I was really happy about using the Photosynth app for the first time to make an excellent panorama. The app has the fastest and smoothest panorama creation out of any app I’ve tried. It does a great job of just letting me adjust my camera, while it captures what it needs to automatically and gives me real time feedback.

And then I saw this horrible settings screen. I had thought about design like this on iOS before, but being confronting it for the first time was especially frustrating. At first the whole IA of the options wasn’t clear to me, nor were they very easy to read and distinguish with its colour scheme that includes a very low contrast choice of dark blue on black. Then I started accidentally being transported to other parts of the app because there’s no spacing between the tab bar menu at the bottom of the screen and the scrolling menu options.

For whatever reason the very first setting option on this screen is “help”, and its found at the very top of the screen, followed by a huge gap until the next option, followed by yet another smaller gap until the rest of the controls appear.

I didn’t know Metro on the iPhone would be such a jarring experience. It’s just too different. I deleted the app.