iOS 7 is a strange beast. I've gone thru the various stages of "grief" over it, starting with a hefty "WTF" through to where I am now.
Visually, on the surface, it's a huge change and not in a direction I was hoping it would go. The icons are especially jarring, as is the heavy semi-transparency, which reminds me of the worst part of the Aero interface in Windows Vista[1]. I can tell there is something under that overlay, just enough for my mind to be distracted by it. Not good when I'm trying to decipher the (new) Control Panel thing.
Busy, distracting and overly vivid are all words that come to mind.
The reason why I have just bought an iPod Touch to test it out from day 1, however, is because this is stuff that is trivial to change and iterate on. Give any designer worth his/her salt a week or 2 and they could clean up a lot of the "broken" visuals - and Apple had some of the best in the world. I'm sure Dribbble will be full of them by the end of the weekend (it already is).
It looks rushed. I suspect it was. And I'm 100% fine with that. Rush the bits that are easy to fix later.
Under the hood, and in terms of function and interaction, it appears to be a big rethink - as big as the visual changes, just not as obvious.. These are the parts that take time to get right. The interaction parts. The "how it works" parts, not the how it looks parts.
That's the stuff I want to get to know more before its released. We are going to have these interactions - potentially - for 5 more years, so the sooner I get my head around how they work, the better.
I'm not putting it on my "carry phone" tho, but I never would, even if it was a visual orgasm of perfect pixels. There is no way back to iOS6, and I don't want an unstable OS on my most used piece of hardware.[2]
So enough ranting from me[3]. If by some freak chance you are a designer from Apple: sorry. That was a knee jerk over reaction. I'm looking forward to playing with and learning the new stuff[4].
Now, Apple Logistics: I put an order in for an IPod Touch on the train this morning. Any chance you can deliver it tomorrow or Friday? Thanks awfully.
Microsoft fixed this in Windows 7 which is by far my favourite version of Windows, visually. ↩︎
and I'm even typing this on the iPhone - I need to get my blog workflow sorted better before we start traveling, but it was surprisingly easy using Byword and Prompt. ↩︎
On twitter mostly. ↩︎
but if you can change the Safari icon in Beta 2 that'd be lovely. ↩︎
