I am, of course, an Apple fanboy. As I write I’m about to pick up an iPad Mini with retina display — my first iPad, incidentally. I have an iPhone 5, which naturally I’ve upgraded to iOS 7.
There’s more than a hint of “Will this do?” in some of the UI for iOS 7. It’s no real secret the engineering team embarked on a radical visual shift for iOS on a tight schedule, so it’s not surprising if some of the elements still feel a little undercooked and segfaulty. I salute their indefatigability, etc.
The lack of polish is very noticeable for me in the Notification Center, in its Today view. You can turn bits of this on and off: I have Stocks switched off, but all the other elements on. I doubt this is unusual.
I have no problem with the enormous date. I’m a fan of enormous dates. Below, the weather in text form. Meh: weather is better shown graphically, and without a hint of a semi-colon. But hey, it’s tappable, and takes you to the Weather app. Useful, no big deal.
Below that, the Today view shows what Settings calls Calendar Day View, and then (because I have no reminders and Stocks is switched off) the Tomorrow Summary. Here’s where I get irritated. So irritated I’ve annotated a couple of screenshots.
Let’s review those points:
- You can tap on the weather, which shows you no indication that you can tap on it, to take you to the Weather app. But you can’t tap on any part of an empty calendar, even though it shows a highly tappable icon, to take you to the Calendar app. (If you have an event that day, you can tap that to go to the event in the Calendar app.)
- When you have no events, Calendar Day View still takes up acres of space. This means you have to scroll to the Tomorrow Summary.
- The Tomorrow Summary knows about all-day events but can’t be bothered to tell you what they are.
- The Calendar Day View appears to be too dumb to show all-day events anyway.
It strikes me these are all relatively easy to fix. Will they be fixed before iOS 8? I wonder.
Note: Comments from Android fanboys fanboying about Android will be yawned at.
PS I annotated the screenshots in Keynote. I think that means I’m now entitled to call myself a Chief Something Officer.
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