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Developer Marco Arment Shares Thoughts On iPhone X's Notch (marco.org)
Developer Marco Arment writes about the infamous notch on the iPhone X, which Apple has told developers to embrace rather than ignore: This is the new shape of the iPhone. As long as the notch is clearly present and of approximately these proportions, it's unique, simple, and recognizable. It's probably not going to significantly change for a long time, and Apple needs to make sure that the entire world recognizes it as well as we could recognize previous iPhones. That's why Apple has made no effort to hide the notch in software, and why app developers are being told to embrace it in our designs. That's why the HomePod software leak depicted the iPhone X like this: it's the new basic, recognizable form of the iPhone. Apple just completely changed the fundamental shape of the most important, most successful, and most recognizable tech product that the world has ever seen.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Please note:
I have an iPod, iPhone, Mac mini and Apple TV. This is not a troll, only the truth that can be seen even by Apple users.
#DeleteFacebook
with a unique, identifiable and recognizable shape for their phone is an idiot. Just like anybody who needs everyone to know what phone brand they use.
I bet they've already trademarked that shape / design.
Better known as 318230.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
And why should we care?
Has Apple trademarked 'the notch'?
At times in the past, Apple has chosen to blatantly 'wear' mistakes they have made. Will this be the same? Will there be further generation 'notces' even when the notch is even less necessary?
Will 'screen protector' stickers with a darkened 'notch' area on one side become the trendy thing to stick on your older Apple Gadget?
I’ll be sticking with my notch-less iPhone 6S for a while longer.
While there are certainly different tiers of smartphones, we’re really at the point where these are more or less commodities. They’ve been powerful enough to keep using multiple years for some time now.
So sorry, Mr. Veblun, but I won’t be spending $1000-1200 on a phone.
#DeleteChrome
Ever since Schiller's said that word, it's nearly lost all meaning.
AC comments get piped to
The Essential Phone does this, in a slightly less obnoxious manner (since the cutout is smaller) -- and receives much ridicule about it.
Justifiably, in my opinion -- it's a terrible design decision. It could be OK if the status bar sat below the cutout instead of being cut in half by it.
There are a lot of FaceID detractors - that is to eb expected of course, since what Apple does is wait until they can make technology not suck before they include it. Before Apple added TouchID, the only experience people had with touch sensors was very poor sensors that mostly didn't work. But now TouchID is beloved and people fear its removal..
FaceID is the same way. Some phones now have face recognition, but it's so primitive it can be fooled with a picture - and even then it often doesn't work really well, because lighting can affect it badly.
Apple's approach to FaceID will pretty obviously work much better than existing systems, so it will be a lot more reliable and quicker than what exists.
But that's not really what I mostly wanted to point out - in the face of FaceID detraction I wanted to explain the many benefits of the way FaceID works that many people may not have thought of.
1) Most important - it will work for the elderly. You may not all be aware of this, but fingerprint sensors have more and more trouble reading your prints as you age. The U.S. government Global Entry readers cannot even read my mothers fingerprints, at all - TouchID sensors can, but even then sometimes it will not work and that will only get worse as she gets older. But FaceID will work well for anyone of any age.
2) I think the flow for working with the system will work better with FaceID than TouchID. There've been a number of times when I've raised the phone to take a picture, and accidentally unlocked to the home screen instead. Similar deal for the Today view on the lock screen...
3) Since it can "see" when I am looking at the phone I no longer have to pick up the phone if I want to check for notifications on the lock screen.
4) For authentication requests there will be zero delay like there is today where a dialog comes up and asks you to confirm with TouchID. Instead it can simply ask if you approve, having already validated your face before the dialog even appears.
5) People seemed concerned about the bar but honestly who even notices things like that after a week? Those kinds of things always fade into the background after days of use and the brain does not even notice them. It takes a lot of sensors to do what they are doing with FaceID and I'd rather they have that then have the entire screen be clear, and do something wonky like move a TouchID sensor to the back of the phone...
Is the X some kind of leap? No, but FaceID come closer to being a real leap than most iterations have.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Marco Arment said:
Many Apple fans were amused when Phil Schiller explained the removal of the headphone jack on last year’s iPhone as “courage”. But that was nothing compared to what happened last week.
