This week Apple unveiled iOS 7 to some very excited Apple fans in San Francisco at their World Wide Developer Conference. While TechCrunch, CNET and many more have plenty of in-depth coverage I thought I’d share the CliffNotes with those of you who want the three minute elevator pitch.
Ready? Here’s what you need to know:
- New Look-and-feel: remembered when slick beveled icons were in? Well they’re out now and the new iOS has a very flat look to it, some love it, some hate it, every Mac geek like me will use it either way.
- Core Apps++: Apple decided to revamp some of their core apps like mail, messages, weather, calendar, photo etc. This has been a long time coming.
- iTunes Radio: have you heard of Pandora? Apple’s finally doing it, uh, like ten years later. This is cool except for the fact that we’ve all built our favorite Pandora stations and tuned them for years.
- A Better Siri: people use Siri? I sure don’t and honestly don’t know anyone else who does, but yes people use it and it’s getting better. Might be a reason to try it again.
- Smarter Multi-tasking: pretty slick feature that allows you to view the full-sized app screens rather than the tiny icons at the bottom of the screen.
- Back Button: swipe to go back, easier than trying to pin-point the back button in your favorite app.
Yes there are more features but these are the core ones that you should know about, the rest you’ll discover when you upgrade. There’s a new Mac Pro, Macbook Air, and Mac OSX and I’ll be doing a “In A Nutshell” version on these as well this week.
Bam! There you go, now you can spend your day surfing, wine tasting, hang gliding or whatever it is you were planning to do 🙂
Photo Credit: William Hook via Compfight cc

Love the new features (such as the new multitask bar), but the design is terrible. The icons look terrible. I know iOS 7 isn’t complete yet (super slow at times, a lot of bugs, etc), so hoping they work on the design before the final release.
The biggest issue I have with iOS 7/Mavericks though, is that Apple stole other peoples’ ideas and designs.
Just look at Mavericks, the new tabbed finder idea was stolen from TotalFinder. The new password feature over iCloud comes from 1Password. Then iOS… stole designs from Android running on Samsung (almost exact copy), and the lock screen looks very similar to the Yahoo Weather app. These are just a few examples.
Here’s two articles on it:
http://www.theverge.com/2013/6/11/4418188/apple-ios-7-design-influences
http://www.droid-life.com/2013/06/10/ios7-vs-android-a-quick-comparison-after-the-wwdc-keynote/
If you guys want a good laugh, check out this Tumblr showing how stuff would look like if designed by Jony Ive:
http://jonyiveredesignsthings.tumblr.com/