Comment by nlarew
7 days ago
> things are now harder to read, identify, and understand
What makes you think that? Do you have a specific example from the keynote in mind?
There must be something since you've never actually used this design system yourself. Or is this just your pre-judgement?
Even in their animations on this page there are things where the user scrolls the interface and the part under one of these glass buttons looks more exaggerated and draws the eye in an unpleasant way, and depending on where they land with it, the text on the button isn't particularly readable.
In the keynote, they showed an app, I think it was Messages, where the UI at the bottom was illegible because it was translucent and the background image and text were showing through too much. There are other examples that I was able to find were legibility was negatively impacted.
Just the short demo videos on their website.
Their example of the music app. You have a translucent bar showing the currently playing music app.
It gets harder to read when it overlaps with the background music album covers. I can very easily see a situation where you need to scroll to an empty bit, just to be able to read what it is actually playing.
Now, imagine you have a visual impairment. It's already hard to read with mostly normal eyes. This will be impossible for anyone with bad vision, probably even worse if colorblind.
It is genuinely unreadable, and a mess visually.
> What makes you think that? Do you have a specific example from the keynote in mind?
Almost every button and menu they showed was harder for me to read than the ones on my current generation Apple gear. The icons on buttons are indistinct, the text is hard to read. The buttons themselves seem to sink into the content "below" making both the buttons and the content hard to see.
Some examples:
- the tabs at the bottom left of the photos app
- the address bar in Safari (what a complete mess... you can't see the content beneath because the address bar blurs it, but you also can't read the address bar because the glass effect destroys contrast
- in the colourless "translucent" colour way, all the icons look the same
- the (admittedly cute) "squish" effect when tapping menus and some of the buttons looked like it would slow down all interactions
- the highlights and light/colour bending effects are utterly distracting, catching your eye when you really want to be skimming the content or overview to orient yourself in the UI
True, I've not used it... but I was watching along with the launch video with rapt Apple fan-boi attention and I was surprised by how uncomfortable the new UI seemed to be. I've never felt that before.
This new design style is certainly "fun", but it looks like it'll get in the way of fast use of the tools.
I want my OS to promote clarity of affordances, and then to recede away from my attention so I can get on with doing what I was trying to do. This new design style looks like it's trying to hold on to my attention all the time I'm using the devices. (Admittedly today's keynote was an ad for the new design, so that sense of attention grabbing was hopefully accentuated over day to day use... but I'm skeptical.)
Looking at Apple's curated headline hero image on https://www.apple.com/os/ios/
Every single example of the five are hard to read, especially the second.
At least half of the example screenshots and videos I've seen in the keynote and on various Apple website pages are hard to read. The lense effects, only visible in the animations/videos, are technically impressive, visually stimulating, but terrible from a utilitarian perspective (unless you consider convincing people to buy iPhones using attractive visuals in a cinematic sort of way but not actually trying to use the devices as some sort of utility to Apple).
See this from another comment in the thread https://imgur.com/a/6ZTCStC
There's literally dozens of examples being presented. Are you doing this on purpose to provoke a response?
I gotta be honest, I don’t find it particularly hard to read. I like how it makes it feel like there is “depth” to the screen, and when I focus on the top layer (eg Notification Center) the background falls away.
I can personally see how others would find it hard to read, just really doesn’t bother me. I can imagine being unconvinced that anyone really finds it to be that bad, and thinking it’s just HN contrarians being annoying, as usual.
Look at the notifications in the middle of the landing page for iOS 17. https://www.apple.com/os/ios/ It is immediately awful. I hadn't even seen the keynote yet when I went to apple.com to see what had been announced and my very first thought was "Oh no"