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Old 11-14-2013, 12:37 PM   #1
Jessica Lares
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iBooks and iTunes U apps have been updated for iOS 7

New icons, new look, but no new features.

http://www.macrumors.com/2013/11/14/...campaign=front

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Apple has released newly updated versions of the iOS iBooks and iTunes U apps, bringing a clean look and feel to the app and getting rid of the wooden bookshelf look that has been a hallmark of the app since it was released.

Other than the new design, the apps do not appear to have gained any new features.


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Old 11-14-2013, 02:34 PM   #2
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I couldn't tell - did they remove the 'book look' when reading the books? I actually LIKED that iBooks visually resembled a book while reading.
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Old 11-14-2013, 02:49 PM   #3
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I couldn't tell - did they remove the 'book look' when reading the books? I actually LIKED that iBooks visually resembled a book while reading.
Yep. It's gone. The flipping effect is still there though.
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Old 11-15-2013, 06:45 AM   #4
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Apple are utterly hopeless. iBooks was ugly until recently, but it has turned puke-ugly now, employing the hideous "iOS 7 look". They are really beyond repair. I also "love" the extra-huge empty margins all around the screen, totally not configurable.

iOS 7 is the fail of the decade in terms of design, and nothing epitomises its ugliness better than the new iBooks.
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Old 11-15-2013, 07:17 AM   #5
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I'm looking forward to losing the bookcase and book similes in iBooks. I'll wait a few days before I upgrade though, as I do with all my essential apps.
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Old 11-15-2013, 07:39 AM   #6
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To each their own. The huge margins all around the screen, wasting large amounts of screen real estate on both the iPad and iPhone, are unpalatable for me -- skeuomorphism here or there. I find it mind-boggling iBooks doesn't give users the option to reduce the margins. Not to mention iBooks's woeful lack of functionality and layout customisation options. ("Apple's customisation options" almost sounds like an oxymoron.)

Now, the wooden bookcase may have been "cheesy". (I didn't think so.) But the replacement? Shades of grey stripes with some two-dimensional, pointedly flat book covers slapped onto them? I was gobsmacked. My goodness, I'd call this the antithesis of aesthetics.

Anyway, as mentioned, to each their own.
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Old 11-15-2013, 10:26 AM   #7
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Trying to insert a positive here. At least it's grey and not white so it's easier on the eyes! Although it's another orange text app. I won't miss the bookshelf look, but I do think the new look is just too bland.
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Old 11-15-2013, 10:37 AM   #8
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Ugh. When I updated to the latest iOS (7.0.4) it automatically updated my iBooks. I had intended to keep with the old one. I LIKED the look of a book. Now I have no reason to use iBooks as all the other choices have the same flat look. I was already reading mostly in Marvin and I can't see a reason at all to use iBooks now.
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Old 11-15-2013, 10:42 AM   #9
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Yep, it is ugly. But I never use it so no big deal to me. I agree that it is stupid the way iBooks and Kindles/Kindle apps all have large margins. What a waste, especially on smartphone screens. I often wonder if the programmers of these reading apps even read on them. I think if they did then the apps would look a bit more like Marvin! The worst reading app I've seen lately is Kindle for Android. It only has one font, so you cannot even choose a different font. And of course, the extra wide margins. We need more literate programmers for reading app design!
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Old 11-15-2013, 11:02 AM   #10
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I like the wide margins.
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Old 11-15-2013, 11:09 AM   #11
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That's the trouble, FlorenceArt. You happen to be lucky in this regard, but... Apple's software design philosophy seems to be, "We'll choose one way to make something work (or look), and if you don't like that, too bad! Take it or leave it. Hell, no, we will not let you customise anything."

I find it to be a disrespectful, arrogant approach to software design. Apple, to me, is a perplexing marriage of superb hardware with awful default software. If it hadn't been for outstanding 3rd-party software on Apple devices, I'd toss my iPads and iPhone and MacBook out the window right this minute. They would be that unbearable.
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Old 11-15-2013, 07:21 PM   #12
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Go look at the Marvin sub-forum and look at all the requests.

Apple, Amazon, B&N, Kobo, and the others don't have time for this. Whatever they add to their readers, is only another thing they have to note in their manuals. Most people just want to get in and out of a book. There is nothing wrong with the choices of colors, fonts, and margins in any of these apps, except that they don't meet the needs of us enthusiasts who like to read A LOT.

