> The move from skeuomorphic design in iOS 6 to the stark minimalism of iOS 7 sparked similar debates about usability and aesthetic merit. [...] Yet within two years, the entire industry had adopted flat design principles, from Google's Material Design to Microsoft's Metro language.
That's quite a rewrite of history considering Windows Phone and Microsoft's Metro interface launched a full three years before Apple's move to a flat design in iOS 7.
There's a weird amnesia in tech journalists that occurs when Apple does something and it's suddenly the first time it's been done. My hunch is that it's because they use iPhones as their daily drivers and don't really use other devices except in passing. So for them it is new and the first time it's been done.
I think if a layman picks a niche, and really goes into it, then the layman has a fair chance beating the professional in that specific niche. So, you are not wrong with this feeling at all. What professionals have in their favor is a higher level overview of the subject, and experience with similar subjects. Usually this means that while they might not know a niche in an out by heart, they can discover it very quickly, or consider things that are not fitting into that specific niche.
Also, these journalists might not be professionals at all.
That is also true in medicine, as a side note. If you have a specific combination of conditions, or a rare condition, you will know more about it than doctors. The good ones know this and accept it. The bad ones are offended you know more than they do in this area – or simply go into denial.
In the end, each body is a niche, which each one is uniquely positioned to know better than anyone else. But it’s hard to accept, for medical personal sometimes, and often for the patients themselves. They tend to want the doctor to be the all-knowing god.
Yes, medicine was specifically what I was thinking about! And it's a touchy subject, just as you mention. A patient, a layman, isn't supposed to know more than the doctor. It's a delicate situation.
Take all human knowledge as a whole pie. Out of that is, the experts only know 1/100 of a slice. We maybe experts in some minute context, yet there are so many that know so much more when removed from that context.
Or rephrased, that Person who has to deal with something 80 percent of their life knows more than the person having to deal with it 20 percent of their life.
Reviews in any medium are entertainment whether it’s film, music, games, hardware, food. Ultimately it’s someone’s subjective opinion on something. If you actually want to be happy with your choices your best bet is to find a reviewer with the same tastes and preferences as you and follow their train of thought. If you hate horror movies, you’re not going to enjoy “bring her back” no matter what the critics say.
You can’t do all of your “thinking” yourself. You’re not a lone, isolated subsistence farmer. People have been reviewing things for other people for centuries, and it’s been a valuable service.
You are not wrong, but one thing is thinking about what others said and thought previously, generating maybe new ideas, or maybe not, but at least making them yours. Just parroting or blindly believe what others says, it's a tad different.
It seems like they do use other devices, but the reviews never make sense, or they focus on the spec sheet too much. Since like 2009, the most talked about smartphone in those tech magazines was always some random thing like an HTC Plus+ Maxx 25.
Apple however often is the first to do a new thing successfully however. Earlier products often did not achieve enough success to be viable or just in a niche. A lot of labor lies in the path from idea to a viable product.
Defining success is hard then.
If they go with a certain design trend and then change it, was that success? Just because of widespread adoption?
“Enough success “ is also hard to pin down.
What’s a thing Apple has done successfully first?
With a product it's pretty simple: sale numbers, market share, adoption rate. The iPhone is just the best example. Sure there were already mobile internet devices out there like the Nokia N800 I owned myself, and android was already in development, but Apple put out a mass-market compatible modern smartphone first.
Like what? No they aren't they wait for stuff to be proven in the market then do it the majority of the time. Face id is just them buying the company who made xbox kinekt etc.
Like smartphones with an entire interface focused on multitouch. There wasn’t another one of those “proven in the market” before the iPhone.
Or, you know, the first mass-marketed personal computer with a GUI, and the first successful one with a mouse (Lisa, Mac).
The Kinect example is nonsensical, it wasn’t as an authentication device. Even if they used the same team and technology, so much more went into it (like the Secure Enclave) than simply repackaging what already existed.
Comparing a screen to a whole smartphone and a concept demo to full mass marketed successful products is quite disingenuous. You can do better. Either we argue in good faith or the conversation isn’t worth having.
