OS X concept as inspired by iOS 7

50 Comments

“A concept version of OS X inspired by iOS 7,” Andrew Ambrosino, currently a Computer Science undergrad at University of Massachusetts Lowell, blogs. Ambrosino also minors in Business, Design, and Mathematics.

 
“Includes some good flatness, translucent blurs, and overall streamlining,” Ambrosino writes. “Enjoy!”

 

OS X Concept by Andrew Ambrosino
OS X Concept by Andrew Ambrosino

See more in the full article here.

50 Comments

    1. You seemed to like previous versions of iOS fairly well. iOS 7 is not that much different from previous versions – even if you dislike every change, that should not be enough to take it from pretty good to the “absolute nadir in OS design.”

      Why do you generally have such extreme viewpoints about every topic on this forum (iOS 7, iPhone display size, Tim Cook, etc.)?

      Reply

      1. Let me put it this way. iOS 6 was the epitome of mobile OS design. iOS 7 on the other hand represents the worst aspects of tinkering with an already proven UI that reverses all the gains made with respect to usability and learning only to replace it with flat two dimensional objects that give less cues and information than before. I would consider that a downgrade.

        It’s as if iOS 6 were an SUV say an Escalade with proper 22″ rims and someone replaced that with a set of thin bicycle wheels. Would you say that your driving experience was affected detrimentally?

        Reply

        1. Exaggerate much?

          Anyway, prior to iOS7, I distinctly remember you calling iPhone UI “stale” and also saying that you were “against skeuomorphic design”. Read your past post’s. It will be eye opening for you.

        3. There were things I liked about iOS 6, but it was far from perfect. Some design choices were annoying:

          — In iOS 6, you had to double-click the home button to get playback controls on the lock screen. Those controls were set close together, so it was easy to accidentally hit chapter forward or back instead of play/pause. (I think that part was eventually fixed.) In iOS 7, full playback controls are available right there on the lock screen, no need to do anything special.
          — In iOS 6, there was no convenient way to adjust the headphone playback volume if you weren’t playing anything. I don’t know how many times I nearly blew my eardrums out because I had the volume turned way up for use with the car stereo. In iOS 7, the Control Center gives you an easy way to fix the volume in advance.
          — You’re telling me your thumb never slipped off the “slide to unlock” control in iOS 6? Happened to me all the time. It was really annoying. iOS 7 doesn’t care where you swipe, which makes a ton more sense.
          — The “figure 8” method of calibrating the compass in iOS 6 is awkward and I was never sure I was doing it right. iOS 7 introduces a new method of rolling a dot around a circle, which is far simpler to do (and looks much less silly),

          Those are just four examples. I’m sure I could think of far more. But if you don’t want to use iOS 7 because you don’t like the flat icons and skinny fonts, that’s your prerogative. But don’t say iOS 6 was an apex of perfect OS design. It just isn’t true.

          ——RM

        4. None of the improvements you mentioned had anything to do with the UI. You are right about the improvements, but we don’t discuss them, because iOS7’s UI detracts from them.

        5. Not only does the iOS7 UI detract from efficient usability, it represents relatively bloated overhead for the old 32 bit phones — with Apple refusing users to easily switch back. That is not user friendly treatment at all.

    5. Agree with BLN 1000%. Very courageous fellow expressing the God honest truth in the Mavericks den and ratings be damned!

      Regular readers know I have consistenty expressed my dislike for iOS LESS 7 in great detail since day one.

      Mainly too thin, cheap graphics and huge step backwards in usability for all ages.

      Already done many times before design motifs and it logically follows how it has gotten so old, so quickly. The initial sizzle lasted a week or two before visual starvation set in.

      Now that Steve’s illustrative perfection is in the dustbin of history, please God, let’s not TRASH OSX.

      Reply

  3. My main complaint about iOS 7 is the lack of distinction between selectable buttons and plain text. It’s one thing to reduce how much they look like 3d buttons, but you still need to be able to know what you can touch and what you can’t.

    Reply

    2. Agreed 1000% !!! iOS 1-6 were plainly obvious how to use for ALL people upon first use. Now it’s a cryptic interface that you have to learn hard how to use with all sorts of non-discoverable functionality (and some text is text, some text is buttons, totally arbitrary.) Steve Jobs would not be happy.

