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by CWuestefeld 45 days ago
Anything I missed?

Under Jobs, UX was king. Devices had to be intuitive, and features discoverable. Today, all that user-friendliness is gone. The devices are no longer approachable for a newbie: you have to just know how to use them.
2 comments
MoonWalk 45 days ago
Yep. The secret "gestures," the peek-a-boo UI, and now "transparent" UI that overlaps other junk on the screen.

It's not even consistent with itself. Example: On iOS, bring up the list of open pages in Safari; each thumbnail has an X in the corner to close it. Pretty intuitive and standard. But now bring up the list of apps running on your phone. There's nothing. No X or other affordance. Who the hell would guess he has to flip the thumbnail up off the top of the screen to quit the application? You've probably forgotten how stupid this is, but that's just complacency for hideous design setting in.

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jshier 45 days ago
Except Jobs approved the design of that screen, which hasn't fundamentally changed since early versions of iOS (iPhoneOS). And it's that way because quitting apps isn't supposed to be something you do very often, if at all. Nowadays people clear the app history by habit, but it was really only supposed to be for misbehaving apps that were burning your battery, so having an affordance to make it easy was never the point, despite how people use it today.

Also, please stop doing this, it breaks apps. It's unnecessary and just forces your apps to cold launch every time you use them.

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MoonWalk 44 days ago
Steve Jobs opposed the idea of real applications on the iPhone in the first place. And Jobs also personally insisted that stuff be misspelled in the iTunes UI... if you believe the pushback in the bug report on it. So who cares if he approved another bad idea?

Quitting apps is something you need to do sometimes. And making it impossible to do, through obscurity, is stupid; as that can leave the application permanently disabled. This is not something I ever want as a developer.

Not to mention that people who don't need to quit an application won't go hunting for a way to do so, and thus the problem solves itself. That's why the vast majority of arguments for crippling things to shield users from "scary complexity" fail: Novice users will not even imagine that these functions are available, let alone go hunting for them.

And I quit apps BECAUSE I want them to "cold launch" next time. But my mom isn't ever going to do that. So rest easy: Your glass-jawed app is safe from the general public.

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moepstar 45 days ago
> Except Jobs approved the design of that screen

..which they, as far as i recall, pretty much stole from WebOS back then..

(well, the functionality aspect of it at least)

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threatofrain 45 days ago
That's not Apple, that's just current design trends everywhere. Jobs was popularizing UX idioms for yet-new hardware to the customer. Now we live in a world where children grow up with tablets.

If you go to Google's design you're not going to see an alternative take from the same playground of design, plus or minus some glassiness, emoji, bounce, etc.

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