9 ms·

iOS 7: Catch me if you can

133 points by jaysonlane 13y ago

skilesare 13y ago
Good point. Hadn't really though of it this way before. I guess as a mobile web dev I'm going to be always behind the curve here. Something interesting to think about.
zachwill 13y ago
iOS 7 was clearly designed to show off what’s possible in 2013. I absolutely agree with this point. And, while I disagree with the post's main thesis — I believe the changes were in no way directed towards the web — it's a pretty entertaining take on the updates, OP.
- josteink 13y ago
  I'd rephrase that as ios7 was clearly made to catch up with android 4 and holo, but maybe that's just me. there's nothing revolutionary in ios7 shown so far. that said, I can't wait for Apple to sue Android over the things they just stole from them.
  - guywithabike 13y ago
    In your estimation, what did iOS "steal" from Android? For example, a common iOS 7 feature cited as "stolen" is the app switching interface. But that's the same interface Safari has used for switching tabs since the very first iPhone. They simply repurposed their Safari UI for the OS.
    - daeken 13y ago
      I'm a bit baffled by this myself. I'm on the iOS 7 beta, and it's far closer to WP7 than Android. (Which is awesome -- I loved WP7, just wished it had apps.)
    - hrwl 13y ago
      I think you could argue the control center is borrowed from Android (although the iOS 7 version looks kinda spiffier). The interface for moving between apps is similar. I had to open Safari to see your comparison. The demo I see on the product page for iOS7 reminds me more of Android than Safari. I remember seeing a few other things in the WWDC presentation but I don't remember what they were. All that said, I hope both sides "steal" good ideas early and often.
    - potatolicious 13y ago
      I make my living writing iOS apps, but come on - there's plenty here that has been "borrowed". Off the top of my head: - The insta-airplane-mode-wifi-bluetooth buttons in iOS7. These are a straight lift from Android, and have been hotly demanded by users for a long time. - Notification Center is an incredibly uncanny look-and-feel-alike of notifications in Android. It's basically an outright clone - though this isn't an iOS7 development. - The new app switcher is a takeoff from webOS. Swipe to close an app is also implemented almost precisely like it was on webOS. Claims that this came from Android are IMO off the mark. I don't think it's fair to say they repurposed the Safari tab-switcher, considering the gestures bear such an uncanny resemblance to the webOS implementation.
      - hnriot 13y ago
        "hotly demanded by users for a long time." I never need to switch to airplane mode, or bluetooth on/off in a hurry? I wonder who these people are they find setting/slide airplane mode so time consuming.
        potatolicious 13y ago
        People who use Bluetooth regularly find themselves having to turn it on and off for the sake of battery life. It's great to be able to do so without diving through multiple menus. It's also not just airplane mode - do-not-disturb mode is also really useful, and it should be fairly obvious why someone would want to toggle it without menu-diving. Ditto orientation lock. In iOS6 is tap-tap-swipe-tap-tap, now it's just swipe-tap. This last one is kind of a platform problem though - orientation lock is useful in part because some apps excel at landscape mode, while others suck at it but insist on enabling it.
  - alayne 13y ago
    There is some "flat" design that is similar to Android, but the similarities are fairly superficial and not what the article was addressing.
    - rimantas 13y ago
      And it is not even flat. Apple talks about three things regarding new design: depth, deference and clarity. Nothing about flatness, on the contrary, it's about establishing visual hierarchy via layers. Also, even bigger part will be not in the static appearance but in subtle motions when interacting, thanks to UIKit Dynamics.
      - myko 13y ago
        > Nothing about flatness, on the contrary, it's about establishing visual hierarchy via layers. This is exactly what the Android design is about as well.
  - gfodor 13y ago
    I haven't used Android since it first came out, but does it have the dynamic physics, layering, dynamic image compositing (blur, etc), parallax, etc, that all are in iOS 7? iOS 7 seems to me to be very much about how it feels and behaves in motion. The current beta still isn't performance tuned, so my guess is the final build is going to be a pretty futuristic experience on the iPhone 5S. I think a lot of people are getting hung up on lack of textures/lighting as "copying Android" but I would love to hear how Metro and Android are comparable on the things that are going to define iOS 7's experience: motion, dynamics, translucency, layering, and depth.
    - bengotow 13y ago
      I agree, but it's funny. iOS 7 is all about dynamic, physical interfaces - so much so that they built a physics engine into UIKit. At the same time, they're ripping apart the user experience so that nothing onscreen _looks_ like a physical object. Before, interfaces looked like a bunch of real-world objects. Now, they look like a bunch of thin-ass lines and boxes, but behave like real-world objects. I agree that iOS is all about motion, dynamics, translucency, layering and depth. But the verdict is still out on whether those things make for better interfaces.
      - madoublet 13y ago
        Motion, dynamics, and depth are a hallmark of the Windows Phone Metro experience.
        seanmcdirmid 13y ago
        Windows phone metro doesn't include a physics engine. The motions are all tweened. Windows phone metro includes no depth at all, it truly is flat and 2D spatial. Dynamics?
        madoublet 13y ago
        I don't know (or frankly care) how it is implemented. While the UI is flat, the apps use transitions and a parallax effect to build the illusion of the depth (similar to how Apple does it using their gyroscopic parallax effect on the home screen).
  - coldtea 13y ago
    >I'd rephrase that as ios7 was clearly made to catch up with android 4 and holo, but maybe that's just me. Catch up? Actually it was more of a "let's go another 100 miles ahead, Android seems to be catching up finally to were we've been the last 3 years".
    - FireBeyond 13y ago
      To quote you: "Citation"? What iOS features have been present for three years that Android is just now getting? Let's be clear too, three years ago, iOS was at version 3.1.3. I would love to be enlightened, as an iPhone 5/iPad 4/rMBP owner.
      - Cookingboy 13y ago
        60fps scrolling? A semi-decent animation framework for developers? Low audio latency and good power management? Pretty much all the advantages Apple has from their decade of experience of developing OS X frameworks?
