The dark secret of yellow is that there’s no such thing as “dark yellow”. Many designers have technical background, and so they fail to acknowledge this fact.

Let’s say we need to create a series of color buttons for some UI. I’ve started with a green one and then quickly made a blue one. Here are the buttons and the way they are constructed:

As you can see a blue button is just a green button with a blue Hue layer on top. And the Magenta button also has an adjustment Curves layer, because otherwise it looks too dark. The bottom two layers are all identical. The base one is a green fill layer with a gradient overlay for button not to look flat and a gradient stroke for sharp edges:

So you can make a button of any color by just adding a Hue and an optional Curves layer, and it will look OK.

Unless it’s yellow:

If we use this method to create a yellow button, it will look like shit (literally, sometimes). Let’s be honest, It’s not yellow, right? And no Curves will make it look good.

Here’s another take on the yellow one:

Now this is yellow. The button was re-made from scratch. The base layer is changed to yellow, but the main change is the  change in the gradient overlay:

It’s not black and white anymore, it’s red and white. The problem with a black and white gradient is that it will try to make a “dark yellow” color which is not yellow at all. The darker you want yellow to be, the more you should shift its hue towards red:

For the button’s body I’ve used a red gradient overlay, and it worked fine. As of the egdes, I’ve just hand picked colors for the new gradient stroke. I’ve also made the glare twice more intensive, because otherwise we’d barely see it. Oh, and the shadow of the yellow button is slightly lighter, because otherwise we’d percieve it as too dark.

Let’s take an eyedropper and see which hues are there now:

The yellow button has different hues, but looks good. So maths isn’t always your best friend, unfortunately.

I have to point out that every button can be made better by hand-picking colors instead of relying on maths. But while for most colors shifting hues works rather fine, for yellow it’s absolutely unacceptable.

Next iOS must be coming soon. What is going to be in it? I’m not sure where to draw the line between “predictions” and a “wishlist”, so here are my thoughts on things that either were speculated, or I just want to be there, in no particular order.

Maps. Everyone has written about Apple planning to switch to its own mapping backend instead of Google’s. And presumably there will be some cool 3D views. I’m curious whether Apple was able to come up with their own navigation, traffic and local transport services. I also wonder if all these awesome things will work in Russia.

Better Notification Center. Notification Center sucks. Not only is it ugly, it’s unusable. It’s particularly bad on the iPad. It should show more text for each notification. The settings for it is a nightmare, it’s impossible to configure it.

Don’t Disturb. There were screenshots of a “Don’t Disturb” feature in Mountain Lion. I guess it temporarily disables all notifications. This would be great to have in iOS, too.

Widgets. Some people want custom Notification Center widgets and even predict an API for that. Given how bad Notification Center is, adding even more crap to it won’t make it better. I’m for Live icons instead.

Live icons. It’s great that the weather is always +23 ˚C (+73 ˚F if you are from U. S.), except that it’s not. Currently only the calendar icon shows the real date, every other icon is meaningless. The most useful would be making the Weather icon show the real weather, but also Clock could show the real time, Maps, your current location, Notes, the text of the latest note etc.

Better Siri. I don’t know much about Siri since I’m on iPhone 4. But there’s no doubt it can be made better (and Tim Cook has hinted it in his interview). The obvious thing to do is to add some integration with third-party apps. Also, what about Siri for iPad?

Default Apps. If Siri supports third-party apps, it should know which apps I use for what. E. g. if I prefered Opera for web browsing I wouldn’t want to always say “Siri, search web for X with Opera”. I’d just want Siri to know it. The most natural way will be for it to just “figure it out” without some messy settings like the Notification Center has. But even without Siri, default apps will be welcome (some people prefer Sparrow for mail!).

Apps interaction. Something like Windows Phone’s Contracts should be added to iOS. If I have selected a piece of text, I want to be able to translate it without going to the Google Translate app. And the “share sheets” should be extendable. Currently in Twitter app I can send a link to Instapaper or Read it Later, but not to Readability — because Twitter doesn’t know Readability. But Twitter shouldn’t even care, the system should know it. Apps interaction (or lack thereof) is one of the weaknesses of iOS.

Airdrop or wireless sharing. Easier sharing between devices and friends will be great. Currently sending a picture or a piece of text over the air to someone nearby is almost impossible. Or, Imagine that you are looking at a web page on your iPhone and want you friend to open it on her iPad. What would you do? This should be easy.

