At this morning's keynote at Apple's World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC), Apple CEO Tim Cook (below) described iOS 7 as "the biggest change to iOS since the iPhone." While I might suggest that the addition of the App Store in 2008 was a bigger change as it really altered how people used their iPhones and smartphones in general, there's no question that iOS 7 represents the biggest visual revamp. Indeed, the changes in iOS 7 completely dominated a keynote that also saw a new version of OS X, new MacBook Air features and a new Mac Pro, iWork for the cloud, and the introduction of iTunes Radio.
On a specific feature basis, I don't think there is much in iOS 7 that is completely new. Most of the features are things we have seen before in other mobile OSes or in third-party products. But the modern, clean interface is a big change. The individual components are very polished and the integration of all of it leads to an experience that looks to be both simple and powerful, at least from the quick demos we saw during the keynote. Users, developers, and corporate IT shops will find things to like about the new OS, which is available in beta for developers now for the iPhone and soon for the iPad, and for consumers in the fall.
From a visual point of view a lot has changed, including the typography, icons, and colors. Perhaps more importantly, the whole system now seems designed around the concept of "planes" that can float on top of one another. This is all done to give you a better sense of where you are in the OS, for instance, letting your icons go in front of your background in a way so that as you move the phone you can see more of the picture below. It's the little things that stand out in the design, such as a bit of translucency among the different planes of information and the animations switching among different screens or tabs within Safari. For instance, when you pick a background photo, the colors in the rest of the system change slightly to match it. None of this is a huge deal on its own; it's the way it all fits together that makes it feel like an Apple product.
Jonathan Ive, senior vice president of design, said in a video at the event, that "true simplicity" involves "bringing order to complexity." He said the goal was to "take an experience that people know well and add to it" and on first glance, it looks like Apple has succeeded. While iOS 7 looks very different from iOS 6, nearly all of the basic concepts are unchanged so iOS 6 users are not going to experience that kind of radical change that Windows users did when they saw Windows 8. (Given that iOS users typically update very rapidly, with Cook noting that 93 percent of the installed base of iOS users now use iOS 6, that's particularly important.)
Craig Federighi (above), Apple's senior vice president of software engineering, went through the details of the system.
In some ways, I think the most important new feature is multitasking, an area where iOS has lagged Android and Windows Phone. Federighi said iOS has always had multitasking but had been concerned about battery life, so started by only enabling it a few years ago for specific uses, such as music playing or allowing background calls. This version finally adds multitasking for all applications, but does it in a way so that the OS notices how you use an application and distributes CPU time across the applications to recognize that; for instance, if you have some applications that you only run at certain times of the day. This intelligent scheduling sounds good, as are other features such as "opportunistic updates" (meaning that the system is more likely to update an app when it has good connectivity than when it doesn't), adapting to network conditions, coalesced updates (meaning that it updates multiple things in packages), and push triggers.
Switching among applications looks to be pretty easy. As with current versions of iOS, you double click on the home button to start moving among your applications, but it now lets you scroll through all the running apps to see this. I'll have to really try this compared with the thumbnail view of apps you use to switch among Android apps, for instance, but it looks pretty nice.
Multitasking is particularly important for those of us who have corporate applications that we want to always be running in the background, even if they aren't in the foreground. So I think this could be a big deal.
Some of the biggest changes appear to be in Apple's Safari, which Apple described as the world's most popular mobile browser. I particularly like the new interface for tabs that makes switching among multiple tabs easier, and the fact that you are no longer limited to just eight tabs. Other features include a unified search screen, improved bookmarking, and a feature that lets you go through your reading list and just move from one item to another as you continue to scroll.
Another significant change has to do with photos. The camera app now allows for easier switching among different modes, as well as live photo filters (similar to those that Instagram made popular, but that are now popping up everywhere). More importantly, the new Photos app changes how the photographs are organized, so that rather than just showing the basic camera roll, it will automatically organize your photos by where and when they were taken. This collects them into what Federighi called "moments" and you can then zoom out to see larger collections, including a year view. It's also easier to share photo streams and now video, and collect comments on the photos.
One new feature here is AirDrop, meant to be an easier way to share photos or videos with the people around you by showing you nearby phones and letting you transfer information very easily. Federighi said this involves "no bumping," a clear reference to ads for products like the current Samsung Galaxy line that use near field communications to do such transfers. Instead, this uses peer-to-peer Wi-Fi networking, but as a result, works only on newer devices.
The long-awaited iTunes Radio made its debut, featuring hundreds of stations pre-programmed by Apple, but also giving you the ability to create your own station. Eddy Cue (above), Apple's senior vice president of Internet software and services, built a station around Led Zeppelin, for instance. It sounds a lot like Pandora and many other similar systems we've seen, but some things were a little different. This keeps track of all the songs you've played in a history, so you can preview and buy them. The system will be free with ads, and ad-free for iTunes Match subscribers.
This will be integrated within a newly redesigned Music app that looks a bit different, and can now show you artist images within your library. This was designed to make it easier to see all your purchased music, even if it isn't on the device.
Cue also showed off a new version of Siri that sounds more powerful, now letting you ask it to do things such as "increase the brightness" of the display, or "turn on Bluetooth" as well as reading tweets, adding information from Wikipedia, and adding Web search results from Bing. (That seemed like a big change to me, especially since Safari still seems to default to Google as a search engine.) It now includes a male voice as well as a female one, with support for a few new languages. I'm looking forward to trying this out and seeing if it has caught up to Google Now in terms of the breadth of questions it answers.
Perhaps more importantly, though in a longer time frame, Cue talked about iOS in the car, saying most car companies today offer music playback from iOS in their vehicles, but that more than a dozen would be integrating iOS featuressuch as navigation or even reading back your emailinto a screen or "eyes-free" using Siri. The first of these cars will be out next year, he said.
Other changes seem more modest but could really make the little things easier to do. The control center now pulls up from the bottom of the screen, giving you quick access to things like the brightness or airplane mode. The lock screen can now display more information, including notifications; the weather and calendar apps now have very different looks; and the messaging system now lets you move more easily between messages and the message list (looking a bit like BlackBerry 10). Notifications are now synced across devices so you can dismiss an item once and not see it again on other machines, which is good for people who have multiple Apple devices. An activation lock will prevent people from wiping a stolen device and restarting it if they don't have access to the iTunes account. Corporate IT departments may well like a per-app VPN feature, and Chinese users should like Tencent Weibo integration.
The App Store has a few changes, such as allowing you to search by age range, or to see "apps near me," which would be useful for finding things related to a city you were visiting. More importantly, the App Store will now update apps automaticallysomething Google Play has had, but that iOS has sorely needed.
Again, most of the individual features don't strike me as particularly new but it is the way they all are polished and integrated that stands out to me. It's the visual experience that makes this different, and yet, keeps it an easy upgrade for iOS 6 users. Federighi said that "installing iOS 7 is like getting a new phone, but one you already know how to use." That's a tall order, but one I'm excited to try out.
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