Yes I'm getting surly in my old age.
The worse thing would be if people blindly said things like "iOS7 is just not intuitive" and went on to drink their PBR and evangelize about Phonebloks - instead, these are real examples of why iOS7 could be better.
At the very least, this thread is instructive for learning designers. I know as a younger programmer and designer, when someone said that "JavaScript has the weirdest quirks", it was useless unless someone showed me the quirks. Along came Douglas Crockford's Good Parts, which, while critical of the bad parts, was very instructive. I think this can function in similar ways.
It's not just "Fail" culture rearing its stupid head - the tone is far from embarrassing to Apple, and instead is generally descriptive of legitimate design failures.
[1] z-index, text overlap, mixed states, etc. These are not questionable design choices. They're bugs. And lumping them in only detracts from the site and the many legit design gripes (problems of focus, alignment, contrast, usability, etc.)
This is fail culture masquerading as design critique, and it isn't even doing that well.
Critique that doesn't actually tell what's wrong ... isn't.
Let's talk about the z-index issue with the AppStore icon. How is this reproduced? I have never seen that. How do I know it's not shopped?
All it says is "z-index". Not useful. Not really a critique to me, it's just too terse.
Google HAS produced a UI as bad as this. Actually worse. The Android UI, up until 4 was amateur hour. And still is not up there yet.
It's just held in much less scrutiny compared to Apple, because nobody expects much better.
I don't care what fanboys say or do online, on any side. I'm here to build good software. If someone has some constructive criticism, let me know.
The Apple community isn't concerned about a lack of Jobs, it's a portion of the non-Apple, Tech community that likes to shout this one out.
We already have plenty of people ready to call out crap. Half the discussions on this site devolve into someone arguing about perceived flaws in something.
What we actually need is people pushing up the level of discourse. A stream of pictures and pithy sarcasm isn't useful until someone else comes along and responds to it. The world needs more thoughtful analysis and advancement, we probably have enough tumblrs full of snarky images.
Crap, really?
There are, however, some valid reasons to upgrade in spite of iOS 7's drawbacks (don't get me started on how the new lock screen keypad makes it harder for me to unlock my phone with just my thumb).
* Call blocking has "finally" (gruber's favorite line lately) been implemented properly -- if you are one of those people who are increasingly getting more telemarketer calls on your cell number, this is a huge deal.
* Safari runs faster on iOS7 than iOS6. 90% of what I do is browsing, so this can be a tradeoff that is well worth making.
It seems to be put together by one guy (instead of user submissions like similar sites) and not quite design savvy at that.
Case in point:
1) http://sloppyui.tumblr.com/image/61441688489 (this is supposed to show "poor alignment")
2) http://sloppyui.tumblr.com/image/61439801745 (this is supposed to show "stray dropshadows" -- didn't they guy get the memo that the iOS 7 UI uses them to show a 3D layer hierarchy?)
3) http://sloppyui.tumblr.com/image/61439835569 (this is supposed to show "poor contrast". Isn't it obvious that the top bar should not be visually striking and distracting?)
4) http://sloppyui.tumblr.com/image/61440586435 (... this is considered "sloppy").
5) http://sloppyui.tumblr.com/image/61440527405 (flat information hierarchy -- one of the few genuine sloppy UI examples).
I'm not answering every single case you mention. The examples I posted show how inconsistent the UI is.
Taste is in the eye of the beholder and I didn't mention what I find ugly but what shows a lack of afterthought.
Just one example here to answer, "Poor Contrast" (http://sloppyui.tumblr.com/image/61439835569) On an iOS device, this is not "Subtle" but unreadable.
That said, noticing alignment issues and font inconsistencies is not given and a lot of people won't give a damn about them.
http://sloppyui.tumblr.com/post/61658685474 This is the most outrageous. Apparently this mid-transistion screenshot demonstrates something poor. What? I have no idea. Is it sloppy in the same way this http://i.imgur.com/e5Vyv5z.jpg is sloppy?
There are also quite a few genuine design errors (Z index of updates available, alignment in the timer, ...) on the site.
It might appear odd in the context in which it appears, that is with the caret at the end of the line, but consider cases where the caret is between letters in a word.
When editing a section of text where you are looking to make a mid-word modification, being able to quickly and easily identify the caret position is important.
If the caret looks even remotely like any of the text being edited you may confuse it for the text or you may find it hard to see where the caret is.
The high text to caret contrast is only one solution to the problem of making the caret easy to find and easy to tell apart from the text itself.
On my stock Android 4.2 device the caret is a mid-grey within black text. On a small screen it is not clear to me with my inadequate eyesight where the caret is from just a glance. When editing mid-word a blue tab-style arrow is applied below the caret as a visual pointer. This sometimes obscures relevant text or controls.
As far as stock Android 4.2 vs iOS is concerned, I'd say that iOS has the superior solution in this case.
As someone with slightly less than perfect eyesight it's an absolute godsend.
Great contrast?
Nice bold color pair?
Not losing the caret because it looks like I or 1 or l?