Work together. All my devices should work together and know when they are close to each other. Don’t display same alert everywhere. If I postpone an alert, postpone it everywhere. Sync open browser tabs, clipboards and everything else.

Airplay target. Open a movie on a Mac and send it to play on an iPad. This should be doable, at least after Mountain Lion (with Airplay) is released.

Better multitasking. I don’t know what exactly has to be done, but I want switching between apps to feel fast and harmless. Currently I think twice before leaving an app.

Facebook integration. I don’t care about it at all, but I’m listing it because it was rumored.

Safari Omnibar. In Safari 5.2 Apple has added what people call an “omnibar”: an addressbar combined with search. Invented by Opera in the 18th century or so and popularized by Google Chrome, this thing was conspicuously missing from Safari for so long. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve entered a search request into address field on my iPhone to get nothing. Modes suck.

Offline Reading List. There were some screenshots of this in desktop Safari, but in mobile one it will make even more sense.

iCloud Tabs. This is included in the latest builds of Mountain Lion, so I guess we’ll see it in iOS 6.

Sync iTunes Match over Wi-Fi. I like iTunes Match (even given how unbelievably buggy it is), but I prefer to use old good iTunes sync, because it works much faster. iTunes Match should detect that my library is available in the local network and download tracks from it (instead of from iCloud).

Sync track positions with iCloud. Want this for podcasts, tired of syncing by hand 5 times a day.

Visual refresh. Aren’t you tired of the standard controls? The transition to the rounded on/off switch (in iOS 5) is not enough. I want something of a Leopard-to-Lion scale at least.

Related links:

• iOS Low-Hanging Fruit by John Gruber,
• iOS 6: Higher hanging fruit by Rene Ritchie,
• 7 Features We’d Like To See In iOS 6 by Paul Paliath,
• 15 suggestions for iOS 6 by Michael Grothaus.

If an executive at some company announces a product or any meaningful partnership with Apple or somebody says that such an announcement has been made, ignore the news. It’s easy: Apple announces all its stuff itself.

Kaspersky’s CTO says Apple asked it to analyze OS X for vulnerabilities. Resolution: bullshit. Let’s imagine for a second that Apple really did ask Kaspersky to do that. Obviously Apple would want that Kaspersky keep their mouth shut. Why would Kaspersky ignore that and speak out anyway? Only one explanation: because they are not in any relationships with Apple and never were.

Kaspersky likes to publicly say bad things about Apple and its security. It doesn’t matter if they are even right, but they surely repel Apple. Apple completely ignored their latest attempt to “help” with Flashback. Do you want help from someone who bashes you all the time?

Kaspersky is terrified that soon there will be no place for them in the world and they are desperately trying to make people think they are important. I’m sure they analyze OS X for vulnerabilities day and night without any requests from Apple in hope to find something and say: you need us. Of course security experts will always have job. But if Apple needs them, they will have a job at Apple.

A lot has been said about how bad iTunes is. What bugs me most is that some actions within iTunes prevent me from actually listening to music. Sometimes iTunes is “Looking for iPhone...” and you can’t do anything until it’s done. And it still doesn’t do the most obviously useful thing for music listener: permanently display current track name somewhere. So we had to make Emcee.

But I’d like to take a look at the iTunes Store (including the App Store). How can it be made better?

What I hate about iTunes store is that it’s clearly a web site, but I can’t use a browser to browse it. The web view of iTunes is crippled and ridiculously slow. Why not use Safari? It will not only make the store better for the user, but I believe Apple will sell more songs and apps.

I can’t open a link in new window or tab. Sometimes I want to check out several things from a chart or from search results. Unfortunately, ⌘-clicking them won’t help, I’ll have to open each, then go back. I don’t think I’m the only one who forgets about going back.

I can’t add link to bookmarks. iTunes has a “wishlist”, but it’s only available on a Mac, not iPad or iPhone (or I wasn’t able to find it there). I want to use the Safari bookmarks manager with the store like with anything else and I want it to be synced between my devices. There are also, of course, no bookmarklets in iTunes, so I can’t tweet an app and I can’t send it to Instapaper (some apps have really long descriptions). No obvious way to save and share links is bad.

Some other things I can do in Safari but not in iTunes: zoom a page, drag an image (i. e. album art), pin a portion of a page to Dashboard, search history, find in page. I’ve found myself searching for a feature in an app’s description a couple of times, and I had to use eyes for that, which is just waste of time.

iTunes is already so bloated that it isn’t even funny. So adding all this stuff to iTunes is not an option. To make iTunes store better Apple should just move it from iTunes to Safari.