iOS7, You're making me sick.
It starts with a dull throbbing headache that makes my head feel heavy and my eyes strained. Then a cold sweat runs over my body. A twinge of nausea hits my stomach, clenches my throat, threatening to worsen if I continue exposing myself to this THING. This THING that has been attached to my hand as if I have a cybernetic removable appendage with ok battery life, that allows me to interact with the world made up by a series of tubes.I just updated my phone to iOS 7 the day before I left to Portland for XOXO. Then after heavy use from traveling, using the maps to get around, instagramming my surroundings, I started feeling it. I took some advil not giving it a second thought. By day two I figured it out. My iPhone was causing this and there was no way to turn this off.
No this is not a rant about the look of iOS 7, but the inability to turn off the animated zoom interaction as you go into your folders, open an app, multi-task through screens into another app. I have motion sickness and I guess no one else in the Apple team had this condition. Yes, you can turn off parallax in the accessibility. It's not the parallax that is causing it, it's the zooming. After seeing an article on App.net, I realized I wasn't alone. I also found other people were complaining on the Apple's Forums.
As much as Apple is praised for its accessibility options, there are other people out there that are motion challenged. We can't play first person shooters, watch 3D movies (or even sit too close to the screen during heavy action movies). I can't use Google street view, or ride on small boats. I do everything in my power to avoid this feeling cause it's something that can just ruin my entire day. The nausea just sticks with me as soon as it happens. When it's really bad, I won't go into detail, but it can get ugly.
This is pretty serious. I'm an app designer, I use the iPhone for my job. I've resorted to closing my eyes, turning my head or covering my hand over the screen between every zoom in/out animation for iOS 7 so I don’t have to pop advil every day (which is totally not healthy). I can't keep going like this, something has to change. Apple, are you listening?
UPDATE: I was told from a friend that it's good to file a radar for things like this. So if you have this same problem, file a report here: bugreport.apple.com and use this number so it duplicated: 15074144
If you haven't done this before, this is what mine looks like:
UPDATE 2: Thanks to all the journalists writing about this: The Guardian, The Economist , Tidbits, Mashable Also thanks to the people who submitted radars, this feature can now be turned off in the accessibility section in settings with a new “zoom” and “motion” settings.
(And no thanks to all the hate mail I received from other people 😒)