I'd be happy if they stopped trying to be fancy and just covered usability basics like supporting the browser back button. I can't even count the number of times I've hit back on an event screen expecting to get to my calendar view and left the calendar site entirely. Yes, there's a fancy JavaScript button that works that I could take ten times longer to trigger, but that's not good practice to force users to use your internal JS only navigation solution.
1. The post is referring to a new Android app, not the web UI.
2. The situation you're talking about has existed since... well, it's been there for the last 3 years I've been using Google Calendar. I, too, would like a working back button, but the web UI is effectively set in stone.
You've blown my mind. I feel like I was hitting the back button from an event detail and landing on the New Tab page very recently. Thanks for pointing it out.
Agreed. I'd really like to just be able to look at part of two consecutive months at the same time. Seems silly to have the same visualization constraints as a real calendar that crossing from the 31st of current month to 12th of next month means going back and forth a few times.
Love google calendar for the cloud, sharing and ability to email myself custom reminders but the UI on the web is pretty minimal. I tried a couple different calendar apps and found fantastical by flexbits.com to have the best UI/functionality for me on iPhone.
I have my custom view set to 3 weeks - but the same principle - it shows me from today (or rather, the Monday of the week that today is part of) through to Monday 3 weeks away. It cares not a jot for where I am within the month. Setting the custom view to any other numbers of weeks will doubtless provide the same 'sliding x-week window' view.
I loved the "meaningful animation"[1] for location pin after you create an event. At first I thought Material Design is a lot of buzz words with not much innovation but when I read the docs I realized they put a lot of thoughts behind it.
Their assists animation looks interesting, but I will wait to judge until I can actually try it. The Apple calendar looks great, but feels really clunky to add and edit events. (Especially on a Mac!)
For pure usability, I haven't found a calendar program that beats MS Outlook running on Windows.
Can you elaborate on what you mean by "clunky"? I haven't noticed any issues adding or editing events, in either OS X or iOS's Calendar apps.
Also note that Yosemite added event suggestions when adding new events to the OS X Calendar app (but I don't believe iOS added anything like that for the iOS app). I haven't had a chance to experiment with it yet (since I primarily do event entry in iOS), but it looks pretty straightforward.
Consistent choreography. Do: Direct user attention with coordinated, orderly motion. Don't: Don’t confuse users with inconsistent or disorderly motion and objects leaving/entering in seemingly random directions.
This seems like a strange hard rule to follow. The disorganized demo has a very different "feel" to it that might be appropriate in some places more than others.
From my viewing, the "feel" is chaos. Why are they all moving different directions? Does it mean anything?
Watching the Don't video legitimately hurt my brain; the only way an app can justify that kind of choreography is if disorientation is an intended part of the emotional experience.
The "Don't" video looks like billiards balls on a break, which might be the feel certain apps are going for, particularly games. It doesn't make sense for a productivity tool like Calendar, obviously.
It's also just a guideline, a suggestion, and if you think your app would benefit from having items fly in and out in all directions, if that's the feel you want to give your users, that's your choice. It's just probably not the right choice in most cases.
Adding events from emails is nice, but I'd love to be able to add an event from taking a picture of a poster or a flyer. I see ads for concerts, rallies, art exhibits, and so on whenever I'm walking around town or visiting the local library. I'd love to just snap a picture and have the details uploaded to my calendar.
But this requires every poster creator to add an ugly QR code. Plus, QR codes just take you to a website and then you have to add info to your calendar manually. Bonus points if they support .ics but that's rare.
I wrote my senior thesis on a calendar assistant that achieves much of the functionality mentioned here (recommending times/places, auto updates, etc) and lost so much motivation just to the sheer amount of integration between parties/services required to solve this problem.
There has been a lot of work in the academic space on optimizing calendar/email functions but its challenging to implement across so many email providers/clients. I'm glad Google is taking a step in this direction, I'm not confident many startups would be able to solve this problem effectively.
I won't lie, I'm starting to become a google fanboy again thanks to the beautiful google material design experience. Hats off to the team behind this new calendar app.
It's interesting how, as Apple's design sensibility gets more and more questionable with the recent changes to iOS and OSX, google appears to be finally paying due respect to good design and really putting the work in. And it's paying off, big time.
> Apple's design sensibility gets more and more questionable
What do you mean by this? With iOS 7, there was a big outcry, because they changed the aesthetics of the OS pretty significantly, but that was a one-time event (and also highly subjective). But this is the first time I've heard anyone imply that Apple is trending towards having worse design. If anything, with the removal of skeuomorphism, Apple's design is more consistent than ever.
> google appears to be finally paying due respect to good design and really putting the work in.
My impression upon watching the video was that it looks very much like a 3rd-party iOS app. I am glad to see Google putting effort into their design. Although I don't agree with all of their choices (for example, I think the "Schedule View" image really is kind of awful, because it adds a lot of visual clutter and inconsistency, making it harder to scan the information quickly).
I'll come out and say it. With iOS 7, Apple took a step backward and started letting others lead. Microsoft debuted late in the game with an also-ran platform, and suddenly everyone had a flat boxy design. Meanwhile Apple had lost Steve Jobs and fired Scott Forstall, the two people who were pro skeumorphism and would have never allowed Apple to go down that path.
