All Things Mac/ Apple
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I still despise iOS 7 with passion, and I'm going to rant (lengthily and perhaps tiresomely, as I know I may be the only software designer on here) about it just one more time.
After a while of usage I've managed to pick my pet peeve from a design perspective; leaving aside the bugginess of the OS: the arbitrary removal of buttons from the OS. It's all (or almost all) either unbordered icons or just text that behaves inconsistently, sometimes even within the same UI, and is difficult to distinguish from text labels. Color (and in some cases boldness) is how they make that distinction, except for when they don't (they of course have exceptions to their own rule, like the "Buy" button in the App Store: things like this are why I say the iOS 7 design language is glossolalia: speaking in tongues, incomprehensible gibberish). Some of these things go beyond a difference in taste or opinion and are straight up what-were-they-thinking dumb. Even if you're not color-blind, it's unintuitive. Labels and buttons are different and should be visually distinct. Areas of touch should jump out at you. And it's easy to find UI elements that behave as buttons but don't even follow this inadequate colored text convention. There's no conceivable rationale for it.
I can find no evidence whatsoever that professional UI/UX people instead of graphic designers were involved in the design of this OS. This is a problem because the former starts with function and works towards form from there, where a graphic designer starts with form and doesn't understand function. I'm not slamming graphic designers (although these ones have poor taste, as iOS 7 is fugly); it's just that it's not their job to understand functionality (I.e., to be UI/UX engineers, which is a highly specialized field).
I think what happened was Apple overreacted to the excessive skeuomorphism of the prior generation OSes and swung it too far in the direction of simplification of the OS, and did so without applying common sense as they were distilling the OS down to be as simple as possible. Each element of redesign needed to be assessed in terms of usability and establishing/adhering to a consistent design language. That clearly didn't happen. Now we have an OS that you have to learn to use instead of one that is inherently self-evident in terms of its use.
My friend handed me his Android to browse some pictures and videos last night and two of us, both professional software UI/UX designers, struggled to figure out that simple task. Once we started playing a video it was impossible to figure out how to go back to swipe-navigating the library of photos and videos. Wound up having to back out of the viewer entirely and start over.
So I guess I'm screwed.
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MCL I agree 100% with what you've said. I gave up trying to be annoyed about it and look at it like a game. 'which word is the one with an action associated with it' kind of thing. Really poor. It's not enough for me to move to Android again, and I do believe they'll eventually figure it out.
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^^I need to learn how to discover/invent silver linings like that, well-said.
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Just hold your phone the correct orientation when taking photos and it'll always be correct :). The mac auto rotates upside down photos so you never see if they're upside down. Older software/PCs etc won't auto rotate, not because they can't, rather because either they CBF developing it, or more likely the make the convenience of a mac just working, look stupid on a PC.
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Yeah, I did some forum research and discovered the classic Apple slogan, "You're holding it wrong."
Thing is, photos STILL display upside down on my Retina MacBook Pro. It's not a PC issue.
As far as the docs are concerned, I am running an old version of Office, so I understand the issue there.
Thanks for the response, Snowman.
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In Preview you can definitely rotate and save that beeyatch if need be.
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^ https://www.icloud.com/#find
It does require the phone to be powered back on, which will likely happen at some point if someone's found it. Best you can do using that is set an alert on it for when it does turn on.
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^ https://www.icloud.com/#find
It does require the phone to be powered back on, which will likely happen at some point if someone's found it. Best you can do using that is set an alert on it for when it does turn on.
done and done…thanks wade!
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Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, 1990.
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The Isaacson biography is well worth a read
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I have it, need to get around to it.
