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Why iOS 7 Is Making Some Users Feel 'Sick'
dryriver sends this story from The Guardian:
"The introduction of fake zooms, parallax, sliding and other changes in Apple's new iPhone and iPad software has a very real effect on people with vestibular disorders. ... It makes frequent use of zoom and slide animations; the home screen boasts parallax, with icons apparently floating above subtly animating wallpaper. And it's making people sick. Triggers and symptoms vary, but TidePool mobile app developer Jenni Leder's experience is not uncommon. A self-professed power-user, she frequently switches apps; but on iOS 7, this has caused headaches and feelings associated with motion sickness. 'I now have to close my eyes or cover the screen during transitions, which is ridiculous,' she told The Guardian, adding that there's nowhere to hide: 'It's not apps that affect me, but accessing them. Tap a folder and the view zooms in. Tap an app and it's like flying through the icon and landing in that app's micro world — and I'm getting dizzy on the journey there.' Reactions to screen-based systems — especially those utilizing 3D effects — aren't new. Cynthia Ryan, executive director of the Vestibular Disorders Association, says 3D effects can cause 'intense nausea, dizziness and vertigo,' sometimes from general vision problems, but also from visual-vestibular conflict. She added symptoms 'manifest more severely if a viewer already has a disorder of the vestibular system.'"
I am not an iOS user, but i know in Android these effects are very easily toggleable by the user.
It's now been replaced, with a brand new phone of the same configuration at no cost to myself. That is brilliant customer service, Apple. Cheers.
... wait, what?
Is there really no way to disable the animations? Could you customize the wallpaper to be a single colour so there is no visible movement?
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
What Would Jobs Have Said?
"They're looking at it wrong." "Apple products just aren't for everybody." etc.
This is the guy who wanted all media apps to look like the current trend (at the time) brushed metal of stereo gear, but I thought skeuomorphism was dead under new Apple?
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Okey, this might not have any relevance at all, but I thought that it was quite funny, so I decided to post a little anecdote. Quakeworld - a quake 1 'mod' - tends to give me motion sickness if I'm not used to it. It takes approximately 3 weeks to accustom to its effects. Watching demos, though. Playing takes about 1 week. Quake 3 on the other hand gave me another kind of motion sickness, but only the Quake3 final. Quake3 test 1.08 was simply fine and impressive. None of the above stated effects. To pick a winner, Wolfenstein gave me perhaps the worst motion sickness from all the games I played/watched. I could go on but this rant is ridiculous enough as it is, later. :>
I'm pretty sure this is a violation of Microsoft's patent on Software as a Sickness.
Okey, this might not have any relevance at all, but I thought that it was quite funny, so I decided to post a little anecdote. Quakeworld - a quake 1 'mod' - tends to give me motion sickness if I'm not used to it.
These guys need to get accounts or I need to get mod points. Apple should have known better, considering that this effect was known fifteen years or more ago; I had a fairly popular Quake site back then (1998-2003) and got quite a few emails from readers talking about this in Quake II, and bigger sites than mine were covering it as well.
Research fail on Apple's part. Hubris or stupidity? Both?
Free Martian Whores!
YES you can turn them off in the settings in iOS7. By the way the next version of Android will have a screen lock wallpaper of hypnotoad. You can turn it off but strangely you feel compelled not to. Everyone would be talking about this but hypnotoad tells them not to.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
This is not new. Apple does not seem to have any competent GUI people anymore, just "designers". And of course, competent testing would have found that problem. I expect in a while we will be hearing that thy did know this but management did not took it seriously. Like the the one time where Apple management thought thy knew more about antenna design that the guys that do it for a living.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Not to be insensitive to people with vestibular disorders, but why is this the first I'm hearing about this? OSes from Windows to OSX to Linux to Android, etc. etc., have employed various zooming/sliding/wobbling/parallax animations for years now. I've only played with iOS 7 that smallest bit, but is it really so different from everything else that's it's causing a sudden wave of heretofore unseen motion sickness?
Sorry, your body has been found to be incompatible with this Apple product, please upgrade your body before continuing.
I, for one, welcome our new hypnotoad overlords.
