Settings renamed Simplifications
New: Mute Haptics
New: Mute Loot Popups
New: Hide Text Prompts
New: Hide Quotes
Removed List Link Sharing feature
Removed descriptive section captions
Removed emojii sprinkled throughout
Removed placeholder intro video
New list title strikethroughs
Fixed Vanilla theme icon
Loot chance on checkoff reduced
I apologize for the experimental feature/removal whiplash, but I do think we are now in really good shape to focus more on polish/fixing for release! Personally I feel Clearās radical simplicity shining through more clearly in this build.
P.S. If youāre familiar with Clearās gestures try turning on the āHide Text Promptsā setting, it needs a polish pass for some extra visual feedback at some interaction thresholds, but there is something elementally simple feeling about it too
Pardon my language but I HATE the absence of emojis in main Clear menu and its settings menus! Please, if possible, give us the option to show/hide those emojis. The app UI in those menus looks so soulless now.
As the person who likes emoji and plastered them throughout the app, I really have to say they felt like placeholders and innately compromised, the way they can clash on some themes etc. And I do feel that Clearās soul is not attached to emoji? Weāll see in the future but for launch I think it will be like this:
Gotta +1 Mr. Dragon here. As someone whoās obsessed with clean themes I liked the emojis as they were and never found them to clash, even if they did. They were just an accepted part of the interface that was fun and helped to visually differentiate the levels. Less soul now, as he said, and more meandering. Iād take the setting.
Yup, they donāt clash at all. And emojis really helped me navigate through app visually. Now it happens that when I go into Clear menu and other submenus there, 5 seconds pass until I figure out where the Personalization is or Themes/Fonts etc., because it all looks the same. Just chunks of text.
When changes to interfaces happen itās usually best to give them a chance, as more often than not weāll quickly adapt to them and maybe even grow to prefer them. That said, I feel like Iām just gonna keep long-term āwalking into the room and forgetting why I came inā every time I back out of a list with this one, haha. Weāll see.
I get it, from the sense that I hung onto them for years in the appās design, they are fun. Somewhat hopeful too that thereās actually people who like them gone too but weāll see
The conflicting gut feeling rising lately as we get ready to land this thing is, I feel like Clearās āsoulā centers around how much charm it packs into a kind of shockingly simple silhouette, and to thread this needle I think nearly everything that goes into it has to be extremely pure and polished, and with full conviction. (Settings fights that conviction some.)
Between erring on the side of launching a little simpler than we should, vs. a little more complex than we should. I would prefer erring a bit on the simpler side and correcting as we go, because itās so much harder to take away things after etc. to simplify vs. the other way around, and this feels especially crucial for Clear compared to most apps. Itās a more nimble approach that fits our tiny teamās resources.
I know weāre not perfectly threading this needle, this really feels like some kind of tightrope walk, but thatās where we are really trying hard to both do a great job, and also not mess it up.
Try hiding Archive btw if for you it is a closet you rarely retrieve things from. Part of the past couple TestFlights has been cutting a number of options in that level so that helps some.
There is totally a chance I am overthinking it and emoji turns out to be a good call, but I guess Iām not feeling ready to call it until we have a bit of space to explore the theme matching glyphs approach too, if that makes sense. And donāt want to ship out one version when itās possible another angle ends up being the way to go.
I hope this doesnāt come off as too defensive, just trying to explain myself! Haha.
Nope, makes sense and sounds good. Just wanted to step out into the light as a Known Emoji Liker.
Perhaps a good temporary alternative for us to differentiate between lists/menu would be to put the emojis in our list titles instead. Iāll give it a try. Just gonna be tougher with 17 of them things.
Yeah I actually had emoji in every one of my list titles, and then removed them all the other week lol. There is some fun in both ways, but the lists level at least is entirely up to the person and their preferences in a simple way.
But yeah itās tricky, thereās a lot of almost koan-like paradoxes we need to figure out, like balancing the simplicity and personality because itās like at a certain frequency they harmonize beautifully, but clash otherwise. And of course some of that is subjective per person too.
Or the way it feels like we need to experiment and R&D and scout out possible ground furiously to do Clear justice, and yet also be very conservative and careful in picking what actually ships in it.
One example I would point towards though is how much of the new Clearās general UI feels like even more of a blank canvas to project your own favorite themes on etc and totally transform the app. Thatās a good example I think where going even simpler lets the personality pop even more.
Anyways enough rambling here Appreciate the initial feedback and Iāll check in later to see what others think as they check it out.
When I look at Clear 2 now I almost donāt recognise it anymore. It seems like every new beta strips more things out of the app and it is starting to get less of my attention as a result. I find this sad because a few betas ago it was flying high for me, everything I needed was there and it was visually a joy to use. Now, with no list sharing, no list duplicating and no emojis it doesnāt offer me anything like the usefulness or pleasure it once did.
Iām sorry to be so down about all this, and I do understand the reasons for the stripping back, but now I feel Iām beta testing an app for that reason alone - just to test it, and I donāt feel any motivation to actually use the app for itās intended purpose. Every time a new beta rolls out I hesitate to download it for fear of even more of what I used to enjoy in Clear 2 being removed. I know for some people the earlier beta features were problematic, but apart from the temporary removal of the back button gesture everything has been fine for me on an aging iPhone XS.
Hereās hoping for a promising future with the app
Itās ok to be down on this build, I know you (and some of the others a bit disappointed with this one) love the app. I promise you there will be some fun polish/filling out/rounding out following these cuts that you will like.
@AndrewDavidJ finally an emoji-disliker emerges in this thread! Glad to hear it Clean is what weāre going for, radically so but hopefully not tooooo much.
Itās fine Phill, like I said above I understand why you stripped back with this one but the earlier betas have shown us some of the extra features we can hopefully expect going forward.
My mistake here was building a workflow that used beta software at itās core and now of course that workflow is, for the time being, broken. My bad, and lesson learned
Yeah appreciate the patienceā¦ that is by far the main thing in hindsight I wish we better framed or anticipated, like in practice this so far has been more of an alpha test than a beta test, with many experiments run by you all. And itās very hard for me to separate out the excitement of a promising new experiment with the time to sleep on it, digest, and sometimes retract I did not mean this to be such a rollercoaster ride there!
I felt like I was going to miss the emoji in the main menu more than I actually do. While they are fun, I think some themes also pop more without the emoji there (emoji do have color to them, after all). Depending on your chosen theme and font, you might find the emoji kind of clash with the aesthetic youāre going for, and thereās obviously no way to adapt the emoji to every possible aesthetic short of designing dozens of unique sets.
Iām keeping the emoji in my list titles for now. A toggle would be cool in the new Simplifications menu (āHide Emojiā), but Iām OK with it as it is, too.
Great. So so far on emoji removal ā anywhere from āsoullessā to ā10x betterā. Got it!
It is interesting how Clearās minimalism makes smaller tweaks or removals like this a bigger deal. Also interesting thereās been more noise about the emoji than some of the features weāve cut. (Thatās good if we cut the right features.)
Hopefully next TF is less controversial. It will be largely filling out the rewards list and rounding out the quotes in a fun way.
Weāll see in the future but for launch I think it will be like this:
Yeah I actually had emoji in every one of my list titles, and then removed them all the other week lol. There is some fun in both ways, but the lists level at least is entirely up to the person and their preferences in a simple way.
Appreciate the initial feedback and Iāll check in later to see what others think as they check it out.
Clean is what weāre going for, radically so but hopefully not tooooo much.