After a busy summer during which I never got to try the beta, I’ve finally got the official release of iOS 10 installed on my phone and tablet. Hooray! It’s always a kick to explore the many new twists and turns scattered throughout each major revision of almost everybody’s favorite operating system.

One of the changes that I like the most is kind of simple and not particularly earth-shattering: this landscape orientation-specific layout for the lock screen on iPad. It breaks iOS’s longstanding center-aligned layout by left-aligning the time and date. It’s a simple move but it was kind of shocking when I first encountered it, and I find it very elegant.

Here is a screen grab of how the layout displays iOS 10’s notifications, which have been changed in this version to appear as cards. (I’ve redacted the information in each notification.)

One of the curses of being a designer is that one can never stop hypothetically redesigning things one comes across in the wild. For instance, I can’t help but think that the layout would work even better if the cards were placed on the right half of the screen. In their current position, they have to scroll beneath the time and date, but if they shifted over to the other side, they could scroll freely from top to bottom. It would also activate that space more effectively.

That’s all I wanted to say today.