“In 2007, Apple released a mobile OS that was a generation ahead. It centered around hardware-accelerated touch animations, tracking your fingers so fast that it created an entirely new type of experience. Rich sprites slid in and out with wonderful fluidity. The world was Apple’s oyster, as only the best hardware and most efficient software could produce such an experience,” Allen Pike blogs.
“It’s now 2013, and the effects that the iPhone popularized have been commoditized. Native iOS apps still have the best implementation of them, but performantly sliding around rich textures in response to touch inputs is no longer impossible in HTML and JavaScript,” Pike writes. “Moore’s rising tide has lifted up the cheap phones and the web renderers. They can can now provide a decent version of the fundamental experience, hurting the case for native iOS apps.”
“Let’s say we worked at Apple, and were challenged with designing an experience that was impossible in 2007. Something that would be entirely impossible with web technology. What would our futuristic UI look like?” Pike writes. “It would have compositing effects that need serious GPU horsepower. Blur is a beautiful but computationally intensive operation, so we’d use it liberally. To push it further, the blurred areas will need to update during scrolling and update at 60 fps. We’d add more 3D effects, stacking and layering content where we can. If we felt really crazy, we’d make simple things like home screens and modal dialogs subtly shift in 3D, real-time, in response to gyroscope input.”
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Pike writes, “iOS 7 was clearly designed to show off what’s possible in 2013. As a side effect, they’ve embraced conventions that will be hard to emulate with commodity hardware or web tech… bringing to life these blurs, animations, and dynamics with HTML and JavaScript isn’t yet possible… iOS 7 is designed and developed for the A5, and will truly shine on the A7. By hanging up their rich textures in favour of rich effects, Apple has gone well beyond a coat of paint. If people fall in love with this new, beautifully living aesthetic, there will be an argument for building native apps for years yet.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: The more we use iOS 7, the more we love iOS 7.
Add Personal Hotspot on/off to Control Center, please, Jony! Honestly, that’s our biggest complaint so far.
[Attribution: Daring Fireball]
