\u201cWhy you got a new phone?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Those words,\u00a0spoken by my three-year-old\u00a0immediately upon seeing it for the first time, are all anyone really needs to know about iOS 7. It\u2019s 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.\u00a0As Lessien wisely noted<\/a>\u00a0months ago, iOS didn\u2019t need to change that much. The biggest risk was change for the sake of change: losing the efficiency that familiarity breeds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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 \u2014 parallax, translucency, animations, motion \u2014 might seem out of place, even gimmicky. Together, they put forth a clear vision, one that\u2019s reinforced by\u00a0one of the best marketing videos<\/a>\u00a0I think Apple has ever made. Even considering Apple\u2019s famously deliberate style, the choice and use of words in this video (and other WWDC materials) stand out: Clarity. Depth. Vitality. Detail. Deference. Realism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s the realism I want to talk about.\u00a0John Gruber<\/a>\u00a0calls it \u201cA real thing, not pixels rendered on glass.\u201d\u00a0Rene Ritchie<\/a>\u00a0says \u201ciOS 7 is alive.\u201d This is the sort of update I was hoping iOS 5 would be nearly two years ago.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What took so long? I think it was a combination of hardware and momentum. Not so long ago, Steve Jobs was telling users that\u00a0wallpapers were too slow<\/a>. The deep animations and real-time blur effects you see between layers in iOS7 are all hardware-intensive operations. The tug of war between \u201crealistic\u201d design and hardware limitations led to an early compromise of false illusions \u2014 shadows, bevels, borders. Once these trends are in place, it\u2019s hard to buck them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now the hardware has caught up, and the Apple design team has a new leader. We don\u2019t need the deception of \u201cphotorealism\u201d anymore. Despite the loss of these tricks, iOS 7 feels more real<\/em>. 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\u2019re going, or where you came from. You are moving through this world. There is almost no change in context, ever.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The emphasis on text is also striking. More than just content, text has replaced iconography in many cases. Look at Camera: the modes \u2014 VIDEO, PHOTO, SQUARE, PANO \u2014 are represented by text for the first time ever on iOS. This to me is proof that \u201cclarity\u201d has taken top priority. iOS is available in\u00a0a number of countries and languages<\/a>, which means every piece of text has to be localized (translated) many times over. This isn\u2019t only time consuming, it\u2019s disruptive to UI design: a short word in English is not necessarily short in German, and suddenly things don\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Icons avoid this problem \u2014 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Clarity. Depth. Vitality. Detail. Deference. Realism. The revelations of iOS 7 are overdue, but still quite welcome.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201cWhy you got a new phone?\u201d Those words,\u00a0spoken by my three-year-old\u00a0immediately upon seeing it for the first time, are all anyone really needs to know about iOS 7. It\u2019s 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.appleoutsider.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.appleoutsider.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.appleoutsider.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.appleoutsider.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.appleoutsider.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=118"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.appleoutsider.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.appleoutsider.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=118"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.appleoutsider.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=118"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.appleoutsider.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=118"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}