The original point, and what Apple is known for, is precisely that they often don’t invent all the parts but put them together in a way that makes sense for and the general public wants to buy. Which also allows competitors to rise. Nitpicking every single component will always lead to “none of them invented transistors, or electricity”.
Denying Apple’s influence to certain classes of products is like denying Google’s influence to the internet, or Microsoft’s influence to offices. It’s nonsensical. I am not interested in flame wars or arguing with others about their biases for or against specific trillion dollar corporations.
I do, but don’t really feel like nitpicking what counts or not with arbitrary rules we make up as the conversation goes along. I chose those examples deliberately because the conversation was about the company’s history and they are pretty unambiguous in their importance. Going in circles with “oh, that doesn’t count because it was not as recent as this undefined period of time I have my head” or any other restrictions is not interesting, and I don’t really care about defending Apple, I was simply providing a factual rebuttal.
> That's quite a rewrite of history considering Windows Phone and Microsoft's Metro interface launched a full three years before Apple's move to a flat design in iOS 7.
Even Android had moved to a flatter design pattern 1-2 years before iOS. While Material Design wouldn't be released until 2014, you can see them moving in that direction from Gingerbread to Jelly Bean, particularly when looking at the system components and first-party apps, since this was before the concept of a unified design language across third-party apps had been formalized.
At the time Apple introduced their flat design in June 2013, they were the odd ones out. In fact, I remember a Daring Fireball article posted in spring 2013 (a few months before WWDC) praising Apple for leading the pack in flat design, and HN excoriating it for making what was at the time a clearly preposterous claim.
> Even Android had moved to a flatter design pattern 1-2 years before iOS. While Material Design wouldn't be released until 2014, you can see them moving in that direction from Gingerbread to Jelly Bean
Oh that was a beautiful time for Google interfaces. google had subtle and clean lines. Things worked well and we weren't overwhelmed with advertising let alone AI Slop.
The lack of skeuomorphic effects and almost extreme flatness of the “modern” (née Metro) Windows 8 interface is remarkably forward-thinking. It’s meant to look best on retina-caliber displays, not the sub-retina displays it debuted on (with Windows Phone 7.x) or the typical PC displays of today. That said, I think there’s a sterility to Metro that prevents it from being endearing. It epitomizes “flat” design, but I don’t think it’s great design.
FWIW, I always liked the Windows Phone OS design. Its text first minimalism was refreshingly useful. It was a big leap ahead from Windows Mobile. I think it had something worthwhile to offer.
For sure, so many of its features were far ahead of the competition. Sleek minimilist UX, live tiles, Qi wireless charging, kids mode, Cortana, search within settings (so simple yet no one did it at the time). Continuum let you plug your phone into a monitor and use it like a full Windows desktop (many years before Samsung Dex and other similar efforts on Android). "Universal apps" that could run on desktop/mobile/web. Sucks that Microsoft fumbled it so bad.
What I was getting at is that the Windows phone wasn't revolutionary to include this as op was implying, certainly wasn't saying that the Nexus 4 was the first.
Still no. It failed due to lack of apps. Apple and Android have twenty years of app ecosystem behind them at this point. If launched today, it will still fail due to lack of apps.
Most of those apps have been completely rebuilt in the last couple of years. Everyone does that regularly. They could easily add a new platform at that point.
They could if they made the same looks with an underlying Android OS, just like Huawei and all the Chinese brands which have been barred from Google Android.
Beyond just the design, it was also an amazingly efficient OS. I had a cheap Lumia that had much lower specs than contemporary Samsung and iPhone flagship smartphones (500MB vs 1GB+ RAM IIRC) yet it was amazingly smooth and responsive, much smoother than the other two. Android especially, and to a lesser extent iOS, would get laggy and stutter while scrolling after a few major version updates, but Windows Phone stayed snappy even after the phone was 3+ years old.
This also made the battery life much better. (Although whenever I mentioned this, the usual retort I got was, of course the battery life would be better if there were no apps to consume it...)
