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A small phone complaint post

Submitted by twovests in just_post

So, after spending some time in Phone Communities, I've noticed that Phone Fans like it when apps follow the design language of their phones creator.

Google has Material design, and Apple has some nebulous "Apple-like" quality that I don't fully understand, and I feel like Apple fans more strongly appreciate adherence to a quality.

But then I think back to my week where I learned the 3D modeling program Blender, a very intense and painful trial of learning.

Blender is a complicated piece of software for a very complicated task and utilizes a UI that is overwhelming and very stateful, with chords of actions both broad and deep. It is not something you can learn very well by clicking around.

But its complex nature reflects the complex process of 3D modeling. This one piece of software has to be able to serve a very wide range of tasks. And once you learn how to use (part) of it, you see the beautiful organization is so methodical and logical, you can appreciate how Blender's UI serves you. You see that it's a fucking pinnacle of UX.

It's a pinnacle of UX, and yet Blender uses no native UI elements and carries with it its own alien language of buttons, tabs, frames, etc. This is because adopting these native elements and languages would hamper Blender's ability to express and organize its incredibly complicated software.

I can't think of much software off the top of my head like it, which have 1. Nonstandard interfaces, for which 2. The nonstandard interface is necessary, because 3. The underlying program is very complex. And I can't think if any truly complicated software that exists for phones that would need this, but perhaps it is because we are constraining ourselves to native UI and design languages. This is because developers are cowards,

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3

devtesla wrote

lmao that this counts as a small post because yur posting it

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devtesla wrote

the iphone apps I like the most, like tweetbot, overcast, drafts, don't really feel like they're following ios design language that much. you shouldn't necessarily deviate to far from how the rest of the os feels, just for onboarding sake, but why would someone use an app that didn't like, focus on a task

this is particularly true of tweetbot, which rules

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hollyhoppet wrote (edited )

apple does have some pretty strongly laid out UX guidelines if you want to dig into it