Horrible new UI — much less pleasant to use

I have loved Chronicle for years. I was disappointed back when it joined the club of “anti-skeuomorphism” and lost its wood-desktop-and-writing-pads look. One of its strongest features was, in my opinion, that it made working with bills actually pleasant and peaceful. But its new interface was stark. The green-orange-red “pending” icons, which were soft and had dimension, became flat bright squares. Everything was harder to read on a stark white background. The visual elements that had attractively (and helpfully) separated the information were gone. For me, it made an app I enjoyed using, more difficult.

I just let Chronicle update itself, and UGH. This interface is HORRIBLE! All the color icons are gone!! They are all now greyscale, and I don’t care what “shape” they are, they all run together. The distinct icons made it so easy to identify which bills were coming up, and were nice to look at. These are bleak and devoid of any personality the app had.

And the “pending” indicators? TINY SLIVERS. (?!?) It was bad enough when they went from dimensional to bright flat squares, but now down to a thin, barely-worth-it skinny rectangle. And there’s basically no space between them now, so the whole thing runs together vertically into a striped line. And they’re not close enough to the bill name/icon to be useful.

I’ll be reinstalling an older version, and stick with that. Whatever features have been added, they’re not worth the tradeoff for me.

Two versions ago, I would have given this app five stars. Two stars may seem unfairly low, but to me it’s not. Chronicle has lost almost all its personality now, and the new UI actually makes it harder to use. I don’t care how bland and monochrome Apple is making itself, I wish that Chronicle wouldn’t have lost so much of what made it great for me as a user.

Bmuse about Chronicle - Bill Management, v6.0.1