Archive for November 8, 2017
Designing Apps for iPhone X
If iPhone X is a design for the next 10 years, maybe our app design should change with it? Here’s my Rule of Thumbs to help :)
This map is horribly incorrect. The entire bottom centimeter of the phone should be red.
Stefan Kieleithner and Michael Ochs:
Supporting the iPhone X was more difficult than initially anticipated, and it required much more work than adding support for any previously announced new iPhone model.
This time around, things were different, because not only did the screen size change — which was the case for previous hardware generations like the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, and the 12.9" and 10.5" iPad Pro — but Apple also added a whole new concept with always visible elements. Because of this, if not laid out correctly, both the sensor housing and the indicator for accessing the Home screen will obscure content that would otherwise display fine on simple rectangular screens.
All iOS apps with dark modes or dark themes must reconsider them for OLED.
On LCDs, dark gray looks better than black. OLED is different.
Previously: iPhone X Design and the Notch.
Update (2017-11-10): Ryan Christoffel:
We’re only a week out from the iPhone X’s debut, so what we see from X-ready apps today will likely evolve over time as developers are able to live with the device longer. But despite it being early days still, there are several apps that stand out among the best the App Store has to offer for iPhone X.
Update (2017-11-20): Federico Viticci:
The most visible departure from Overcast 3.0 is the replacement of the “stacked card” visual metaphor (of which I was a fan) with a more traditional horizontal navigation. Show pages and episode details are now always pushed into view from the side of the app; the Now Playing screen has gone back to the Overcast 2.0 style, abandoning the Apple Music-inspired card design of version 3.0.
According to Arment, these were necessary changes to take advantage of the iPhone X’s screen and increase the reachability of all navigation controls throughout the app. It’s hard to tell without an iPhone X in my hands, but I assume that “embracing the notch” with a unified title bar should look better than blocking out the device’s status bar with a black background, which Overcast’s old stacked card UI (pictured in the image above) would have done.
Update (2017-12-15): Sebastiaan de With:
Now, a month after the release of iPhone X, I want to show you how we designed and released an app redesigned for iPhone X, without ever even having held one.
Update (2018-01-14): Khaos Tian:
Wait iMovie is still not updated for iPhone X?
iPhone X Physical Design
If there’s an ergonomic issue I’m going to have with the iPhone X, it’s the height of the device, not its width. Holding my iPhone 8 in one hand, I can barely reach my thumb up to the top of the screen. But not only is the iPhone X 5mm taller, but the screen extends almost all the way to the top. I can’t keep the bottom of the iPhone X braced with my pinky and use my thumb to tap items high up in the interface. I suppose over time I will either change how I hold the phone in my hand, get used to shimmying my hand up the phone to reach the top, or get used to not one-handing my iPhone as often as I currently do.
For any of you buying glass-back phones that are used to leaving them on your lap or bag or whatever know they are REAL slippery on textiles.
Following a series of six drop tests of the iPhone X, gadget insurance company SquareTrade has labelled the iPhone X ‘the most breakable, highest-priced, most expensive to repair iPhone ever.’
When it comes to hardware, this is the most densely-packed gadget we’ve ever taken apart. Thanks to drastically shrinking the bezels, the iPhone X sports the largest display of any iPhone—in a smaller form factor than the “Plus” devices. That super-sized display needs a super-sized battery, and there wasn’t room with the iPhone’s traditional layout. The solution? An unprecedented degree of miniaturization of the main board. Apple effectively folded the logic board in half—and soldered the layers together—to free up valuable real estate for the Plus-sized battery. In its compact and stacked form, the iPhone X logic board takes up about 70% of the area of the iPhone 8 Plus board. Separated and spread out, the X’s board is actually 35% bigger than the one in the 8 Plus—which leaves plenty of room for new goodies, like hardware to power FaceID.
Looking at iPhone X, you can see how Apple has taken 10 years of those innovations in industrial design and essentially summarized it.
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The iPhone X is a design that condenses the essence of every past iPhone and somehow transcends it to become something entirely new.
iPhone X looks great, but like all of Apple’s phones since the iPhone 5s (and SE), I do not find it comfortable in the hand without a case. The edges are too rounded, though they feel a bit less sharp than the 6/6s/7, perhaps because the X is thicker. Unfortunately, it’s even more slippery than previous models. I’d prefer to see a more sticky surface and more square edges.
iPhone X Face ID
While Apple has touted that Face ID is more secure than Touch ID, it also shared that this isn’t the case for twins and those under the age of 13. Now that a few outlets have had more time with the iPhone X, we’re seeing some mixed results when it comes to identical twins tricking Face ID.