Since we're using "courage" as a synonym for "stupid" these days, the removal of the headphone jack took more "courage". The cutout has mostly an aesthetic impact. The headphone jack removal has a functionality impact.
Isn't it obvious? The 'notch' screams QUALITY so loud that even non techies are eager to part with their $1,000. Combined with the clearly identifiable Apple Watch, these proud owners will turn their noses up at the rest of us unwashed common folk.
...omphaloskepsis often...
By default, the notch is blacked out in landscape mode. You have to click on the "expand" arrows to fill the screen to the edge and make the notch visible.
Ask me how the Heisenberg Principle may or may not have saved my life.
Wow, gush much? I think I need an insulin shot after reading that summary...
"Apple just completely changed the fundamental shape of the most important, most successful, and most recognizable tech product that the world has ever seen." /yawn
Capiche?
No, capisce.
Source? Cause everything I am seeing from designers looks like a dick in the margins to me: https://twitter.com/thomasfuch...
The funny thing about the notch to me is I don't really care about it, it seems like non-Apple people are making a bigger deal out of this than the Apple people...
I thought Apple people were the ones who cared about superficial looks, but that does not appear to be the case.
On a side note I didn't get the part of the video where he was swiping up to home, he was pretending he meant to scroll instead? But who does that from a tab bar, honestly. The rest of the video was amusing though.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I enjoyed the article, until the last line: "That’s courage." Really? Reminds me of this ...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
It looks like those old remote controls. The Notch is an unwanted blemish IMO.
I would rather see developers hide it.
The most important part of the video, the reason I linked to it, is the part where that notch is clearly obtrusive when watching photos or videos.
#DeleteFacebook
No, capellini.
#DeleteFacebook
I care when they start trying to shove IE6 levels of stupidity into the browser-wars.
It would be OK if Apple didn't force all apps to use the areas on both sides of the notch and always displayed status icons on a black background.
The whole thing would bland and sort of become invisible. But that would be good for users and bad for marketing, so screw the users.
#DeleteFacebook
But even there he had to circle the thing in big lines to call it out. In real use after a week or so you'll not even notice the thing is there.
In real use people rotate phones rarely, even looking at photos they are more inclined to zoom to see a landscape image than they are to rotate.
In watching videos most people rotate, but if you consider how tall the screen is doesn't it seem like most aspect ratios for movies / tv shows will have black bars at the sides of the screens anyway? It's only video shot on the phone itself that would really fill the screen like that unless you were cropping the top/bottom of the video.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Answer: more than necessary
Seriously how many people can tell the difference between a 400, 425, 450, 500 ppi screen 16-24 inches from your eyes? All of this bitching and moaning about screens is stupidity. We've gone far past diminishing returns for screens. It uses more battery, increases the charges needed per week and overall is a waste of energy. Go ahead and get all bent. The "future" part of X is the neural engine and dedicated ASIC in A11. Yes I own a iPhone and I also own android tablet. I don't give a crap because at the end of the day I build software for customers. What I do care about is the built-in hardware capabilities and the ease of development process.
Frankly I could give a shit about how pretty the iPhone looks. I'd gladly swap out the expensive industrial design to save money. For a simple reason, people drop phones. My kids drop their phones. A more expensive screen just means more $$ to fix it. Buying used phones makes it affordable. Anyone that buys a new Smart phone be it iPhone or Galaxy is a fucking moron with more money than brains.
I agree.
I could actually see a way that Apple could make use of that space that isn't fugly. My main issue is that they're putting the notification bar up there.
But if they put the notification bar below the notch, and used the "ears" for something else -- maybe user-customizable super-important priority indicators -- that could work. The "ears" remain black most of the time, but light up when the super-notification happens.
https://fscl01.fonpit.de/userf...
#DeleteFacebook
TFA provides a Rorschach Test -- no not the guy from Watchmen -- of mobile phones, but with right and wrong answers..
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Judging by the design decisions being made in the computer industry over the last few years, there seems to be an awful lot of designers who think that bad design is the hallmark of good design. It's the curse of the UX crowd.