      I’m fine with the AESTHETICS of iOS 7. But that’s a very different thing than its usablity.

      Reply

  4. It still strikes me as utter too feminine, like opening the pages of a magazine and being blasted with the smell of some perfume, but I’m getting used to it and there’s nothing I can do about it. So I’m looking beyond what assaults my senses and paying attention to what gets my work done.

    Reply

  5. No such thing as good flatness in OS X.

    Flat is a fad already long adopted by Microsoft and Google and will look very dated in about a minute.
    Ive is following a trend rather than leading- otherwise not earning his pay.

    Apple DNA is to LEAD- not follow. At least is was under Steve Jobs.

    Reply

  6. Everyone is entitled to an opinion. Some people want to keep expressing that same opinion over and over, perhaps believing that saying it often enough will have some effect, but other than annoying a bunch of other MDN readers, I don’t know what that effect could be.

    Reply

  8. Lots of people I know have Macs, iPhones, iPads. Not a single one likes iOS7 – they all regret “upgrading”. I hear that allegedly “people” like iOS7, but I haven’t met a single one of them. And the calendar went from bad to utterly useless.

    Reply

    5. I like it just fine. It seems just as natural to me as any other iOS version – I had zero adjustment period. It could use a few visual tweaks here and there to improve clarity, but I’ve never seen anything that doesn’t, especially after a serious overhaul. Personally, I just don’t get the intense emotional response some people seem to have over it.

      Reply

        1. Someone at Apple is listening! Good link.

          Still, overall these tweaks are just bandaids to a fundamentally unintuitive and unattractive GUI. iOS7 remains a flat lifeless somewhat easier-to-read-but-still-not-acceptable mess.

          Apple put so much effort into the underlying font management, why can’t they allow the user any choice in the matter? I suffered through iOS6, but enough is enough. I thought for sure iOS7 would give the user some real controls. Nope. If all the obvious parameters of a GUI can’t be set properly to the user’s preferences, it’s not a good GUI. Going from blinding white to lifeless gray is a rather tiny step.

  12. Well, if Apple chooses to implement such a disgustingly flat boring juvenile OS on the desktop, it might as well offer bargain-basement GPU cards too. Heck, why not go to Seurat-style pointalism just to be really avant-garde, that’ll save the need for crisp displays too. /s

    STOP THE CONVERGENCE! Mac users like realism and intuitive, tasteful skeumorphism. Hardware can support better realism and detail than ever before. WHY IS APPLE NOT USING THE GRAPHICS EVERYONE KNOWS THEY CAN DELIVER ???

    Reply

  13. Tim Cook has panned convergence attempts by Microsoft, saying such attempts are “not pleasing to the user.” He compared hybrid tablet-notebook devices to that of selling a refrigerator with toaster functions tacked on the side.

    “Anything can be forced to converge,” Cook said. “But the problem is that the products are about tradeoffs. You begin to make tradeoffs to the point where what you have left at the end of the day doesn’t please anyone.”

    NO KIDDIN’ TIM!!! So listen up — the same principle that applies to hardware convergence applies to the OS — AND just as much to each program! Pages 5 is appalling. Please stop this blind rush to convergence.

    Reply

  16. iOS 7 has some fans, but it is an inconsistent and sometimes cryptic design. Take a look at the icons.

    Put Mail and Camera next to each other. Mail is “lit” from below, while Camera is lit from above. It’s inconsistent.

    Put Music and iTunes next to each other. They differ in color, but the only difference in the symbols is that iTunes has a circle around the musical note.

    Put Phone, Messages, and FaceTime next to each other. The green isn’t dark enough for a good contrast with the white part, and since there is no texture or shading, the three icons are very similar.

    Put PassBook and Contacts next to each other. They are both a primitive form of skeuomorphism, but not good enough for immediate recognition, since they are similar.

    Look at Newsstand. It looks like a fourth-grader’s attempt to draw a brochure rack.

    Call someone then return to the home screen to run an app. Look at the return-to-call button at the top. Can you read the text? I can make it out, but a friend of mine with normal vision said, “I guess you just have to know what it’s for.” Those are bad color choices and they don’t contrast enough.

    Make a graphic that consists only of a flat, solid color background (say, medium gray) and put it in iPhoto. Sync the iPhone. Use the flat gray graphic as your background picture for the lock screen and the main screen. Notice how much “beauty” iOS 7 loses.

