It frustrates me that the iPhone's UI is stuck firmly in what can effectively be considered the smartphone's past. The UI was revolutionary at first, but that was years ago. Now it's archaic and limiting. I understand Apple's reasons for disallowing UI change, as it is a support nightmare, but I do wish they would allow some kind of opt-in system where you could enable UI replacements, without being forced to jailbreak your phone.
Where you see archaic and limiting, the market - aka normal folks like our mom's and dad's - see a friendly and consistent platform that doesn't change ever time they see a new Droid commercial.
People need to realize Apple is a consumer electronics company now more like Sony than Microsoft.
I don't think I've failed to realize that, in fact I specifically addressed it. But that doesn't mean that Apple can't enable power users in some fashion.
Plus, a lot of the iPhone's UI now is just ugly, usability aside. The settings menu is just painful to look at, compared to the slick menus and options in Android phones.
When I had a Windows Mobile device, I found the Today screen very busy. I'm usually only interested in one or two pieces of information from the Today screen, and found the information-overload aspect of sifting through the unnecessary data distracting. How would this new design avoid that problem?
Pieces of software basically never exist in a vacuum; they're always connected to other pieces of software and hardware (compilers, processors, graphics cards, phones, OSs, libraries, web services, ...). Other pieces of software and hardware always change, and if there's no one home improving this particular piece of software, it will invariably lose pieces of functionality, one by one, as they change to be incompatible with how they were before or disappear entirely because they lost to a competitor or turned out to be a bad idea.
Users know this instinctively, which is why a website that never changes loses users quickly.
Presumably the loaf of bread you bought did everything that it was supposed to when you bought it (and without bugs, or else hopefully you'd throw it away).
Software is almost never bug-free when released, and increasingly isn't feature-complete. I don't think it's crazy to be wary of using software which isn't being actively developed. It will certainly depend on what it does, and whether or not what it doesn't do (or what bugs it has) are livable.
Yeah - that is annoying. I mean my Toaster keeps being upgraded to newer versions of tOaSt, and I require the bread to remain compatible...
...there is something different about software, evidently. I want something I use to still work if Android gets updated to version x, and a dormant app doesn't normally promote confidence that this will happen.
I see your point, but — as already more eloquently explained by ecuzzillo and monastic — dormancy does eventually lead to worthlessness.
Already people are experiencing issues with features not working properly [1], and relatively simple (but non-vital) updates to add to functionality are not being made [2].
[1] I don't get RSS updates reliably any more, essentially making the app worthless to me, considering that was the main reason I bought it.
[2] E.g. the Twitter button opens m.twitter.com, not the official Twitter app. Same goes for Google Reader.
I'd like to point out this blog post is from mid-2009.
I initially thought the screenshot was a LockInfo theme. In any case, such an app already exists, and has for quite a while. There are also plugins for RSS, Things & Appigo tasks,iOS notifications etc.It's very themeable, as well.
The only hitch? Your iOS device needs to be jailbroken, due to Apple's limitations.
The author's LockInfo home page is pretty lacking but he spends a lot of time hacking on LI and you can follow his progress via his Twitter account, @stimpy5050
It can not be stressed how much LockInfo changes the way you use your phone. It is the most I've ever paid for an app, and it is by far my favorite app.
I've always wondered if David has ever been approached by Apple to work on iPhone notifications. He deserves some recognition for delivering such an essential feature set while Apple has taken their time.
I wondered what all the fuss was about... indeed it seemed like the guy copy/pasted the Gruppled Lockinfo theme and popped some text on the page to describe it all.
Lockinfo became too much useless info for me to have open all the time. Notified Pro with Statusbar plugin is the minimalistic approach I was looking for, although not perfect as yet.
Edit/ Unsure what year the post was created. Might've been before Lockinfo.
In that small an amount of space you can basically get today's weather which I can see by looking out of the window which generally makes it a bit useless really.
Not saying that I wouldn't like a better notification screen on the iPhone - I really would - just that all weather widgets do to my mind is add a bit of graphical sugar but with no great purpose.
Or am I missing something? Does everyone else live in a bunker?
I guess you just have more faith in the data the weather app on the iPhone throws up.
I find the single day temperature / image to be too much of an average (so 12 degrees and sunny means that it's between 6 degrees and 18 degrees which basically doesn't help me for that sort of decision making).
Maybe that's just where I live and that for others it does provide useful information.
Current temp is the key one, which can vary widely throughout the day, is hard to tell by looking out the window and has the most impact on what you put on before you head out the door :)
Which would be great if it were something resembling the current temp but on all the weather apps I've seen the best you'll get is a weather forecaster's prediction (nothing actual) and the best accuracy is three hours.
