# iOS7, all change for the ageing mobile OS?



## Kid_Eternity (Apr 29, 2013)

With WWDC coming soon and the likely unveiling of the new iOS the rumours, leaks and wild speculations (read: wish lists) have begun in earnest:




> According to multiple people who have either seen or have been briefed on the upcoming iOS 7, the operating system sports a redesigned user-interface that will be attractive to new iOS users, but potentially unsettling for those who are long-accustomed to the platform…
> 
> 
> 
> The new interface is said to be “very, very flat,” according to one source. Another person said that the interface loses all signs of gloss, shine, and skeumorphism seen across current and past versions of iOS. Another source framed the new OS as having a level of “flatness” approaching recent releases of Microsoft’s Windows Phone “Metro” UI.


 

Apple certainly needs to up its mobile OS game if it's to stave off the rising accusations of iOS being stale or outdated, be interesting to see just how much they can change it and maintain the super ease of use it currently has...


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## fractionMan (Apr 29, 2013)

This flat/dropshadow/gloss thing is just icing that revolves every few years. Who fucking cares?


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## Kid_Eternity (Apr 29, 2013)

fractionMan said:


> This flat/dropshadow/gloss thing is just icing. Who fucking cares?


 
Designers? People with eyes?


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## fractionMan (Apr 29, 2013)

Kid_Eternity said:


> Designers? People with eyes?


 
The same designers who said "gloss is the best thing evar!!1!  Flat is soo... flat!!" two years ago?  

Fuck em.


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## Kid_Eternity (Apr 29, 2013)

Well...clearly this isn't the thread for you...!


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## fractionMan (Apr 29, 2013)

I like interface design, I've been designing interfaces (badly) for ages.  

The thing is, so much of it is _fashion_.  Actual changes in interfaces are rare nowdays.


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## RedDragon (Apr 29, 2013)

I'm a little disappointed with Apple they've allowed themselves to become the Volvo of the smart phone market and seem happy marketing to my gran an her cat. 

They really need to pull the iPad away from being an oversized iPhone and cater to those who are now using it as a substitute computer.


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## Kid_Eternity (Apr 30, 2013)

I think they need to open iOS up, allow people to set their own default apps for key functions...


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## beesonthewhatnow (Apr 30, 2013)

Kid_Eternity said:


> I think they need to open iOS up, allow people to set their own default apps for key functions...


They won't though.


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## Kid_Eternity (Apr 30, 2013)

beesonthewhatnow said:


> They won't though.


 
Of course not, they dominate web traffic why would they allow that to end up in Google's hands via the Chrome iOS app?


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## souljacker (Apr 30, 2013)

Multiple user profiles is what I want from the next ios version.


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## mwgdrwg (May 1, 2013)

It's why I went for BlackBerry10. I was put off the iPhone becaues I just didn't like the OS, and BB10 is fantastic.

I'll certainly reconsider an iPhone if it gets thoroughly revamped though.


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## beesonthewhatnow (May 1, 2013)

mwgdrwg said:


> I'll certainly reconsider an iPhone if it gets thoroughly revamped though.


It won't be though. They'll tweak the UI a bit, maybe a few tweaks to how things are done but they have no need to do a massive overhaul. It works. 

At which point all the tech blogs will wail and moan and say that Apple has lost it and they don't innovate anymore, then Apple will carry on selling millions of phones and being the richest tech company on the planet.


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## Crispy (May 1, 2013)

Quite. Tech sites fetishise novelty.


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## mauvais (May 1, 2013)

I don't really have a handle on this. I know it's becoming an antique platform but I don't really get where they might go.

What could and should they do to it?

Are they in a strong enough position to force all the apps to be rewritten in support? Inability to do that would be a limiting factor, although not cripplingly so.

What level of disruption would it take before users considered using the lack of familiarity as an opportunity to platform switch?


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## elbows (May 1, 2013)

They have no need, ability or desire to break app support. They do have the ability to get a lot of highly motivated developers to make relatively small tweaks to their apps within a reasonable timeframe to embrace certain small changes, feature additions and removals.

I dont predict anything too radical that would utterly change the landscape of the OS. They can still overhaul certain aspects in significant ways if they choose to, but I doubt they see anything wrong with a number of their previous decisions that piss people off. I do not utterly rule out them opening certain specific parts of the system a little more at some point, but its by no means a cert. Hell I'm not even sure if/when we may get widgets of some kind on the homescreen. And for those that complain that their tablets are not enough like laptops, I have no particular reason to expect them to bring back the concept of a non-sandboxed filesystem, or add support for external storage. They might come up with some slightly better methods for multittasking at some point, but they'll want to do it their way. 