        myko 13y ago
        > 60fps scrolling? It's pretty easy to make UITableView's chug if you do something stupid when populating cells as well. > A semi-decent animation framework for developers? The property animation system introduced in Honeycomb and backported to what, 2.2? works very nicely. > Low audio latency Audio has been an issue on Android. I've not delved into it myself but this is certainly something that only seems recently fixed. Not sure this warrants calling the platform far behind though. > and good power management? I'm not sure what you're getting at here.
        Cookingboy 13y ago
        There is a property animation system on Android, but it's woefully lacking when compared to iOS. IIRC it doesn't even support 2.5D transform with a Z axis and variable camera distance (which is useful for perspective transform). On iOS 7 they now have a full rigid-body physics engine built in and comes with a nice high level API for developers to take advantage of.
  - Cookingboy 13y ago
    Catch up? People like you really have no idea how much behind Android is as an OS. It's until very recently it's got close to 60fps scrolling, and low audio latency and decent power management. One example on the advancement of iOS 7, how about take their animation framework a step further (which is already ahead of whats available on Android) and introduces a full rigid-body physics engine that's easily at the developers' disposal? What Apple has always done is good developer support in the form of great APIs
- apike 13y ago
  Thanks Zach. I don't think the changes were directed towards the web either - they were a side effect: > As a side effect, they’ve embraced conventions that will be hard to emulate with commodity hardware or web tech.
ajross 13y ago
This needs a dose of cynicism I think. The success of the iPhone in 2007 really wasn't driven by hardware capability (except arguably the capacitative touch screen). Even then, other phones had faster processors, more memory, and equivalent GPUs. Apple won because it invented new usage models, not because it drove its designers to "show off what's possible in" 2007. The stuff this is talking about is just eye candy. The original iPhone was much more than an eye candy improvement.
- potatolicious 13y ago
  It was a bit of both. The original iPhone wasn't a hardware revolution, but it was an OS revolution. It was the first time anyone put an OS on a phone that had a blazing fast graphics layer. Touchscreen phones existed before then, but because of platform performance, was always of the "poke, wait, stuff magically appears, poke, wait, stuff magically appears..." model. Apple didn't just invent new usage models, they invented the platform that made it implementable. The deep integration of UIKit with hardware acceleration, as well as animation as a first-class consideration in the API, were (and still are) some of Apple's greatest advantages.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - mtdewcmu 13y ago
    My impression was that the iPhone was fully thought out in advance so that everything would work together. Take away a major piece, and the whole thing stops making sense. It needed a touch screen so that it didn't need a keyboard. There couldn't be a keyboard, because it took space away from the display. Replacing a keyboard with a touch screen was radical at that time, and it had to work really well. People would need visual feedback to be able to interact with it effectively. The visual feedback couldn't lag, so that required fast graphics. And so on...
    - potatolicious 13y ago
      Sort of. It wasn't quite such a clear causal chain - there were some things that positioned them well in the first place. Quartz, which is the drawing and compositing engine developed for OSX, is really at the core of it. For one thing, Quartz is really fast, and long before iPhone was even a rumor Apple had already tied it deeply into OpenGL and made it hardware accelerated. Quartz is really the "secret sauce" to the responsiveness and graphics performance of iOS, and it predates iOS by a pretty wide margin. Core Graphics was built on top of Quartz, as well as Core Animation, which form the primary ways third party devs interact with the graphics layer. If Apple hadn't done OSX first, or done it differently, I don't think they could have pulled off iPhone.
hacliff 13y ago
This is assuming that everyone is chasing the same level of perfection as apple. If the web can provide a "good enough" interface will the bulk of developers go to the extra effort of native apps? Currently things like games are (largely) not good enough on mobile web and so the issue is forced, but building a native app for a nicer blur effect? Probably not.
- rimantas 13y ago
  I'd argue that bulk of developers are already doing native. The thing is, extra effort is required to replicate with web technologies even simple things that native SDKs offer. If everything you know is HTML, JS, CSS then yes, learning iOS or Android SDK will require some effort but it is worth it. Even the best webapps still feel subpar on iOS6, on iOS 7 they will feel very clumsy.
theaeolist 13y ago
I don't care about 3d or blur or other eye candy. I'd happily trade all that crap off for the battery life of my old Nokia 1100.
- potatolicious 13y ago
  The 3D and blur aren't what's draining your battery. The big ass LTE radio sucking down videos, music, and photos is what's doing it. That and the huge, brilliant LCD screen staring at you. Optimizing battery life by getting rid of animations and graphical effects would be extremely penny-wise, pound-foolish.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
- danielrhodes 13y ago
  In time. I think the battery life vs. computing power tradeoff took a turn in 2007 because batteries were finally robust enough to handle a bright screen for a reasonable amount of time. Ideally I would like a device which has a battery which, when bought, will last the lifetime of the product.
  - peatmoss 13y ago
    One that recharges itself continuously via radioactive decay? I wonder if, regulatory challenges aside, a radioactive decay trickle charge could be enough of a trickle charge to meaningfully extend daily battery life...
    - potatolicious 13y ago
      None of what goes into modern battery is notably radioactive, unless your'e suggesting a battery that's similar to a RTG?
      - andrewflnr 13y ago
bornhuetter 13y ago
If this article is accurate - and that iOS 7 has so much eyecandy that it will only work on the latest high end hardware - does this mean that a low end budget iPhone is off the table? Or is this Apple's way of segmenting a high end version of the OS and then a version with all the eyecandy disabled for the cheap iPhone? It's interesting that Apple and Google seem to be going in polar opposite directions right now - with Apple going for high end effects, and KLP reportedly focusing on reducing the minimum requirements and letting it run on lower end hardware.
