Getting flattened under the iOS7 bus

Unless you're living under a rock in the middle of Mongolia, you've probably heard that the iPhone has a new look. Oh, of course, it comes in a rainbow of colors and probably has the NSA drooling with the spying possibilities.

But I'm not talking about the new hardware, I'm talking about the software. iOS7 is famously flat. Very FLAT. I've been using it for a week and I've become accustomed to many of the new visual elements. Moreover, I've come to really like many of the features and user-experience changes.

Many people has said that iOS7 is just a visual change and it's really just about copying Windows Phone. Or that it's just putting lipstick on a pig and that iOS needs more fundamental changes to keep up with the flexibility and additional features that Android provides. Well, some of that may well be true, but after using iOS7 for a week, I can say that the OS level changes and the changes to the default Apple apps like Mail, Calendar, Safari, & Weather are really well thought out. There were flaws in the old Calendar app that I didn't even realize until I started using the new version and then it's like "WOW, I can't believe I lived that old version!"

Updates to apps certainly don't require a revamped OS, but I must say that the changes are really aligned well so that the way you use the OS is similar to the way you use apps. Gestures has become more important and more useful. And since visually, many of these apps have been cleaned up quite a bit, it becomes all the more important to provide the right cues so that these new gestures or features are easy to use and make sense. Overall, I think Apple has done a good job with that and it becomes more clear that the job they did wasn't just about changing the look of apps or the OS, they worked on usability and making it easier and better to use things throughout the phone.

The question now comes about the other apps. The ones that people may spend a heck of a lot more time in. Facebook, Twitter, Whatsapp, Instagram. What will those apps look like once they update for iOS7? Well, for Facebook and Twitter, we already know since they released new versions yesterday. Facebook has changed the layout of its screen to include a bottom button bar and the ability to swipe between screens. In some ways it feels more confusing to me, but I've only used it a couple of times since the refresh, so I can't lay judgement until I've tapped around more. Twitter's app is mainly a visual refresh, but there are a number of OS level changes and connections to Twitter elsewhere which are interesting such as the ability to search Twitter via Siri and the link list available via Safari. A number of other apps updated yesterday to ensure they work with iOS7, but they don't all have usability changes or even visual changes. The bus is clearly picking up steam and it's going to be an interesting few months as more apps are updated.

TechCrunch has a rundown of some of the first movers in the iOS7 space.

Before & After iOS 7: How Your Favorite Apps Are Changing

It's going to be really interesting to see where apps go from here. I agree wholeheartedly that new icons and flatter design isn't the most important thing. But the usability changes that Apple is heading towards are what app designers need to keep in mind as they develop new versions of their apps. It's not to say these designers need to follow the same mindset that Apple may have. But it's clear that the simplification of on-screen elements is important and well-thought-out integration of gestures, menus, and navigation are at the heart of the changes we should expect. As the TechCruch article points out, some app designers started from the ground-up and others have made simpler changes.

As we see more of these changes, it's quite clear that it's not just time for a re-vamp of the mobile OS, but of the mobile app as well. This is not just about becoming flatter or more colorful, it's about re-imaging how users should interact with a mobile app. And while developers for Android or Windows Phone could certainly take up the same challenges, it seems that the real momentum for these changes is due to the release of iOS7. I'd love to hear your first impressions of iOS7 as well as your favorite apps. What do you think so far? What do you think is still needed?

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Back with some rants

Not bad...less then 3 months of laying low. And I'm back with some rants. So let's get into it...

Before my trip to India, I set up Google Reader as an easy way to go to a single page and catch up on news and interesting sites which I like. I used it a bit while vacationing, but in reality, I don't really care about news & blogs when I'm chillin' on a river in Kerala. Know what I'm sayin'?

By the way, if you're not familiar with Google Reader, it's an online service that lets you aggregate RSS feeds and read them in a single view. Read up on RSS here. The basic idea is that websites can publish their content in a standard format which is understandable by a RSS reader.

So last week I finally got back into G.Reader (as I have named the bookmark in Firefox) and I'm addicted to it. I save so much time by not having to go to multiple sites to read up on the latest blog posts. But there's one big drawback: News sites. They publish their headlines via RSS so they show up in my reader, but that's it. If I want to read the story, I still have to go to the site. That's understandable since they want to ensure you're getting the full experience they have to offer and they make money off the ads they place on their site. But the major news sites don't seem to get it with RSS...they publish ONLY the headline. Nothing more. And the headlines are such that you can't really tell if the story is anything interesting until you read the first few sentences. Why not just publish the first paragraph of the story along with the headline? That'll pull me in so I know it's something I want to read, and if it's interesting, I'll go right to your site to read the story and potentially even read more on the site directly rather than jump back to my RSS reader. But instead I just get a lame headline. NYTimes, CNN, ESPN, Yahoo, Slate, blah blah blah. You're all guilty of this and because of that I've taken them ALL off my subscribed RSS feeds. In fact, I actually go to those sites LESS now since it's more of a pain to click onto their website. Rather than visiting the sites every couple of hours, I head over to them just once or twice a day. Your loss, not mine.

Just more examples of big companies not trusting their users or readers and thereby alienating them.

Okay, so the next annoyance I have is with a subset of Mac users. Nothing new there. Mac-o-philes tend to be a little crazy to begin with. Most of it is due to simply being accustomed to certain ways of doing things. But sometimes I really wonder about them when they do things which just seem to make life harder.

So recently, Adobe came out with a huge update to all of their main software apps. Photoshop, Illustrator, etc, etc. Among all of the changes, they also changed the icons which the Mac uses to represent the applications. The old icons used to be a variety of colorful natural objects like feathers, leaves, flowers, etc bound within white boxes. I was used to them, but I always found myself trying to remember if the feather was the icon for Photoshop or for Bridge. I got it wrong about half the time and ended up waiting for the wrong app to open. Nice looking icons are cool and all, but when similar applications have similar icons, it's just a waste of time trying to remember which icon is which. So with the version of the apps, I think the Adobe people realized this and decided to simplify everything. So they made icons with two letter abbreviations for each icon. Nice and simple. More importantly, meaningful. Photoshop's icon says "Ps" on it. Bridge's icon says "Br" on it. At a glance, I quickly know which icon is which. They're not exactly beautiful, but they make a lot of sense for a lot of reasons.

Okay so Adobe did a good thing. Meanwhile, Mac-o-philes obsessed with cool looking things, decided they still needed icons which look good on their docks. So they created replacement icons which have no tie-ins to the apps at all. Why? They look cool?

This is the subset of mac users which I find really annoying. They do things JUST BECAUSE they look or feel cool. They like a disc-burning app called Disco because it has black smoke coming out when you're burning a disc. Cool? I suppose. But seriously...smoking apps? In the time it took that developer to add in the smoke, I'm sure something more functional could have been built into the tool.

And these Adobe icons? I'm thankful of the genius that figured out the utility of putting an application abbreviation on the iconset. SO useful. And yet, we have people who dislike them so much for reasons of beauty that they have to replace them.

Go figure.