My view on the esthetics:
I really like the Now Playing screen, from a design perspective. Details below the picture:
-
I like the uniform white, with no delineation of areas, like the footer bar vs. the rest of the page. This is modern design — “modern” in that it came out of Switzerland in the 30s. Early computer design was Victorian, with centered headings and labels, and lots of frames and lines delineating areas. Look at any modern magazine, or a photo book, or something like that: minimal lines, no stupid drop shadows, text for the album is left-aligned.
-
Look at the left margin: the hamburger menu, the album cover, the play controls and the time line are all left aligned, this creates a virtual left edge that doesn’t require a line. And similarly on the right edge, search button, three dots, volume button and time line are right-aligned, creating a virtual edge with no line.
-
No borders on the pictures either — when was the last time you saw borders on photos in a magazine?
-
I like the album picture breaking out of the grid. Adds a little tension.
-
It’s actually not white but light gray. I can imagine some reasons for that, less glaring, but I disagree with it. Newspapers and magazines are white, my iPad is mostly white — this page is white! Doesn’t matter much on this page which is all uniform, but when you collapse the page and get back to the footer on an album page, you get the area delineation again. All white everywhere would be better.
-
I absolutely didn’t like the old black play bar. Black over white is such a harsh contrast. You don’t see black section demarcations on magazine pages, the page footer is just a white bottom area with a page number. Similarly, the main menu is black - yeww!
-
I similarly prefer a few things like DSP now getting a full page, instead of being a pop-up dialog box. Such pop-ups are terrible, they break the flow, don’t fit in normal navigation, especially when modal (or system-modal — WTF?). We still have a few: the zone selector, which does not go away when I hit play but does go away when I touch elsewhere, and the volume button brings up its own dialog box but doesn’t bring down the zone selector and their lifetimes are stacked, and if I have both zone selector and volume box open and hit the Play control arrow the volume box goes away but I have to hit Play again to make it happen but if the zone selector is up the Play control works directly… Random stuff.
And the cleanliness of the Now Playing page is missing elsewhere. As @brian said, such cleanup is incremental. But I can’t wait. All white, no sections!!!