None of this means I think their traditional compromises with their mobile OS are just fine as they are, but they still have reasons to see these things as a strength rather than a weakness. And I'm sure they are aware that a good proportion of those who dislike Apple are unlikely to become Apple lovers simply by fixing a couple of aspects, so why bother chasing this market and further muddy their own vision in the process.

Having said that I personaly am not finding their vision for how power, flexibility and ease of use should be balanced to be just fine and dandy. In particular their attempts to do the cloud stuff right and bring aspects of their mobile OS to the desktop/laptop OS have not exactly been a roaring success. But I doubt this stuff is trivial to fix and they run the risk of making things worse rather than better. So for this version I only really expect some noticable UI changes and a few new features, although in some ways I'd be happy to be wrong.


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## pesh (May 1, 2013)

sounds like it's about time i installed iOS6


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## Kid_Eternity (May 1, 2013)

souljacker said:


> Multiple user profiles is what I want from the next ios version.


 
Like the idea although a bit unlikely, be useful for the iPad though...


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## Sunray (May 2, 2013)

This is an interesting problem with technology in general. We live in a world that expects technology to change but that appears to also include how we interact with that technology.  If windows XP and Windows 8 have taught us anything, its that change for change sake is pointless and often resisted, especially if you make big paradigm changes. 

 I  don't really think there is anything really wrong with iOS, people talk about it being antiquate!.  There are small issues but nothing fundamentally wrong that requires a total overhaul.


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## gabi (May 2, 2013)

Sunray said:


> This is an interesting problem with technology in general. We live in a world that expects technology to change but that appears to also include how we interact with that technology. If windows XP and Windows 8 have taught us anything, its that change for change sake is pointless and often resisted, especially if you make big paradigm changes.
> 
> I don't really think there is anything really wrong with iOS, people talk about it being antiquate!. There are small issues but nothing fundamentally wrong that requires a total overhaul.


 
I agree with this. Microsoft's constant tinkering has been its downfall. In my own personal experience anyway. It wasn't broken. Don't fix it.


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## mauvais (May 2, 2013)

Sunray said:


> If windows XP and Windows 8 have taught us anything, its that change for change sake is pointless and often resisted, especially if you make big paradigm changes.





gabi said:


> I agree with this. Microsoft's constant tinkering has been its downfall. In my own personal experience anyway. It wasn't broken. Don't fix it.


You both attribute MS' UI evolutions to tinkering or for the sake of it. I think you're wrong.

Windows 8 is about aligning how people interact with the system on old form factors (PCs, traditional laptops) with how they interact on their new ones (tablet, smartphone, touchscreen laptops). It will probably pay off in the long term. You say it's not broken but if refusal to adapt eventually puts you out to pasture with the dinosaur bones, then really it turns out it was.

Apple _may _have to do the same to keep up with contemporary mobile paradigms. I say may because I'm not sure that the market really demands it yet; for all of its technical failings and limitations, is iOS that far behind more recent designs in the eyes of the ordinary consumer?


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## souljacker (May 2, 2013)

Kid_Eternity said:


> Like the idea although a bit unlikely, be useful for the iPad though...


 
I'm sure its been mooted by Apple somewhere (can't be arsed to go looking for it!) but now that you can do it on the Nexus, I think Apple would be crazy not to implement it. It would lead to a different iOS for phones than tablets though. And also presumably reduce revenue because you could get away with having one iPad for the whole family.


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## souljacker (May 2, 2013)

Turns out I could be arsed and found this: http://appleinsider.com/articles/12...t_on_ipad_is_a_known_issue_being_investigated


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## Sunray (May 2, 2013)

mauvais said:


> You both attribute MS' UI evolutions to tinkering or for the sake of it. I think you're wrong.
> 
> Windows 8 is about aligning how people interact with the system on old form factors (PCs, traditional laptops) with how they interact on their new ones (tablet, smartphone, touchscreen laptops). It will probably pay off in the long term. You say it's not broken but if refusal to adapt eventually puts you out to pasture with the dinosaur bones, then really it turns out it was.
> 
> Apple _may _have to do the same to keep up with contemporary mobile paradigms. I say may because I'm not sure that the market really demands it yet; for all of its technical failings and limitations, is iOS that far behind more recent designs in the eyes of the ordinary consumer?