In the iPhone X simulator, if you load up YouTube and play pretty much any video, then go full screen - you get black bars at both sides of the screen because most videos are not that wide...
A few really wide movies (like Hateful Eight) would probably go under the bar. But most widescreen movies would not.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The Essential Phone was the first to do a notch, although it is much smaller. It generally seems to be fine, not annoying or problematic or distracting.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Here's David Pogue mentioning it: https://twitter.com/Pogue/stat...
Ask me how the Heisenberg Principle may or may not have saved my life.
Not shown in this video: the fact that it's an optional view. The other option? Video zoomed out enough to not be cut off by edges and corners, with black bars where necessary. Since the phone has an aspect ratio of 19.5:9 and most videos are 16:9, the unobscured view will be the default view most of the time anyway.
Also, "the crotch" is a funnier name for it.
I think what they have done with the status bar is a decent design decision. But the design really goes off the rails in Landscape mode. Just look at the browser, where Apple insist on not hiding the notch and corners with black bars on either side of the page (which would make the screen look narrower, which is fine). Instead they put white bars on the sides, making the notch really stand out while not serving any other useful purpose, reducing readability and breaking every web page's visual flow in the process.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
... maybe user-customizable super-important priority indicators ...
"User-Customizable"? You do realize this is Apple we're talking about, right? To the folks in Cupertino, what you're suggesting is tantamount to painting a mustache on the Mona Lisa.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
In the past few years, cell phone makers appear to have "embraced" the fashion design world, in the manufacturing of a tool, namely the smartphone. Watch just about every announcement, read pretty much any story about a new smartphone, and what's typically the #1 thing they announce? How fashionable, stylish, colorful and slim it is. Heck, if they even mention it, it is at the BOTTOM of the article, on how well it works in it's name...AS A PHONE. You have stupid stories about how "ugly" bezels are, how it detracts from the design to have a hideous camera bump on the back. Instead of having a good tool, they have relegated the smartphone, to the red carpet runways of the hollyWEIRD crowd. It's now nothing more than a status/fashion symbol. Can't wait for the low attention span crowd to move on to something else to screw up, and the smartphone will be off it's silly diet, allowed to wolf down a few pizzas, some cheese fries, gain some WEIGHT. Thicken up the smartphones, put back the LARGER batteries, add some slight bezels to hopefully stave off any impact to the edge of the phone, cracking the screen, place a retractable 5-10x zoom lens and larger camera sensor on the back. This fashion icon crap, is nothing more than a way for manufacturers to jack up the price even more because morons continue to buy into the "fashionable/slim/colorful/stylish" crap. With build costs of the flagships (Apple/Samsung) of around $300 dollars, but "commanding" prices above $1,000 dollars now, you'd thing people would demand the price come back down. Heck, people claim pharmaceutical, oil companies and other are ripping people off, but no one blinks an eye, to overpay for a smartphone.
I don't know about you all but I find it really hard to tell my Samsung phone from an iPhone these days. Maybe to a designer a circle versus oval home button jumps out like a flashing red light. To me, a mere mortal, I have to look carefully to tell which is which. They're both white rectangles with a button on the bottom and a rectangular screen.
As to the notch making an iPhone instantly recognizable again, that sounds like wishful thinking. They're still both going to be rounded white rectangles with a rectangular screen. "Oh yeah, that one has a little piece of something near the top, must be an iPhone."
So... it can add margins when viewing videos based on which mode you pick... More modes! Apple has an entire guide instructing designers to embrace the notch.... Why would any indie team embrace the "notch" for their game / app / website? This seems like a pretty big fuck you to them from Apple.
I think what they have done with the status bar is a decent design decision.
My problem with it is that it reduces the size of the notification bar by half, and then cuts that half in half again. This seriously reduces the utility of the bar, as well as simply looking bad.
The notch only obscures the video if you zoom in, otherwise you get black bars.
It's the gap between Madonna's front teeth.
love is just extroverted narcissism
Does that mean Apple can't patent this and Samsung can copy it?
No sig today...
I suspect more than a bit of it is turnaround for the ribbing the Apple people were giving to the Moto 360 watch's "flat tire".
