Scott Forstall’s Most Heinous Crimes Against Humanity
By Sam Biddle
Scott “Wild West” Forstall is dunzo at Apple—and for good reason. Everyone except Steve Jobs hated him, and his design ideas were appalling. However, as an Apple alum he’ll still spend the rest of his life unimaginably rich. There will never be justice for what he did to us. Below, the worst of his terrible software horrors. To The Hague we go.
Forstall cherished the idea of making software that resembled real life objects that people felt comfortable around. Like making iOS’ never-used Game Center app look like a pool table, or something. Green felt—never a good idea.
Better, but still bad, Siri was touted as the reason to buy an iPhone 4S. A year later, and the software still doesn’t work very well.
Hold on—searching the web for “Where cran die find a train to glue fork.”
If you ignored the hilariously bad 3D component, Apple Maps was never that terrible. But it remains inexcusably subpar, and was the laughingstock of the entire Internet for a few days. If you search for a coffee shop it’ll still point you to a landfill or something.
Find My Friends was maybe the worst of the worst of the worst. Just look at the icon—the stitching! The rawhide! It made us want to avoid our friends, because our friends might be wearing embossed leather assless chaps.
Bookshelves in iOS have always had to look like an actual IKEA shelf. The idea that we can’t grasp reading books made out of pixels unless there’s an illusion of a physical bookshelf is insulting. Also, you can’t hide the Newsstand app, which also looks like a dumb wooden thing, in a folder.
This idiotic, functionless faux-cloth texture pervades iOS. A smartphone should never look like it needs mothballs. Stop making phones out of fabric, Apple. Or leather.
Ugly things that didn’t work well. Make sure that isn’t your legacy.