A lot of people liked the skeumorphic designs. It made the technology feel polished, beautiful and natural. Not to mention textures work way better than transparent colors when you're watching, say, a video with a white background so you can't even see the controls. Oh and hey, try swiping up from the bottom in the Camera app - Whoops!
And what's with the puke neon green for status bars during phonecalls that you can hardly read white text on? What's with the complete breakage of the browser UI with a subsequent "minimal-ui" apology all of which is then reverted back in iOS 8?
For that matter, sending group messages in apps is still horribly broken since iOS 7. And iOS 8.1 was a disaster and was recalled quickly.
Yeah, Apple's design changed, and not for the better.
> With iOS 7, Apple took a step backward and started letting others lead.
What do you mean by that? iOS 7 saw the introduction of a new design, with new design language, created entirely by Apple rather than mimicking other companies. Superficially it may appear more similar to other companies because of the loss of skeuomorphism, but once you look past the fact that it's flatter than before, it's still quite distinct from Microsoft and Google and everyone else. So given all that, what does "letting others lead" mean?
> suddenly everyone had a flat boxy design
Apple's design is flatter than before, but it's not flat. If anything, the blur and parallax create an even deeper design than it was when it was skeuomorphic. Microsoft is definitely going with the very flat design. Google's new design language I haven't looked at very much, but I think it's safe to say it's relatively flat as well, though probably not as flat as Microsoft.
> Meanwhile Apple had lost Steve Jobs and fired Scott Forstall, the two people who were pro skeumorphism and would have never allowed Apple to go down that path
I find it rather distasteful to invoke the memory of Steve to try and make a point like this. Did you know Steve personally? I doubt it. Similarly, I doubt you can predict what he would have done. Steve was rather (in)famous for his ability to change his mind and do things he'd previously said would never happen. Without Forestall, I think it's quite possible that Jony could have convinced Steve to go with the new design.
As for Forestall, yes, he would have never let this happen. But that's usually considered to be a point against Forestall, not a point for him. The Mac / iOS dev community, and the wider tech press, generally had the opinion that Apple kept going with skeuomorphism for much longer than they should have, and that it was Forestall's fault, and that the ousting of Forestall was a change for the good. So I find it quite odd to see you implying that Forestall's ousting was a bad move.
> A lot of people liked the skeumorphic designs.
Who are these people? Serious question here.
Skeuomorphism is generally considered a good thing to have when introducing new interaction metaphors. It allows people to recognize the widget and instinctively know how to manipulate it. See a button? Push it. A slider? Slide it. Etc. But skeuomorphism is also considered to hold back design and be visually clunky and distracting once users have learned to feel natural with the interaction. This can be seen time and time again in the evolution of GUI platforms. Take for example Mac OS X. The original OS X was full of skeuomorphic touches, such as the very blobby shadowed buttons. And successive versions of OS X slowly kept reducing it, removing the visual distractions, removing the excess skeuomorphism. It was a slow evolution, but if you go back and look at screenshots of OS X 10.0, and try to imagine a new platform introducing that look today, it should be obvious that it would be widely ridiculed.
The iPhone introduced a brand new interaction metaphor to the general population. Yes, the technology existed before, but almost exclusively stylus-based, mimicking desktop OS interaction, and only used by a fraction of the population. The iPhone was, almost everyone, their first experience with handheld touchscreen devices (and many of those hadn't used stylus-based devices either). Beyond the novelty of actually touching the screen, Apple also had to come up with new gesture-based interactions that they had to teach users. In this context, skeuomorphism is very useful. It makes it obvious to users what can be tapped or dragged or swiped. But as the years went by, and as every other smartphone manufacturer immediately started copying Apple, the skeuomorphism became a hindrance. People didn't need the visual affordance to tell what was a tappable button anymore, or to understand that the colored navigation bar at the top was a distinct UI element from the content below it. Skeuomorphism outlasted its utility, and thus, once the last holdout (Forestall) was gone, it was excised from the OS.
You can certainly argue they went to far in some cases. For example, the navigation bar buttons lost their borders and just became text. Was that a mistake? Well, that's a highly subjective question. But from a usability perspective, it certainly seems like it wasn't, since everyone has already learned that content on the left and right edges of the navigation bar is tappable.
> Not to mention textures work way better than transparent colors when you're watching, say, a video with a white background so you can't even see the controls.
What are you talking about? The OS-provided video controls are displayed on top of a neutral grey background (with blur). This is easily readable no matter the video content. The only video player that comes to mind that might have this issue is the YouTube app, which uses custom controls (which has no relation to the OS design).
> Oh and hey, try swiping up from the bottom in the Camera app - Whoops!
Whoops? What whoops? It behaves exactly like I thought it would; the little arrow control shows up indicating that a second swipe will pull up Control Center. That's exactly what I expected to happen, since the Camera app hides the status bar. And in the Camera Roll it brings up Control Center with a single swipe, since the status bar is visible there.
What are you seeing that elicited the "whoops"?
> And what's with the puke neon green for status bars during phonecalls that you can hardly read white text on?
I hope you aren't seeing "puke green", because if so you might need your eyes checked. As for reading text, that's fairly hyperbolic. White text isn't as readable as it is on a black background, but it's still quite readable. I just tried it out, and the text was just as readable on that green background as it is across most of the OS. Besides, what are you actually trying to read on it? The only text on it besides the status bar is "Touch to return to call".
> What's with the complete breakage of the browser UI with a subsequent "minimal-ui" apology all of which is then reverted back in iOS 8?
