Matt Gemmell, almost a month ago:

iOS 7 will be unveiled soon, and rumours abound that Jony Ive’s influence will push it further along the spectrum towards a flatter, more elegant, more elemental presentation style — a ‘backlash’ against skeuomorphic overindulgence, as the press would gleefully have us believe, as if it were all simply a matter of personal taste. iOS 7 may indeed have such an appearance, but anti-skeu won’t be the sentiment behind it.

Currently, I think that there’s an inherent tension between iOS and its devices. The aesthetics of the OS have never quite fulfilled the stylistic promise of the hardware design, and I think that’s probably intolerable to Jony Ive.

Mike Rundle’s initial impressions on iOS 7:

I expected iOS 7 to be much flatter than iOS 6, but still with subtle curvatures, inset highlights and shadows to indicate subtlety and realism and that the interface was emulating some physical materials. I was very wrong. iOS 7 is as flat as a board.

Mike has some good points, and I think a lot of people agree with him — so far iOS 7 is proving to be quite polarizing. My own snap judgment, based only on the screenshots I’ve seen from Apple, is that I see a lot I really like and a lot that I’m probably going to miss from iOS 6.

Naturally, we’ll have to hold our final opinions of iOS 7 until it ships this fall and we’ve all had time to actually use it and interact with it. But also, this isn’t the end of the story. Just as OS X has been refined and improved since 10.0 shipped over a decade ago, and just as the first generation of iOS was refined and improved over the past 5 years, so too will this next generation of iOS be refined and improved. Just because it’s a radical departure and Apple’s announcement that iOS has “grown up”, doesn’t mean it will be a grand slam in every area of design and function.

Jim Dalrymple:

There is no doubt that iOS 7 is a great looking operating system. In fact, I liked everything that I saw, except the icons on the home screen. I don’t know what it is, but they seemed kind of odd to me.

Agreed. And this seems to be the sentiment around here with those I’ve been talking to this afternoon, as well as some folks on Twitter: that the new UI design within the apps is much more mature than the new Home screen icons.

The number that most shocked me, is regarding how active the iOS App Store catalog is. Tim Cook said 93-percent of the entire iOS app catalog (over 900,000 apps) is downloaded every month. Or, put another way, of the 900,000 apps in the iOS App Store, 837,000 of them are downloaded at least once a month.

Obviously nobody is going to make a living selling a single copy of their app each month, but it’s impressive nonetheless that if you’ve got an app in the App Store, your chances are 9 out of 10 that it will be downloaded every month.

Apple’s overview page is live. Feature-wise and design-wise, iOS 7 looks absolutely stunning. The feature I’m most looking forward to? Probably Control Center.

You can watch the keynote live on Apple’s website, or through the special WWDC 2013 channel on your Apple TV.

If you aren’t able to watch the live stream but want to track in real time, I suggest you follow the live blog updates from either Macworld, Engadget, or The Verge.

John Gruber’s WWDC 2013 expectations:

The primary problem Apple faced with the iPhone in 2007 was building familiarity with a new way of using computers. That problem has now been solved. It is time to solve new problems.

If you’re on App.net then trust me, you want this app. For event-centric communications, like, say, this week at WWDC, Whisper is the new Glassboard. It supports group messaging and uses ADN’s location API to post links to places.

I’ve been using Whisper for the past several weeks and highly recommend it. It will be in my iPhone’s Dock all next week during WWDC. (Also, a small humble brag: I was the very first Whisper user to post a message using the AeroPress sticker. The proof is in the demo screenshots.)

The app is free and you get access to 100-percent of its functionality. You can upgrade to the Pro version via an in-app purchase to get access to additional typefaces, the more-awesomer dark mode, and more.

If you don’t yet have an ADN account, I’ve got some invites for a free ADN account.

Note that when you join ADN, your new account will automatically be following me (@shawnblanc). Free accounts can only follow up to 40 people, so feel free to unfollow me if you want.

Drew Houston’s MIT Commencement address:

When you’re in school, every little mistake is a permanent crack in your windshield. But in the real world, if you’re not swerving around and hitting the guard rails every now and then, you’re not going fast enough. Your biggest risk isn’t failing, it’s getting too comfortable.

This ranks up there as one of the best 404 pages I’ve ever seen. It’s part of Bold’s new website.

Also new: Office Hours, Bold’s new podcast about running a small design studio. I’ve gleaned a lot of wisdom from Noah Stokes over the years about integrity, work-ethic, work/life balance, and entrepreneurship. His new podcast will no doubt be equal parts hilarious and helpful. I’m looking forward to it.

There’s a Fantastic update to LaunchBar today that includes a new Snippet feature, integration with Automator for custom workflows, indexing of iCloud documents, and more.

You can read all about how to create and access LaunchBar Snippets here. Snippets can include placeholder variables (such as date formats and clipboard contents) and they are accessed as easily as LaunchBar’s clipboard history.

While LaunchBar snippets won’t be all-out replacing TextExpander for me, I do suspect I’ll use both. One great advantage of LaunchBar’s snippets is that you can access your whole list with a keystroke and then search for the one you want. Don’t tell anyone, but sometimes I forget what abbreviation I assigned to this or that TextExpander expansion (especially ones I use infrequently). And so, for some cases, I expect I’ll be using LaunchBar snippets instead.

Seth Abramson wrote a pretty great review and analysis of Iron Man 3.

It’s National Donut Day, and the Blancs will be making cornets for dessert tonight (though semi-cheating by using Pilsbury’s crescent dough). (Thanks, Jason.)

Well, never mind the article I was just sitting down to write about Vesper because Marco nailed it — his article parallels my thoughts almost exactly.

The handful of reviews and comments I’ve read today seem extremely polarized. For the most part people seem to love the app or hate it. I’ve always thought that when you’ve got a polarizing design it usually means you’ve got a winner.

Hating on Vesper because it shipped with “not enough features” is a bit like hating on a sedan because it’s not an SUV. It’d be one thing if Vesper had hard-to-hit tap targets, crashed on launch, lost data, and had typos in the credits. But it doesn’t.

Though Vesper is shy on power-user features — no Dropbox sync, no iPad version, no TextExpander support, no import, no export — what it’s not shy on is thoughtfulness and extreme attention to detail.

Vesper’s current lack of sync, export, etc. isn’t an oversight; it’s an intentional omission at this time. What Vesper does do, it does extremely well. It’s a skillfully crafted app, and that’s exactly what I’d expect from the team behind it.

Whether or not Vesper becomes my new go-to note-taking app or not is irrelevant. An app doesn’t have to become my most-used app before I can appreciate its design considerations and its delightful details.