It was "efficient" by leaving almost no memory for user applications. I used two phones with 512 MBs of RAM each, one Nokia-something (620 or 625), and the other Asus-something (completely forgot the model, but it was on Android 4 and then 5).
WP would offload applications from RAM as soon as you switched into another application. It was impossible to multitask — you're writing a comment on a message board, switch into a dictionary to quickly look up a word, switch back... and the state is gone. If you're lucky and the application was written correctly, you would only have to wait for 5-10 seconds before you get your half written comment back. If not (which was the norm for the stuff I used), well...
The second Android phone had none of these problems, not remotely to the same degree.
It was such a widespread problem that it quickly became a meme on forums.
It seems like iOS is still fairly aggressive in killing background apps, a dozen years after the Nokia 625? I rarely feel like I can be sure that if I go off to look something up, that I can be confident that a half-written comment will still be there when I go back to it?
Huh, interesting, I've never had good luck maintaining drafts on mobile devices so very early on I got into the habit of drafting them in something like a mail or notes app. Sometimes I still slip up and start writing drafts in an app itself and then lose them if I get distracted for a minute, though it's more often because apps are too aggressive in refreshing their feeds (the LinkedIn app being a prime example).
The Lumia was such a great deal back in the day. An amazing camera for the time, a great UI, comfy to use and supported crashes as a champion. The last bits of classic Nokia legendary hardware. It's a shame that the Microsoft ecosystem was so limited in apps.
I would separate Nokia Lumia and Microsoft Lumia (the last batch). I was so happy with my Nokia Lumia that I eventually upgraded to a newer Microsoft Lumia phone. What a disappointment it was.
Windows Metro UI was fantastic. It was leagues better than Android for sure. It was a very different take than iOS as well.
Honestly, it's a huge loss for all of us. I always felt like the U.S. government should have blocked Google from making Android "free." It killed the market for all non-iOS operating systems. We'd have a much richer world if all horizontally integrated OSes had to charge a licensing fee, instead of using a search monopoly to kill competition in other markets (and then using said free OS to further extend their search monopoly).
I also blame Google for killing Blackberry. If Google is blocked from using its search monopoly to make Android free, imagine the world we would have.
Android, for many years, was actively bad, but it was also a free OS that phone companies could grab. And the rest is history.
Nobody stopped Samsung or Microsoft from supporting android apps. Virtualization is pretty much present in all the phones.
The reality is that they all wanted what Apple had - a walled garden to charge exorbitant amounts. Only Google had the foresight to leverage open source (not free).
Blackberry killed Blackberry. Were you alive during that period of time or did you just read about it?
Blackberry was so slow to react to the changing technology and the demand for a (decent)full touch device(the Storm 1-2 was trash).
I guess BlackBerry either had their head up their ass or were afraid of killing off their biggest money maker, a phone with a Keyboard that the industry no longer wanted.
By the time they had a possible candidate ready with the QNX based platform(2012) it was way too late.
Palm and Nokia did have very good OS's at the time and well HP killed Palm and then Microsoft Nokia(those two turkeys)
Android wasn't great but Google iterated very quickly and had the clout to go with it at the time.
You didn't happen to try an app called Nothing but Crickets did you? I made a whole $4 from advertising.com from that on WP7. It was a single button and when you clicked on it, the sound of crickets would play. I always hoped someone would use it in a meeting. I didn't care about the money. I just wanted to make people laugh.
Nah they just joined the race too late. Remember that Steve Ballmer was laughing at and dismissing the iPhone when it launched ("it's too expensive, no one will use it, it doesn't even have a keyboard"). Microsoft continued pushing Windows Mobile at that time and even spent $1B+ acquiring Danger and releasing Kin (remember that disaster?). Then Windows Phone 7 finally launched in 2010 and was rebooted again in 2012 with Windows Phone 8. By that time the mobile OS market was a duopoly, and neither users nor developers nor manufacturers cared for a third platform.
