arrows at the bottom of the screen, but also from swiping the whole screen to the left or right. And open tabs are now accessed by pulling down from the top of the page to access, delete and rearrange pages from a cool looking overhead fan. One serious concern for developers would be what happens with web apps that may already be using "off canvas" navigation.
Siri: Apple's electronic assistant continues to get smarter with the integration of new services like twitter, wikipedia and (as a snub to Google) Bing search results. For visual enhancement, Apple has added a live soundwave of your voice, which isn't really useful, but kind of cool to look at. More significant is the debut of two new Siri voices, a male, now, and a female, replacing the original female voice. Additional voices in French, German and other languages are coming soon. Also, Siri can now control the preferences in the control center as well. I wonder how long it will be before Siri's voices are opened up to developers to create "vocal themes" that match different voices with specific apps or functions. Could be fun.
Mail: The new iOS Mail borrows liberally from the Mailbox app, recently acquired by Dropbox. Why Apple didn't buy it, I'm not sure. Not only does it have swipe to delete and archive functions like Mailbox, but the light feeling with the little dots of light blue of the iOS interface altogether is also reminiscent. This is an example of how Apple curates as well as invents. Even more important, Mail is supposed to have improved performance in terms of searching and retrieving mail, both on iOS and the desktop. Maybe they will win me back from Mailbox and desktop Gmail?
Weather: One of the nicest touches in iOS 7 is the way the parallax effect makes it feel like there is a shallow space inside the phone where the sun is shining or the snow is falling. Very nice as well is the way you can pinch different locations together and see a set of horizontal bands, each of which represent the weather and time of day of places around the world. This kind of realtime awareness of the world's diversity and scale is what all of this technology should be doing for us, but so rarely does.
Messages: The messaging app is one of the purest executions of playful, flat design in the whole OS. Its simplicity promises additional functionality (viewing videos or real time feeds in place, for instance) that could be added without changing the architecture of the interface. Both the light "content" theme and the dark "data" themes create useful contrast in the overall system. Translucence is then deployed to connote something transitory and interstitial to your main activities.
One of the reasons, perhaps, that the beta of iOS 7 (and we have to remember that that is what this is) is such a beautiful mess, is that interface design is very different than the type of product design Ive has spent his career on. Although the iPhone, for instance, is a complex system composed of many parts, very few of those parts are actually visible. The majority of the decisions that enable the phone to achieve a certain thinness, for example, are behind the scenes, below the waterline of consumer visibility.
A fully-featured operating system is, by definition, full of features—all of them visible. Despite Ive's (incontestable) assertion that "True simplicity" is "about bringing order to complexity,” he is now dealing with a lot more visible complexity than ever before. The beauty of the iPhone and other Ive products has been the curation of a few exquisite details and the stripping away of most everything else. iOS 7 has those few wonderful details—the translucent panels, the parallax shadow box, the fluid navigation—but there is an awful lot left to be refined. iOS 7 is indeed , "like getting entirely new phone that you already know how to use," but you may not like everything about it—yet.
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