Apple have done a lot of great things with iOS since its launch in 2007. After the iPhone took the world by storm, Apple have been slowly improving the OS and the UI that people who own their devices see and use on a day to day basis. What you see on the left is a screenshot taken from my iPhone 3GS running iOS 4.1. You can see that in comparison to iOS 1.x there have been numerous improvements and everything looks ten times better. Even in comparison to 3.x most of the default application icons look better. But there are numerous problems with the UI still. And hopefully with 4.2 or even 5.0 Apple will fix these.
Here’s the first example, the Messages icon. On the left you can see iOS 3.x, on the right you can see iOS 4.x. Most of the icon is improved in iOS 4.x but the bubble itself is actually worse. Now it looks to have worse, blurred edges which are not clearly defined, and on the iPhone 3GS’ screen it looks even worse. If Apple just took the bubble from 3.x and put it on the 4.x icon, it’d be perfect, or they could do something completely different with 5.x.
Easily the biggest culprit of the jump to iOS 4.x, the calendar icon is notably worse, the day text no longer has the embedded look and the shadow is far too strong going from the red to the white. The rest of the icon is perfectly fine, but this is a major design hiccup which needs to be looked into!
In terms of the rest of the UI, most of it is very sharp, but overlooking a few major things like this is not like Apple. But one thing that should be made a requirement is a smaller variation of the app icon for the settings menu if it uses the Preferences.app in iOS rather than having its own context menu. Most of them look blurry and horrible there, and I can understand how iPhone 4 owners feel when they see an icon that hasn’t been updated. Out of the 18 icons in Preferences.app, a total of 7 have properly designed icons for this menu. That’s less than half! Come on developers! Here’s a few I have done to make up for it. They may look a bit big but this is the actual size of the icons in the menu.
