I can’t help but read Apple’s guidelines and think they read something from the 90s or early 2000s and completely misinterpreted it. Quoting (and this theme is repeated over and over):
> Ensure that you clearly separate your content from navigation elements, like tab bars and sidebars, to establish a distinct functional layer above the content layer.
This makes perfect sense. Separate content and controls. In this variant, controls go on top, like a toolbar, and then there’s a horizontal division (maybe an actual line, maybe just blank space), then content.
Then I looked at the pictures again and did a double take. Apple doesn’t have a clear separation at all. And the controls are at the bottom, not the top.
The punchline, of course, is that Apple transposed the Y and Z axes! The functional layer isn’t toward the top of the screen — it’s toward the user! You are supposed to separate content and controls along X or Y so that content is next to controls but separated a bit but, for some reason, Apple is floating controls over content, in the Z axis. The separation is a plane, parallel to the screen, that you can’t see because the controls are in the way.
Apple, turn off your fancy shaders and go back to the drawing board. You have so many more pixels than any 90s designer, and yet you can fit almost no unobscured content on the screen. And your poor users can’t see the divisions between content and everything else because you built the technology to rotate the whole UI 90 degrees about the X axis!
> Ensure that you clearly separate your content from navigation elements, like tab bars and sidebars, to establish a distinct functional layer above the content layer.
This makes perfect sense. Separate content and controls. In this variant, controls go on top, like a toolbar, and then there’s a horizontal division (maybe an actual line, maybe just blank space), then content.
Then I looked at the pictures again and did a double take. Apple doesn’t have a clear separation at all. And the controls are at the bottom, not the top.
The punchline, of course, is that Apple transposed the Y and Z axes! The functional layer isn’t toward the top of the screen — it’s toward the user! You are supposed to separate content and controls along X or Y so that content is next to controls but separated a bit but, for some reason, Apple is floating controls over content, in the Z axis. The separation is a plane, parallel to the screen, that you can’t see because the controls are in the way.
Apple, turn off your fancy shaders and go back to the drawing board. You have so many more pixels than any 90s designer, and yet you can fit almost no unobscured content on the screen. And your poor users can’t see the divisions between content and everything else because you built the technology to rotate the whole UI 90 degrees about the X axis!