When discussing disasters, it’s impossible to ignore BlackBerry. They crafted solid devices, and their downfall from a hardware company is a tragic one. They grew too big and failed to adapt in times of “war” with a diminishing market share. However, I firmly believe they could have maintained a loyal user base over the years, at least large enough to allow them to fight another day.
Their user interface was a true gem - beautiful yet functional. The devices were incredibly fast, and the optical cursor was a revelation. I genuinely believe the way the trackpad cursor functions on the iPad is inspired by BlackBerry’s design.
They owned their space in their time, nothing came close, and then, one day, times have changed and their product become obsolete. I don't blame them.
It's cool to sit on HN and think everyone should pivot on a yearly basis, but in reality it rarely happens for companies that big. It takes a lot of time and effort to change to course of a tanker ship, and when you're in position that you have a product that is precisely on point, competition can't touch you, the most reasonable thing to do is just not to fuck things up... and then it's too late. Sometimes. Most of the time it's the winning strategy.
Its difficult for leadership when you are already making billions to change ship, if you are the guy who proposes it, gets approval to work on it then executes and if the plan fails you are probably out of that cushy job.
My only experience with BB was awful, though it was at the perfectly wrong time. I was responsible for developing an app for the Storm and it was really the worst of both worlds.
The storm was virtual keyboard only, and a markedly worse one where you had to click in the whole screen. Worst aspect of touchscreen keyboard (finger placement, no keyfinding haptics, still need to look directly at it) with the added slowness of needing to click the biggest possible button - one the size of a whole phone.
I think so. Heck, why don’t they open source it now? Although my guess is it’s a lot of low level C++ that I wouldn’t touch with a 10 foot pole. But I’ve been surprised before. What if they used dotnet?
I suspect it shared quite a bit of code with the regular windows codebase, so open sourcing it would have exposed a lot of proprietary code (and not necessarily only their own — there may have been licensed bits that they would not even have been allowed to open source).
Aye; MS wanted to make easier porting apps into their platform from Android and iOS with project astoria and islandwood but they abandon both at some point.
Apps availability was the main issue - there were people who baked their own 3rd party apps for instagram, snapchat and vine. Google on the other hand "fought" with MS by blocking access to YT from their app on the devices - because unsurprisingly ads in videos weren't playing on it. Only Opera released their browser for this platform - Mozilla had short lived Fennec in early alphas.
The OS updates were handled by device manufacturers/service providers and release times differ from one company to another. That could be also another issue leading to platform's failure.
Version fragmentation was also another thing; devices running WP7 couldn't upgrade to WP8 - these had a special 7.8 release which bring some features from 8.0. Same thing happen with WP8 devices - the top-most could get W10M while mid and low-end ones would stuck on 8.1. I tried installing 10 on my Lumia 1320 - it made phone ran hot.
Metro interface was perfect on mobile devices and tiles were an amazing middle ground between icons and widgets at that time. Apple pick up quite recently that concept allowing icons to be expanded into widgets serving particular bits of information. Overall the OS interface focused exactly on displaying needed information instead of delivery form for it; this was achieved by big font and modest use of icons within e.g settings pages. Windows 8/.1 failed miserably on desktop as we know - it wouldn't be as bad if start menu and desktop paradigm would remain and only visually system would receive a flat "lifting" as it did with Windows 10. But at that time it was too late.
YouTube stomping out the good 3rd party apps on Vision Pro killed the device for me (along with it being heavy enough to give me neck aches after a few sessions of use)
The fragmentation was equally worse on the dev side. You couldn’t develop WP8 apps on Win7 and vice versa no WP7 apps on Win8. The same happened with Win8.1 and Win10. So you had 4 different phone OS completely incompatible.
At the time I was working on WP apps for a customer and needed 3 different OS installed to work on their apps.
Different strokes for different folks, I guess. I hated that the UI was just rectangles in a grid with a single fill color. Few icons. The customization options were really poor from what I can remember, making it so that everyone's UI looked almost identical.
