Effecting Change From the Outside ⇥ marco.org

In the wake of The Great Stroke Thickening of 2013, Marco Arment has some thoughts on how much this decision was affected by bug reports and commentary:

Apple isn’t a waterfall dictatorship. It’s a company full of many smart people at all levels, and while those people are generally in agreement on high-level philosophies and priorities, they often have different ideas that need to be resolved through experimentation, debate, or executive order. […]

We can’t participate directly in those debates, but we can provide ammo to the side we agree with.

From which Business Insider troll bottom feeder “writer” Nicholas Carlson expanded:

Blogger Declares Victory Over Apple Design Boss Jony Ive, Claims Deep Influence At Apple

Meanwhile, Mark Gurman doesn’t think bloggers had anything to do with it:

iOS 7 beta 3 was already floating around the week of WWDC. CC @marcoarment

Will Strafach chimes in:

@markgurman @marcoarment it wasn’t called that, obviously, but mark is absolutely right. devs got an older but more stable build.

While a newer build of iOS 7 existed at WWDC, why would use a different weight for the first two builds (and all web mockups), then switch it? If they knew they were going to use the regular weight all along, why did they demo it with the lighter weight?

But that’s a silly aside. John Moltz agrees with Arment:

[T]his isn’t the first time bitching about something has caused the company to reconsider something (see: transparent menu bar in OS X).

Indeed. This is the biggest UI makeover to an Apple operating system since the transition from OS 9 to OS X, and the process appears broadly similar. Consider, for example, the difference in the Dock between Mac OS X 10.0 DP2 and the 10.0 public release. There was probably an internal debate, but it was no doubt informed by developer feedback.