I'm a fan of clean design, which is most definitely not flat.
The trouble is UI and UX stopped being anything about productivity and became simply empty fashion.
iOS 6 was an excess of 3D shine and starburst effects, and skeuomorphism excess like news looking like a set of library or newsagent shelves. Mitigate some of that and the UI would have been lovely. And finished.
Since iOS 7 the excess flatness detracts from usability and discoverability. I still feel the camera icon looks annoying wrong and bland, as do settings, photos, calendar, passbook, compass, safari. Games and Passbook are determinedly unrepresentative of anything at all, just random blobs of colour conveying nothing at all.
Still, on the plus side MacOS and iOS have not followed through with the excess of bland extreme flatness that is Windows 10. That still seems to want to push the propaganda of a phone GUI on the desktop that started in 8. Several years of regular use and I still hate it at every touch. Even adding every tweak I can find to make it more like 7 and it's still a significant step back from 7, and two headed in typically Windows fashion in that settings are partly in apps partly in old control panel. Usually control panel is required for basics that for some reason aren't felt necessary to allow configuration of any more. Never a complete transition from one to other.
After all this progress? I find the app based settings worse in every respect, and perfectly typifies the ethos. Fixing a ton of things that were not, in any respect, broken. I guess they knew that or they'd have continued to permit theming. :)
Replaced by. Completely different app. Newsstand was really a wrapper around the App Store, in that every "magazine" you could buy or subscribe to were in fact actual iOS apps, which were only visible within Newsstand, and they each provided their own way of reading a digital copy (usually just PDF version of the print version) if the magazine. The News app has none of that.
The trouble is UI and UX stopped being anything about productivity and became simply empty fashion.
iOS 6 was an excess of 3D shine and starburst effects, and skeuomorphism excess like news looking like a set of library or newsagent shelves. Mitigate some of that and the UI would have been lovely. And finished.
Since iOS 7 the excess flatness detracts from usability and discoverability. I still feel the camera icon looks annoying wrong and bland, as do settings, photos, calendar, passbook, compass, safari. Games and Passbook are determinedly unrepresentative of anything at all, just random blobs of colour conveying nothing at all.
Still, on the plus side MacOS and iOS have not followed through with the excess of bland extreme flatness that is Windows 10. That still seems to want to push the propaganda of a phone GUI on the desktop that started in 8. Several years of regular use and I still hate it at every touch. Even adding every tweak I can find to make it more like 7 and it's still a significant step back from 7, and two headed in typically Windows fashion in that settings are partly in apps partly in old control panel. Usually control panel is required for basics that for some reason aren't felt necessary to allow configuration of any more. Never a complete transition from one to other.
After all this progress? I find the app based settings worse in every respect, and perfectly typifies the ethos. Fixing a ton of things that were not, in any respect, broken. I guess they knew that or they'd have continued to permit theming. :)