It’s a brave new world, iPhone users.
Purveyors of all the iThings Apple has today unveiled its new and improved operating system, iOS 7, explained in greater detail below by Senior Vice President of Design, Jony Ive.
So what the hell is different?
The first thing to note is the gorgeous new cosmetic upgrades which include a sleeker typeface throughout (hello Helvetica Neue Ultra Light), a 3D interface which overlaps on itself and reacts accordingly to the tilt of your hand, an exuberant but understated colour palette, translucent graphics and redesigned app icons. It looks sleeker and sexier than its predecessor and updates the well established iPhone visual language to create a futuristic-feeling user experience moving closer to that of Tom Cruise in Minority Report.
As Ive explains: “There is a profound and enduring beauty in simplicity, in clarity, in efficiency. true simplicity is derived from so much more than just the absence of clutter and ornamentation. It’s about bringing order to complexity.”
What else? Remember how awesome 3D Tazos were?
Your can now do that with you phone thanks to a phenomenon called the parallax effect which creates the illusion of a fluid depth of field. V. cool.
Software upgrades include Control Center, Notification Center, upgraded Multitasking, AirDrop, enhanced Photos, Safari, Siri and iTunes Radio. The best upgrades in descending order of importance are:
– All apps can now multitask.
– The control panel has far more control, flexibility and is easier to update your settings on.
– iTunes Radio
– Safari is faster and now has a unified address and search bar.
– Camera now comes with four default settings – video, photo, square and panorama- and sorts your photos into “Moments” using metadata.
– Siri, Apple’s answer to HAL 9000, is fully integrated with Twitter and can now search Wikipedia.
– New AirDop makes sharing a breeze.
– The notoriously inaccurate weather app now has awesome animated backgrounds.
iOS 7 will be available as a free software update later this year.
