hahahahah shitty things people celebrate these days.

It also marked the downfall of UI design at Apple, when they let an industrial designer with no knowledge of the field create a new design language for iOS and macOS.

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Written by Scott Forstall

UIs have specific needs. They not only should look nice, but also be practical. For example, macOS now hides scrollbars by default. It makes the screen look nicer, but I've made a lot of mistakes by not recognizing that a certain view was scrollable, so I was missing content I didn’t know existed.

Ive has no idea about this. He went straight to nicely looking designs with no regards to practicalities. He also got rid of UI control borders, making them blur together with the background. This is an accessibility nightmare.

They added accessibility options to bring back both scrollbars and control borders, but they made the UI look like garbage, because they just didn’t care.

I, for one, like my Notes app to not be some skeumorphic legal pad. :P

Jony wasn't perfect (his hardware decisions were atrocious, reducing the ports on MacBook Pros was a crime against humanity), but Apple's UI design matured and looked decidedly less toy-like and more professional. Even as someone who geeks out over the Material Design docs, Apple's UI suite is still marvelous today (and I say that with the macOS 13 System Preferences revamp, too).

Damn it, Scott.

Rip. Good lad

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Good news everyone!

Forstall had nothing to do with iPadOS 16, and that’s a buggy mess that doesn’t even render the home page correctly.

Cook may have viewed Maps as the final act for Forstall, but years later others continue to fail and the only message is ‘we think you’re gonna love it’.

I think it was more Cook signing the apology letter and not him over Maps. Let’s face it, Maps sucked and it was so bad that I rarely use it knowing they improved it. A huge misstep.

He probably wishes he signed the letter.

I’m sure he’s still using bills from that $100 million dollar net worth to wipe his tears. 😂

It did not prevent Apple from becoming first trillion dollar company. As a matter of fact, it my have helped.

This was an interesting little deep-dive into something I didn't know about. Very interesting indeed.

Who?

it was one of the downfalls.

Mac OS Panther with all the metal windows, jellybean buttons, etc. was all done without Jony's help.

The thing to bring scrollbars back isn't even under accessibility. It's in the general setting as you need it if you don't use a mouse with two-way scroll wheel.

And some Apple apps don't completely work right if you turn them on.

Yeah, Apple Maps is quite good now and it feels weird. I still use Google Maps more often on Macs though, mostly out of habit.

I use Waze. I feel the traffic and 5-0 reports are on point.

True, but maps apps are not just for navigation.

I don't love all skeumorphic design, but having spent over a decade doing UX testing on various interfaces at a university, using gradients and other visual effects to mimic real-world elements can be vastly superior to flat design. This is especially true for new or non-savvy users (which includes a shitton of college students, despite many people believing otherwise).

I remember very clearly testing interfaces of various iPhone apps (and iOS, and even some MS products) after Ives made his "Skeumorphism is dead!" proclamation, and it was sad how users struggled with usability -- particularly of buttons -- because "I didn't know I could click there." Fortunately there was some backpedaling involved.

> He went straight to nicely looking designs with no regards to practicalities.

It was really clear that nobody at Apple at the time was doing any UX testing with real-world users.

Now this is fascinating. Do you still do UX testing, or are those days long gone?

We were looking for “install”, “install”.

Flat design is stupid cause of the button thing.