iOS 7, flat transparent toolbars and clarity

Let’s talk about iOS 7 — it clearly has not been covered enough lately.

The new flat transparent toolbars have a curious quality: they create a problem which Apple specifically says they are made to solve.

Apple says nothing should distract you from your content. The user interface should not get in the way. In iOS 6, the website you are looking at or an email you are reading are squeezed between the heavy and overly decorated toolbars. They dominate the view, says Apple.

So in iOS 7 they make the content and the chrome indistinguishable. Before, though the chrome was indeed heavy, I was able to filter it out, because it was so different than the content. But now everything looks the same. It is so much harder to focus on my content.

The new user interface gets in the way.