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Top-level
 Remember, this is 2012. Phone cameras were terrible, so we all had to slap a bunch of filters over our photos to make them palatable. Some were fine. Most were gaudy. Apple targeted this in their marketing, calling their built-in effects “professional-quality.” They’re...fine, but they’re also 2012 app filters, so. You know. Similar to the brushes, they expand out from this Pantone-style fan deck. 13 comments
Finally, we’d be remiss if we didn’t call out the photo inspector modal. It mimics a pro camera’s LCD readout — drop-dead gorgeous. They’re also doing something really interesting with the map. This predates them switching away from raster map tiles and Google Maps, so we’re seeing a version of Google Map tiles but with this neat photo book-style skin on top of it. I’ve never seen stylized map tiles before, so this was a fun discovery. All good things must come to an end. iPhoto for iOS was dealt two death blows. The first came in late 2013, when it got redesigned for iOS 7. Listen, it was the right move for Apple to usher in a fresh visual design language now that people were familiar with direct touch manipulation as a paradigm. They didn’t need the Notes app to look like a legal pad for us to understand that it’s a text field. But this an absolute massacre. Look at what they did to the brush panel: The final nail in the coffin was in 2014, when iOS 8 got serious about the standard Photos app. It got proper editing features, print products, smart search, and photo extensions. At the same time, a check was hard-coded into the system to prevent iPhoto from launching, presenting this alert instead: This entire thread has made us reflect on the work we do. It’s extremely ephemeral. It’s an art form where you could spend two and a half years crafting a beautiful product, only to have it killed for business reasons. I get it. It didn’t make a ton of sense for them to support two separate photo apps with increasing overlap. But it stings when it’s an artifact of pure craft. I still keep an iOS 6 device in my desk drawer to reference from time to time as a design archive of sorts. As primitive as some functionality is, the craft in first-party apps from that time is unparalleled. It serves as a baseline and a constant reminder for the type of work we strive to do.    @lickability Most people dont’ realize that iOS7 wasn't so much a “fresh” visual update as it was a stripping back of nearly everything to destroy the near total dependency on the 320pt width that had pervaded nearly every design everyone had been doing up to that point. It was in advance of Apple releasing a bunch of new iPhones that had larger and variable screen sizes. iOS7 was the death of "pixel perfect" designs. @lickability This was a side effect of travel visuals in the printed photo books. There was an entire framework essentially devoted to map tile treatments.  @lickability @marioguzman I really, really miss such UI's these days. |
Gregory's Server
Some are color-based, others do some kind of blur or texture-mapping. They did a really nice job adapting photo filters to touch here. Take a look at how you can scrub through the black and white filters and change how the photo gets converted to black and white. This is such a neat interaction.