I have no idea what you're referring to here. Can you elaborate?
> For that matter, sending group messages in apps is still horribly broken since iOS 7.
I don't know what you're talking about here either. It works fine for me and everyone I know (and we use group messages a lot).
> And iOS 8.1 was a disaster and was recalled quickly.
What are you talking about? Perhaps you're referring to 8.0.1, which was replaced a day later by 8.0.2? The issue with 8.0.1 has not even the slightest shred of relation to design.
What do you mean by that? iOS 7 saw the introduction of a new design, with new design language, created entirely by Apple rather than mimicking other companies.
Apple has always had a distinctive style and design language. It had to do with aesthetically pleasing skeumorphic appearance. Look at most of the articles written after iOS 7 came out, people were horrified. Don't get me wrong, iOS 7 was still progress, but despite the design, not because of it. It had things like the new control center, more WebOS-like app switching, etc.
Apple's design is flatter than before, but it's not _flat_. If anything, the blur and parallax create an even deeper design than it was when it was skeuomorphic.
People had to get used to the blur and parallax, because they had no choice. Some people got vertigo and seizures from all the movement, so Apple had to tone it down a bit (but not get rid of it).
And if all you can say is that apple's design is flat but not AS flat as Google, which isn't as flat as Microsoft ... that's not saying a lot. I think iOS 7 was Apple's Vista. Look at the exodus to Android when it came out.
Minor point: You can find tons of articles hating the new icons. Many people thought the white background of Safari was a placeholder icon. Nope.
I find it rather distasteful to invoke the memory of Steve to try and make a point like this. Did you know Steve personally? I doubt it. Similarly, I doubt you can predict what he would have done.
I've watched a lot of Steve Jobs videos - interviews and documentaries and back-and-forths from when he came back to Apple, and I'm going off of what he explicitly said and valued. I think I'm being pretty true to what he explicitly said and pushed for.
Steve Jobs used to praise when things on screen looked "familiar", and famously called the new iOS buttons "lickable".
People didn't need the visual affordance to tell what was a tappable button anymore, or to understand that the colored navigation bar at the top was a distinct UI element from the content below it. Skeuomorphism outlasted its utility, and thus, once the last holdout (Forestall) was gone, it was excised from the OS.
No, Forstall was gone because Tim Cook fired him, after Steve Jobs passed away. Tim Cook explained that he did this to increase collaboration after Steve Jobs. Note that Steve did NOT fire Forstall and replace him with Jony Ive even after Forstall had messed up royally after being placed in charge of Maps (to be fair, Maps was almost impossible to pull off in time, and Forstall took the blame).
I think there were two iPhone fiascos under Steve, one was the battery and the other was Maps. Compare with the number of fiascos now (iOS 8.1 anyone?) ... my company makes an app called Groups, and iOS 7 broke group messaging for EVERY app on iOS and Apple just flat-out never fixed it. It's STILL BROKEN. Yes, the iOS lies to the apps and says the message is sent, but sometimes it just doesn't send it. What is that? I would have emailed sjobs@apple.com and he would have had it fixed in the next version.
What are you talking about? The OS-provided video controls are displayed on top of a neutral grey background (with blur).
In the camera app, it appears that I could swipe up to reveal the control center with the flashlight. But instead, it just takes a photo!
Oh yeah while I'm on the camera app, remember how in iOS 7 Apple just decided to make a non-obvious control that you had to SWIPE instead of tapping? That took a while to figure out. Also Apple decided to replace the beautiful-looking option-selectors with a "3d fisheye" version that made it hard to see anything and couldn't fit as many items anymore. etc. etc. The new design decisions were hardly consistent, and seemed to be done "just because it's cool to do translucency".
As for reading text, that's fairly hyperbolic. White text isn't as readable as it is on a black background, but it's still quite readable.
after:
http://i.stack.imgur.com/bPcm8.png ... what genius signed off on making the status bar show white text on light neon green during a call? compare the readability to the previous.
I have no idea what you're referring to here. Can you elaborate?
Apple broke a lot of mobile websites and lots of web designers gave it zero love after iOS 7. They had just figured out how to make their apps go fullscreen with scrollTo(0, 1) that worked across iOS and Android. And then Apple ruined it all, touting how their interface "gets out of the way" when it fact it would pop in whenever a person tried to, say, touch a button on the bottom or top of the screen, making the person do a double-take and have to tap AGAIN.
Then they kind of conceded by adding "minimal-ui" to the HTML which would make the UI disappear. But then in iOS 8 they took it away again, and went back to something like iOS 6. No consistent direction, just experimenting and apologizing. That's not what Apple was before.
Oh and in iOS 8, they broke file uploading... so yeah, you can't even upload photos anymore.
What are you talking about? Perhaps you're referring to 8.0.1, which was replaced a day later by 8.0.2? The issue with 8.0.1 has not even the slightest shred of relation to design.
Right, but it speaks to how the company now pushes things out, and what processes are in place to assure quality and consistency through the whole development process.
> Look at most of the articles written after iOS 7 came out, people were horrified.
Some people were horrified. It's a gross exaggeration to say most people were horrified. I think the tech press in general tended towards the "horrified" angle because the tech press loves to magnify any seeming flaw in what Apple is doing. It makes for good page views. But the tech press is not the same thing as Apple's customer base. And like any sweeping design change, some people love it, some people hate it, most people are probably pretty indifferent but will tend to lean towards criticizing anything new for the sake of it being new (and then very quickly getting used to it and completely forgetting they pooh-poohed it to begin with).
