Monday, March 11, 2013

iOS 7 Leaked

Don't ask me how I got this (I don't want to be responsible for any drone strikes), but I have a prototype of Apple's upcoming iOS 7.  This has been hotly anticipated, partly because people were getting fed up with the staleness of iOS 6, and also this is our first chance to see Jony Ive's fingerprints since he took over as head of design.

iOS 7 Home Screen

Gone is the schizophrenic skeuomorphic implementation of previous releases in favor of a much simpler, more unified design.  Instead of switching from metal to leather to blue jeans, your eyes will be now be focused on one texture, with all icons and graphics following the same graphical framework.  But that's just the visual.  The real innovation here is with two brand new technologies called "MultiFinder" and "Hypercard."

iOS 7 MultiFinder

MultiFinder, simply put, brings the new ability to run apps side by side in an interactive manner.  I almost don't know what to say about this.  It's so new I think we'll need some time to process all the implications.  It's one thing to have apps, but to have multiple apps working together at the same time?  My head is officially blown.

Hypercard is something I haven't had time to get much into yet, but it's supposedly an intuitive programming interface that will allow any ordinary Joe or Josephine to produce their own apps, no programming language necessary.  This is nothing less than the democratization of software development and could be a revolution in how we interact with our devices.  One can even imagine people eschewing current media models and producing their own communication networks.  Imagine if we had something like this twenty-five years ago.  The World Wide Web would be a far different place.

iOS 7 Keyboard

Other additions are a built-in calculator (finally!) and something that makes my fingers particularly happy, an extended keyboard.  I should apologize for not going more in depth, but I just got this and I'm literally trembling with the adrenaline rush as I write it.  Hopefully I'll have more, though I'm sure Gizmodo will chime in.  They're never far behind on this stuff.  But, yeah, the world's changing.  Thank you, Apple.  Just thank you.

10 comments:

  1. Wow, that's pretty awesome news, is this available on iPhone 4s?
    Software Development Company

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  2. Wow, that looks really cool!!! Though, I didn't think that Apple would take this "gray" idea so far......And, it's not really inovative if you think about it, because it looks shockingly like the original 1984 Desktop OS......

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    1. I don't know what a desktop OS is. Those beasts are so the past.

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  3. Isn't this post about two or three weeks too early? ;)

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  4. Why didn't Hypercard change the world? Was it because was proprietarily locked down? Multiple incompatible versions? I was always meaning to learn Hypercard... until gopher and http came along. Now it lives in my BasiliskII HFV file, my Ambrosia game junkyard. I take it for a spin once or twice a year to look up Star Trek trivia.

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  5. one of the funniest post of the year (on one of the best blog on the web)! thank you! :)

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  6. I guess the post on MR was right! They are going back to the flat look!

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  7. Hypercard did change the world, it became the world wide web !

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