Log in or piss off.
You get the big top bezel no matter what. The only question is whether or not the top edge of the display is cut in half by the bezel.
I never hear anyone call them iSheep or mindless fanbois.
You are very lucky to have managed to avoid the generation-spanning flamewar between the Ford fanboys and the Chevy fanboys!
It's not even a "notch"; its substantial width precludes that term being the correct way to describe it, except in the poorly educated mind of the journalist who first referred to it in that fashion. It's a sensor bar that doesn't extend all the way across the phone, with little display areas extending up on both sides for some reason. And getting worked up about it seems like a tempest in a teapot. It is remotely possible that it is a marketing ploy to gain mindshare/free publicity.
FaceID is also going to work great for government agents trying to get access to your device. Now all they have to do is have you look at the phone. It's just as bad as the fingerprint reader is as far as legally compelled unlocking goes (at least in the U.S.).
I get that FaceID is really for the people who wander around with their phones totally unlocked, but lets not pretend it's a secure way to protect your device. You also open yourself up to being remotely surveilled by not blocking the forward-facing camera. Just keep it simple and use a long password that can't be guessed.
Marco Arment is an idiot Apple fanboy. Great, thanks Slashdot!
"Most important, most successful, and most recognizable tech product that the world has ever seen" my ass. Fuck you, Marco. You don't seem to have a clue what your'e talking about. What a disgusting sellout to the king of proprietary software.
FaceID is also going to work great for government agents trying to get access to your device. Now all they have to do is have you look at the phone.
You are actually exactly backwards on this issue:
1) If you just shut your eyes or look away it will not unlock.
2) On the TouchID phones you can put it in passcode only mode with five taps on the lock button. But with the X, you just squeeze the power and either volume button at the same time as you are handing the phone over to someone, and it goes into passcode only mode - so even easier and not obvious what you are doing.
It's just as bad as the fingerprint reader is as far as legally compelled unlocking goes (at least in the U.S.).
The thing is both are really useful, and with iOS11 both are easily temporarily disabled so you can have convince while staying safe legally, too.
lets not pretend it's a secure way to protect your device.
How is it NOT secure?
You also open yourself up to being remotely surveilled by not blocking the forward-facing camera.
Not on an iPhone you do not, because apps have no access to the camera when backgrounded.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Just wait until they find out about the Lincoln vs Miller welder fanboys, Ford vs. Chevy has nothing on them.
Time to offend someone
I just put a piece of duct tape over my old Iphone 6 so everyone will think it's an iphone X
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
This is how a fanboy admits that Apple really fucked up the aesthetics.
"It's not bad ergonomics if I can train myself to stop doing it."
That’s why Apple has made no effort to hide the notch in software
Please, Marco, elaborate more on this idea.
I am really looking forward to eat you...
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
"It's not bad ergonomics if I can train myself to stop doing it."
So to scroll up on a table on screen, you start by pressing on a tab bar below the table then swiping up?
Even on UI for existing phones, that would select a different tab before it scrolled anything... so if you do that you must be a blithering moron.
But then, you are an Apple Hater so I guess that goes without saying.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I don't see a compromise in the design at all. The screen is so tall comparatively it's not like that notch imposes into the screen in any significant way for using any apps (which even if you remove the notch area of the screen still have more vertical real estate than they would on the normal phones). And as I noted above, pretty much any video you will ever play on the phone will not underlap the bar in landscape due to the aspect ratio.
So where is the compromise? Or did you just come here to cackle about Apple because your heart is full of hate you must express in some way?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Swiping from the edge has always been a different gesture from swiping fully on he screen. Up to now, swiping from the bottom edge brings up a settings panel. So no, no one would ever have used that gesture to scroll. The video is jut wrong.
But then it was made more for laughs than accuracy.
Why on earth are you grabbing your phone on the front and back like a freak?
I grab it by the bottom (because that's what's closest to my hand in my pocket) and sometimes by thumb hits the home button, unlocking to home. You probably do not have a Plus, which generally does not have enough room in a pocket to reach around it.
So if you put your phone down on the table, you now have to be extra careful nobody swipes your super-expensive phone. It will be unlocked and usable by anybody.