> People had to get used to the blur and parallax, because they had no choice.
What does that mean? Every design choice in a product "forces" people to get used to it. This statement is pretty meaningless, except in that you're trying to imply that people had to be forced to use the new design, which is as stupid as it is untrue.
> Some people got vertigo and seizures from all the movement, so Apple had to tone it down a bit
Apple had the switch to tone it down from the beginning. All they "had to do" was slightly increase the effect of the switch. But the fact that you're criticizing Apple for providing a switch to reduce motion effects is ridiculous. That would be like criticizing them for providing the "Increase Contrast" option, which incidentally is right next to the "Reduce Motion" option under Accessibility settings. Except it's commonly accepted that people have vision problems and benefit from accessibility options geared towards them (side note: Apple is famous for the rich accessibility support they provide in both iOS and OS X), the only thing different here is that having an accessibility option for people with vertigo has not previously been something that anybody ever thought about.
> And if all you can say is that apple's design is flat but not AS flat as Google [...]
That's not all I can say. It's completely incorrect for you to make that assertion, and it suggests that you are not arguing in good faith.
> I think iOS 7 was Apple's Vista. Look at the exodus to Android when it came out.
Wild hyperbole is not an effective arguing tactic. Nobody would ever seriously consider iOS 7 to be equivalent to what is widely considered one of the highest-profile tech flops ever, especially given that iOS 7 reached a staggering 87% adoption rate after less than 7 months[1]. And there was no exodus to Android, I don't even know where you got that idea from and I highly suspect you made it up on the spot.
> Minor point: You can find tons of articles hating the new icons. Many people thought the white background of Safari was a placeholder icon. Nope.
You can find tons of articles hating every new design that's ever been produced for anything popular. People dislike change in general, and the press in particular find that articles critical of popular new things become popular articles. This is one of the reasons why the tech press tries to magnify every possible perceived issue as much as they can.
And again with the "many people". Some people thought that. Or actually, I seem to recall seeing one person suggest that, which was quickly forgotten. That was not a generally-accepted possibility.
> [...] I'm going off of what he explicitly said and valued. I think I'm being pretty true to what he explicitly said and pushed for
Absolute bullshit. I already told you that trying to invoke Steve's ghost was distasteful, and now you're doubling down. As I already said, he was quite infamous for his ability to change his mind and directly contradict previous claims he'd made, and he did so quite regularly. You cannot possibly think to speak for him. The fact that you're continuing to do so is rather repulsive.
> yadda yadda yadda more claims about group messaging being broken with zero evidence, and a laughably absurd claim about being able to email sjobs@apple.com and having it be fixed immediately
...
> In the camera app, it appears that I could swipe up to reveal the control center with the flashlight. But instead, it just takes a photo!
No it doesn't. It takes a photo if you tap the photo button. But if you're putting your finger down on the photo button then that's already too high to display Control Center. Trying to claim it's taking a photo means you are blaming the OS for your own complete incompetence in the act of swiping up from the bottom of the display. Everybody else seems to have figured out that you start with your finger off the bottom of the screen and swipe upwards and onto the screen. But I guess you thought trying to make up completely invalid "bugs" in iOS for internet arguments was a better idea.
> links to pictures for the in-call status bar
That picture is wrong. The color shown there is wildly off. Measuring the picture, the color it's showing apparently doesn't even display in sRGB, but the closest I can get is #21EF00. The actual color of the status bar as measured from the iOS Simulator (running 7.1, since that's the earliest sim that works with current tools) is #44DB5E. And I'm pretty sure this is a fault with the image, not a difference between iOS 7.0 and 7.1, because not only have I never seen such a neon green ever show up on my iPhone before, but the Facebook blue color is also wrong.
So yeah, if you go by images found on the internet that have their colors messed up, then you can make all sorts of incorrect claims about the usability of the OS!
> Apple broke a lot of mobile websites and lots of web designers gave it zero love after iOS 7. They had just figured out how to make their apps go fullscreen with scrollTo(0, 1) that worked across iOS and Android. And then Apple ruined it all, touting how their interface "gets out of the way" when it fact it would pop in whenever a person tried to, say, touch a button on the bottom or top of the screen, making the person do a double-take and have to tap AGAIN.
I'm having a hard time believing that you're serious with this. Apple made MobileSafari significantly easier to use. It moves the chrome out of the way while still retaining full usability. From a usability perspective, it's so nice to use it almost feels like magic. I was genuinely gleeful when I realized that even though the bottom bar was hidden, tapping on the bottom edge of the the screen brought it back so I could use the controls on it.
The fact that some web designers had their ugly stupid workarounds broken is kind of a good thing. Websites that deliberately attempt to hide the browser chrome are a bad thing. It breaks usability, since the browser chrome is no longer predictable.
> [...] minimal-ui [...]
That was added in 7.1. And I don't think I ever actually saw it get used. It was presumably removed in iOS 8 either because of changes to the behavior of Safari's chrome that made it not usable, or because it didn't do the job right, or because Apple wanted to make the browser chrome even more consistent, or maybe some other reason entirely. I don't know. But the fact that I never actually saw it in the wild is suggestive that it really doesn't matter that it was removed. This is not the first time Apple has added something in one OS version and removed it in another. And it surely won't be the last.
