Responding to the same ‘Samsung out-innovating Apple’ piece I wrote about earlier, John Gruber at Daring Fireball talks about the iOS app launch grid:

The utter simplicity of the iOS home screen is Apple’s innovation. It’s the simplest, most obvious “system” ever designed. It is a false and foolish but widespread misconception that “innovation” goes only in the direction of additional complexity.

This is a viewpoint I’ve long shared and continue to argue in favour of. The problem is that the tech press lives in its own little bubble, and often those commenting on articles (and therefore shoring up viewpoints) are also those heavily into tech, tweaking and customisation. The reality is most people either cannot do such things or really don’t care about doing so. Most people just want to get on with performing tasks.

The question with iOS and its perceived limitations is whether it stops people from doing this. Some pundits have said the iOS lock screen should be massively overhauled, to add a slew of widgets, providing immediate access to information from diverse sources. Clearly, that’s something that works for some people, but it’s also a confusing, unfocussed mess for others. I look at my parents, new to touchscreen devices, battling iOS. If they were bombarded with crap the second they turned on their devices, said devices would soon end up in a drawer, never to be used again. But because they get a clean grid of icons and can focus on a single task, they’re getting into using these devices, and exploring the app ecosystem.

Even from my own perspective, I’m becoming an advocate of simplicity over complexity. I used to weld countless add-ons to my Mac, but I’ve in recent years stripped them back to only include add-ons that I cannot do without, because removing them would make me significantly less productive. I’m not sure how a more complex launch environment on iOS would make me any more productive. At-a-glance tiles can barely show any information anyway, and if they were showing something that’s ‘cropped’, I’d be more likely to open an app and become distracted. By contrast, when I open Tweetbot on iOS, it’s because I want to spend some time on Twitter, and the configurable Notification Center can take care of flinging an alert in my face for anything that’s especially important and/or time-sensitive.

Note that I’m not arguing that Apple’s got it ‘right’ and Android and others have got it ‘wrong’. But, like Gruber, I am arguing that taking a default stance that increased complexity is always a boon for computing is a bafflingly wrong standpoint that should cause any writer to take pause and reconsider.

Via The Loop, a nice post by Louie Mantia on skeuomorphism. I’ve written in the past about Apple’s heavy use of textures on iOS, defending such decisions and also highlighting what can happen when the other extreme (over the top minimalism) is instead used.

Mantia rightly notes that a lot of what people are complaining about as ‘skeuomorphism’ is in fact simply custom textures integrated with standard interface design, because something skeuomorphic is supposed to have a connection with an older/familiar way of doing things. Therefore, a direct translation of some music hardware—knobs and all—to the iPad is clearly skeuomorphic. Find My Friends, with its leather stitching, is not, because you never used to use your leather stitched ‘thing’ to find your friends. Unless you were a serious weirdo in a leather suit, often getting arrested on ‘scaring the shit out of people’ charges.

However, the part of Mantia’s post that really struck with me was this:

More importantly, a visually distinctive app such as Game Center, Find My Friends, Podcasts, or iBooks helps you to remember which app you’re in. The colors, textures, and environment paint that picture instantly.

As I’ve said in the past, I find it strange people now see Jony Ive’s shift to looking after all of Apple’s human interface as an indication that future software will be as minimal as the hardware. If that is the case, either they don’t understand Ive or—more worryingly—Ive doesn’t understand good software design. I don’t have a problem with Apple perhaps toning down some of its excesses, but to remove every texture and all the fun from its software and head towards Office 2013-style minimalism would be the wrong decision.

There’s certainly nothing wrong with somewhat minimal design when it’s the best decision for the app in question (such as Letterpress), but as a default it would make it difficult for people to immediately know what application they are in. On OS X, people have complained enough about Apple removing colour from Finder, and removing textures entirely from iOS would be rather similar. Also, the point of iOS hardware is that it is a blank canvas—it’s designed to get out of the way and enable the device to become the application or game that is running. But in making apps extremely minimal, Apple would be in danger of painting shades of white on its blank canvas, which won’t excite anyone and would even cause minimalist advocates to rapidly start griping that iOS was now boring and less usable.