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Today, Business Insider,Mashable, and The Wall Street Journal put Face ID to the test with identical twins and triplets…and so far it looks like a false match probability of 3 out of 4 (with extremely limited testing).
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Another interesting note from the Mashable article is that Windows has apparently solved the twin problem with its Windows Hello facial recognition.
Emmanuel Ocbazghi (via Mitchel Broussard):
I was pretty shocked that the iPhone X could really pick apart the details between me and my [twin] brother, considering some of our own family members can’t tell us apart.
Apple touts that Face ID is even more secure than Touch ID was, with there being a 1 in 1,000,000 chance of a different person being able to unlock someone else’s iPhone X with Face ID. A new video posted to Reddit, however, shows Face ID failing to properly differentiate between siblings…
[Update (2017-11-08): It sounds like the siblings inadvertently trained Face ID that they were the same person.]
Pretty fully used to the iPhone X now, and overall it’s a superior phone. One issue with Face ID, in fluorescent light. Otherwise flawless.
Here’s a theory about why folks who haven’t used the iPhone X for several days might get more Face ID misses: it’s a learning computer.
Here’s what the infrared dot projector on the iPhone X’s Face ID looks like when viewed using a night vision cam[…]
Face ID is very nice. But anyone who tells you it works flat on a table without awkwardly towering over it might be yanking your chain 😂
Overall though I’d take it over Touch ID. It actually does feel more convenient. Didn’t expect it to either.
Face ID works well—doesn’t work at my desks at all though
The iPhone X can be unlocked with a passcode instead of Face ID, but it's not obvious how to do it. To use a passcode, tap the screen to wake up the iPhone, swipe up on the Home bar, and tap “Face ID”.
I do this to unlock my iPhone while it's lay down flat on my desk.
I just ran into the HUGE flaw with #iPhoneX Face ID. It doesn’t work in other orientations besides normal portrait. Can’t unlock in bed
Face ID was better than 5s Touch ID on day 1, even better now (it actually seems to be improving for stuff-in-front-of-my-face somewhat).
It took 1.2 seconds for Spoonauer to unlock the iPhone X from pressing the side button on the side of the device and another 0.4 seconds to swipe up to get to the lock screen, while getting to the Home screen on an iPhone 7 Plus using Touch ID took 0.91 seconds.
When using Raise to Wake and swiping up on the display as the iPhone is recognizing a face (as Face ID is meant to be used, according to John Gruber), unlocking was faster at a total of 1.16, but Spoonaeur still found it to be slower than Touch ID.
In a raw comparison like that, Touch ID seems like the faster unlocking method, but as TechCrunch’s Matthew Panzarino points out, in actual day-to-day usage, Face ID has benefits over Touch ID because it’s a more streamlined interaction.
It’s hard to describe how well done FaceID is. So well done that it’s subtle in use. Obviously how this should have always been done.
Which makes the minor blow up over unlock speed versus TouchID even more silly. It’s 1000x better. The button will not be missed.
I’ll be honest: The combination of the Touch ID sensor with the iPhone’s home button led me to bad behavior. My habit was always to lay my thumb on the sensor and then push the button, a combination that invariably led me to unlock the phone and send it to the home screen. The idea of gently laying my thumb on the home button and then taking it off in order to browse notifications rarely, if ever, occurred to me.
Face ID isn’t perfect: there are a lot of edge cases where having Touch ID would be preferable. By its fourth iteration in the iPhone 7, Touch ID was utterly dependable and, like the best sort of technology, barely noticeable.
FaceID takes this a step further: while it takes a bit of time to change engrained habits, I’m already at the point where I simply pick up the phone and swipe up without much thought; authenticating in apps like 1Password is even more of a revelation — you don’t have to actually do anything.
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The trick Apple pulled, though, was going beyond that: the first time I saw notifications be hidden and then revealed (as in the GIF above) through simply a glance produced the sort of surprise-and-delight that has traditionally characterized Apple’s best products. And, to be sure, surprise-and-delight is particularly important to the iPhone X: so much is new, particularly in terms of the interaction model, that frustrations are inevitable; in that Apple’s attempt to analogize the iPhone X to the original iPhone is more about contrasts than comparisons.
Apple Pay is so cumbersome now with Face ID...has taken me multiple tries each time I’ve used it with my new phone 😞
Update (2017-11-08): Tommy Collison:
I’m interested in Face ID from an accessibility standpoint. PINs and Touch ID take fine motor control that not everyone has.
When Face ID doesn’t work the first time, you have to lock the phone to try again AFAICT. That’s pretty unintuitive and annoying.
