Quite a bit has been said about Apple’s iOS 7, with both positive and negative comments being made. New information that was recently released reveals that the design that was shown off at WWDC on Monday was merely a work in progress, meaning that the initial impressions everyone has are likely to change in the months ahead. According to the folks at The Next Web, people familiar with Apple’s latest mobile operating system said that the iOS 7 beta, as well as the preview shown at the WWDC keynote on Monday, is a “mid-stride” snapshot of the work being done behind closed doors at the moment.
The pace is so quick that some of the builds used to present the operating system on stage two days ago were later versions of what was seeded to developers in the iOS 7 beta. It can’t be confirmed at the moment which feature sets are more advanced, though the beta version is slightly inconsistent with the operating system demoed on Monday by software engineering head Craig Federighi. The fact that iOS 7 is to change before its release seems quite obvious as the software currently in the hands of developers are beta versions meant for testing. However, while the backend and UI tweaks are expected to change for early build software, the radically different new design language of iOS 7 is also reportedly largely under construction.
One of the things that’s interesting is that Jony Ive, who is now the head of the company’s Human Interaction section called on in-house marketing design teams to flesh out the first party app icons which have received overhauls in many cases. The sources said both print and web design personal laid down a framework of color palettes and a general “look,” which Ive’s app designers used as guidelines to produce what was seen in the iOS 7 preview. As with operational facets of the OS, these are also works in progress.
According to Apple CEO Tim Cook, iOS 7 is the biggest change to iOS since the first iPhone was introduced in 2007 and from a design perspective that is true. Ive and his team have managed to change the core of every theme and nuance that OS has amassed over the past six generations. From skeuomorphic iconography to UI and UX, the new iOS 7 tears down almost everything, replacing it with a clean, if not controversial, design. Apple has finally managed to achieve a feel that is at once completely new yet wholly familiar at the same time, at least in its current iteration. We’ll have to see how much of this sticks and how much will change going forward.
0 comments:
Post a Comment