Never understood the fixation on primary colors and so forth in and around children’s hospitals. We’re putting you in this giant, intermittently noisy machine with a cage enclosing your head; please focus on these colors, which adults apparently interpret as whimsical, and not your impending existential doom. As always, thanks for being scanned by Pepsi™ presents CAT scans [menacing clown laugh].
The Ugly: I think any rational person would agree that Safari, Notes, and Maps all have pretty terrible icons in this regime. Safari is just astoundingly bad. Anything else would be preferable. And at least the little idiotic wooden newsstand showed me some (albeit tiny) tidbits of information. Let’s replace that minor utility with white space. Huzzah!
The Bad: Settings is change for change’s sake and, again, not a change for the better. Photos makes no sense in the abstract, other than as an additional abstraction of the previously nonsensical flower icon.
Flattening does no favors to Phone, Messages, Videos, iTunes Store, App Store, Mail, and Music. The gradients on the latter five are, uh, poor choices to my eye. People’s animus against (boredom with?) gloss seems to have metastasized into these flat gradients. Hope you’re happy with that. Camera now inexplicably looks like an SLR of some kind. The essential nature of the thing is far closer to the current icon, Jony. Which looked like an iPhone camera.
The Good: I guess Calendar is pretty good. Weather does the job. Passbook also looks like the work of a modern master in comparison to the rest of this lot. Clock is essentially unchanged and Compass looks fine.
But, hey, at least we got rid of leather, felt, and stitching. Right? After all, Game Center is now a totally sensible collection of randomly colored blobs of various sizes. Where else would you visually decide to click for your Game Centering needs? Big usability and interpretability win there. Right?
All the semi-transparency in the demos did nothing to allay that old sinking feeling. Officially worried the unwinding is upon us.
MacStories: iOS 7 Confirmed: New Banners Up at Moscone West
Not like you didn’t know it was coming, but still. That’s a mighty fine lookin’ 7.
I give it a 9. (Also, what’s the grill-like pattern on the bottom? Mac Pro?)
My guess would be that’s Grille™ brand grille. Like in the vents of your iPhone. And it will be the new linen. Heard it here first.
If you’re going to have a software-created “bottom layer” to your interface, it should be true to the device. This would, er, make it so.
It’s a self-eating watermelon of despair.
As we move into the connected age and build a quantified society, Facebook’s dark shadow looms over us like a menacing monster.
Obama is still trying to win over the Serious People, by showing that he’s willing to do what they consider Serious — which just about always means sticking it to the poor and the middle class. The idea is that they will finally drop the false equivalence, and admit that he’s reasonable while the GOP is mean-spirited and crazy.
But it won’t happen. Watch the Washington Post editorial page over the next few days. I hereby predict that it will damn Obama with faint praise, saying that while it’s a small step in the right direction, of course it’s inadequate — and anyway, Obama is to blame for Republican intransigence, because he could make them accept a Grand Bargain that includes major revenue increases if only he would show Leadership ™.
Matt Yglesias asks:
There’s no mystery as to why the National Republican Campaign Committee hates Nancy Pelosi, but their dislike for San Francisco is a bit puzzling.
Almost directly, and seemingly without realizing it, Matt Yglesias also provides the answer:
[San Francisco is] an enormous economic success story. The San Francisco metropolitan area has the fourth-highest median household income in the country, with its Bay Area partner San Jose coming in at number three. Metro San Francisco is in a tie for having the third-highest-pay for low-wage workers, its fourth in median wages, and third in 90th percentile wages.
GOP orthodoxy requires “government” of any kind to be an abject and self-evident failure. Few citizens of the US would dispute the sense that San Francisco is the liberal bastion of the United States. Therefore it must be an urban hellhole and not be visited by any kind of success. Where success exists, it must be ignored. Similarly, old Taxachusetts must be forever suffering under the yoke of ludicrously high taxes (and one must never acknowledge the reality: that MA’s effective tax rates and collective tax burden generally trend lower than those of old Live Free or Die itself, that glibertarian heaven called New Hampshire).
Much like the Post Office and many other examples, any functioning example of government, large or small, must be (at a minimum) denigrated. If possible, it must also be actively undermined such that it may then be pointed to as an example of the impossibility of government intervention, large or small. All evidence to the contrary must be marginalized. And that is why the GOP “hates” San Francisco and largely assumes it to be barely survivable smoking ruin.
I hope you don’t have friends who recommend Ayn Rand to you. The fiction of Ayn Rand is as low as you can get re fiction. I hope you picked it up off the floor of the subway and threw it in the nearest garbage pail. She makes Mickey Spillane look like Dostoevsky.
I was disappointed when Speaker Gingrich ultimately decided against [forming a Santorum/Gingrich Unity ticket in the GOP primary], because it could have changed the outcome of the primary, and more importantly, it could have changed the outcome of the general election.
I’m starting to worry a bit about Gmail, which is at the core of pretty much my entire life. I know, I know — Gmail is safe. The data it feeds into the Google mainframe is extremely valuable to the search giant. They won’t let anything happen to it.
You should be worried and they will, inevitably, let “anything” happen to it. While Reader had far fewer aggregate users than GMail has, think of what the underlying dataset was. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions of savvy users collecting the the feeds they were interested in and then ladle on top what they actually read out of that list. Back in the old days, it was also what they starred and shared with friends. But that’s not allowed anymore, hasn’t been for a long time now…so, uh, there went that little nugget of highly actionable advertising information right down the toilet.
Many of the biggest sites around still garner huge fractions of their incoming hits from Reader feeds, and this is a product that has (at best) been ignored and (at worst) progressively disabled by a parent company ever sure that Reader’s just not “social” enough and therefore not anything people would ever be interested in. This, of course, after they killed the social functions in Reader. Nothing at all worth seeing in there for a massive advertising company, what with all the hits and all. Outgoing hits, don’t you know. One should expect to stay at Google. Kinda like AOL. You know, the early 90’s and the high excitement of “portal” sites. Which were pretty great, I think we’ll all agree. “You’ve got GMail!” is really something they should look into with the doodle. Get somebody’s 10% time assigned to that, Grace.
But the fact is, Google saw nothing worthwhile in that Reader data, or they wouldn’t be killing Reader. Yes, I understand that they think all that hot, linking action will automagically move into Google+, where no one is, and that the same massive group of nobodies will laboriously (and mostly manually) create the equivalent feed(s), one entry at a time, and just go back to enjoying all that great Google+ product when they’re not doing so. But, you know, manually. And in front their pals who also aren’t using the service.
So it should be pretty plain that the moment some corporate bozo decides that GMail is the problem with Google+ (or whatever the idiotic corporate bozo windmill Google is tilting at come the day), GMail will end. And no amount of “but I paid for more space!” will save your email, Ezra. This too shall pass.
So enjoy the grand convenience of being advertised to based on your emails while it lasts. Quite frankly: I love it too. Were it legal, I might marry it. Again, for the first time. And but also buy the biggest hard drive you can afford every couple of years and back up all your Google data to it. Because all of it will go away. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon. And for a long time.
Lemkin 