[pwthornton]

The flat area and now liquid glass are all post-Jobs creations. Apple needs a true product person back in charge with taste to get this ship back into a better place.

Jobs acted as an editor and sounding board. You can't just let designers (or engineers) run wild.

[steveBK123]

The thing killing me with Apple design now is not just the look of UIs but the UX of how they actually work. I swear they move buttons every year for no reason other to move them. Workflows randomly take an extra click that didn't before.

I'm not sure if the phone or the Mac OS changes are worse, maybe its a tie.

One pet peeve is on the iPhone messages app if you accidentally tap into the search bar they inserted at the bottom, it clears the list of messages (rather than waiting for you to type and start filtering based on context). First time it happened I thought sync failed and the phone didn't have a copy of any of my texts.

[nandomrumber]

Peak UI / UX was some years ago, exactly when depends on any given persons particular preference.

What we have now is akin to a Sheperd tone[1], where the design has to get intentionally worse so that corps. can then go on to boast about how the new design in following years is better than ever, but on the whole no real progress is made.

1. A Shepard tone, named after Roger Shepard, is a sound consisting of a superposition of sine waves separated by octaves. When played with the bass pitch of the tone moving upward or downward, it is referred to as the Shepard scale. This creates the auditory illusion of a tone that seems to continually ascend or descend in pitch, yet which ultimately gets no higher or lower. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shepard_tone

[overfeed]

> Jobs acted as an editor and sounding board. You can't just let designers (or engineers) run wild.

Apple went way too far with the skeuomorphism, and Ives & co. may have over-corrected. Speaking of running wild: I'd consider painstakingly reproducing the stitching on the seats in Job's jet in the icon for an Apple app (Notes, IIRC) to be going overboard. Apple was rightly mocked for taking skeuomorphism too far, and as a result making onscreen, virtual objects mimick real objects became outdated, and people are now nostalgic for it because the backlash has been forgotten.

[kasabali]

> people are now nostalgic for it because the backlash has been forgotten.

What backslash? Only backslash I remember is when flat design was introduced. The only people complaining about skeumorphism was designers chasing latest fad.

[overfeed]

> What backslash?

https://www.macrumors.com/2012/09/11/apples-designers-clashi...

https://techcrunch.com/2013/06/10/skueomorphism-red-headed-s...

https://gizmodo.com/apples-podcasts-app-no-longer-has-horrib...

https://www.theverge.com/2012/11/22/3680320/skeuomorphic-des...

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/09/death-to-textures-io...

https://www.theverge.com/2012/9/21/3367270/yves-behar-apple-...

https://techcrunch.com/2013/06/09/skeuomorphism-isnt-ioss-bi...

https://daringfireball.net/2013/01/the_trend_against_skeuomo...

Edit: FYI: you typoed 'backlash' twice

[kasabali]

> The only people complaining about skeumorphism was designers chasing latest fad.

You're just proving my point. Notice how all of these were posted after Zune/Metro/Windows Phone/8/whatever it's called flat design craziness started.

Just look at this quote from Gruber's blog post:

...these hallmarks of modern UI graphic design style are (almost) never used in good print graphic design. They’re unnecessary in print...

No shit, guess what also wasn't needed in print: Buttons to be pressed and radioboxes to be selected. The whole fad just built on "old design is old and designers need to be employed".

[sunaookami]

Apple had an internal clash over which design direction they should go after the release of Windows 8 but every user rightfully hated Windows 8 flat design. The resonance to skeuomorphism was very positive back then.

[overfeed]

I don't know when Windows 8 was released, but by 2012-2013, skeuomorphic design had become very unpopular, tacky even. See the links I included in response to sibling comment.