I may be confused by wording here, sorry: which one does "had to" mean:
* there was some external force pushing him (I'm thinking CEO rather than bloggers' complaints)
* he couldn't resist the urge
It somehow feels like the latter is what really happened, but I do not have any sources for that, and would be happy to know.
And when you see the iPhone 5C with iOS 7 it's pretty clear why.
This is the real issue.
There are few "complete redesign" success cases, but somehow Apple thought they would pull it in a matter of months.
A lot of these "sloppy UI" examples are in non-Apple apps, intentional, or otherwise misleading from the screenshot.
Also, the blog is not called "Apple Sloppy UIs", but "Sloppy UIs". That still qualifies.
Tagline to the blog: "We love Apple. We think this is the best way to point out what's not up to their standards so they can fix it." (emphasis mine)
Do they expect Apple to fix the UI of other people's apps?
http://www.androidpolice.com/2012/09/18/ux-things-i-hate-abo...
Don't get me wrong, I much, much prefer Android and can't ever see myself moving back to iOS, but always good to measure things in balance, nothing is perfect.
It's weird. The iPhone 5s seems to be without a doubt the overall best phone out there. The low light camera, the processor, all that stuff blows me away, but yet I don't want one. I think the iPhone is like a really fancy and nice race car, that I can do nothing but admire, but all I want is a truck. Android is my truck.
How are these small/annoying issues are passing the test cases?
Don't they have the same development cycle as they had while developing the first Iphone which was a huge thing at the time.
Most of those are neither sloppy nor issues. The blog does a bad job of mixing a few real issues with a lot of stuff he just doesn't like personally.
Before I upgraded yesterday, there were a couple of apps I saw (I think it was Shazam) where they must have emulated the iOS 7 feel, rather than using system-native widgets, so the result was a "business in front, party in the back" mishmash of UI on the same screen.
It is worse in touch devices. At least in a desktop webapp you have the option of waving your mouse cursor over suspect areas and can get some kind of feedback (a balloon text or some change in the status bar etc.) On a touch device, you won't know until you touch!
I must imagine that this tumblr is already being poured over in Cupertino and radar's are being filed in right now. This tumblr is a good thing.
One I noticed is a very slight difference in weight between the carrier text and the data status.
It's so slight, almost the difference between "sharp" and "strong" in Photoshop.
Also, people, easy on the "way to criticize but not offer any constructive criticism!" OP is effectively filing a ton of bug reports, which is a good thing.
Good quality criticism regarding choices developers and designers have made have lead to some of the best debate and discussion I've seen on HN. Conversations that focus on criticizing execution (for example the UI bugs in the tumblr) have been some of the worst.
As a developer I would get huge value out of having a nuanced discussion about the pros and cons of iOS 7's language, particular as we begin (or have begun) redesigning our apps - hopefully that is something this tumblr can evolve into eventually.
I mentioned this SAME STUFF (specifically the horrible lack of contrast) months ago just to be met with downvotes and handwaving dismissal.
NOW people agree. Better late than never, I guess.
The most frustrating part is that Apple fanboys now justify their love for iOS 7 using the exact same arguments they used to dismiss Windows Phone.
However, some of these (Z-Index? What?) should've absolutely been fixed before GM.
Design over a large product like iOS or OS X is hard, it takes time to get all the edges smoothed down and given that iOS 7 is probably the result of a year to two years of work it's not a surprised it's rough. If it's a bug (or a UI niggle) report it to Apple, they may or may not be listening but it's a better solution to highlight it with them directly, as well as on Tumblr.
Done is better than perfect.
Seems they're losing that attribute without gaining the others.
Actually you only lose features you wouldn't want in the first place and would drag the whole thing down (less battery life, bulkier, etc). Not having FM radio for example is like not having a floppy disk drive an modern PCs.
As for "incredibly well polished and thought out" it still is. For one, there's much more to a mobile OS than graphic design. How it works and feels is much more important than how it looks ("design is how it works").
Second, most of those are some guy's pet peeves, not genuine problems. If he cannot understand why a red carret matches blue text, that doesn't make it into a genuine problem. Same if he didn't get the memo that drop shadows are used to add a depth to the UI layers and thinks they are stray leftovers.
Apple's new MO it seems.
It's not a big deal but I thought Apple would be well on top of stuff like this
The average iOS 6 app did not look like Game Center or Find My Friends (which was not even built-in). But I guess that's how it will be remembered now. =/
We love Apple. We think this is the best way to point out what's not up to their standards so they can fix it. It's all about intellectual honesty, not trolling.
IMHO, using texts to replace icon based buttons is clever to simplify the working of screen resolution adaption, however, it does increase the possibility of inconsistency between different locales. I still remember NYTimes.app for iPad displayed ugly aligned date texts which is just too long to fit into the space left for them, only in Chinese locales, which they do not officially support, and I doubt that they really did testing on it.
I am assuming that the “sloppy UIs” are from the general release.
There were tons of changes from beta 1 to the GM and there are still some UI bugs, but they are not showstoppers.
But what do I know.
Stopped reading there ...
