Yes, it takes tremendously more work and is difficult to get right on a variety of screen sizes but there are also multi-billion-dollar companies that are in charge of this and I think it’s time they hired some more artists.
[1] https://1.bp.blogspot.com/_cTU5hVb22k0/R6u0lS9EFuI/AAAAAAAAB...
[2] http://cdn.cultofmac.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/Susan_Ka...
The whole trend to do away with Skeumorphism led to things like Google’s Chrome browser having an empty white area where you apparently have to know you should tap to type the URL. It is still there on iOS.
Because showing browser chrome as slightly 3D is apparently “too skeumorphic” and distracting — better not to know where the website begins and ends lol
>“When we sat down last November (to work on iOS 7), we understood that people had already become comfortable with touching glass, they didn’t need physical buttons, they understood the benefits,” says Ive
Along with Federighi's comments. I still remember reading it at the time saddens me. They then spend the next three version of iOS trying to walk back all these flat, glass, no button decisions. Another 6 years before they rework all icons to the old circular proportion.
One thing to nitpick though was that Steve was well aware of the iPhone Plus or iPhone Phablet market condition. As it was in shown in the one of the court case email. And he was willing to go with it so he is not too stubborn about the size. / width.
I also think it was the turning point of his philosophy. Steve always wanted the iPhone to be an "smart" appliance. Hence it could be small, and used one handed. It was first and foremost an appliance, easy to use devices, Apps on top are something extra. Except the model has shifted to your Phone being the computer. And Apple no longer has his intuition to guide them.
It is even more frustrating that the OS is slowly being locked down so much that you basically can’t “fix” UI annoyances anymore, not without rebooting into Void My Warranty mode. You can’t fix bits and pieces of apps because they’ll no longer pass code-signing and fail to launch. In the old days you could pretty much hack any cool icons you wanted into any part of the system, and it was really amazing what people came up with.
> "NeXt's OPENSTEP refined for Mac – "macStep" is a derivative scheme based on the OPENSTEP 4 scheme by Scott Naness, specially adjusted for Mac usability"
You noticed that too? I wonder what karmic factors are in play here.
https://www.theregister.com/2021/11/26/linux_software_instal...
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The HighRes versions on this site, however, are exquisite
However, as someone whose youth involved waaaay too many hours tweaking files called .fvwmrc, I knew that looks are important, but skin deep. Hard to say which aesthetic I preferred. BeOS’s stock blue background, golden yellow tabs, and simple icons always made me feel “happy” even if they didn’t feel as staid and sophisticated as NeXT.
But to the end user, the look and feel of BeOS hasn't been matched still.
He's been pretty kind on Steve, on written word at least, over the last couple of decades.
The reality is that the art world, of which industrial design is an integral part, lives and dies around fads or "movements", which negate each other every few years. We're currently at tail end of a wave that preached flatness, leveraging the move from low-res to high-res screens to entrench itself as easier to implement. Now that the migration is near completion, a correction is bound to happen. Apple have already started: they attempted to reintroduce depth and shadows in their recent iterations of icons, arguably with mixed results. More and more people will try, eventually resulting in a new wave against flatness.
While it is true that CPU and GPU powers have increased, also the ways we use our machines have changed, people might have wildly different environments that the same UI needs to work on these days.
Scalable UI alone can become a nightmare if you have anything more complex going on. Even the big players have a hard time figuring out proper usability, like look at Apple or Microsoft constantly making a hurdle to iterate on their designs, making mistakes along different releases.
Building usable UI is freaking hard and requires a lot of user feedback, iteration and focusing on details that you don't know before starting to build the product. Changing even one thing can lead to another thing breakin, and so on..
https://interfacelift.com/icons/artist/32/itomato/index1.htm...
EDIT: 5 mins later I found this submission to the homepage https://github.com/trunkmaster/nextspace
