I gave some first impressions on Apple’s new Creator Studio bundle earlier this week, but one thing you don’t get to see when things are under embargo is how it all rolls out to the general public, which it did on Wednesday.
What strikes me most about it is how even Apple is stuck with the App Store and its limitations. Developers are quite familiar with how limited Apple’s back-end systems are and how they can inflict frustration on developers and customers alike. But it’s another level when the same thing happens to Apple and its own apps.
For example, yesterday the old versions of Numbers, Pages, and Keynote were updated, apparently with the only new feature being a dialog box that appears when you launch it that says “Use the New Version of Numbers,” with a button to Open New Version.
Why? Seems like Apple has chosen this moment to unify the iPad and Mac versions of Numbers and its fellow apps in a single entity in the App Store, and that leaves the old versions high and dry. The right thing to do here would be to gracefully migrate that Mac app and merge it with the other apps, but apparently not even Apple can convince itself to prioritize a feature that would make the launch of its new suite a little less clunky.
I’m also struck by the fact that Apple has had to do the App Store trick of attaching subtitles to the names of every app it makes, because the design of the App Store has led to stuffing keywords into titles becoming somehow a best practice. So it’s not Final Cut Pro anymore, it’s “Final Cut Pro: Create Video.” And Numbers is “Numbers: Make Spreadsheets.”
Also confusing: Double apps! Right now, I see two versions of Final Cut Pro in the Mac App Store. They’re actually the same app, but one is the original app that someone might have purchased in the past, and the other is a bundled edition that is tied to the iPad version and available by subscription. They have different icons, but otherwise seem to be identical, version 12.0.
I’ve complained a bunch about Apple converting its free iWork apps into freemium apps with paid upsells (to an bundle that’s a bad fit for many users), but that was before I saw that if you don’t subscribe to the bundle, the new versions of Pages, Numbers, and Keynote include ads attached to interface elements promoting the Creator Studio. The first-launch screen and two prominent menu items under the application menu push the Creator Studio. There’s also a prominent toolbar button for the suite-included Content Hub so that you can browse all that great premium clip media—but if you insert it, it’s watermarked, because you haven’t subscribed.
Finally, a word about the suite’s new app icons, which I specifically did not address in my review. It’s very easy and fun to complain about icons because art is entirely subjective. You can like what you like. I will say this: The early days of OS X icons were a reaction to the incredibly limited icon palette of classic Mac OS, so apps often offered incredibly detailed, photorealistic icons to represent themselves. It felt so modern. And many of those icons were beautiful.
But let’s forget about art for a moment and consider utility. Where do we interact with icons? For me, it’s the home screen on my iPad and iPhone, and the Dock and Spotlight launcher on my Mac. In every context, these icons are very small, far too small for a gorgeous skeuomorphic icon.
Clearly, the brief given to the designers of the new Creator Studio icon set was to make them all differentiated by color and shape. While I don’t love a lot of the choices they made—there are a lot of metaphors that seem to have drifted so far from reality that they make no sense anymore—I have to admit that they are all different silhouettes and colors, which means I know that the green bar chart that looks like it’s giving me the finger is Numbers when it’s in my Dock.
Should Apple aspire to better than utility, even when it comes to something as far away from mission-critical as app icons? Yes, it should. And I don’t think the people who are complaining about app icons are really complaining about app icons. They’re pointing out a symptom of a larger disease, which is Apple losing its way when it comes to usability and software design.
But if you’ll forgive me, I find it hard to get too worked up about icon designs when Apple is putting ads for a professional creative suite in its free productivity apps. Which is the greater offense to the user experience?
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