Sigh. Not while I'm not looking at it, when it automatically locks again. I realize living in your moms basement you may bot be aware what normal people do, but putting a phone on a table is pretty common these days.
That's pretty stupid. No prompt to verify you want to do?
It's a lot more stupid of you to not even read what I wrote, which was there would still be a prompt, just no delay to read the finger as there is now. It's even MORE stupid of you to critique a system where you apparently have no idea how it functions now, nor how it will change.
Or they could have simply gon with a 98% bezel-less phone instead of 99% and not have the notch?
Sure, but then they'd have a vastly inferior phone generally, and more specifically one that has vastly inferior convenience around unlocking while remaining secure.
I'll let you have the last response because idiots always have to yabber on about whatever.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The funny thing about the notch to me is I don't really care about it
It's interesting to see the very mixed responses. Some people don't care, others (like me) think it's a blemish. It's like something is stuck to the screen and I can't get it off.
It would be interesting if there's any relationship between these views and typical screen designs the viewers are used to. e.g. I have rectangular screens on all my devices. I wonder if someone with e.g. a Galaxy Gear watch or similar device with a non rectangular screens feel the same way. But personally it looks wrong, and the mild OCD in me wants to clean that black goo away or return the phone with the obvious area of dead pixels.
Notch + curved corners + FaceID - TouchID = first iPhone I won't be buying, ever.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
The compromise is that it's asymmetrical from top to bottom
How is that a "compromise" when iPhones have always been that way?
The black bars at top/bottom have been around the same size but had different features (like a home button on bottom).
or from side to side in landscape
But again it's really not. Watching any video in landscape and you get equal black bars on either side, except if you opt to fill the entire screen and chop off the bottom and top of the video - but who does that? And if they choose to, why would it matter if a little more it chopped off another edge? Almost no-one uses phones landscape normally.
The notch feels like they tried to cram too much on the front of the phone
No, they needed enough space to implement an actually functional FaceID. It is not "too much" if it actually works as well if it looks like it does, it certainly would be "too little" if they removed some of the sensors and the feature were not reliable.
That again is not a compromise, because they put what they needed up there in the space it took to hold it. A compromise would have been to make the top bar smaller or drop FaceID.
Personally I would have preferred removing everything from the front except a fingerprint-through-glass sensor.
As I said elsewhere a fingerprint sensor is really not nearly as good in the end as FaceID implemented right, which has a number of benefits over a fingerprint sensor.
Apple realized this and simply stopped working on the fingerprint-through-glass sensor, as they realized it was no longer needed.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Every other screen I have is rectangular, and I personally thought the Gear flat tire thing was horrible. But that was an intrusion into the usable space of the screen.
The iPhone X is so tall that the notch is not really imposing on the usable area; to me the screens to the side of the note seem like additions preventing the status bar from having to take up the top of the screen, rather than the notch subtracting anything.
Perhaps that is the difference, some see more where others see less.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
When I first read the story about a "notch" I fully expected to see the entire case notched out in a ridiculous attempt to differentiate and patent a new design. Seeing the stupid bar across the screen led to both disappointment and restoration of my faith in the human race.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
Although Apple didn't write it themselves, their fans and critics just have to write stupid bullshit like that, about how they've changed the landscape, how brave they were, blah blah.
At the end of the stupid fucking day, if Apple could have managed to make that screen have a speaker, all those cameras and sensors, without the bar, of COURSE THEY would have fucking done it!
Stupidity and fanboyism.
Oh and I like home buttons and headphone jacks personally, no sale.
> most important, most successful, and most recognizable tech product that the world has ever seen
I think someone might have something to say about that.
The iPhone X is so tall that the notch is not really imposing on the usable area
Oh I agree with that. I don't think it is taking anything away functionally. It's just purely a visual ... blemish in my eyes. An otherwise rectangular screen with something that I would historically have associated with an area of failed pixels. It's either subtle OCD on my behalf or conditioning of expecting a rectangular screen to show all the pixels within it's border.
Either way I can't get past it. The essential phone has a similar notch and I can't help wondering (even though I know better) if that notch is obscuring a notification icon.