 
I had Vista and Win 7 and see the benefits.  Windows 8 without a touch screen, should really reconfigure itself to the hardware its got in front of it and make that easy to use.  Discovering the Windows+X key was a great help. I am very happy to move to new paradigms if I see traction in what they have changed.

I have W8 on my laptop, its shit.  The next major update see MS eat MASSIVE humble pie.  They are going to put the start button back on the desktop.  All it will do it take you to the normal start menu.  But taking it away was just doing it for the sake of it and confusing people who come from windows xp and Win 7.

People forget, when a UI becomes old it embeds itself into the psyche of even the most non-technical of people.  They can get done what they want having already over come the learning curve over many years.  The Windows 8 learning curve is pretty steep.  It took me a couple of minutes hunting about to find the shut down button in the new UI!  It still baffles me where they have put it because its not an uncommon task.

As for iOS the very rigid interface look and feel means that I can pretty easily get what I want done.  The flaws appear when something needs to be done that doesn't really fit the guidelines and it often shows.  Cross platform stuff is also a pain. There are iOS apps that have the long press which is one of Androids worst decisions.  Its totally unintuitive, like double click.


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## Kid_Eternity (May 2, 2013)

souljacker said:


> Turns out I could be arsed and found this: http://appleinsider.com/articles/12...t_on_ipad_is_a_known_issue_being_investigated


 
Not convinced they'll do it, why give everyone the opportunity to buy less iPads?


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## Fez909 (May 2, 2013)

Sunray said:


> I had Vista and Win 7 and see the benefits. Windows 8 without a touch screen, should really reconfigure itself to the hardware its got in front of it and make that easy to use. Discovering the Windows+X key was a great help. I am very happy to move to new paradigms if I see traction in what they have changed.
> 
> I have W8 on my laptop, its shit. The next major update see MS eat MASSIVE humble pie. They are going to put the start button back on the desktop. All it will do it take you to the normal start menu. But taking it away was just doing it for the sake of it and confusing people who come from windows xp and Win 7.
> 
> ...


 
I agree with most of that, although I have mixed feelings on the long-press. You're right that it feels unintuitive, but people can be taught. Double-click just seems natural now. Some of the gestures on the iPad and MacBooks for scrolling with two fingers etc are hardly intuitive, but once people know about them they use them all the time because they're such good features.

The one thing I'm seeing a lot on Android which feels like a mistake is the UI trend for swiping the screen to the right to see a menu appear on the left. It's useful once you know about it, but I didn't even realise it existed on one of my apps until I accidentally did it.


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## souljacker (May 2, 2013)

Kid_Eternity said:


> Not convinced they'll do it, why give everyone the opportunity to buy less iPads?


When jobs was in charge, they wouldn't. But I don't think the iPad mini would have existed with jobs in charge either.


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## elbows (May 2, 2013)

souljacker said:


> When jobs was in charge, they wouldn't. But I don't think the iPad mini would have existed with jobs in charge either.


 
I lack confidence in such claims, because for all of Jobs 'qualities' he was quite prepared to u-turn on plenty of stuff as things evolved. I certainly dont think that Jobs trying to belittle the smaller tablet form-factor means he wouldnt have released an ipad mini, especially as its still quite a bit bigger than the tablets he was mocking. If Apple released a tablet with lots of physical buttons I would probably shout 'Jobs would not have done that' but there arent too many other aspects like that that I really think would make Jobs turn in his grave.


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## Kid_Eternity (May 2, 2013)

souljacker said:


> When jobs was in charge, they wouldn't. But I don't think the iPad mini would have existed with jobs in charge either.


 
I reckon it would have, don't get me wrong I think multi users for iPads would be bloody great and for iPhone I can see how having one phone and your work log in and personal one makes sense too..just can't see Apple doing it, the iPad mini makes them money. Allowing people to share an iPad means one less sold for each one sold, not good business.


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## elbows (May 2, 2013)

However they'd rather sell just one ipad to a household than have them buy an android tablet instead, so I certainly dont rule this feature out.

And they could probably imagine the users loving their ipad so much that they engaged in tug of wars over who got to use it, and ended up going out and buying more.


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