- mitchty 13y ago
  Ios 7 runs fine on most hardware right now even with beta 2, blur effects aren't exactly that big of a power draw. Don't believe everything you read in articles before its released. Best not to form opinions on things that aren't in general availability. Apple isn't going for "high end effects" at all with ios7, more fluid effects that overall provide a consistent experience. Can't get too into details due to nda but it isn't nearly as crazy as this article makes it out to be. It is impressive what they've changed since Ive took over though, very impressive how much of a change they've made actually. It definitely feels designed all the way through.
Recoil42 13y ago
>If we felt really crazy, we’d make simple things like home screens and modal dialogs subtly shift in 3D, real-time, in response to gyroscope input. (To a mobile web developer that sounds like a troll feature request.) Uh, except that's all completely possible on the modern web, thanks to tools like CSS3 and deviceorientation APIs. In fact, when iOS7 was revealed a few weeks ago, developers raced to duplicate the parallax background feature, and did exactly that in very short order: http://matthewlehner.net/ios-7-style-parallax-background-based-on-device-orientation/ http://matthewlehner.net/ios-7-style-parallax-background-bas...
EricMuller22 13y ago
iOS 7 implementing "troll feature requests" for web developers had me chuckling. For the most part, I'm finding iOS 7 to be great.
baddox 13y ago
> The 3D, the blur, the compositing – all of them are disabled or degraded on the [iPhone 4's] A4. I hadn't heard that before, and it's quite interesting. Does anyone know if previous iOS versions have similar feature segmentation, other than the obvious (and perhaps artificial) ones like Siri and 3d maps?
- calebegg 13y ago
  It's not unheard of. The camera's panorama feature, taking photos while recording video, some other stuff: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5457 http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5457 Also, some OS X stuff, like AirPlay mirroring or Power Nap require up-to-date hardware: http://support.apple.com/kb/ht5444 http://support.apple.com/kb/ht5444
- coob 13y ago
  Navigation isn't available on the 4.
- bdcravens 13y ago
  Background apps was a pretty big one when iOS4 came out, and couldn't run on the 3G. (I actually jailbroke to get the feature, and it was painfully slow)
- potatolicious 13y ago
  Besides what others have already mentioned, third party devs (including myself) find ourselves disabling features on the iPhone 4 also. The important thing to recall is that the iPhone 4 quadrupled the number of pixels you had to render while doing almost nothing for CPU performance. Graphics performance-wise the iPhone 4 was a huge downgrade from the 3GS. If you're doing any sort of graphics work that's CPU-bound, your iPhone 4 performance is going to be dismal.
drivebyacct2 13y ago
"Try copying this assholes" Seriously? I can't get over there are iOS fanboys out there still with their heads so far in the sand. Along with more characterizations of web development that are a decade out of date... sigh. (And anyone who doesn't understand what I mean should watch the Shadow DOM and Polymers presentations from this year's Google IO. They really need to put the Sandbox on a public url for a quick impressive demo...)
- ebbv 13y ago
  Yeah, I am an iPhone owner and prefer it to Android, but this article is just asinine. First of all, you can absolutely do anything iOS does on the web; it's just a question of how much effort you're willing to put in. There's not a library already in existence that you can use easily which perfectly mimics iOS 7, but if there were then iOS 7 would need more work. But there will be web libraries that allow you to mimic iOS 7. The whole concept of "X platform can't do this" is so wrong headed to begin with. When it comes to software, the first thing anyone should learn is that anything can do just about anything. The limitation is hardware.
  - jcampbell1 13y ago
    Explain how you are going to animate blurred glass at 60 FPS if Safari doesn't give you a fast path to the GPU? I don't understand your comment. Are you just saying that both Javascript and Objective-C are Turing complete? If that is the point your are making, well that isn't really debatable.
    - altcognito 13y ago
      http://www.theverge.com/2013/6/11/4418188/apple-ios-7-design-influences http://www.theverge.com/2013/6/11/4418188/apple-ios-7-design... I'm baffled why all the Apple people are excited about features I disable in Windows because they are obnoxious and ugly.
    - ebbv 13y ago
      You really think you need direct GPU access for a simple blur effect? There's already plenty of ways to accomplish blur effects with CSS and JS. Do a little research.
ozataman 13y ago
Nice to see a non-negative analysis of iOS7. Not having tested it myself, I hadn't realized that iOS7 was actually pushing the boundaries of what's possible with modern hardware. My previous impression was that, if anything, it was a simplification of sorts and that seemed a dubious direction. Thanks for pointing this out!
methodin 13y ago
Will it be true that Apple still has enough weight to cause ripple effects in design paradigms completely unrelated to a mobile device? I am guessing so, but mostly because a lot of designers are coupled strongly to Apple ideology and it affects their designs directly. This is of course painful as someone outside of this bubble - watching designs that conform to a device and a way of thinking instead of living and breathing in their own right.
- bornhuetter 13y ago
  Well, at least this design is a lot closer to current Android and WP8. When developers designed specifically for iOS and then ported to Android as an afterthought, the results often looked completely out of place. I'm hopeful that it will be easier for clever designers to make apps that look very similar on all three platforms, and also look at home on all three platforms.
  - methodin 13y ago
    Good point. That may not actually be too bad. I would hate to see blur and super-thin lines propagating all designs but those would hopefully be minor details if the apps themselves are more similar.
angersock 13y ago
What's funny here is the idea that somehow commodity SoCs will not soon be catching up and providing the same hardware benefit to all the competitors. Hiding behind a hardware wall is not a safe place to be these days.
jenius 13y ago
