2. Click on the hamburger menu in the top right
3. ???
Those, those are ~thoughtful~ icons and not at all default.
I think mid-00s commercial OSes are a good target in this regard. OS X 10.2-10.9 and Windows XP-7 had a pretty good level of density while also feeling relatively clean and would be good to take some cues from.
Looking at all their design missteps and corrections in recent releases my only takeaway is that they are making it up as they go along just like the rest of us.
If somebody always gets everything right in your opinion, you should be suspicious of your own values, not of the people who don't achieve constant perfection.
Large phones were a bad idea because you cant use it with one finger, until iPhone Pro Maxes came out.
Installing apps from the internet is scary because viruses, yet Macs let you do that no questions asked.
Ads are bad and dangerous, until it shows up on Apple Maps.
Apple is just a simple company, existing to make as much money as possible. They make beautiful devices though - but no reason to put them on a pedestal.
The individual at Apple who decided to try and keep phones small, for example is probably not the person who decided to make them big. I feel confident saying this because the person who was supposedly the driving force behind keeping them small died in 2011, and they didn't start releasing phones that are too large for comfortable one-handed use until 2014.
The lack of transfer I don't think is out of unwillingness from the old guard, but rather due to the greenhorns throwing everything that came before their time out without questioning the reasoning behind any of it (Chesterson's Fence) and assuming that whatever they came up with was superior and better fit for the modern era ("those old principles can't possibly hold, we have touch screens now!").
It's also been made worse by UI design roles having been taken by those with backgrounds in unrelated design disciplines, as well as sites like Dribbble which reward pretty mockups over working products. This leads to overemphasis on the visual aspect of the UI and not enough on its functional and usability aspects.
(1) Clickable elements no longer visually signifying that they're clickable. Words aren't underlined or written in a special font, sometimes the profile avatar is the clickable link to the profile but sometimes the name is, etc.
(2) No more clean, compact directory trees. We used to have high-contrast compact UI design to look through nested ontologies. Now it's rounded-edges card-based, often without trace lines, and barely ever compact. RIP
Even plain old tables with sortable columns, a staple of all of the traditional desktop UI frameworks, are increasingly falling by the wayside in favor of mobile-style single-column lists with cells consisting of stacks of labels.
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The iPhone 4 was such a letdown...
Apple's design never recovered from the flattening of iOS 7.
But that was in a different millennium.
Easier said than done so it's not surprising they have atrophied in their former genius but im curious.
Accessibility has been left in the dustbin as well. You go to all these sites extolling these beautiful, innovative sites and they're completely useless with a keyboard or screen reader.
netsharc•49m ago
> They designed it, shipped it, lived with it for a year, then publicly changed their guidance on it. To me, that’s a lot more persuasive than simply saying, “Apple doesn’t do this.”
> Choosing not to do something you’ve never done is one thing.
> Choosing not to do something you’ve done is experience.
A more persuasive sales pitch for me to consider Apple products would be if the company had judgement not to ship such a hot mess of a sloppy product in the first place...
happytoexplain•43m ago
MS would include superfluous icons because they observe it in other software and can't think for themselves, or they would omit superfluous icons because it never occurred to them in the first place.
Everything Apple does is carefully considered, good and bad.
I take the latter every time, because I understand how bad things are in software. I know it's unrealistic to be as choosy as I want to be.
readthenotes1•35m ago
It would have been a very easy thing to test the people outside there bubble.
GMoromisato•23m ago
Wowfunhappy•19m ago
Couldn't they have just talked to the people who wrote the old guidelines? Why do they need to re-invent the wheel? Are they going to randomly forget in another 15 years and need to rerun the experiment, taking us all along as test subjects?
sssilver•18m ago
When I read a sentence like this, I have to remind myself that this is Apple products we're talking about.
What other company do you feel surpasses Apple in terms of "judgement not to ship such a hot mess of a sloppy product in the first place"?
Is there any consumer electronics company today that ships products that are in any way less of a slop than Apple?