> Oh and in iOS 8, they broke file uploading... so yeah, you can't even upload photos anymore.
Funny, I just uploaded an image to imgur.com just fine on my iOS 8 device: http://imgur.com/CRZ4dCU
> Right, but it speaks to how the company now pushes things out, and what processes are in place to assure quality and consistency through the whole development process.
No it doesn't. It only speaks to how people like you leap to conclusions based on a complete lack of any evidence whatsoever as to what went wrong and what, if anything, it indicates about their processes.
Some people were horrified. It's a gross exaggeration to say most people were horrified.
Most articles at the time were negative. If you take issue with this, then I'd like to know what design changes you can EVER say about that most people didn't like the change, but were forced to put up with it and eventually forgot about it.
What does that mean? Every design choice in a product "forces" people to get used to it. This statement is pretty meaningless, except in that you're trying to imply that people had to be forced to use the new design, which is as stupid as it is untrue.
It's not meaningless. Given a choice, people might have stuck with iOS 6, but eventually upgraded to iOS 7 for other reasons than design (e.g. new functionality, apps requiring it, having Apple nag them, inability to downgrade after a while). That is relevant when talking about design being more or less liked.
But the fact that you're criticizing Apple for providing a switch to reduce motion effects is ridiculous.
Now you're being disingenuous. I didn't criticize Apple for PROVIDING the switch, but rather for replacing the interactions with a 3d zooming paradigm that introduced the vertigo. It was a minor point, however.
That's not all I can say. It's completely incorrect for you to make that assertion, and it suggests that you are not arguing in good faith.
I'm pretty sure I am saying exactly what I think. As are you, and you appear to be quite the Apple fanboy. (Disclosure: I develop for and own many versions of iPhones.)
Wild hyperbole is not an effective arguing tactic. Nobody would ever seriously consider iOS 7 to be equivalent to what is widely considered one of the highest-profile tech flops ever, especially given that iOS 7 reached a staggering 87% adoption rate after less than 7 months
Yes it is true that Apple's whole ecosystem and platform has always excelled at making people upgrade -- even as it junks their existing laptops / iphones / ipods making them run slower with every OS version, people wind up caving and updating.
I should clarify to avoid pedantic misunderstanding: I am talking about Vista also introducing interface "innovations" in the form of Aero, and people not going for it.
You pretend like there weren't lots of people saying stuff like this, until it died down:
Absolute bullshit. I already told you that trying to invoke Steve's ghost was distasteful, and now you're doubling down. As I already said, he was quite infamous for his ability to change his mind and directly contradict previous claims he'd made, and he did so quite regularly. You cannot possibly think to speak for him. The fact that you're continuing to do so is rather repulsive.
What part of it is bullshit? So apparently I'm not supposed to discuss what views Karl Marx explicitly expressed or mention things he publicly extolled because I'd be invoking his ghost?
Apparently when a person dies their publicly stated views shouldn't be mentioned because it's distasteful? Or is it just too soon? I'm pretty sure Steve Jobs would want people to know what he said.
As for him changing his mind, that's you completely overstating the case in order to downplay the relevance his actual stated views. Nowhere did he express with words or actions that skeumorphism should be replaced with this stuff. That's like saying that mentioning Steve Jobs' position on two-button mice is distasteful and irrelevant because hey, he might have changed his mind later about it. And linking to articles which quote him is invoking his ghost? Come on now.
In a broader sense, are you lashing out at anyone suggesting that Apple's design direction changed after Steve Jobs passed away?
Look, YOU CAN FIND TODAY a growing consensus that Google's mobile app design is now superior to Apple's, in the last couple years. This is really sad to see, considering Apple was always a leader in interface design and Google was very utilitarian. Yet it's true, more and more people are finding Google's apps today more beautiful and consistent than Apple's.
No it doesn't. It takes a photo if you tap the photo button. But if you're putting your finger down on the photo button then that's already too high to display Control Center. Trying to claim it's taking a photo means you are blaming the OS for your own complete incompetence in the act of swiping up from the bottom of the display.
I just took out my iPhone and did it again just to make sure. I still have iOS 7 on my phone. Bring up the Camera app. Start with your finger BELOW the screen. Move it up. Yes, the drawer appears showing that you can swipe up a second time, but by that time WHOOPS a photo has already been taken!
Perhaps instead of insulting me you can try it for yourself. And after you do, come back and tell everyone what you saw.
That picture is wrong. The color shown there is wildly off. Measuring the picture, the color it's showing apparently doesn't even display in sRGB, but the closest I can get is #21EF00.
I had several iPhones and I have seen it for myself. Neon green. Are ALL these images wrong?
That was added in 7.1. And I don't think I ever actually saw it get used. It was presumably removed in iOS 8 either because of changes to the behavior of Safari's chrome that made it not usable, or because it didn't do the job right, or because Apple wanted to make the browser chrome even more consistent, or maybe some other reason entirely. I don't know. But the fact that I never actually saw it in the wild is suggestive that it really doesn't matter that it was removed. This is not the first time Apple has added something in one OS version and removed it in another. And it surely won't be the last.
I don't know how much you participate in web developer forums or Q&A sites but check on stackoverflow how many web developers have had gripes with iOS 7's redesign.
