By now I’ve read a ton of reviews about {i;mac;iPad;vision;watch}OS, how people love it and others hate it. I spent hours with it while friends and family haven’t even heard of it. Now, that it’s released for a few days I wanted to note down my thoughts on this in a broader way.
Why they did this
With all the positive and negative feedback on the internet, I always wished to know some of the designers working on Liquid Glass to ask all the important questions:
When it comes to smartphone screen sizes, there’s no frontier model with a screen smaller than 6". Most of them have at least a 6,3" screen. Long are the times gone that devices are controllable with one hand - especially for folks with small hands. When Apple introduced their iPhone Mini 12 and a year later the iPhone Mini 13 they were on the right track: they hit a niche with a high demand. Now, that the iPhone (17) Air has been released, people once again gather together to show their wish for smaller (i)Phones1. It’s this time of a year that I think a lot about why this group is simply ignored.
Since the introduction of widgets on iOS, the Stocks widget is one of the few widgets I use1. I like it to see how the market reacts without opening the Stocks app. When you click the widget you open the associated app. For the 2x2 Stocks widget this not only opens the Stocks app, but also immediately loads the detail view for the list item you clicked. Since forever, I miss the option to prevent this when clicking on the widget and only to open the Stocks app. This takes me always one more click to dismiss the detail view when I just want to get a general feeling on what’s happening.
This week this Reddit post about the time picker inside the iPhones alarm app made the round. It was posted on HN and some old StackOverflow questions like this and this were linked. I didn’t know that the time picker is just a long list. I find it funny, but I can fully understand why one would decide to implement it like this. The overall effort feels so much lower compared to the complexity of the circular logic and is also less error-prone.