phryxis, NSXrebel -
I'm jealous of you. I know I can be a pretty picky and opinionated guy when it comes to good/bad design, but I find most every design change (I refuse to call them design improvements) to be steps in the extreme wrong direction functionally & appearance-wise.
When I first got an iPhone in July 2010, I found that things just "worked" and I was able to figure out all apps almost intuitively. I found the artwork/skeumorphism to be very impressive and fun and gave things a weighty, quality, artistic feel. Was completely impressed from the getgo and went even deeper with drinking the juice (apple juice) and convincing family & friends to make the move to Apple.
Besides the fact that my iPhone4 is so sluggish now: With ios7 I found myself instantly confused how to make things work that were previously instantly intuitive in ios6 and prior versions. The idea of removing "buttons" and just using text to signify commands seems nutty. After 1 month I still often don't know at first glance what text is a command and what is just info/FYI. I've read that Jony Ive says "the world no longer needs to see a button, they're smarter now" or something relatively similar. Really - there will never be any new-to-iphone customers who could benefit from the previously instantly intuitivie methods? Asinine.
I find the small light-monochromatic-colored font on light-monochromatic colored backgrounds hard to read quickly and impossible to read w/o glasses, such as when you'd like to set or adjust an alarm while in bed and w/o glasses. The "data wheels" for setting dates or picking an email address to send email from used to be large & easy to read - now the "data wheels" are much smaller and monochromatic and the text on the top & bottom of the wheels is much smaller and becomes translucent, making it harder to use the wheel easily and anticipate what text is coming - now have to scroll much slower and deliberately. Improvement?
I don't know. The feeling I get when I use ios7 is that all of Apple is now run by "Deiter" and "Sprockets" intelligentsia types all dressed in grey pants and grey turtleneck sweaters and that Tim Cook doesn't even own an iPhone. I'd love to hear Apple brag about the % customer adoption rate of ios7 if only they also allowed the option to resort back to ios6.
Even the small stuff: # of bars for coverage strength - are now circles of the same size, and instead of showing just 3 circles of coverage for example, they show 3 full circles and 2 outlined circles that can look alike at a distance - the increasing size of the previous bars of coverage was much easier to read with a casual glance. It's completely, utterly baffling to me how these steps backwards got released.
Tell me which
screenshots are more artistic/quality/interesting, fun to use, and easier to comprehend quickly?
Oh well, what can you do. Just makes me doubt their prior strength in the marketplace, and it definitely puts on hold any thoughts of spending more $ for an iphone 5s and laptop, both of which I wanted to get in 2014.
Am I a rarity or do others share some frustration with ios7 vs. ios6? If I'm one of the few, then I'm jealous of all of you!