Anything that pushed native over web in my mind is a step backwards. Let's think about the challenges that come along with native ios apps: - Less accessible. Objective C is a strange, low-level, difficult-to-learn, niche language used only for mac development. - More work. See above explanation of Objective C. You need an IDE to even be remotely efficient, an IDE that Apple also controls. - More work to port anywhere else. Popular app on iOS and want it on android? Time to rebuild the entire thing from scratch in another language! - More expensive. Want to sell your app? Better give Apple their 30% cut, in addition to the yearly fee in order to have an app of any sort. The common theme of these points being that Apple wants control over everything, and has control over everything. But that's a point for a separate rant. My point here is that the web has none of these drawbacks. The web is a uniform interface across devices, the languages are fairly simple and widely used, and the environment is open. Apple could still take control and sell web apps, but they seem to be very purposely not doing that, and pushing native as hard as they can while occasionally implementing a buggy web app feature here or there. It just makes me sad. We don't need parallax when we move our phones around. We don't need blur effects everywhere. We need an easy, clear, open, and accessible way to develop apps for mobile devices.
- sjtgraham 13y ago
  > Less accessible. Objective C is a strange, low-level, difficult-to-learn, niche language used only for mac development. I don't think you know what a low level language is. Also, Obj-C is quite a breeze to learn.
- gcb0 13y ago
  Ah, you forget the main Advantage (to Apple) - native means control.
- pbsdp 13y ago
  > - Less accessible. Objective C is a strange, low-level, difficult-to-learn, niche language used only for mac development. It's not hard for someone that already knows C, or really any other language. The learning curve is in platform knowledge, and every platform -- including the web -- is different. > - More work. See above explanation of Objective C. You need an IDE to even be remotely efficient, an IDE that Apple also controls. The IDE is a major win, not a downside. It automates the mundane, and applies equally well to web development -- I use IntelliJ for web work. > - More work to port anywhere else. Popular app on iOS and want it on android? Time to rebuild the entire thing from scratch in another language! That's unfortunate, but it provides the best user experience. > - More expensive. Want to sell your app? Better give Apple their 30% cut, in addition to the yearly fee in order to have an app of any sort. On the other hand, Apple has a mountain of customer's credit cards on file. The 30% buys you a lot. > My point here is that the web has none of these drawbacks. The web is a uniform interface across devices, the languages are fairly simple and widely used, and the environment is open. The web has a massive pile of its own drawbacks -- it's a language monoculture, low performance, no platform to speak of, much less platform consistency. Development is a hodgepodge of different interdependent tools, server-side and client-side. None of your users actually own anything, and webapps can just disappear at any time. Neither proprietary native platforms NOR the web are perfect, and both are imperfect in very different ways.
Zikes 13y ago
Gauging iOS's progress on aesthetics alone is like a Formula 1 driver on the highway saying "I have no idea where I'm going, but I'm making great time!". They only recently implemented a sane notifications system and quick-access settings, and they STILL don't have anything comparable to Intents on Android, which I believe is a revolutionary feature that should be core to any mobile OS.
Gravityloss 13y ago
Why is blur supposed to be computationally intensive? It's very simple mathematically...
- pja 13y ago
  It's not the computation itself, it's the GPU memory bandwidth it takes up. (Assuming you're doing it in real-time of course.)
  - jdgiese 13y ago
    if you blur an MxM area with a NxN kernel you have approximately MxMxNxN multiply adds. That can add up to a lot especially on a retina display. You are right that it is simple mathematically though :)
  - seclorum 13y ago
    Shaders.
    - potatolicious 13y ago
      Most certainly you want to use a shader, but that doesn't fix all your problems. You have to push a (very large) texture across the bus. The GPU will chew on it and spit out the result, which you then have to pull back across the bus into main memory so that it plays nicely with other UI elements that are CPU-bound and not cached in VRAM. So you've removed the processing bottleneck in exchange for a bus bandwidth bottleneck :(
      - Gravityloss 13y ago
        are you sure it has to be pulled back to main memory?
        seclorum 13y ago
        Yeah, that doesn't make sense to me either. Especially since the entire point of the recent changes to iOS is precisely to get everything on-screen handled by the GPU, in the first place ..
ChikkaChiChi 13y ago
Apple doesn't need to introduce delicious eye-candy to its interfaces that nobody needs to hamper web developers...they can just keep neutering the shit out of WebView by keeping it several generations behind the Safari javascript engine.
- arcosdev 13y ago
  Bing! Give the man a prize! I totally agree.
kevinbluer 13y ago
From my brief, albeit limited time, running iOS 7 beta 2 on my 3rd gen iPad I have to say that I'm thoroughly underwhelmed. Bugginess aside, it just feels like a significant step backwards in terms of intuitiveness and usability. It's as if Apple (obviously) had to do something and prioritized jumping on the flat UI bandwagon over a well thought-out / polished experience.
svantana 13y ago
Another cynicism that comes to mind - this won't only help staying ahead of competitors, but also perhaps persuading owners of older iphones to get a newer device, even though they were fully satisfied up to this point.
dakimov 13y ago
You may be surprised, but iPhone 5, or even more, Galaxy S4 are capable of much more than that crap. Like the full 3D with bump mapping, environment mapping and dynamic lighting. The main problem is iOS 7 does not invoke a desire to copy it. Whereas various items of the old iPhone's UI can be found all over the web. That UI style is so routinely copied nobody even notices. Some things from the iPhone have even become some sort of a standard.
seclorum 13y ago
Apple haven't done anything with iOS 7 that I can't do with MOAI. (http://getmoai.com/ http://getmoai.com/) By taking this direction, they've given me even more reason to ignore their Native GUI frameworks and continue to focus on implementing a clean, usable GUI using non-native (read: 100% cross platform) technologies. I think this is a good thing, personally. I don't see any reason to write code specifically for iOS any more, when I can, just as easily, declare a similar GUI function in a language that will work on all platforms.