People were very happy that minimal-ui came out (see articles online) and from what I see here you're actually praising Apple for:
1) Taking the predictable iOS 6 browser and making the chrome hide as you scroll + hijacking clicks on the bottom of the screen to make it appear again
2) Introducing minimal-ui to address the many complaints from web developers
3) Deprecating minimal-ui in iOS 8 and bringing back the "predictable" iOS 6 UI
OK, if going back and forth is what you consider so great, what can I say.
Funny, I just uploaded an image to imgur.com just fine on my iOS 8 device: http://imgur.com/CRZ4dCU*
No it doesn't. It only speaks to how people like you leap to conclusions based on a complete lack of any evidence whatsoever as to what went wrong and what, if anything, it indicates about their processes.*
> yadda yadda yadda more claims about group messaging being broken with zero evidence,
DUDE I am a web developer and my company develops mobile apps. We took a lot of heat from our users because the iOS broke SMS messaging in EVERY app on the system, and hasn't fixed it to this day. Since iOS 7, the system LIES to the apps and says a message was sent, and there is NO WAY to determine that it wasn't. Users think it's our app until they realize that EVERY app has the same problem. And Apple hasn't ever fixed it until iOS 8.
Well, for people don't like iOS7/8 and who are still forced to use it (either due to inability to downgrade or due to app restrictions like "ios7 or higher") they will hate this "design" more and more every day. At least I do :) .
It may be the case for some of the Google apps but the lack of coherent design in many many many of the Play Store apps leaves a lot to be desired, and almost tarnishes the platform a bit.
This is a common problem that plagues every modern windowing environment. In my own experience, OSX suffers from this the least, but even there, inconsistencies between apps are pretty common.
Many complaints only some of which come to mind immediately. Presence/status -- can't set it. Will I annoy this other person if I send a message? In busy hangouts requires that I scrollback to new messages, having to remember the last message I read. Can't search. One pile of people, big mistake -- no opt-out of this. Can't segregate people into different attention classes. (Just because I have 1000 people in a g+ circle doesn't mean i want them all to be able to freely message me, or even see my status). These are all UX issues. [Android client. Never looked at the iOS client]
Is it really true that you can't set your status/presence in it STILL? I only ask because I have been on Google Talk since Vic Gundotra announced the new Hangouts at Google IO 2013 with much fanfare, yet failed to mention that this basic feature was missing.
It's so elementary in an IM application - even MSN Messenger had it!
I don't think it's 'missing', it's more like they opted out of having it.
Hangouts is going towards integration with SMS and is supposed to work the same way (i.e. you send a message to someone regardless of their status).
Whether this is a good thing or not, I don't know. But it sort of makes sense in a way. IM seems to be the only form of online messaging where you decide whether to message/call someone based on their status. If you call someone, you have no idea if they are available or not, same with SMS or email.
I also often see the case where a user will perpetually set himself to 'Away' or 'Busy' as he 'never' wants to be messaged, defeating the whole purpose of a messaging service in the first place.
In the sense that it's annoying a lot of Android users, it certainly is paying off.
What the current Android leadership simply don't understand is that there were a lot of Android users that bought Android devices because they didn't like iOS, not because they couldn't afford it. iOS 7 caused a critical mass of my iPhone using network to want to switch to Android, and now with Lollipop the reverse is happening, since if people wanted the iOS experience they might as well get the real thing.
Design fascism works when you're in a niche, but will never be mass market. Windows Phone is similarly lauded in design circles but mysteriously fails to sell, and this is why. The crowds praising all these "improvements" are the sort of people that actually thought Windows Mobile was not only tolerable, but a good idea.
My gut is Google think this is the only way to get iOS users to switch, and they aren't too concerned about existing users, but the side effect of this is that all of the major smartphone OSs have reached the same level of out-of-touch ness that we had prior to the original iPhone coming along.
> My gut is Google think this is the only way to get iOS users to switch
Huh? I've been an Android user since the days of the Moto Droid, and I really like the design direction they're taking. It's clean, it's not full of crappy, drastic gradients and obscene amounts of clutter. Some of the menus/lists are organized better now, which I greatly appreciate. The Music app is actually bearable now. The Gmail app is better than ever for my usage cases.
The only thing that annoys me is the new Message app removing the ability to swipe convos off when you are "done" with them. But that's a small little annoyance to get all of the other goodies.
I'm sure there are others that hate it, but it's not like everyone does. I'm more satisfied with my phone now than I've ever been.
> In the sense that it's annoying a lot of Android users, it certainly is paying off.
Do you have any data to back this up? From what I can tell, a majority of Lollipop reviews trend positive.
> there were a lot of Android users that bought Android devices because they didn't like iOS
Again, is this your presumption or do you have any source to back this up?
> iOS 7 caused a critical mass of my iPhone using network to want to switch to Android, and now with Lollipop the reverse is happening
A critical mass of my Android using network welcome and love the refreshing new look. Does that prove anything though? No, because my network doesn't include ~1 billion other Android users [1].
Design is a pretty subjective field, and what appeals to you doesn't necessarily appeal to others. You never really know what the majority camp is without an extensive study. What really gets me is when people start projecting their opinions as facts.
What exactly don't you like about the new design direction? You mentioned people wanting to switch because of Lollipop/material/"design facism", but I'm not sure why.
Almost everything. The colours, the flatness, the overreliance on animation to reveal cues that have been hidden by removing too many of the useful aspects of colours and depth.