Some of what I say is fact, some is conjecture, the rest I'm just blowing out my ass...you guess.
You really shouldn't repost articles from other websites in their entirety. You've just taken advertising dollars away from information week, and indirectly from the authors pocket, and given them to Dice, and indirectly, idiots like Timothy lord.
That's lose - lose all the way around.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
As usual on /., many commenters above failed to either read the article or actually try it themselves.
You can turn off the background paralax effect. But, really, that is quite subtle and not that objectionable. I turned it off, simply because I figured it eats CPU, GPU or both unnecessarily.
The new animations are gratuitious - they don't seem to serve any useful purpose. They are just plain silly-looking. Home-page icons now fly-in from all different angles. Drag a page, and now you are no longer dragging a skewmorphic piece of paper, but a skewmorphic sheet of silly-putty - drag at the right side, and the page warps, your finger "stretches" the right-hand side of the page. This kind of stuff was all the rage on Linux desktops - about 5 years ago. By now, everybody still running Linux has gotten tired of it and turned that nonsense off. The "bounce" now has a "warp" effect as part of it as well - the page deforms when it bounces.
It's like playing a bad ho-hum video game where they amped-up the effects because of lack of compelling content.
No, you can't disable these effects.
I'd imagine that if there is a medical issue with this, it is worse on iPad, because it fills more of your field of view when you are using it.
Well, yes you can. You can downgrade to a device that Apple has deemed incapable of rendering these effects. I think you need, say, an iPhone 4.
Apple seems to have become recently brain-dead when it comes to practical aspects of UI. And I hate to say it, but it must be due to Ivy, because they were quite good about it before. He is really, really good at designing appealing surfaces and finishes and packaging. UIs, not so much.
Another example of the non-functionaly of the new UI - buttons. It seems now that many buttons have absolute NO feedback that you have pressed them. I imagine the concept here is that the button is meant to perform some action, and the action itself is the confirmation that the button was pressed.
(Of course, a button is a skewmorphism, and we don't want skewmorphisms, right? So, I guess I shouldn't say "button" but "that word that's a bit bigger and fatter than the other words, and is off by iteself, that if you touch it something happens"...)
Somebody should have telegraphed that message to the poor developers who were given the impossible task to insure that the "action" happens soon enough for the user to connect their touching something on the screen with the "action" - regardless of the amount of work the action might take, and, oh, regardless of any other background processing that might be going-on in the device. Well, actually, I suppose somebody did, and those developers probably now feel like shit for having failed, even thought they could not have possibly suceeded.
Point taken about reposting an article in it's entirety. Thank you for enlightening me.
First world problems.
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
I don't have a vestibular disorder, but Apple products have always made me sick. Or is it annoyed? Yeah, I think that's the word I am looking for.
Those "features" are nothing more than visual bling. This suggests Apple is running out of great ideas and resorting to fancy instead of functional? I can name a whole list of UI features that would be awesome and seem innovative, while actually doing useful stuff easier.
Parallax? That's so Angry Biirds.
Microsoft Zune & Windows Phone had this parallax feature for years. It was on the first Zune HD back in 2009.
Why didn't we ever hear about people getting sick on their Zunes and Windows Phones?
Oh, wait, nevermind.
Kriston
You're missing the point. It's not that we should all get down to the lowest common denominator, it's about having useless visual bling (that is annoying and distracting even for a healthy person) that serves no useful purpose and CAN'T BE SWITCHED off making the phone unusable for people with a medical condition.
Again, the solution is not to force everyone to use a static UI, it's to give people the choice. Which is something Apple never does, I guess because then there would be people who switch it off and then complain that it does not work. I am an iPhone 5 user recently switched from Android and while the phone works just fine, I sorely miss the ability to actually customise anything.
What Would Jobs Have Said?
"They're looking at it wrong." "Apple products just aren't for everybody." etc.
Heh. He would have gone on to explain that Apple makes premium products for premium people, and if you are susceptible to motion sickness, then perhaps you are not worthy of owning the Apple brand... :-)
You can never know everything, and part of what you do know will always be wrong. Perhaps even the most important part.