Apple's Car Play Isn't About Taking Over The Car - But More About Bringing A Familiar Face To The Dash

At the 2014 Geneva auto show, we got the first hands-on demonstrations of CarPlay, the feature of iOS7 that Apple announced last year as iOS in the Car. From comments on the Internet, you might think Apple software has now taken over car dashboards, leaving Android users with the choice to convert or walk.

It may seem unlikely, but many Internet commenters are wrong, at least about CarPlay. I was one of the first journalists to get a demonstration of the system at the show, and I was impressed.

Rather than a revolution in dashboard infotainment, what I saw in CarPlay was an evolution of iOS music library integration in cars. For the last 10 years, cars have increasingly featured USB ports that let you plug in an iPod, iPhone, or iPad with its white cable, and control music playback using the car's own touch screen LCD or dashboard controls. With this integration, you can browse music by artist, album, genre, and track, select something, and play it.

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TheSteve - 3/11/2014 6:28:19 PM

+1 Boost

There was a time when Apple was superb at graphic user interfaces (GUIs). Back in the day, when I developed Mac software, I was well versed with their Macintosh User Interface Guidelines, a thick book that detailed to developers how to use various user interface elements, what fonts to use, what positioning to use for UI elements on screens, and so on. Apps were intuitive, and looked attractive.

As the years went by, Apple has gone from bona fide leader of UI design to just another face in the sloppy crowd. We see Apple "at its best" today with iOS 7. There, legibility is an issue due to their selection of hard-to-read fonts and translucent windows, which sound cool on paper but appear murky in person. You also get ambiguous UI elements, such as text that looks the same as a label, but which is actually a clickable object (you just have to know that it's a control and not a label). Apple has even moved away from expertly-design icons that looked three-dimensional and gave the impression of having a glossy surface, to icons that look like they were created as part of a high schooler's cut paper project.

There was a time when I would have rejoiced to have an Apple designed screen in my car. Today, I go "Meh." Apple has lost its shine since Jobs has passed away.