Maybe that's just the UK and the US is getting something more accurate but I'm guessing not.
My Android phone's weather widget gives me the current temp, the daily high and low, and a general icon (sun, snow, freezing rain). Here in Massachusetts, it's accurate enough to be useful.
The spatial resolution on the weather data is pretty good; it distinguishes between my town and the next one over, and gives separate forecasts. The forecast is always a little different at home than at work (about 30 miles), but not too bad. Maybe it'd be a problem if I lived in the Bay Area, where the punchline of the "don't like the weather?" joke is not "wait 5 minutes" but "move 5 feet".
all i care about (in chicago) is whether it's going to rain or snow. the temperature or cloud cover don't really matter to me as much. http://goingtorain.com/
For some reason, this is one of my favorite things about my phone! I had already moved to looking at wunderground.com instead of the thermometer on my back porch any time I wanted to know the temperature, and once I got a smartphone, it became the way I always check the weather.
I live somewhere that can be prone to extreme temperatures... looking outside doesn't tell me if it's wickedly cold, fairly cold, or surprisingly comfortable. If it's snowing, I want to know how much is expected and so on.
"where it can be sunny outside, but still need to know if you need to take a jacket to lunch?" - mbreese
I never understood this till I lived in India. I understand your confusion. I do agree with you that weather widgets waste pixels and can be done in a better, more compact way.
Hardly, Scotland in the UK. The phrase four seasons in one day was, I believe, coined about the place - it's why weather apps are rubbish, it's too unpredictable.
You might gain information but you also gain 'information stress', with the current homescreen you feel the phone submits to you in letting you do what you want. With homescreens like this and the notification systems in competing platforms the phone is the one that tells you that 'you really should be looking at these other things as well, nag nag'.
This is useful for certain types of users, that lead busy lives. Therefore for professional users and business users the homescreen in the article will be an improvement because of the extra information but for the casual user and home user it will be mainly an increase in stress, I expect.
Apple doesn't put new email notifications and such on the lock screen or the status bar, and I don't think that's an oversight. It would be the equivalent to a blinking red "back to work! message* and make people hate to look at their phone.
LockInfo (http://lockinfo.ashman.com/) is the big reason I jailbreak my iPhone. Having a useful lock screen does wonders for making my phone a feel like a communication hub.
I desperately hope that Apple make the home screen (along with better notifications) the primary focus of iOS 5. I first saw this very concept a while back now, and still think it looks amazing.
I was under the impression you could get it via a jailbreak, but as I've never jailbroken my iPhone I've not looked into it.
For me these are least important and I struggle to understand why others are so obsessed with it (this does not mean that I think current implementation is the best possible, I just don't care).
The reasons: if I see a badge on a program (mail, phone or SMS) I will check it anyway, so I don't need the full info on the home screen.
For me, it's convenience. My phone is laying on the desk, I can just stretch my hand, press the home button and instantly see the overview of situation. Easily distinguishable lines (courtesy of jailbreak and LockInfo) for missed calls, SMSes, emails, calendar events. What's more, unlike the default notifications, I get a little bit more information, allowing me to see that all the mails are from Facebook and can be ignored at the moment.
I don't cary my phone with me everywhere, especially when at home, so checking up on the situation is a common task for me.
I have to ask: have you ever used a lockscreen notification app? Once you do, you'll realize the value of having all the information that you might want to see at a glance immediately on your lockscreen.
LockInfo, for instance, lets you choose the type of information to display as well as how to display it. You don't see anything you don't want to see.
Then once you use something like it, you can't go back. There are a ton of people who jailbreak just to install LockInfo. That's how good it is.
Just jailbreak.. or get an Android. DIY! Don't desperately hope that Apple will do something for you, they are purposely dumbing down their products for the sake of "User Experience".
Slightly unrelated but a really simple change I'd really love to see is the "swipe to unlock" moved to the top of the screen so it's easily answerable with one hand.
This way you don't have to crane your thumb down or juggle the phone to a higher position in your hand.
How the heck do you hold your phone? I have to stretch to hit the top of the screen with my thumb. I'm with Apple's HIG that the commonly used controls should be at the bottom.
You can, of course, get your little finger under it move the phone body up so it's easy to swipe with your thumb however that's a lot of hand movement and you need to look at what you are doing.
If you are holding the phone whilst walking you generally hold it as in the image above which is much more secure it would be nice to be able to answer it without having to shuffle the phone with your pinky.
To be honest even moving the thumb horizontally to me doesn't feel like the most natural way to move your thumb. Instead consider moving your thumb from the top left arcing across (i.e. from a 12 o'clock position to almost 3 o'clock) of course you'd need to consider lefties but it feels a lot more natural...
