“‘For a company that was never gone, Apple sure is back.’ So tweeted technology entrepreneur Aaron Levie. Spoiler alert: on Monday at WWDC, Apple won back the majority of our hearts at The App Business,” Daniel Joseph writes for The Guardian.
“Apple has been heftily criticised for its failure to take wild moon shots like Google’s self-driving cars. But Apple’s message was clear – its gift to the world isn’t going to be a stream of wild experiments,” Joseph writes. “Apple’s gift to the world is a platform that lets you – the developer community – take the moonshots yourselves, at low cost, and with the chance of incredible reward. That’s why the first demo on Monday wasn’t by Apple. It was by a relatively small studio which had developed its own self-driving cars which run on iOS.”
Joseph writes, “Forget the icon design hoo-ha. The breakthrough here is how Ive is constructing an experience in which the software and hardware work in perfect harmony. A device on which the customer doesn’t separate the hardware and software experience. How’s he doing this? Ive and his refreshed user interface (UI) now consider the phone as a singular object, with a universal law of physics governing its hardware and software. The phone now consists of panes of content, stacked vertically, that can come to the top and into view. He’s added translucency to the panes not for design flourish, but to give you a sense of location. And he’s added parallax effects so that the UI moves as you move the hardware, in perfect harmony. Even the apps now run to the screen edges to erode that division between hardware and software.”
“Ive is clearly working towards a vision of a device that is simply a singular pane of glass that really is just all content,” Joseph writes. “This is an awesome vision for app developers on a mission to create delightful, engaging experiences.”
Much more in the full article – recommended – here.