Every time a new update comes out, I feel like a kid on Christmas Eve. It’s quite distracting, and I find myself daydreaming about all the goodies in store for me. Some updates are more awesome than others, but I’m glad to say that the iOS 7 did not disappoint me, iPhone Life-ers! It certainly is the biggest change in five years. Sure there are things that I would change if I were boss of the world, but there’s lots that I like. Instead of going feature by feature, let’s focus on the visual user interface (UI) differences. As the husband of a graphic designer and a person who has overseen the design and development of many iPhone apps in his day, the look and feel is really important to me.
One of the first things you notice after upgrading is how much bigger the screen seems to be. With steadily increasing screen sizes available from competitors, Apple knows that screen real estate is very precious stuff, and they worked hard to strip clutter and unnecessary “chrome” from the UI. Just looking at the lock screen can show you how dramatic this effect can be: those black bars at the top and bottom are completely gone. It can be disconcerting, but you do get used to it; and when compared side to side iOS6, it looks like you’re peering through a porthole. The goal of reducing chrome and clutter is replicated throughout the UI.
Once you unlock the phone (by swiping anywhere, not just on the slider anymore), the home screen really lets you know you’re in something new. The first thing most people notice is that the app icons seem to float above the background wallpaper. Apple calls this the parallax effect (shifting the position of the background image according to inputs from the accelerometers), and it really creates an illusion of looking INTO the phone as opposed to AT it.
The icons themselves have been toned down a bit. Gone are the “fake Photoshop 3D” icons with shadows and specular highlights providing a look of being rounded and a sense of depth. The old style icons looked more like buttons, which made them more familiar. Now they have been flattened which, when combined with parallax, yields a much more realistic 3D sensation of a plane of icons floating in space. Skeumorphism is taking design elements from old things and adding them to new. Think of the way previous operating systems represented the newsstand as a wood-paneled bookshelf with magazines. I can assure you there’s no wood in an iPhone! The new bookshelf is now a lot more symbolic, cartoon-like, and rough. Icons now use gradients to provide texture, instead of light source and shading.
Another big change is the color palette. The rich, earthy, darker tones are gone, replaced by bright and bold primary colors. As with the icons, gradients have replaced textures, and white space is in abundance. I think this plays into the common impression that the UI is “lighter,” not just in tones, but in feel as well.
One complaint I’ve heard regularly enough that I think it has some legitimacy is that text is harder to read right after updating, especially for people with eyesight issues. Apple rolled out a new font for this update, Helvetica Neue typeface, and I’m a huge fan—everything looks ultra-crisp and modern, with thin, clean lines! But I think that is part of the problem, because the font is not a very “heavy” font. Couple that with the lighter palette and you have a potential for decreased readability.
The great thing about this “problem” is that it is easily rectified in settings. I found that going into the Accessibility section and turning on “Bold Text” made a huge difference, giving the font a little more heft. The second option I enabled is to “Increase Contrast” which also helped. Frankly I don’t see any downsides to enabling these two options, though the bolding does seem to increase character spacing slightly (it’s hard to tell because it requires a reboot).
Finally, even if those two tweaks still leave you squinting and trying to focus on the screen, there is a slider to increase the size of the text itself. I prefer to sacrifice a little scrolling in return for a quicker glance, so I bumped it up a notch, and now I’m perfectly happy with the readability.
I think the dynamic wallpaper, with its seven different color choices and subtle animations for the home and lock screens, is attractive and fun to interact with; but it might be a suck on battery power, so I’m choosing not to use it.
The revamped Notification Center and Control Center exist on top of the wallpaper level and inherit the wallpaper’s color so that when you change your wallpaper everything else changes with it. Control Center looks different depending on the wallpaper, and the numeric keypad gains outlines based on the wallpaper color as well.
The new photo UI is perhaps one of my favorite improvements. The design is clean and clear, making it much easier and even more fun to use with the swipe interface. t’s a completely different look and experience.
I read that some people are so impressed by how this (free) update has made their phone feel brand new, that they’re considering holding off on upgrading. For someone like me that sounds like blasphemy, but it just goes to show how powerful an iOS update can be!