You can easily customize Marvin to the point that it's not readable anymore. And it's the problems like that which can hurt these companies, because it'll only lead to more customer support requests from people needing help to fix it. We're all tech savvy here, but really, millions of people who use the same tech we do are so dumbfounded when it comes to obscure settings. I constantly have to deal with college professors who have no idea how to operate a printer, or setup a projector, and struggle with it for at most a hour during classes.

My dad has always had problems with the Start Menu in Windows even, he tries to get to a program, and it closes as he's going up through the menus.

If you don't cater to the masses, you're not going to get anywhere. A company like Amazon or Apple would not survive with just the 230,000 of us here onboard. And they can deal with not having up when there are millions of millions of other customers who are happy and spending lots of money..

As for iTunes U, I like the new setup. The menus at the bottom, instead of all the elaborate planner stuff, is a welcomed change IMO.
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Old 11-15-2013, 10:59 PM   #13
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Sorry, Jessica, not buying those excuses. You are saying as if logic commanded that corporate software must by necessity be crappy software. I admit it looks that way, because corporate software usually is crappy. But it's not because corporations don't have the resources to produce quality software. They have the resources, but they lack the will to produce quality. Why? Because their focus is on maximising profits, instead of on increasing quality. And here is something that is almost like natural law: you cannot maximise profits if your primary focus is quality. That's because the great masses of customers do not demand top quality. The great masses of customers are not interested in "best possible", but in "good enough". Catering to those great, indiscriminate (in several senses of the word) masses of users, is where most of the profits are.

Perhaps both of us are saying the same thing, only in different words. You are as if exonerating corporations from producing crappy software, whereas I am as if blaming them for the same thing.
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Old 11-16-2013, 12:10 AM   #14
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It's not as if the Kindle app is perfect - it has a limited adjustment for margins, but neither Kindle or iBooks come close to Marvin - margin adjustments, colours, fonts, screen contrast aswell as brightness, built in access to dropbox, and on and on...

The Kindle app, and iBooks both work... just like Safari and Internet Explorer work. If you want something better, then dig around for something designed by a group of people whose main priority is that one application ( web browsing, ebook reading, app launching on a desktop or laptop etc) and you'll find many superior alternatives.

It staggered me when i got our first iPad that people just stuck with Safari - it's only recently got tabs for goodness' sake.
I've got more multi-touch gesture control on my web browsing on my Macbook Pro with Better Touch Tool installed - again. an application built to leverage the excellent Apple trackpad and allow fantastic gesture support system wide or by app. Why are gestures so limited on a touch screen tablet....?

Rant over - i do like these ipads ;-)
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Old 11-16-2013, 01:01 AM   #15
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It staggered me when i got our first iPad that people just stuck with Safari - it's only recently got tabs for goodness' sake.
And the implementation of tabs in Safari is inferior, too: in order to close a Safari tab, you must first actively switch to it! In every smart browser, you simply tap the "x" icon to close a tab, while remaining on the current tab.

But as you say: it's default, lame software, such as many have come to expect from Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, etc. I just find it amusing when it is claimed that the world's wealthiest multi-billion corporations are unable to produce quality, smart software. Oh, they definitely could do that, if that was their intention. But their focus is not on supreme software quality -- it's on maximising profits. In order for corporations to produce supreme software quality, they would consciously need to sacrifice part of their profits for that goal. It appears that corporations are constitutionally unable or unwilling to do so because certain levels of corporate management would then get blamed for decreased profit growth if they permitted themselves to focus on quality rather than quantity (= mass of users).

I think the least us users can do, is call things by their right names. As you know, it's part of the corporate marketing to pretend as if corporate software were of supreme quality. (Just watch any Apple keynote.) I believe if enough users call things by their right names -- call low-quality software low-quality when they see it ("The king is naked!") -- this may help put some pressure on corporations to focus more on quality, even if it were at the expense of quantity. No corporation would enjoy the reputation of producing low-quality software. However, if we take it for granted that corporations produce low-quality software, if we even attempt to justify corporations for not caring about quality, essentially approving their approach... then no overall improvement can occur in future.

You know, iBooks is the smaller problem here -- you can replace it with Marvin. (Not on all occasions: DRM-protected books...) A more serious problem is something like iOS with its overly restricted environment and limited functionality. You can't swap iOS for something else on your iPad or iPhone; nor are you allowed to tweak and improve its functionality in the ways it's possible on traditional computers. If low-quality software is not criticised and is even taken for granted, it's unlikely to ever improve.

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