133 points by jaysonlane 13y ago

Good point. Hadn't really though of it this way before. I guess as a mobile web dev I'm going to be always behind the curve here. Something interesting to think about.

zachwill 13y ago

iOS 7 was clearly designed to show off what’s possible in 2013. I absolutely agree with this point. And, while I disagree with the post's main thesis — I believe the changes were in no way directed towards the web — it's a pretty entertaining take on the updates, OP.

josteink 13y ago
I'd rephrase that as ios7 was clearly made to catch up with android 4 and holo, but maybe that's just me. there's nothing revolutionary in ios7 shown so far. that said, I can't wait for Apple to sue Android over the things they just stole from them.
- guywithabike 13y ago
  In your estimation, what did iOS "steal" from Android? For example, a common iOS 7 feature cited as "stolen" is the app switching interface. But that's the same interface Safari has used for switching tabs since the very first iPhone. They simply repurposed their Safari UI for the OS.
  - daeken 13y ago
    I'm a bit baffled by this myself. I'm on the iOS 7 beta, and it's far closer to WP7 than Android. (Which is awesome -- I loved WP7, just wished it had apps.)
  - hrwl 13y ago
    I think you could argue the control center is borrowed from Android (although the iOS 7 version looks kinda spiffier). The interface for moving between apps is similar. I had to open Safari to see your comparison. The demo I see on the product page for iOS7 reminds me more of Android than Safari. I remember seeing a few other things in the WWDC presentation but I don't remember what they were. All that said, I hope both sides "steal" good ideas early and often.
  - potatolicious 13y ago
    I make my living writing iOS apps, but come on - there's plenty here that has been "borrowed". Off the top of my head: - The insta-airplane-mode-wifi-bluetooth buttons in iOS7. These are a straight lift from Android, and have been hotly demanded by users for a long time. - Notification Center is an incredibly uncanny look-and-feel-alike of notifications in Android. It's basically an outright clone - though this isn't an iOS7 development. - The new app switcher is a takeoff from webOS. Swipe to close an app is also implemented almost precisely like it was on webOS. Claims that this came from Android are IMO off the mark. I don't think it's fair to say they repurposed the Safari tab-switcher, considering the gestures bear such an uncanny resemblance to the webOS implementation.
    - hnriot 13y ago
      "hotly demanded by users for a long time." I never need to switch to airplane mode, or bluetooth on/off in a hurry? I wonder who these people are they find setting/slide airplane mode so time consuming.
      - potatolicious 13y ago
        People who use Bluetooth regularly find themselves having to turn it on and off for the sake of battery life. It's great to be able to do so without diving through multiple menus. It's also not just airplane mode - do-not-disturb mode is also really useful, and it should be fairly obvious why someone would want to toggle it without menu-diving. Ditto orientation lock. In iOS6 is tap-tap-swipe-tap-tap, now it's just swipe-tap. This last one is kind of a platform problem though - orientation lock is useful in part because some apps excel at landscape mode, while others suck at it but insist on enabling it.
- alayne 13y ago
  There is some "flat" design that is similar to Android, but the similarities are fairly superficial and not what the article was addressing.
  - rimantas 13y ago
    And it is not even flat. Apple talks about three things regarding new design: depth, deference and clarity. Nothing about flatness, on the contrary, it's about establishing visual hierarchy via layers. Also, even bigger part will be not in the static appearance but in subtle motions when interacting, thanks to UIKit Dynamics.
    - myko 13y ago
      > Nothing about flatness, on the contrary, it's about establishing visual hierarchy via layers. This is exactly what the Android design is about as well.
- gfodor 13y ago
  I haven't used Android since it first came out, but does it have the dynamic physics, layering, dynamic image compositing (blur, etc), parallax, etc, that all are in iOS 7? iOS 7 seems to me to be very much about how it feels and behaves in motion. The current beta still isn't performance tuned, so my guess is the final build is going to be a pretty futuristic experience on the iPhone 5S. I think a lot of people are getting hung up on lack of textures/lighting as "copying Android" but I would love to hear how Metro and Android are comparable on the things that are going to define iOS 7's experience: motion, dynamics, translucency, layering, and depth.
  - bengotow 13y ago
    I agree, but it's funny. iOS 7 is all about dynamic, physical interfaces - so much so that they built a physics engine into UIKit. At the same time, they're ripping apart the user experience so that nothing onscreen _looks_ like a physical object. Before, interfaces looked like a bunch of real-world objects. Now, they look like a bunch of thin-ass lines and boxes, but behave like real-world objects. I agree that iOS is all about motion, dynamics, translucency, layering and depth. But the verdict is still out on whether those things make for better interfaces.
    - madoublet 13y ago
      Motion, dynamics, and depth are a hallmark of the Windows Phone Metro experience.
      - seanmcdirmid 13y ago
        Windows phone metro doesn't include a physics engine. The motions are all tweened. Windows phone metro includes no depth at all, it truly is flat and 2D spatial. Dynamics?
        madoublet 13y ago
        I don't know (or frankly care) how it is implemented. While the UI is flat, the apps use transitions and a parallax effect to build the illusion of the depth (similar to how Apple does it using their gyroscopic parallax effect on the home screen).
- coldtea 13y ago
  >I'd rephrase that as ios7 was clearly made to catch up with android 4 and holo, but maybe that's just me. Catch up? Actually it was more of a "let's go another 100 miles ahead, Android seems to be catching up finally to were we've been the last 3 years".
  - FireBeyond 13y ago
    To quote you: "Citation"? What iOS features have been present for three years that Android is just now getting? Let's be clear too, three years ago, iOS was at version 3.1.3. I would love to be enlightened, as an iPhone 5/iPad 4/rMBP owner.
    - Cookingboy 13y ago
      60fps scrolling? A semi-decent animation framework for developers? Low audio latency and good power management? Pretty much all the advantages Apple has from their decade of experience of developing OS X frameworks?
      - myko 13y ago
        > 60fps scrolling? It's pretty easy to make UITableView's chug if you do something stupid when populating cells as well. > A semi-decent animation framework for developers? The property animation system introduced in Honeycomb and backported to what, 2.2? works very nicely. > Low audio latency Audio has been an issue on Android. I've not delved into it myself but this is certainly something that only seems recently fixed. Not sure this warrants calling the platform far behind though. > and good power management? I'm not sure what you're getting at here.
        Cookingboy 13y ago
        There is a property animation system on Android, but it's woefully lacking when compared to iOS. IIRC it doesn't even support 2.5D transform with a Z axis and variable camera distance (which is useful for perspective transform). On iOS 7 they now have a full rigid-body physics engine built in and comes with a nice high level API for developers to take advantage of.
- Cookingboy 13y ago
  Catch up? People like you really have no idea how much behind Android is as an OS. It's until very recently it's got close to 60fps scrolling, and low audio latency and decent power management. One example on the advancement of iOS 7, how about take their animation framework a step further (which is already ahead of whats available on Android) and introduces a full rigid-body physics engine that's easily at the developers' disposal? What Apple has always done is good developer support in the form of great APIs
apike 13y ago
Thanks Zach. I don't think the changes were directed towards the web either - they were a side effect: > As a side effect, they’ve embraced conventions that will be hard to emulate with commodity hardware or web tech.

