That ship has sailed a long time ago. Pull-to-refresh, that-slide-out-navigation-from-the-left, fan-out-navigation, parallax scrolling, all are now common iOS UI tropes that originated nowhere near Apple.
Personally I hate that back button - it's huge, but that's a pretty minor gripe in the grand scheme of things. This UI is clean, functional, and its functionality is intuitive. Pretty decent win, all things considered.
Not to mention at the very core it doesn't stray very far from Apple's guidelines - it's very clearly built around the standard navigation stack, uses segmented buttons for radio choices, puts large oversized buttons towards the bottom of a flow for completion, defaults finishing actions to the right side of the screen, uses a minimally styled version of UIActionSheet...
I'm struggling to find anything here that hasn't been seen in a hojillion other iOS apps, or even functionally different than the "standard" iOS flow. But all I see is a fairly minimal, tasteful skin over the default elements.
All that you listed relates to _interaction_ rather than _appearance_, and they saw wide adoption, because they are well thought out, innovative and inherently consistent with the iOS experience.
Gradiented button set in allcaps Proxima Nova is not. It's exactly what you said - a skin, and skinning a single app is a sure way to make it stick out as a sore thumb.
I have never been able to used to the back button or the bluish-gray top nav bar Apple insists on using. If I ever spend time thinking about it, I feel like puking, no exaggeration.
But my dislike for the bar is offset by rest of the device.
But has it? The most common apps that I see people interact with are Facebook, WhatsApp & variations thereof and Apple's own apps, and they all look a lot "more native", i.e. like UIKit with very superficial appearance tweaking. (Even though FB seems to use a custom nav bar, the swipe-to-go-back gesture of iOS6 is broken).
I wish we had public app usage data... I really suspect that the average iOS screen looks a lot more old-fashioned than the average HN front-page app does.
Comments
That ship has sailed a long time ago. Pull-to-refresh, that-slide-out-navigation-from-the-left, fan-out-navigation, parallax scrolling, all are now common iOS UI tropes that originated nowhere near Apple.
Personally I hate that back button - it's huge, but that's a pretty minor gripe in the grand scheme of things. This UI is clean, functional, and its functionality is intuitive. Pretty decent win, all things considered.
Not to mention at the very core it doesn't stray very far from Apple's guidelines - it's very clearly built around the standard navigation stack, uses segmented buttons for radio choices, puts large oversized buttons towards the bottom of a flow for completion, defaults finishing actions to the right side of the screen, uses a minimally styled version of UIActionSheet...
I'm struggling to find anything here that hasn't been seen in a hojillion other iOS apps, or even functionally different than the "standard" iOS flow. But all I see is a fairly minimal, tasteful skin over the default elements.
All that you listed relates to _interaction_ rather than _appearance_, and they saw wide adoption, because they are well thought out, innovative and inherently consistent with the iOS experience.
Gradiented button set in allcaps Proxima Nova is not. It's exactly what you said - a skin, and skinning a single app is a sure way to make it stick out as a sore thumb.
I hate that back button
I have never been able to used to the back button or the bluish-gray top nav bar Apple insists on using. If I ever spend time thinking about it, I feel like puking, no exaggeration.
But my dislike for the bar is offset by rest of the device.
> That ship has sailed a long time ago.
But has it? The most common apps that I see people interact with are Facebook, WhatsApp & variations thereof and Apple's own apps, and they all look a lot "more native", i.e. like UIKit with very superficial appearance tweaking. (Even though FB seems to use a custom nav bar, the swipe-to-go-back gesture of iOS6 is broken).
I wish we had public app usage data... I really suspect that the average iOS screen looks a lot more old-fashioned than the average HN front-page app does.