Update (2017-11-10): Rich Mogull:
Put simply, Face ID is the most compelling advancement in security I have seen in a very long time. It’s game changing not merely due to the technology, but due to Apple’s design and implementation.
Update (2017-11-13): Tim Bradshaw (via Ivan Krstić):
The real secret to both FaceID and TouchID, however, is that they are easier to use than manually typing a numerical passcode to unlock the phone. More customers, therefore, are likely to leave this vital security protection turned on. Even the most rock solid of security systems is useless if customers turn it off because it is too complicated.
When Apple released the iPhone X on November 3, it touched off an immediate race among hackers around the world to be the first to fool the company’s futuristic new form of authentication. A week later, hackers on the actual other side of the world claim to have successfully duplicated someone’s face to unlock his iPhone X—with what looks like a simpler technique than some security researchers believed possible.
On Friday, Vietnamese security firm Bkav released a blog post and video showing that—by all appearances—they’d cracked Face ID with a composite mask of 3-D-printed plastic, silicone, makeup, and simple paper cutouts, which in combination tricked an iPhone X into unlocking. That demonstration, which has yet to be confirmed publicly by other security researchers, could poke a hole in the expensive security of the iPhone X, particularly given that the researchers say their mask cost just $150 to make.
Update (2017-11-15): Bruce Schneier:
I don’t think this is cause for alarm, though. Authentication will always be a trade-off between security and convenience. FaceID is another biometric option, and a good one. I wouldn’t be less likely to use it because of this.
A new video has surfaced of a 10-year-old child unlocking his mother's iPhone X with his face even though Face ID was set up with her face.
Update (2017-11-20): Rich Trouton:
Face ID is the most compelling security advance I have seen in a very long time. It’s game-changing not merely due to technology, but also thanks to design and implementation. Apple has created a new authentication modality.
Update (2017-11-21): Ashley Park (via Dan Masters):
FaceTec conducted an experiment with a “sleeping” iPhone X owner and placed numerous pizza toppings on their eyes, such as olives, mushrooms, and pepperoni, to easily hack into what Apple promoted as a “secure and private new way to unlock, authenticate, and pay.” As shown in the video, the iPhone opens right up as soon as it recognizes the toppings as the owner’s eyes.
Update (2017-11-29): Juli Clover:
Bkav reset Face ID on camera and then set it up anew with the demonstrator’s face. “Require Attention for Face ID” and “Attention Aware Features” were both shown to be enabled on the iPhone X. For those unaware, “Require Attention for Face ID” is meant to add an extra layer of security by requiring you to look at your iPhone to use Face ID, and it’s one of the features that’s supposed to prevent Face ID from unlocking with a mask, with a photograph, or when you’re looking away from your phone.
After activating Face ID, the Bkav demonstrator unlocks the iPhone X normally with his own face, and then unlocks it once again with the mask. The mask appears to be able to unlock the iPhone X right away, with no failed attempts and no learning, as Face ID was set up from scratch just before the test. The mask’s 2D infrared eyes also appear to fool the “Require Attention for Face ID” setting.
Update (2017-11-30): Sam Bingner:
I don’t know if it’s me or if everybody else just seems to have better luck… but FaceID is much less reliable and slower than TouchID was for me. FaceID is always slower, and fails quite often. Yes, I enter the code to “train” it when it fails. Constantly.
Update (2017-12-01): Joe Rossignol:
Apple’s current focus with Face ID is on single-user authentication, suggesting support for multiple faces won’t be added in the near future, according to an alleged email from the company’s software engineering chief Craig Federighi.
Update (2017-12-05): Ryan Jones:
Face ID is magic – clearly the future. But it still works less often than Touch ID, so far for me.
Touch ID ~98%
Face ID ~92%
Update (2017-12-13): Troy Hunt:
I’ve been gradually coming to this conclusion of my own free will, but Phil Schiller’s comments last week finally cemented it for me: Face ID stinks.
Update (2017-12-18): Chris Ogden (Hacker News):
For while Apple have said their facial recognition software on the iPhone X is top-notch and that the chances of somebody else being able to unlock your phone is - literally - ‘one in a million’, a woman called Yan has already proved that’s clearly not the case.
Hailing from Nanjing in China, Yan got her hands on an iPhone X, only to discover that her co-worker could easily unlock it with her face, too. Even after a major rejig of the configuration settings.
According to a report from Shanghaiist, Yan called Apple’s hotline to report the problem in the hopes of finding a solution, but was told, essentially, that what she was describing was impossible.
Update (2017-12-28): Samuel Axon:
iPhone X owners have found that Face ID isn’t available as an authentication method for the “Ask to Buy” feature, which allows parents to approve their kids’ iOS purchases and downloads. Instead, the parent (or any other “family organizer,” as Apple terms it) must enter their entire Apple account password to approve each individual purchase attempt.
