Comment by pndy
7 days ago
This whole flat style fever which doesn't distinguish between active elements and informative text allowed to spread darkpattern tactics which lead to deploying adverse or even harmful changes for users. It also contributed to nullifying customisation under linux - looking exactly at you adwaita.
My age shows here as well and I'm not in any way excited about this design change at all. Suddenly Apple decided that this fancy acrylic glass animation for widgets, interface that says "look we aren't stagnant - we did something" will be enough to diverge attention from other problems. I sincerely doubt that it's gonna be.
This release feels like a return to transparency trend which we had somewhere around Vista and initial KDE Plasma releases.
I was initially excited as on paper it sounds like a fantastic throwback to the Aqua design, which I still think was fantastic.
From the preview so far I'm not excited.
I have to say app icons look nice (the borders make them pop just a bit more), the border highlights are clear without being loud, and elements like the dock look nice. The inactive button states actually look great – as shown in the Camera and Facetime screenshots – they actually do look like little glass buttons, which is good.
Where I have issue is when multiple of these glass elemenst are shown at once they fight for attention and it's persnally quite overwhelming for me. The image of the video player controls on iPhone and AppleTV are in my opinion awful and load, and that's especially where you want a quiet UI.
When the shape has a strong refractive index and that's where it becomes really noisy for me with the Safari and music tab bars being absolutely awful in my opinion.
It's a shame because I think if they kept the idea but dialed it down from 11 it could be fantastic.
Someone installed beta and posted a screenshot down below somewhere; control center with these glass buttons over a colorful springboard icons grid turns interface into a visual mess.
I wonder if they manage to change anything or tweaks, polishing (sic!) will happen over next or two iOS releases.
like a lot of redesigns, its more about marketing and 'the new shiny' than anything else imo
Maybe it's because I'm living in a country where we had to catch up with marketing and advertising after communism fell and I have some kind of "immunity" and cynical approach to such forms of product presentations... But this whole keynote video felt like it's on nearly same levels as car salesman, infomercials/teleshopping.
And I honestly felt sorry for woman who tries to sell me amazing emoji combining "technology". Who actually uses this beside the obvious die-hard fans on dedicated sites and forums.
get the same vibes as well, its basically a 90min commercial (and at a developers conference no less)