    There is too much use of walk-into-the-light white. I don’t want to feel like I’m dying when I look at the screen. It’s all light colors against bright white with very little contrast. Any book on web UI design can give guidance on color selection that would produce any number of color schemes that would be better.

    Even if you like iOS 7, now you can see where we’re coming from when we say that iOS 7 is an esthetic and usability disaster.

    Reply

    1. Good comments, and I see where you’re coming from. But a lot of people disagree, both about the subjective conclusion of whether it’s good-looking-or-not, and its usability. As to the usability point, I think its an improvement. See http://9to5mac.com/2013/10/11/ios-7-tops-2013-mobile-os-user-experience-benchmarks/

      Regarding aesthetics, a lot of these complaints can be thrown at iOS6. Some default iOS 6 icons had gloss. Some didn’t. That’s inconsistent too, per your mail-camera observation. The musical note in iOS 6’s music app also was differentiated—in addition to color—by the lack of a circle around the note in iOS 6. I think the icons now look more cohesive. Again, that’s a subjective conclusion though.

      Your points on facetime-phone-messages and Newsstand are valid, in my opinion!

      Reply

      1. When iOS6 came out, we talked about all the things we could do with our iPhones. When iOS7 came out, we started a public debate about whether or not it was awful.

        If you are giving a speech, you want the audience to debate your message, not your haircut. iOS7 is the iPhone’s latest haircut. Even if iOS7 were an artistic breakthrough and a usability masterpiece, it would still be a bad design, because it accomplishes the opposite of its purpose. It creates a controversy that detracts and distracts from the iPhone.

        Reply

        1. Again, great points. There’s undoubtedly been a HUGE debate about iOS 7 among techies and normal consumers alike.

          That’s inevitable with any major OS redesign, though. Seriously, consider Facebook, Microsoft, Google, hell, even MySpace (remember them?) dealt with same issue. Redesign means change, change means uncomfort, and uncomfort means (justified) complaints.

          Complaints are justified because we *should* be questioning Apple’s choices. I still think, overall, that they made the right ones though. Their improvements in the latest beta also show that they are listening. They’re adding a “buttons” feature that allows users to more easily identify cues on the UI, for example.

          How much longer can the same aqua-UI last on OS X? Apple needs an interface that will take advantage of high-quality displays. We needed gloss in 2007 because of the low quality of the iPhone display. Crisp, flat text on a high-res display is so much more inviting! (Again, though, this is my subjective conclusion).

  17. Strong NO on convergence.
    Each version of iOS, in the area of consistently of how apps function and deliver information back to the user (app controls specifically) look the are all designed by completely different teams.

    The strength of Mac always was consistency of operation in the interface. If you were competent on one application, you could very easily learn a new app. That was because of Apples interface guidelines. My only guess is that since Steve Jobs is no longer around, those are definitely not being enforced.

    Change for the sake of change, not quality user experience.

    Am I going to Windows, of course not, but it is much harder to work on Mac than it was, every app is a new interface adventure, and that’s not what I need for entertainment.

    Mac (OSX) is indeed for me a “truck” I use my Mac to create content, and trucks are what is needed. As opposed to entertainment devices.

    i regularly use over 20 applications, and the only Apple software I regularly use is Pages maybe 6 times a year. Keynote, a fabulous application, but I only need it once or twice a year. I am a web developer specializing in HTML5 content, and that market is 100% specialized soft wear. Not going to happen on iOS.

    Most iOS users would likely never have heard of the apps that I use, or the names of the apps that create the content that they view. That’s why we have the “trucks” so that they can operate their Prius equivalents.

    Reply

    1. Clarification; of course I use Safari, Mail, etc.
      But for production of serious content. Apple does not have the tools, any more than a box of sockets and ratchets can be used to tear down and repair the engine out of a 747.

      Reply

  18. That is FU*KING UGLY!!!!!!!!!!!!

    Please Apple, stop with the iOSinization of OSX, especially now that you’ve taken a very nice UI (iOS 6) and designed it for young girls and/or hippies.

    Please, PLEASE, PLEASE!!! don’t eff up OSX with this stupid and butt-ugly iOS7 look and icons.

    Reply

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