Where did you get that? In my search of Apple's iOS HIG, I came across the exact opposite: Think Top Down [1], where Apple states that important information should be placed at the top "where it is most visible and easy to reach."
Can we try and not make up stuff?
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The location of the slide, I guess, is to allow people to see their lock screen wallpaper. That's my stab at it, but who knows.
Given the state of useful information on home/lockscreens in competitors (Windows Phone 7, Android, WebOS), it's almost necessary for Apple to make a UI overhaul in iOS 5. I'm loathe to jailbreak (performance issues), but when I have jailbroken my phone, the lockscreen with usable info (weather, notifications) was brilliant. I don't think Apple should open up the lock/home screen to the app environment necessarily, but Apple should do something to make their devices more useful when they aren't in active use.
This is very nice, don't get me wrong, but I have to wonder if there is a good design reason that Apple didn't go this direction in the first place.
There have been several mobile devices which used the "daily agenda" format for the home screen (my old iPaq comes to mind: http://www.bestezonlinestore.com/images/T/PDA1391SL-304.jpg) and while it intrinsically seems like a good idea I wonder why they chose not to go that way?
That home screen reminds me of Android. While there's nothing wrong with that, the point of Apple products is that they're aesthetically pleasing.
The lock screen just displays your wallpaper, and is actually one of the only places you can see your wallpaper without clutter. It's clean, simple, minimalist. Adding widgets and text and shit all over it is the exact opposite of that.
And frankly, that's a big selling point for the iPhone (and apple products in general). That's actually the point.
There are indications that there won't be an update to the notification system in iOS 5 (Apple had a recent job posting that indicated they were just now looking at updating the notifications), so it's almost hard to imagine what Apple has been working on if they don't update either the homescreen or the widget system. I'm afraid this guy's work will be wasted.
I follow that design studio fairly closely, and from what I can tell, the project's been abandoned anyways. They got a developer in, but after that there wasn't much progress.
I believe there is a good chance that Apple will be improving the notification system in iOS since many months ago they hired the UI lead engineer from webOS that apparently came up with the notification system for Palm (now HP) webOS. I have used it a couple times and it was really elegant and not intrusive.
So I will expect Apple to get something fresh for iOS 5. And who knows they may show some feature of iOS at tomorrow's announcement.
My guess is that they've hired a good designer who happened to work on the notifications feature, rather than hiring some sort of "notifications" specialist.
You hire someone with a view to them working with you for years and I don't think notifications is that big a deal that you'd bring in someone specific to do it.
At least fingers crossed that's it because it would be great to see something in iOS5.
We all know Apple planed the iPhone 7 from day 1 and are simply staging it over a series of years to maximise profits.
I expect Apple will start allowing screensaver/wallpaper type apps in the not too distant future. It'll open up another revenue stream for them.
We know it's almost ready to be rolled out (by looking to jailbroken iPhones) but Apple will want to iron out memory problems before releasing it (at least that's what they'll say).
Exaggeration definitely. But it's no secret that's what Apple does (holding back features they could already deliver for the sake of getting people to upgrade their hardware every year).
Btw, I own an iPhone and MacBook so I'm not anti-Apple.
I had a look at it today and it does look great. My only suggestion would be to implement the "later" and "Open" in the bar itself so that it is a single click to read it or mark it for later, rather than two clicks.
On a superficial layer it might not seem important but when this is a daily affair it will become irritating.
I guess I just don't personally see it as wasted space.
One doesn't want anything being touch-sensitive on the device when it's locked other than the unlock mechanism. So if there was more information shown, there'd be no way to do anything about that information (reply to it, clear it, delay it until later, etc) without unlocking the phone and then navigating back to the information that triggered the information in the notification through whatever app was doing the alerting.
Maybe I'd feel differently if I had a passcode/password on my phone; but, since I don't, unlocking is just a button-push-then-swipe that happens unconsciously during the transition from my pocket to in front of my face. So I might as well use the 'real' app by the time I'm ready to do anything on the device.
The exception of course is the time/date which are already shown - that's information that is strictly received by the user, who doesn't have to do anything (in the device) in response. So maybe adding things like the weather as an option makes good sense... but I don't personally think I want actionable things like emails/tweets/etc on the lock screen.
Of course, there is on iPhone the "alternate lock screen" that appears when you double-click Home and music is playing. Maybe there is room for an expanded not-quite-unlocked mode when you double-click Home to unlock?
I personally expect there to be changes to the notification system in iOS 5, but I won't be surprised if the lock screen stays approximately as-is. Wouldn't necessarily mind being surprised though!
This area must be on the list of improvements for Apple with the next software shipment. There is huge opportunity to use this space as a communication hub, something all iPhone users would benefit from.
