iOS 7 has been unveiled and it’s a fresh new start for Apple’s iOS platform. The clean and elegant typography, with layered environments makes a stunning and more addicting experience for the user. Finally though, a lot of people’s hopes for airdrop and control pannel have finally come to fruition.
Some things are a bit off with the beta upon our testing, such as the dynamic backgrounds not exactly working too well. However, those backgrounds will give you much fun if you decide to trip face. Also if you were a huge fan of having your Twitter or Facebook posting options on your slide down notification center, you will be missing that. But! No more cliché bars of service, instead they have been replaced by dots that stay out of the way and give more screen area.
Quick note: if you use iOS 7 along with a custom carrier logo, it will no longer work and you will have AT&T or Verizon displayed. We will be waiting for a fix in the near future.
With the completely new re-design they’ve redefined the typography to make things clearer and sharp to go with the design of the iPhone. The Weather app is even revamped with animated backgrounds to give you a feel for the weather before you even look outside or get ready for a trip. Even iMessage has been redesigned to give more of a cleaner canvas to type your messages and send photos or videos to friends and family.
The camera has been improved dramatically. Now instead of flipping that annoying toggle, you can just swipe to video, photos, squared or panorama photo modes. Not to mention you get some pretty nice filters to make your photography pop. Kind of weird at first but it sticks with you after one look through.
Safari has now taken back it’s spot as my key browser instead of Chrome on my iPhone at least. It’s elegant, easy, fast and most importantly full screen. I can’t say much more about it that hasn’t been said by Apple, but if you have the capability to get iOS 7 as a dev it’s worth giving it another go if you gave up on the browser.
Siri is a bit buggy upon testing but it could also be from high traffic from developers. It looks A LOT like Google Now, but at least it’s a lot better looking than the previous Siri scheme. The voices are much clearer and better sounding to the ear, not obviously computer generated as with the original Siri.
iTunes Radio is pretty good, but those of you who like explicit lyrics will be really bummed. Yep. They use the clean versions to sell you rather than the original tracks. So music fans be weary. You may run into buying a clean version of a song.
Photos is now turned into Moments basically where your photos are automatically sorted for you by date inside your albums. Not only date, but by the places you’ve been as well. Kind of creepy but awesome to actually remember those wasted nights and where you ended up!
Airdrop and sharing is so clear and easy to use it makes bumping phones look disgusting. Not to mention people go on the toilet with their phones and do they wash the phone? No, but hopefully their hands. During the key note Apple took a shot at the Galaxy S series with a logical, “Who needs to go around a room bumping phones?” Instead you can make yourself discoverable to a contact or everyone in your general area.
Control center has been a long time wish by many users. Not only can you control the brightness, iPod, AirDrop, AirPlay, but a flashlight, timer, calculator and even a camera shortcut right there for your ease of use.
Notification Center is cleaner and has incredible typography so you don’t miss a thing. If you liked the widgets, forget about them. They’re gone and good riddance.
Multitasking has gotten better finally with a preview of the window you were last at and swipe up to kill the app.
Overall despite minor errors I have easily fallen in love with the new iOS 7. It’s incredibly fluid and clear for a mobile OS and the attention to the typography has really really really impressed me. It does remind me in some ways heavily of Android, but done in such a beautiful manner. Just by playing with iOS 7 you feel the functionality emerge with the iPhone.
Really worth waiting for this Fall if you were thinking about switching to Android.
Numerous changes and additions are still being discovered. We’re taking our time to gather as much as possible before spilling tons of jumbled features or additions to the new iOS 7. We hope you join in and comment your suggestions!
