14 DAY TRIAL // Designers are not very taken with the new iOS 7. While everyone agrees that Jonathan Ive is a prodigy in hardware design, his peers can’t see the same level of brilliance across Apple’s new mobile operating system.
In a TUAW piece, a number of designers are quoted as saying a lot of negative things about iOS 7.
One of them says, “You gotta wonder if they took their phones outside and looked at all that thin-lined icon + transparency stuff in the sunlight.”
Ouch! If that’s true, Apple’s software design teams might have to go back to the drawing board. Literally.
A guy using the Twitter handle @samin makes an interesting observation, saying, “designers who have actually done any mobile OS design work really seem to dislike iOS 7.”
Another one states, “Am I alone in thinking the iOS 7 home screen icons look ugly, poorly balanced, and of an unattractive color palate (sic)?”
Admittedly, these impressions might sound as first reactions to a couple of screenshots that others reacted to in the same manner, influencing the general opinion.
Which is why a more elaborate opinion might be in order. The same TUAW obtained a comment from Product Club’s Tom Coates who used to do software design for both BBC and Yahoo's Brickhouse.
His opinion is that iOS 7 “looks so much like wireframes with placeholders for things.”
“Bit like a webpage with Times New Roman....It's cramped in places, childish and garish in others, icons blend in with the background,” he says.
“And some of the design fetishes it has are as egregious if not worse than ios6 – frosted glass, fake depth, sliders with shadows,” Coates opines.
He ends his take on iOS 7 with an admittance that “There are many good things about it too,” such as the app switcher (Multitasking).
He adds, “Interaction wise it looks and feels solid.”
Others had good things to say about the software, of course. However, the general impression among designers seems to be that iOS 7 needs more work from a visual standpoint.