Every day, the world edges closer to becoming an episode of The Day Today, with a news cycle that is beyond satire. Today, The Register reports:

Russian Orthodox Christians have defaced the logos on Apple products because they consider the bitten Apple to be anti-Christian, says Russian news agency Interfax.

The radical Christians have replaced the Apple logo with a cross, claiming that the current Apple logo – well-known around the world and often voted one of the world’s most popular logos – symbolises the original sin of Adam and Eve and is generally insulting to the Christian faith.

The Register adds a new law is currently barrelling its way through the Russian Parliament to clamp down on religious insults, and there is speculation that

there could be commercial impact, even a sales ban, if Apple fell on the wrong side of the law.

But how would Apple fall on the wrong side of the law? In a sane world, this would be an argument about intent and not speculation, and as Apple logo designer Rob Janoff once told me in an interview:

The religious myths are just that […] there’s no ‘Eve and Garden of Eden’ and ‘bite from the fruit of knowledge’ symbolism!

Unfortunately, this no longer appears to be a sane world (if it ever was).

The Next Web reports for Instagram that times are a-changing. There are essentially two kinds of app in Instagram’s ‘add a pretty filter’ space:

• Highly entertaining apps that evoke old-school instant camera charm by live-applying a filter, so you can see what you’re going to get. This is Instagram today.
• Hum-drum apps where you take a photo in a normal, boring way and then spend several days arsing about with countless filters, before more or less choosing one at random, because the alternative is starving to death with a smartphone in your hand, which would be really dumb. This is Instagram tomorrow.

The m0st astonishing aspect of this story comes from Instagram itself, via the known issues site.

As of the current release (v3.1), Instagram does not support live filters on the iPhone 5. Going forward, live filters will be phased out as we work to improve the Instagram experience for all users.

That last sentence is very important and warrants breaking up into chunks:

as we work to improve the Instagram experience

What? How are you improving the Instagram experience by removing something that is core to the Instagram experience?

for all users.

Oh. So Instagram’s boarded the lowest-common denominator train. Next stop: Shitappsville.

UPDATE: Ha! So, on Twitter the response has been split between “Instagram are idiots” and “I never even knew live filters existed”, so perhaps this is also a case of Instagram stamping on a tricky engineering problem related to a feature not used by enough people for them to think it matters. (That said, Android users have responded, grumbling that they’d really like live filters.) Regardless, it’s still a pity to see an app that’s like a ton of point-and-clicks in your pocket get downgraded to one of a billion apply-a-filter-later apps welded to a social network.

One of the things that currently annoys a lot of people about Apple is the way in which it constantly builds apps that resemble real-world items. iBooks has a background that resembles an open book, and Apple’s calendaring apps have leather stitching and torn paper at the top. In some cases, such design merely irks designers who like the minimalism Apple showcases in its hardware; occasionally, though, usability suffers. For example, the iBooks background never changes, and so while you can instinctively look at a real book and see how much is left to go, iBooks doesn’t help in this way; worse, Address Book for OS X apes a real book and ends up a total mess that’s far slower to work with than its predecessor.

Of late, a lot of people have been pointing to Microsoft as the superior company when it comes to interface design, citing the mostly very smart Windows 7 and Windows 8. The problem is, not all interface design scales, and when you go very minimal, interfaces can lose any sense of tactility and make it hard to focus. Peter Bright of Ars Technica’s shot of Office 2013 highlights that the opposite of Apple’s current design aesthetic isn’t necessarily any better. Acres of white space lead the eye to flick all over the design, making it hard to focus on the content (which is the smallish box on the right, with “This is an inline reply” in it). It’s unclear which components are buttons and which are content areas. Worse, there’s no sense of warmth at all. This feels like an email client designed to appeal to people bereft of emotion. In short, it’s every bit as horrible as Apple’s worst UI design, just in a very different way.