WWDC 2013

What a great keynote! Some very, very good things and some strange ones.

Lots of people way more interesting than me have written even more interesting things on yesterday’s keynote, and while I’m too lazy to sum them up or link them all, I suggest you go read some. Go to your usual places, they’re all good.

Instead of writing a lengthy piece which will surely go awry along with my writing, let’s jump right in with my gut feelings from right after the show. More authentic, barebones.

OS X Mavericks

I’m truly excited for this year’s release. OS X is already highly polished and it’s got great features.

The recent years have seen a lot of iOS features coming back to the Mac, and looking back I’ve used none of them: Launchpad, fullscreen apps, Notification Center, Mission Control, etc. They are not part of my workflow, and I’ve been blissfully ignoring them as I went along.

This year, however, I’m eager to get my hands on the new features: Finder tabs, tags, Safari, iCloud Keychain, better notifications, the advanced technologies like Compressed memory, OpenGL 4, etc. Those are features that will make my life easier.

On a side note, it was great see Craig Federighi this enthusiastic about a new OS X release. The guy’s really come a long way from a couple years back: remember his stage fright, stuttering and sweatiness? Well, no more: confident and good looking Federighi is the man!

iWork for iCloud

I’ll say it right away: I have absolutely no use for this. I haven’t used iWork in years, even though it’s a great suite of apps. Keynote is certainly the best presentation app around, for Mac or not.

However, I have to admit that this new iWork for iCloud, running in a browser, seems like quite a feat. We’ll see how it fares in the real world as Apple isn’t renowned for its web services.

Side note: Firefox and Opera haven’t been mentioned once. Sad.

MacBook Air

Better, faster, less expensive: what more to ask for?

Battery life. From 5 and 7 hours to 9 and 12 hours for the 11-inch and 13-inch respectively. Quite a feat.

So the higher-end MacBook Air now outlasts the iPad! Remember those ultrabooks with 2 hours of battery life, at most? Well, long gone they are. No wonder Intel is cutting down the investment on this flawed category of bygone technology. MacBooks are where the future’s at.

Mac Pro

I love my Mac mini. It isn’t the most extensible thing, that I’ll admit. But it’s a horsepower-packing little beast the size of a typical desktop’s hard drive bay.

The Mac Pro is the mini’s younger, bigger brother. Very small and tight form factor yet incredibly fast and powerful. It’s truly ballsy to come up with this Mac Pro after last decade’s disaster, the Apple Cube.

But I think Apple now has the engineering power to come up with this and make it work.

iOS 7

I have mixed feelings on this one. It’s great to see Apple having the balls to try and come up with these kinds of changes. But I fear Apple has gone a tad overboard on this one.

There are lots of great features, most of them under the works:

• automatic app updates
• smarter multitasking, intelligent fetch, new multitasking tray
• Control Center
• AirDrop
• UI paradigm where context is king
• one-handed operations are much easier

Unfortunately, for each good thing there seems to be three bad ones.

Those icons, man, those icons…

I think it’s the primary source of iOS 7 backlash: I don’t see Apple not changing them before final release. But, heck, I tweeted yesterday that I couldn’t see Apple going with such fuckin- ugly icons, and yet it did.

They are flat yet using over-the-top gradients and tacky, Fisher Price-y colors. The Safari and Settings icons are probably the worst offenders; Mail’s gradient just clashes with the rest; Camera seems unpolished; Clock has true black so it looks horrendous on a black background; Photos and Game Center, just what the fuck?

No, seriously, they are bad. They should have gone with the style of Facebook, Google+, Hangouts, Camera Noir, Cardiio, Thingslist among others…

I’m concerned with the corner radius. Apple had made something truly iconic and everyone recognize the shape of an App store icon instantly. With this new bigger, rounder border radius, half a decade’s worth of brand recognition is just lost. Not good.

Helvetica Neue Light

Yes, Helvetica is a great font. Millions love it, and I for one am among its admirers.

But no, don’t use Helvetica Neue Light all over the place. You see — you know that already — I’m desperately blind. I grew up with a computer since age 3 and I’ve been staring at crappy displays for that long. My sight is just shittingly bad, and even though I wear glasses I have to zoom in constantly. When I browse the web, I find myself zooming in more than I scroll! That’s how bad it is.

Right now, on iOS 7, when I hold my iPhone (it has a retina display for the curious) at reasonable distance, I can read neither the labels of the apps, nor the current time, nor the current battery level, nor the date on the Calendar icon, nor… I think you see the point. I just can’t read things on my iPhone, where labels just were bold and all the night before. Very frustrating.

Most of the buttons have foregone their border and have gone plain text, with various colors. Is this a button? or a label? I just can’t tell unless I tap.

Something stranger even, even though there’s white everywhere, the font is light, the borders and gradients and shadows have disappeared, iOS 7 actually looks and feels way more cramped than iOS 6. Labels and icons are way too close to each other, and I feel uneasy and claustrophobic. Not a great sign.

Black and white

Okay, so white is the new black. Everything is black on white. Err, thin and black on white. How less legible can Apple make it? Add blur behind. Yes, that’s a great choice.

To be honest, I like the blur: it puts things into context, and I find it important. But 1px black icons on a light, blurred background make the things ridiculously hard to tell apart and read.

In the Settings app, even though it’s not strictly black and white, the icons have gone monochrome: I cannot tell them apart and I have to actually stop, read the labels and think about each. Not great either.

Animations

New UI apparently meant new animations. Gone are the days of the horizontally scrolling stack of views, now they fade in and out. Apps launching from the Homescreen are fading and growing in from their starting position. Weird, but okay I’ll adapt.

Three new animations I absolutely despise even though I’ve only been using iOS 7 for three hours are:

• when the Hold button is pressed, there’s a fade-in or fade-out animation playing, depending on the state of the phone: fade out when it’s unlocked, fade in when it’s locked. As usual, when locking the phone, there’s a slight, unnerving delay but we got around it, and despite the delay the phone locked pretty much instantly. Now, there’s a very unnecessary animation; more importantly, this animation actually prevents me to wake my device right after I locked it. This weird gesture I do daily allows me to quickly see the time and date, or the song playing currently. Now I can’t. And it’s even more so irritating.

• in Control Center, the new sliding panel that allows for quick access to services, the switches to enable or disable WiFi, Bluetooth and all, play a little animation with a label showing up right on top to spell out the action I’ve just triggered. Yikes. Okay for the label, whatever, I’ll adapt. But does it need to play for an eternally long second? And queue the next label change for it to play for a second too? Quickly toggle the radio services and you’ll see the label get quickly out of sync and struggling to match pace. Very weird, very bad looking. Very amateur.

• when I unlock my iPhone, the Homescreen icons are flying in from close to my face to their final position. That’s neat and all, and a great thing to see the first time I launch iOS 7, but I do not need to see that excruciatingly long animation every goddamn time I unlock my device.

Conclusion

iOS 7 has gone way overboard: too flat, too tacky, less comprehensive, too cramped, too bright…

I just don’t like the new UI, even though I want to love it.

The UX — as in the gestures, the way things work, not look — is an improvement too.

The features are what makes iOS 7 a keeper in the hand. But the pill is very hard to swallow for iPhone lovers around the world. People say that uninformed iOS users (your dad, my mom, our cousins) are liking the change: we’ll see if liking is enough to switch, or more importantly not to switch back to Android.

I won’t, but now my phone just looks like the UI of Android that I despise so much.