The Cinema In Your Hand – Part One
What Mobile takes a look at handheld cinema – just what’s on offer for your smartphone or tablet and what’s the best deal?
Alex Walls
June 20, 2013
Apple announced iOS 7 to much fanfare last night, it brought a brand new design as well as the hotly anticipated iRadio.
I mean, you could see the excitement on Tim Cook’s face when he finally announced that they were redesigning iOS — he looked like a kid in a candy store who had just been told he can have everything free. It was quite fitting really, given the new look iOS7 was really designed more for your children than you.
But who cares? It’s iOS, we all love to have icons which make no sense and what not. So without further adieu, here’s the top 5 things that really suck about the new-look iOS.
New Icons
Apple had a huge chance here to update those static icons to help show some added information — much like live tiles on Windows Phone. Whilst the calendar still shows you the correct date, and even the clock app displays the right time — I’m not seeing anything else. That’s not even the biggest issue with the icons, as it seems like Apple were trying to design this operating system for people with the mental age of a 3 year old. I’m not even sure why Game Center is just a load of colourful blobs, but apparently it has something to do with gaming — and Settings? Don’t even get me started on settings. It looks more like a lopsided Mercedes logo than a set of gears.
Control Center
There’s all kinds of wrong with Control Center, it seems that Apple ran out of places to put functions so instead of hiding them away in Settings causing a minor inconvenience to people, they decided to design an ugly panel that you pull up from the bottom. It’s okay though, you get a torch, time and calculator all included! But seriously, this looks like some child has done some finger painting and Jony Ive didn’t want to just put it up on the fridge, but include it in iOS’ very own fridge, obviously with this frosted glass effect over it first though — wouldn’t want to get too good of a view on that finger painting.
App Controls
The Verge pointed out that the icon styles “vary from app to app”, and quite frankly, I can agree with their view that this makes the OS utterly confusing. I mean I couldn’t believe that the box in the middle of Safari’s controls was actually a sharing button — in fact, why do we even need a sharing button that prominent on the controls?
No uniform design
Apple seems to have gone a little wishy washy when it comes to design, with many apps using one design theme, whilst others a completely different one. For instance, Camera looks entirely different to photos. Why is the whole new design using a lot of white and the camera is suddenly using black? In fact, in this case it would have been better to use the old camera app style, because the new one is the least appealing camera app I’ve seen.
Maps
This hasn’t really changed since iOS6, it’s still the very same Maps — there’s unfortunately been no big update, oh except that it’s coming to OSX (yay?). Whilst Maps still looks great, it doesn’t match the might of either Google Maps or even Nokia Drive. Sorry, but until you make Maps better, I don’t want it on my home screen, or even Mac for that matter.