Material design is a company led attempt to create a fad a la Metro. They'll keep trying for about 18 months before they create a new one where it's back to bevels again. Just don't expect any of the non-Google apps to follow it, in the same way that all previous efforts went wrong.
Incidentally the number of U-turns by Google on this stuff is incredible. We were previously told explicitly not to attempt doing physical analogues of motion etc. as those didn't map to the app navigation model . . . but now that's exactly what they want.
What really grates though is just how the developer experience for all this stuff seems to be going backwards.
Calendars on mobile phones are a hard design problem. We're used to large calendars the size of well... a wall calendar. Try making that 3" wide and you can't show all the days and information and you either (1) make things too small (GS4 Cal app) or (2) make it a swipe fest. This is probably the reason they didn't address the design previously.
It's not like it's not a widely addressed problem - look at FantastiCal and other calendar apps - lots of very cool design ideas to deal with the limited space.
My employer (German) just banned all Google products (except search) for work-related things, due to privacy issues. Reading Google's latest terms-and-conditions, this move is somewhat understandable, given the strong privacy laws that German companies and institutions have to follow.
On the other hand, I guess that scanning a large amount of emails is the precise thing that allows them to offer robust email-to-event conversion. But I wish that this sort of thing would work locally (on the cellphone or computer in question), not on a remote server somewhere.
It will be interesting to see if in years to come we'll look at Germany's policy as overly cautious and a net loss or extraordinarily prescient.
I'm genuinely on the fence on this one. I'm rather cavalier on privacy issues (at least where they affect my own person) and quite happy with the goodies I receive in return. However I sometimes wonder how I'll feel with the benefit of hindsight.
I meet quite a few people talking about moving their tech infrastructure away from US controlled cloud services. I may live in a bubble, but it would be interesting to see some data on intentions in EU companies about this.
Not just in the EU - I hear this a lot in Canada too. My use of their services was even considered a red flag on a recent consulting gig.
Another odd case I ran into is parents trying to prevent their children getting into the Google ecosystem until they're mid-teen level. This is manifesting in resistance to their education stuff being adopted by schools.
I used to think that it was important to protect data from being stored in the US .... until the NSA leaks and the realisation that Canada is a Five Eyes member rendered it effectively moot. Now I'm simply more worried about theft or spying by non-government third-parties -- the security in place rather than the laws that apply to the service provider. But that's just me.
What a terrible advert. I couldn't focus on the features being demoed because they were on screen so fleetingly and the background scenes were so distracting.
They're trying to imitate Apple's adverts but completely blow it by showing overcomplicated interactions.
It seems I do not really have to hope my vendor will provide an Android update for my phone, as Google distributes most cool new stuff using the app ecosystem. As with Inbox, I think Google is finally generating sufficient pressure on developers and businesses to use meta-data for their mails and websites. I appreciate that. If their text parser for stuff like locations and times works for non-english texts, I'll be a super happy user!
The flip-side to this is that the Android versions of these apps aren't getting anymore love. Messages is now Hangouts, Browser is now Chrome, Calender is now GCal. I heard that the Gmail app is going to start allowing Yahoo email accounts too. Android is much more locked down than it once was.
Not sure if this applies, but I got the web version of Inbox about 2 days after I installed the Inbox app on my phone. Ideally they'll release the web version soon after as well.
I second this. I cannot wait for the day where I don't second guess myself whether I want to put an event in my company's MSExchange calendar, or google calendar because I don't know if I will see it if saved to the latter.
The web-based version is way too outdated. Given Inbox was written using the newest GWT, and I assume Calendar is using an older version, maybe it won't be such a big deal to refresh that, too.
It shocks me that the default calendar for android does not interoperate with any calendar server except gmail's (unless you can shoe-horn events in with a separate caldav app.)
The Gmail Web Calendar has many good features I agree.
But, the Android Calendar would be much better if it would work with other calendar servers besides Gmail. If google called the Android Calendar the Gmail Calendar App, it would be more appropriate. But, this current default android calendar app doesn't use the CalDav protocol and only works with the gmail calendar. This is very peculiar behavior and not what I'd expect from google.
I've got a number of .ical calendars added to the web interface, and all of them both appear on my phone, and get updated without me going to the web interface. I'm not sure if my device retrieves them, or whether google's servers do it for me (probably the latter). It would be handy to have a full calendar app though.
I watched the video twice and I still can't figure out what the changes are about because I kept getting distracted by all the stuff happening in the background.
Even after I purposely tried to focus on the device UI, I couldn't process all of it in any coherent way. Please don't make promo videos that leave me with no sense of the product you are trying to demo.
So first we have a new Gmail app, and now a new Google Calendar app. What's the roadmap here?
Is Google going to roll out new versions of their other apps? Do they plan to maintain both apps in parallel, and for how long? Is this just an experiment or do they plan to convert all users to the new apps eventually?
Are you referring to inbox? Or the Gmail app redesign?
All the Android and Web apps are being updated at the moment for Material Design, with the higher priority being on the Android ones it seems to get them ready in time for the imminent 5.0 launch. They're just updating the app for everyone (the new ones are backwards compatible with less flashy animations). Inbox is a separate app though.