ajross 13y ago

This needs a dose of cynicism I think. The success of the iPhone in 2007 really wasn't driven by hardware capability (except arguably the capacitative touch screen). Even then, other phones had faster processors, more memory, and equivalent GPUs. Apple won because it invented new usage models, not because it drove its designers to "show off what's possible in" 2007. The stuff this is talking about is just eye candy. The original iPhone was much more than an eye candy improvement.

potatolicious 13y ago
It was a bit of both. The original iPhone wasn't a hardware revolution, but it was an OS revolution. It was the first time anyone put an OS on a phone that had a blazing fast graphics layer. Touchscreen phones existed before then, but because of platform performance, was always of the "poke, wait, stuff magically appears, poke, wait, stuff magically appears..." model. Apple didn't just invent new usage models, they invented the platform that made it implementable. The deep integration of UIKit with hardware acceleration, as well as animation as a first-class consideration in the API, were (and still are) some of Apple's greatest advantages.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- mtdewcmu 13y ago
  My impression was that the iPhone was fully thought out in advance so that everything would work together. Take away a major piece, and the whole thing stops making sense. It needed a touch screen so that it didn't need a keyboard. There couldn't be a keyboard, because it took space away from the display. Replacing a keyboard with a touch screen was radical at that time, and it had to work really well. People would need visual feedback to be able to interact with it effectively. The visual feedback couldn't lag, so that required fast graphics. And so on...
  - potatolicious 13y ago
    Sort of. It wasn't quite such a clear causal chain - there were some things that positioned them well in the first place. Quartz, which is the drawing and compositing engine developed for OSX, is really at the core of it. For one thing, Quartz is really fast, and long before iPhone was even a rumor Apple had already tied it deeply into OpenGL and made it hardware accelerated. Quartz is really the "secret sauce" to the responsiveness and graphics performance of iOS, and it predates iOS by a pretty wide margin. Core Graphics was built on top of Quartz, as well as Core Animation, which form the primary ways third party devs interact with the graphics layer. If Apple hadn't done OSX first, or done it differently, I don't think they could have pulled off iPhone.

hacliff 13y ago

This is assuming that everyone is chasing the same level of perfection as apple. If the web can provide a "good enough" interface will the bulk of developers go to the extra effort of native apps? Currently things like games are (largely) not good enough on mobile web and so the issue is forced, but building a native app for a nicer blur effect? Probably not.

rimantas 13y ago
I'd argue that bulk of developers are already doing native. The thing is, extra effort is required to replicate with web technologies even simple things that native SDKs offer. If everything you know is HTML, JS, CSS then yes, learning iOS or Android SDK will require some effort but it is worth it. Even the best webapps still feel subpar on iOS6, on iOS 7 they will feel very clumsy.

theaeolist 13y ago

I don't care about 3d or blur or other eye candy. I'd happily trade all that crap off for the battery life of my old Nokia 1100.

potatolicious 13y ago
The 3D and blur aren't what's draining your battery. The big ass LTE radio sucking down videos, music, and photos is what's doing it. That and the huge, brilliant LCD screen staring at you. Optimizing battery life by getting rid of animations and graphical effects would be extremely penny-wise, pound-foolish.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
danielrhodes 13y ago
In time. I think the battery life vs. computing power tradeoff took a turn in 2007 because batteries were finally robust enough to handle a bright screen for a reasonable amount of time. Ideally I would like a device which has a battery which, when bought, will last the lifetime of the product.
- peatmoss 13y ago
  One that recharges itself continuously via radioactive decay? I wonder if, regulatory challenges aside, a radioactive decay trickle charge could be enough of a trickle charge to meaningfully extend daily battery life...
  - potatolicious 13y ago
    None of what goes into modern battery is notably radioactive, unless your'e suggesting a battery that's similar to a RTG?
    - andrewflnr 13y ago

bornhuetter 13y ago

If this article is accurate - and that iOS 7 has so much eyecandy that it will only work on the latest high end hardware - does this mean that a low end budget iPhone is off the table? Or is this Apple's way of segmenting a high end version of the OS and then a version with all the eyecandy disabled for the cheap iPhone? It's interesting that Apple and Google seem to be going in polar opposite directions right now - with Apple going for high end effects, and KLP reportedly focusing on reducing the minimum requirements and letting it run on lower end hardware.

mitchty 13y ago
Ios 7 runs fine on most hardware right now even with beta 2, blur effects aren't exactly that big of a power draw. Don't believe everything you read in articles before its released. Best not to form opinions on things that aren't in general availability. Apple isn't going for "high end effects" at all with ios7, more fluid effects that overall provide a consistent experience. Can't get too into details due to nda but it isn't nearly as crazy as this article makes it out to be. It is impressive what they've changed since Ive took over though, very impressive how much of a change they've made actually. It definitely feels designed all the way through.

