Nova81426: it would have been much easier to just use a different clock design

Well, if anyone would know about visual design for timepieces, mobile device UX and IP law, it would be you, random internet poster!

/what is it about Apple that draws out the peanut gallery?

Nova81426: Are we not supposed to comment on articles anymore? I'm confused.

Not if you're completely unqualified to do so and not with an air of certainty! Same as regular life, give someone who knows what they're talking about some air time. It's ridiculous for you to say what's "easy" about someone else's highly technical, esoteric work with tons of legal and artistic considerations, without a hint of uncertainty.

I have to deal with it all day at my job and so I'm taking it out on you!

Nova81426: Having one guy change a few details on a clock graphic is an hour's work.

Thank you for being nice, I am a grouchy person :)

Changing clock.app is not as expensive as $12MM, but it's definitely not an hour's worth of work, not even close.

First, they would have to decide which things to change. 6-8 people, 6-8 hours. Minimum. In a room, arguing, with the guy who's clock wasn't chosen last time being an asshole about it. Then they would have to craft the new design, mock it up and get approval. This is probably what you're thinking is an hours' work. It's more like 2 days. After that, there's getting the devs to put the new content in the codebase. Depending on which changes are made, this could be instantaneous, or it could be many hours' work (changing the hands = hard, changing the face = easy, adding numbers = hard, changing the ticks = easy). If they decide to add numbers, it will have to be localized into every language iOS supports (about a zillion). If they change the size of the face or the length of the hands, the code to rotate the hands will have to be changed to reflect this. If they change the color of the hands, the shadow will have to be changed to show a hint of that color, or the hands won't look "real". The assets they deliver to devs (or, more likely , wait for devs to request) will have to be in retina and regular format.

Then there's testing, then acceptance testing. We're talking a clock here, so you have to test by looking at it at all different times of the day to make sure it doesn't look weird at 1:13:31:09 AM, etc. Then there's focus grouping, bucket (aka A/B) testing, and some other optional steps that could be skipped, but it's Apple, so they won't be. If one or more of those tests turn up a problem ("the hands, when slightly overlapped, at 12:01, look aliased on the Retina display iPad3 only"), it starts back at one of the other phases I mentioned earlier.

This doesn't take into account accessibility concerns for the vision impaired and other things I'm surely forgetting. If I had to spitball it, I'd say changing the clock, without knowing what will change about it, would take at least two person-weeks of a multi-disciplinary team. Give or take (likely give) a week.

On top of that, there's waiting until there is an update released to actually deploy all this work to the device. This isn't the web, where you can just change old_clock.png to new_clock.png and hit F5. Then, when your legions of haters/stalkers hit the blogs with screenshots of your "ugly" new clock, you can say you make your product worse rather than pay up, and write another apology letter for Slashdot to jerk off onto. Oh, and you can explain that it was "too expensive" to have the best clock you could find. That should go over great.

Wow, that felt good.

Nova81426: I'm the director of the UX department at a web development company

I would not do your job for all the clocks at Apple. Unqualified, unfocused criticism to prove you are paying attention during a meeting drives me insane, and JAD sessions are full of it.

Nova81426: And besides, this is a really trivial thing to be getting all worked up about anyway.

It's cumulative. Thanks for giving me a chance to vent. I didn't know so few people maintained iOS, that is interesting news.