Users are frustrated because equivalent functionality was available on Touch ID devices, and that functionality has been lost in the transition to the iPhone X.
Update (2018-01-12): Thom Holwerda:
After six weeks with the iPhone X:
- Face ID is so-so. Regularly doesn’t work. Would’ve preferred a print sensor on the back. Friends of mine have actually turned off passcode/Face ID entirely because of this.
- Occasional performance hiccups in Springboard and applications.
Update (2018-01-14): Jennifer Tilly:
I never believe when people say I look like my sisters. But Meg just picked up my IPhoneX and it facial-recognized her and opened right up!
iPhone X Display
iPhone X is the first iPhone with an OLED display. OLED — organic light emitting diode — has several advantages over the LCD technology Apple used in every previous iPhone. For example, the pixels emit their own light so there’s no need for a separate backlight the way there is on LCD. That allows for thinner displays and, because only the pixels that need to be lit are lit, deep, inky blacks.
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To make the diamond arrangement look as good as possible, Apple is applying its own subpixel anti-aliasing. It’s effective enough that, after leaving the iPhone X hands-on area after Apple’s September event, almost no one seems to have noticed the difference in pixel layout. Even now, staring at it, it looks great. Maybe under a macro you could see the difference but to my naked eye, Apple nailed the pixels.
Apple is also individually calibrating every iPhone X before it leaves the factory. That’s not something most vendors do.
It’s an awesome display. After reading your review I took this picture of the diamond PenTile pixel arrangement.
A closer look at the iPhone X display’s OLED diamond subpixel pattern.
I hate to say it, but it makes the iPhone 8 Plus LCD look kind of like butt. I love it, even though it is flawed in one noticeable way.
The one area where this display falls prey to standard OLED gripes is in off-axis viewing. Apple tells me that it has done work to counter the drop in saturation and shift to blue that affects OLED screens traditionally. I can tell you that, compared to other OLED screens, you have to get further “off of center” to see a real shift in color, holding the phone 30 degrees or more off of dead on. But it is still there. For people who share their phone’s screen or use it at odd angles a lot, it will be noticeable. On some phones, OLEDs go super blue. On the iPhone X it’s more of a slight blue shift with a reduction in saturation and dynamic range. It’s not terrible, but it definitely exists.
Apple (via Steve Troughton-Smith, Hacker News):
If you look at an OLED display off-angle, you might notice slight shifts in color and hue. This is a characteristic of OLED and is normal behavior. With extended long-term use, OLED displays can also show slight visual changes. This is also expected behavior and can include “image persistence” or “burn-in,” where the display shows a faint remnant of an image even after a new image appears on the screen. This can occur in more extreme cases such as when the same high contrast image is continuously displayed for prolonged periods of time. We’ve engineered the Super Retina display to be the best in the industry in reducing the effects of OLED “burn-in.”
Still getting comfortable with the iPhone X, but the Pentile artifacts are present. Especially on text.
Pentile is usually bad with hairline text and lines which helllllooooo iOS UI
As it does for each iPhone launch, DisplayMate has released a display shoot-out for the iPhone X, praising Apple’s technology in areas like the higher resolution OLED screen, automatic color management, viewing angle performance, and more. According to DisplayMate, the iPhone X has the "most innovative and high performance" smartphone display it has ever tested.
I’m seeing very different color temperatures with True Tone on X vs. 8 (iPhone 7 on right for reference)[…]
The dead pixels are visible throughout the video on all close-ups of the iPhone; this means it’s probably a hardware issue and not something that can be fixed via a software update.
This phone is absolutely unreal. It also seers my eyeballs this early in the morning. It can’t get as dim.
I’m going to miss the iPhone SE size. But the X screen is incredible. So crisp and close to the surface it looks fake.
As someone who uses the Plus phones more for vertical real estate than horizontal, the X looks to give me exactly what I want.
Update (2017-11-09): John Gruber:
Here’s a Reddit thread [suggesting the] iPhone X display is not responsive once temperature gets to around freezing.
We asked Apple about this situation and they sent us this response:
“We are aware of instances where the iPhone X screen will become temporarily unresponsive to touch after a rapid change to a cold environment. After several seconds the screen will become fully responsive again. This will be addressed in an upcoming software update.”
Update (2017-11-13): Steve Troughton-Smith:
So what does PenTile mean in practice on iPhone X? Only green is ‘true 3X’ You need exceedingly tiny text to notice the effect, just about the limits of decent human vision.
See also: Simon Helyar.
