Sunday 16 June 2013

iOS 7 properties




Ending all rounds of rumours and attacks of hysteria, Apple finally took off the shrouds from the seventh generation of its mobile operating system, the iOS 7. At the World Wide Developers Conference at San Francisco, Apple released the simpler and flatter iOS 7 that we all were anticipating. It is the most drastic overhaul of the iOS since its debut along with the iPhone in 2007, and is set to revamp the experience of millions of iOS users worldwide.


We were constantly updating you on how Jony Ive, the architect of iOS 7, was striving for a complete refresh of the interface, shades, background and colours. Here is what all has changed:

The Design


iOS 7 looks remarkably different from its earlier counterparts. The design is all flat and colourful. The icons have gone under the hammer and are completely redesigned. They have lost the gloss and shadows, and are now perfectly flat and simple. But they still appear beautiful and vibrant, thanks to a new palette of colours which has been employed. All the windows have a base colour of white with text, buttons and tabs of other colours. This makes the interface look cleaner and does away with the “clutter”, as Apple puts it.

There is a sense of translucency which is prominent in iOS 7. When you open a new window over an existing one, you can still see the colours of the bottom window. Jony Ive claims this gives a sense of your context and location.

Control Centre


This is a new swipe-up menu which can be accessed from anywhere, even when the screen is locked. You can control your music, switch back and forth to airplane mode, enable Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, timer, camera, calculator and a new flashlight tool, all simply by swiping over. There is also a button for a new feature called AirDrop. AirDrop works by connecting two devices over Wi-Fi or Bluetooth after users tap the button to initiate it. From there, users can see icons of their friends, and will be able to easily send photos and other files over to them.

iTunes Radio


This new on-demand music service from Apple is a new addition to the iTunes store as well as to iOS 7. With the new design philosophy spilling over to iTunes as well, iTunes Radio lets you stream the songs of your choice from different radio stations and allows personalization of those stations based on artists, albums and genres. You can even start your own stations, much like starting your own playlist, and iTunes Radio will help you to curate it based on your past song selections.

This new service is free but comes with ads. However, subscribers of iTunes Match can listen to their songs ad-free.

Redesigned apps


The stock apps, that is, apps built in your device by default, are redesigned in exactly the same manner as we anticipated. The Calendar app gets red text and circles with a plain white background. The Weather app goes all animated: it rains for you when it predicts rain, or shines a Sun for you when it predicts a bright day.


The Camera app features a new square mode for taking photos, just to give a new Instagram-style aspect ratio. There are new retro filters as well. In the Photos app, there is a new hierarchy in which your photos are organized. Years sort your shots by years. Within 
each Year, there are Collections based on certain times and locations, like trips and holidays. Within Collections are Moments, photos from specific and distinct places like Shimla Mall Road or the India Gate.

Safari now brings full-screen browsing and a unified smart-search field – the address bar and the search bar are now one and the same, similar to Google’s Chrome browser. All the open tabs appear as cards which can be flipped and swiped off. Two new features are built right in: iCloud Keychain which syncs your account names, passwords and credit card numbers across all iOS 7 and OS X Mavericks devices; and Password Generator which suggests and saves passwords for you.

The App store is also overhauled with a new location-based app suggestion feature and a new Kids category. App store will now update your apps regularly on itself without begging your attention.

Multitasking


iOS 7 has been made intelligent enough to decide when to schedule updates for your apps, based on your tendency to use them at certain times of the day and based on the strength of Wi-Fi around. Certain apps, like social media apps,  are automatically updated in the background right before you open them, thus eliminating the waiting time. Now you can see large previews of opened apps just by double tapping your home screen.

Availability of iOS 7


iOS 7 will ship in this fall to these devices and above: iPhone 4, iPad 2, iPad Mini and fifth-generation iPod touch. This further strengthens the possibility of new hardware coming this winter, which will have iOS 7 built-in. However, some new features such as iTunes Radio might be available first only in US.

iOS 7, as we already said, is a daring effort by a company known for innovation but being criticized for not innovating lately. The radical new design philosophy might come as a pleasant wave of breeze for millions of iOS users and might even urge some Android fans to ‘switch over’. One thing is certain: iOS 7 is real and is here to stay.