Recoil42 13y ago

>If we felt really crazy, we’d make simple things like home screens and modal dialogs subtly shift in 3D, real-time, in response to gyroscope input. (To a mobile web developer that sounds like a troll feature request.) Uh, except that's all completely possible on the modern web, thanks to tools like CSS3 and deviceorientation APIs. In fact, when iOS7 was revealed a few weeks ago, developers raced to duplicate the parallax background feature, and did exactly that in very short order: http://matthewlehner.net/ios-7-style-parallax-background-based-on-device-orientation/ http://matthewlehner.net/ios-7-style-parallax-background-bas...

EricMuller22 13y ago

iOS 7 implementing "troll feature requests" for web developers had me chuckling. For the most part, I'm finding iOS 7 to be great.

baddox 13y ago

> The 3D, the blur, the compositing – all of them are disabled or degraded on the [iPhone 4's] A4. I hadn't heard that before, and it's quite interesting. Does anyone know if previous iOS versions have similar feature segmentation, other than the obvious (and perhaps artificial) ones like Siri and 3d maps?

calebegg 13y ago
It's not unheard of. The camera's panorama feature, taking photos while recording video, some other stuff: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5457 http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5457 Also, some OS X stuff, like AirPlay mirroring or Power Nap require up-to-date hardware: http://support.apple.com/kb/ht5444 http://support.apple.com/kb/ht5444
coob 13y ago
Navigation isn't available on the 4.
bdcravens 13y ago
Background apps was a pretty big one when iOS4 came out, and couldn't run on the 3G. (I actually jailbroke to get the feature, and it was painfully slow)
potatolicious 13y ago
Besides what others have already mentioned, third party devs (including myself) find ourselves disabling features on the iPhone 4 also. The important thing to recall is that the iPhone 4 quadrupled the number of pixels you had to render while doing almost nothing for CPU performance. Graphics performance-wise the iPhone 4 was a huge downgrade from the 3GS. If you're doing any sort of graphics work that's CPU-bound, your iPhone 4 performance is going to be dismal.

drivebyacct2 13y ago

"Try copying this assholes" Seriously? I can't get over there are iOS fanboys out there still with their heads so far in the sand. Along with more characterizations of web development that are a decade out of date... sigh. (And anyone who doesn't understand what I mean should watch the Shadow DOM and Polymers presentations from this year's Google IO. They really need to put the Sandbox on a public url for a quick impressive demo...)

ebbv 13y ago
Yeah, I am an iPhone owner and prefer it to Android, but this article is just asinine. First of all, you can absolutely do anything iOS does on the web; it's just a question of how much effort you're willing to put in. There's not a library already in existence that you can use easily which perfectly mimics iOS 7, but if there were then iOS 7 would need more work. But there will be web libraries that allow you to mimic iOS 7. The whole concept of "X platform can't do this" is so wrong headed to begin with. When it comes to software, the first thing anyone should learn is that anything can do just about anything. The limitation is hardware.
- jcampbell1 13y ago
  Explain how you are going to animate blurred glass at 60 FPS if Safari doesn't give you a fast path to the GPU? I don't understand your comment. Are you just saying that both Javascript and Objective-C are Turing complete? If that is the point your are making, well that isn't really debatable.
  - altcognito 13y ago
    http://www.theverge.com/2013/6/11/4418188/apple-ios-7-design-influences http://www.theverge.com/2013/6/11/4418188/apple-ios-7-design... I'm baffled why all the Apple people are excited about features I disable in Windows because they are obnoxious and ugly.
  - ebbv 13y ago
    You really think you need direct GPU access for a simple blur effect? There's already plenty of ways to accomplish blur effects with CSS and JS. Do a little research.

ozataman 13y ago

Nice to see a non-negative analysis of iOS7. Not having tested it myself, I hadn't realized that iOS7 was actually pushing the boundaries of what's possible with modern hardware. My previous impression was that, if anything, it was a simplification of sorts and that seemed a dubious direction. Thanks for pointing this out!

methodin 13y ago

Will it be true that Apple still has enough weight to cause ripple effects in design paradigms completely unrelated to a mobile device? I am guessing so, but mostly because a lot of designers are coupled strongly to Apple ideology and it affects their designs directly. This is of course painful as someone outside of this bubble - watching designs that conform to a device and a way of thinking instead of living and breathing in their own right.

bornhuetter 13y ago
Well, at least this design is a lot closer to current Android and WP8. When developers designed specifically for iOS and then ported to Android as an afterthought, the results often looked completely out of place. I'm hopeful that it will be easier for clever designers to make apps that look very similar on all three platforms, and also look at home on all three platforms.
- methodin 13y ago
  Good point. That may not actually be too bad. I would hate to see blur and super-thin lines propagating all designs but those would hopefully be minor details if the apps themselves are more similar.

angersock 13y ago

What's funny here is the idea that somehow commodity SoCs will not soon be catching up and providing the same hardware benefit to all the competitors. Hiding behind a hardware wall is not a safe place to be these days.

