Matt Drance on iOS 7:
Apple has kept all the right things, and built a new experience celebrating the values behind them. iOS 7 is truly the sum of its parts. On their own, many of these new elements — parallax, translucency, animations, motion — might seem out of place, even gimmicky. Together, they put forth a clear vision, one that’s reinforced by one of the best marketing videos I think Apple has ever made.
Tweetbot shipped just over two years ago. In my review I wrote:
Tweetbot has more personality than any other Twitter client out there. Every single pixel has been hand crafted in order to build the most custom looking UI of any Twitter client I’ve seen. Moreover, the sounds, the animations, the actions — everything has been thought through with intent, care, and fun. It all adds up to create a Twitter Experience Extravaganza.
When Apple revealed its stark design changes in iOS 7, one of the things I first thought about was how 3rd-party developers would respond to the massive design changes. And one of the first apps that came to my mind was Tweetbot.
Comparing the current design aesthetic of Tweetbot to that of iOS 7, there’s more than just the contrast between the “light” design of the latter and the “heavy” design of the former. In iOS 7 most buttons have become just tappable text, whereas one of the most prevalent design elements in a Tapbots app is the custom button.
I’m using Tweetbot as an example here because it has a strong, customized design aesthetic all its own. An aesthetic that will need revisiting in order to fit in with iOS. But also, I’d hate to see Tapbots just slap on the iOS 7 skin and call it a day. Fortunately, that’s not going to happen.
Paul Haddad, during a sidewalk interview with Lex Friedman at WWDC, talked about if and how Tapbots plans to respond to the aesthetic changes in iOS 7:
I don’t think we have to match exactly what’s there, but we definitely have to take some of the cues they’re giving us and probably make some changes. […] I’m guessing there will be some [design elements] that take the iOS 7 look and some things that take our custom look.
Obviously this is an off-the-cuff conversation, and it’s still early since the iOS 7 beta was released. However, this morning Paul tweeted that, “if you are an iOS developer and don’t think iOS 7 is the biggest opportunity in years, you need to find a new job.”
For as long as Tapbots has been making apps, I’ve been a fan of their aesthetic and style. With the entire foundation of iOS changing this fall, I am very curious about what direction Tapbots will go with their app design and how their custom look will evolve and mature.
I’ve already spoken with a few developers who are planning to go “all in” with their apps in iOS 7 by releasing a major updates that closely align with the new aesthetic of iOS 7. And I think that’s good and right. There is a lot of great change in the new version of iOS and it won’t do any one any good if apps cling to their legacy design for the sake of arguing against where Apple is going.
But it’s also fair to say we don’t want every single app to mimic the iOS 7 look and feel without adding any personality and innovation.
Jared Sinclair, designer of Riposte, in an article, “Apps are content, too“:
Here is a quote from one of the iOS 7 marketing pages:
> Conspicuous ornamentation has been stripped away. Unnecessary bars and buttons have been removed. And in taking away design elements that don’t add value, suddenly there’s greater focus on what matters most: your content.
The implication here is that third-party apps that pride themselves on tasteful toolbars and easy-to-recognize buttons don’t add value for the user, that the app itself isn’t content.
Bollocks.
User interfaces are as just as much a part of the experience of an app as the text, photos, and videos that it displays.
Agreed.
What makes an app great is the little things — the small details that take something normal and turn it into something extraordinary. I see iOS 7 as a blank canvas — an “un-design” if you will. The goal of a 3rd-party isn’t to copy the stock apps pixel for pixel (that wasn’t the goal for iOS 1-6, and it’s not the goal now). Rather this is Apple saying it’s time to re-imagine what mobile software should look and act like. Five-hundred million people are using iOS devices, and it’s time for the training wheels to come off.
And Tapbots, among others, are in an excellent position to set an example of custom design done right in iOS 7. They have the skill to take the designs they’ve built over the past years and merge them with the new foundation Apple has laid.
So yes, strip away conspicuous ornamentation, but don’t strip away feeling and personality and delight.
Tom Witkin (via MacStories):
I’m elated to share that I, along with Poster, will be joining Automattic. I’ll be working with the mobile team where I’ll be both designing and coding.
Poster is one of my most-used iOS apps — it is how I post links and articles to this site from my iPad and iPhone. Its brilliant support for custom fields and URL schemes has been an incredible aid to my ability to work from my iPad or iPhone.
Alas, due to the acquisition, Poster is no longer for sale in the app store. I will of course continue to use it, and Tom has pledged to continue to maintain it. But there will be no future development of Poster.
However, on the other side of this story we see some very promising and exciting potential. It was just 6 months ago that Automattic acquired Simplenote, my most-used note taking app. And now they’ve acquired Poster, my favorite WordPress app.
Which means it’s very possible that in the future, the official WordPress iOS app will also be the best WordPress iOS app.
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My thanks to Themeco for sponsoring the RSS feed this week. Sponsorship by The Syndicate.
Matt Gemmell has an excellent take on iOS 7 along with some great comparisons to iOS 6:
I think it’s an enormous improvement, and a typically opinionated move.
Speaking of setting fire to the past versions of iOS and starting afresh, Stephen Hackett’s likening of iOS 7 to the 2002 iMac G4 is a brilliant example:
If you remember back to 2002 when Apple released the iMac G4, it was a huge departure from the G3-powered machines before it. However, looking at the whole timeline, it fits with the overall direction the product was heading in. The move to the LCD was a clear forerunner to the iMac G5, whose shape is still present in the iMacs of today.
When Tim Cook said that iOS 7 was the biggest change to iOS since the introduction of the iPhone, he wasn’t kidding. The UI is of course drastically different, but things like background-updating and better car integration are huge changes.
Marco Arment:
Apple has set fire to iOS. Everything’s in flux. Those with the least to lose have the most to gain, because this fall, hundreds of millions of people will start demanding apps for a platform with thousands of old, stale players and not many new, nimble alternatives. If you want to enter a category that’s crowded on iOS 6, and you’re one of the few that exclusively targets iOS 7, your app can look better, work better, and be faster and cheaper to develop than most competing apps.
See also what Mike Monteiro said to Om Malik:
It’s a breath of fresh air. Where was Apple going with the current crap? This opens up all manner of possibilities. I’m excited because it’s new. And fresh. The Forstall crap went to its logical conclusion. Any design system that can no longer be extended is death. The new stuff is a fresh start. Eventually it’ll die too. But right now I’m excited about how it can grow and be extended. It’s not perfect. But, as a designer, that excites me. As a consumer? I dunno.
A huge congrats to Coda 2, Letterpress, and Yahoo Weather among others.
Coda 2 on Mac and Diet Coda on the iPad are two of my all-time favorite apps. I wrote a somewhat detailed review of the them last spring when they shipped.
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.