To be fair, I was getting seriously fed up by the poor software support at the same time which may have amplified my resentment.
My take was that Metro was flat to leverage finally-computationally-and-energy efficient scaling hardware. All design elements were simple primitives with overlaid text, with limited texturing.it was a design of the hardware of the time.
iPeople reject your reality and substitute their own.
When Apple makes a mistake, it was really a genius 4D chess move and everyone will copy them and also it wasn't really a mistake, we just have to trust the plan.
It's not just that. When Apple adopts a trend or implement a modern feature/flow that they are not the first to, like flat UIs, wearables, VR, etc they do put in earnest effort to polish and distinguish their experience compared to others. Something their competitors don't put a ton of weight in. This pushes people in general to believe that the "Apple way" is somewhat better just because it's different or at least has some mysterious merit. iPeople even more so tan the general public.
I read a lot of Apple blogs and they all complain about Apple all the time. They like Apple products, but they aren't stupid. For example, nobody thinks that Siri is a 4D chess move, everyone knows that Siri sucks.
that's what iPeople-haters like to say. people panned the trashcan pro. people panned the butterfly keyboard. people panned the removal of sd card reader from laptops. people call out apple, but that doesn't fit the iPeople-haters narrative, so it's best to just ignore it
Yep. This is another semi-fawning, apologistic article full of made-up assertions.
It ignores the fact that there has been a welcome step back from the derelict wasteland of "flat design" that users have endured for far too long. Flat design is often cited as a reaction to absurd levels of skeuomorphism, which Apple certainly WAS a leader in. Remember the "felt" surfaces of Game Center, the "paint" upon which was inexplicably a control? And the "leather" binding of Notes?
Then there's this: "In AR, visual affordances work differently. A button that casts realistic shadows and responds to virtual lighting feels more "real" when floating in your living room than a flat, colored rectangle."
That makes it a SHITTY control, which will get lost in the visual noise of the real environment. This UI sucks for the same reason that sports-stats graphics that are tracked onto real surfaces in TV coverage suck: They don't stand out. It's that simple.
So after years of "flat" design where nothing was demarcated as a control and users were apparently supposed to click on every pixel and every character on the screen in a hunt for hidden goodies, this article celebrates Apple's plan to create the same problem in AR using OVERLY-decorated controls.
Not to mention the stupidity of crippling computer, tablet, and phone UI for the sake of a "VR" UI. This isn't just dumb from a practical standpoint, but from a technical one as well. There's no reason that the control library can't be rendered differently on different devices. So, if this (admittedly poorly-substantiated opinion piece) is right about the motivation behind Apple's exhumation of the "transparent" UI fad that died 20 years ago, we can only lament the end of desktop usability... which Windows flushed vigorously with Microsoft's brain-dead attempt to dumb its UI down for touchscreens years ago.
Lucky for you, Valve has sold millions of SteamDecks. The result is that the majority of mainstream Windows software now works well in Proton == Wine on Linux.
And despite people constantly whining about it, GNOME is ultra fast, has great shortcuts, and it looks kinda like the pinnacle of UI design, which IMHO was Windows XP.
Lmfao. Despite people constantly whining about it, KDE is now stable, has good defaults, and it actually looks like Windows. It's not an accident that Steam Deck uses it.
The worst part about all of those DEs is that there's more than one. Even one OS might switch its default DE, like Ubuntu did 3? times. Just settle on one, I don't even care which. Gnome2 was fine.
It won't ever fully settle, because Linux users like tinkering by their nature. But in the mainstream, it's kinda already settled on the Gnome-KDE duopoly
This is also a history rewrite. The recent MS UIs in at least the last 5 years are doing exactly the same thing. Fairy sure I saw some Windows AR demo about it a few years back.
This is happening a lot. If you talk to ChatGPT about any company it has quite a rosy picture to paint of just about everyone. Probably trying to convince companies to integrate advertising.
That's quite a rewrite of history considering Windows Phone and Microsoft's Metro interface launched a full three years before Apple's move to a flat design in iOS 7.