jenius 13y ago

Anything that pushed native over web in my mind is a step backwards. Let's think about the challenges that come along with native ios apps: - Less accessible. Objective C is a strange, low-level, difficult-to-learn, niche language used only for mac development. - More work. See above explanation of Objective C. You need an IDE to even be remotely efficient, an IDE that Apple also controls. - More work to port anywhere else. Popular app on iOS and want it on android? Time to rebuild the entire thing from scratch in another language! - More expensive. Want to sell your app? Better give Apple their 30% cut, in addition to the yearly fee in order to have an app of any sort. The common theme of these points being that Apple wants control over everything, and has control over everything. But that's a point for a separate rant. My point here is that the web has none of these drawbacks. The web is a uniform interface across devices, the languages are fairly simple and widely used, and the environment is open. Apple could still take control and sell web apps, but they seem to be very purposely not doing that, and pushing native as hard as they can while occasionally implementing a buggy web app feature here or there. It just makes me sad. We don't need parallax when we move our phones around. We don't need blur effects everywhere. We need an easy, clear, open, and accessible way to develop apps for mobile devices.

sjtgraham 13y ago
> Less accessible. Objective C is a strange, low-level, difficult-to-learn, niche language used only for mac development. I don't think you know what a low level language is. Also, Obj-C is quite a breeze to learn.
gcb0 13y ago
Ah, you forget the main Advantage (to Apple) - native means control.
pbsdp 13y ago
> - Less accessible. Objective C is a strange, low-level, difficult-to-learn, niche language used only for mac development. It's not hard for someone that already knows C, or really any other language. The learning curve is in platform knowledge, and every platform -- including the web -- is different. > - More work. See above explanation of Objective C. You need an IDE to even be remotely efficient, an IDE that Apple also controls. The IDE is a major win, not a downside. It automates the mundane, and applies equally well to web development -- I use IntelliJ for web work. > - More work to port anywhere else. Popular app on iOS and want it on android? Time to rebuild the entire thing from scratch in another language! That's unfortunate, but it provides the best user experience. > - More expensive. Want to sell your app? Better give Apple their 30% cut, in addition to the yearly fee in order to have an app of any sort. On the other hand, Apple has a mountain of customer's credit cards on file. The 30% buys you a lot. > My point here is that the web has none of these drawbacks. The web is a uniform interface across devices, the languages are fairly simple and widely used, and the environment is open. The web has a massive pile of its own drawbacks -- it's a language monoculture, low performance, no platform to speak of, much less platform consistency. Development is a hodgepodge of different interdependent tools, server-side and client-side. None of your users actually own anything, and webapps can just disappear at any time. Neither proprietary native platforms NOR the web are perfect, and both are imperfect in very different ways.

Zikes 13y ago

Gauging iOS's progress on aesthetics alone is like a Formula 1 driver on the highway saying "I have no idea where I'm going, but I'm making great time!". They only recently implemented a sane notifications system and quick-access settings, and they STILL don't have anything comparable to Intents on Android, which I believe is a revolutionary feature that should be core to any mobile OS.

Gravityloss 13y ago

Why is blur supposed to be computationally intensive? It's very simple mathematically...

pja 13y ago
It's not the computation itself, it's the GPU memory bandwidth it takes up. (Assuming you're doing it in real-time of course.)
- jdgiese 13y ago
  if you blur an MxM area with a NxN kernel you have approximately MxMxNxN multiply adds. That can add up to a lot especially on a retina display. You are right that it is simple mathematically though :)
- seclorum 13y ago
  Shaders.
  - potatolicious 13y ago
    Most certainly you want to use a shader, but that doesn't fix all your problems. You have to push a (very large) texture across the bus. The GPU will chew on it and spit out the result, which you then have to pull back across the bus into main memory so that it plays nicely with other UI elements that are CPU-bound and not cached in VRAM. So you've removed the processing bottleneck in exchange for a bus bandwidth bottleneck :(
    - Gravityloss 13y ago
      are you sure it has to be pulled back to main memory?
      - seclorum 13y ago
        Yeah, that doesn't make sense to me either. Especially since the entire point of the recent changes to iOS is precisely to get everything on-screen handled by the GPU, in the first place ..

ChikkaChiChi 13y ago

Apple doesn't need to introduce delicious eye-candy to its interfaces that nobody needs to hamper web developers...they can just keep neutering the shit out of WebView by keeping it several generations behind the Safari javascript engine.

arcosdev 13y ago
Bing! Give the man a prize! I totally agree.

kevinbluer 13y ago

From my brief, albeit limited time, running iOS 7 beta 2 on my 3rd gen iPad I have to say that I'm thoroughly underwhelmed. Bugginess aside, it just feels like a significant step backwards in terms of intuitiveness and usability. It's as if Apple (obviously) had to do something and prioritized jumping on the flat UI bandwagon over a well thought-out / polished experience.

svantana 13y ago

Another cynicism that comes to mind - this won't only help staying ahead of competitors, but also perhaps persuading owners of older iphones to get a newer device, even though they were fully satisfied up to this point.

dakimov 13y ago

You may be surprised, but iPhone 5, or even more, Galaxy S4 are capable of much more than that crap. Like the full 3D with bump mapping, environment mapping and dynamic lighting. The main problem is iOS 7 does not invoke a desire to copy it. Whereas various items of the old iPhone's UI can be found all over the web. That UI style is so routinely copied nobody even notices. Some things from the iPhone have even become some sort of a standard.

seclorum 13y ago

Apple haven't done anything with iOS 7 that I can't do with MOAI. (http://getmoai.com/ http://getmoai.com/) By taking this direction, they've given me even more reason to ignore their Native GUI frameworks and continue to focus on implementing a clean, usable GUI using non-native (read: 100% cross platform) technologies. I think this is a good thing, personally. I don't see any reason to write code specifically for iOS any more, when I can, just as easily, declare a similar GUI function in a language that will work on all platforms.