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Real

Mark · Jun 17, 2013 ·

“Why you got a new phone?”

Those words, spoken by my three-year-old immediately upon seeing it for the first time, are all anyone really needs to know about iOS 7. It’s a reimagining that catapults the system into a new era while retaining the most important intuitions built up over the last six years. So much has changed, yet the changes themselves are so basic. As Lessien wisely noted months ago, iOS didn’t need to change that much. The biggest risk was change for the sake of change: losing the efficiency that familiarity breeds.

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. Even considering Apple’s famously deliberate style, the choice and use of words in this video (and other WWDC materials) stand out: Clarity. Depth. Vitality. Detail. Deference. Realism.

It’s the realism I want to talk about. John Gruber calls it “A real thing, not pixels rendered on glass.” Rene Ritchie says “iOS 7 is alive.” This is the sort of update I was hoping iOS 5 would be nearly two years ago.

What took so long? I think it was a combination of hardware and momentum. Not so long ago, Steve Jobs was telling users that wallpapers were too slow. The deep animations and real-time blur effects you see between layers in iOS7 are all hardware-intensive operations. The tug of war between “realistic” design and hardware limitations led to an early compromise of false illusions — shadows, bevels, borders. Once these trends are in place, it’s hard to buck them.

Now the hardware has caught up, and the Apple design team has a new leader. We don’t need the deception of “photorealism” anymore. Despite the loss of these tricks, iOS 7 feels more real. The parallax effect conveys an entire living world under that glass, not just abstract pictures and icons. This is reinforced by the launch and quit animations: your eye never loses sight of where you’re going, or where you came from. You are moving through this world. There is almost no change in context, ever.

The emphasis on text is also striking. More than just content, text has replaced iconography in many cases. Look at Camera: the modes — VIDEO, PHOTO, SQUARE, PANO — are represented by text for the first time ever on iOS. This to me is proof that “clarity” has taken top priority. iOS is available in a number of countries and languages, which means every piece of text has to be localized (translated) many times over. This isn’t only time consuming, it’s disruptive to UI design: a short word in English is not necessarily short in German, and suddenly things don’t fit on screen anymore. I attended many meetings at Apple where people cringed at changing a word shortly before release, because it meant a whole new round of localize-then-build-then-test.

Icons avoid this problem — when done right. They speak no language, which is to say every language. Or they can only speak a few. The truth is, images have nearly as much cultural variance as text. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but sometimes a single word is worth a thousand pictures. That realization, raised above any logistical or procedural consequences, tells me just how serious this new philosophy is.

Clarity. Depth. Vitality. Detail. Deference. Realism. The revelations of iOS 7 are overdue, but still quite welcome.

Open Season

Mark · Apr 8, 2013 ·

Facebook Home is coming. It’s a unique threat to Google’s mastery of Android that Google can blame nobody but itself for. It’s the unique nature of the threat — both Home’s technical foundation, and the nature of Facebook’s rivalry with Google — that I believe makes Home the first real test of Google’s “open” mantra regarding Android.

There have been many challenges to date, but most of them involve “forks” of the Android system: where another company builds their own system on top of a previous Android release. Amazon’s Kindle Fire, Barnes and Noble’s nook, and Samsung’s rumored / assumed proprietary fork are all notable examples of Android derivatives. None of these to date have looked poised to take Android away from Mountain View anytime soon. Samsung, with its market share momentum and marketing prowess, could stand to be a significant threat, but for now its flagship products still run Google’s “stock” Android, more or less.

Horace Dediu put it plainly:

Facebook Home can only reside on Android because only Google was daft enough to allow it.

I’d add “for now.” Now we get to see how true to its ethos Google and Android stay. How long will Home remain on the Google Play store? How often, and how mysteriously, will it have “compatibility issues” with new releases? How long before launchers in general start to get buried under convenient categorization?

At the least, I expect an increased emphasis from Google on the virtues of “stock” Android, and an increased push to make that consistent for consumers. This is already underway on both OEM and developer fronts, but Facebook’s lurking presence will force the issue that much harder.

Home’s to-be-determined success could also force Apple’s hand. Such a product is neither technically nor legally feasible on iOS at the moment, and Facebook’s integration into iOS 6, while powerful, is much less than Facebook Home provides on Android, and thus presumably much less than Facebook wants on iOS. As I said last week, if too many c