Putting aside the fact that GWT 3.0 is about to come out... neither Gmail nor Google Calendar even use GWT. Like the overwhelming majority of Google's real-world web apps, they're primarily based on Closure Tools. GWT is only used in a handful of places these days, the most significant being Google Maps (assuming they didn't remove that during the last rewrite).
Despite being famously "backed by Google", I'm not sure about how many real-world Google properties actually use Angular yet. Most actual Google web apps still very much revolve around a technology stack from 5 years ago. Do as I say, not as I do...
Regardless, what does the JavaScript library for their web apps have to do with their native mobile apps?
The new Calendar uses the same architecture as Inbox, read into that what you will.
Google Sheets uses GWT in much the same way as Inbox.
Then there's AdWords, Google Shopping Expression, Flights, Hotels, Android Play Console, Google Wallet, Google Groups, and a bunch of new apps coming up.
There are 3,000 engineers internally using GWT, and we record 150,000 monthly active unique users hitting our SDK update servers. Last time I checked, about 20,000 unique domains use GWT.
Apple (iAds Workspace), Amazon (AWS Console), Nike, etc use GWT.
Google Maps has never used GWT, although there were internal prototypes.
As to what this has to do with native mobile apps, it has a lot.
We have built separate Hybrid apps. Hybrid not in the sense of PhoneGap, but in the sense that we mix native code and cross-compiled Java together.
Inbox has a core set of client side (non-UI) logic representing about 70% of the code base. This is written in Java.
GWT is used to cross-compile this code into a library for the Web, it is type-annotated with JsDoc, and then the remaining UI code is done with Closure. This gives us cross-language type-checking and optimization (Closure will flag as error if JS->Java or Java->JS calls are wrong)
j2objc is used to cross-compile the shared code into Objective-C for iOS. The remaining portion (UI critical code) is done with traditional XCode toolchain.
For GWT Users who are interested, I am giving a deeper presentation on GMail's Inbox architecture at this year's GWT.create conference (http://gwtcreate.com/).
I'm a little worried that this is introducing a new vector for spam. I have already been getting spam through invites (where they get auto-added to my calendar even before I have a chance to see what they are).
Frankly, I want my calendar to be a private calendar. I don't want to share it, or receive invites through it, or auto-add events just because I got an email. I'm still happy to have the sync capability, because I use a smartphone, but aside from that I really have no use cases which require my calendar to be online at all.
Admittedly, this may just be a case where Google's interests are not aligned with my own. If so, are there (real, viable) alternatives?
I wanted a private calendar without sharing/invites too, so I ended up building my own (do not recommend unless you have a lot of time on your hands!).
No spam, no ads, you own your data. Feel free to email me if you have any questions about it.
I've been using and (for the most part) promoting Android ever since the G1... but after 2.x the rate of UI change has, in my opinion, been terrible from a usability experience.
Pretty much all software (whether that's apps, websites, programming languages, or anything else) past a certain complexity has quirks. Getting used to the quirks is part of learning the software.
Massively changing large swathes of your built-in software is bad for users! I get that it'd be suicide to say "OK, permanent feature freeze... now," but big changes to the UI on apps that are (to many normal users) fundamental to using Android break the user's understanding of their use, often amounting to months of acclimation down the drain.
I too have been using Android since the G1 (I still have it for testing on!) and I would agree that the introduction of new paradigms/ways of interacting with apps (seemingly introduced every I/O every year) is frustrating.
The hamburger menu is in fashion. Then it isn't. Swiping from the left is, then it isn't. All of the examples in their design spec of how NOT to do things was precisely what they did on 2.x.
I know you have to be seen to be "innovating" for attention-deficit new phone buyers, but living in a world of constantly shifting sands just means it's hard to see from all the dust blowing around in your face.
I don't see it the same way - Android's been behind the other smartphone operating systems in UI quality, and has had to iterate quickly in 2.x, 4.x and 5 in order to catch up. As they reach a point where Android has as good or better user interface as the competition (I think they're close to that now), the rate of change will most likely slow down.
Whilst true to some extent, it isn't as new as we think. Window Mobile has been around for a very very long time and Palm OS preceded it with usable Palm Pilot devices.
Although it's not obvious, I guess popularity as a lot to do with ergonomics and usability and their evolution so something will only continue to be pushed forward if there's enough people to actually use it. I don't know, I'm just thinking out loud why something which has been on the market for such a long time only recently has seen such a crazy amount of innovation.
Given that it is now more than 2 years since Gmail cards were released for Google Now, and there's still no sign of them arriving for Apps accounts... I'd say no.
Is there any 3rd party product that can sync gmail with apple's calendar?
I have google phone/Chromebook, and my wife - iPhone/OSX. So I haven't really looked, but we were thinking of starting to use more and more the calender to sync up with things we need to do.
I don't think you need any 3rd party products. I use an iPhone, an Android phone for work and use a Macbook Pro and my main calendar is my Gmail Google calendar which syncs among all 3 devices without any 3rd party software. I guess you may just need to know how to set it up on iOS and Mac products.
personnally i can't stand calendar views that do not show empty stretches of time - it is important info to me if i DON'T have anything coming up in the next two hours.
i can see this at a glance in classic calendars. i cannot in this agenda/stream view.
Good grief, they sure are desperate to turn their most useful apps into activity streams. The day I have to scroll past an ad to check an appointment is the day I stop using Calendar.
Not sure why this is downvoted. I would like to see Google to support Windows Store. Offering the best possible cross-platform support ist definately not evil.
