iOS 7, thoroughly reviewed
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
- Smaller fonts and less obvious icons on the weather app
- Less info on the world clock without the digital time text, which helps grasp the time at a glance especially when you're looking at several zones.
- Smaller direction character font on the compass (why would anyone do that? It's like 40% of what it used to be and is only a single char!)
- Less contrast across the entire interface with all white text; harder to discern differences.
... and at best a neutral change across the others. I haven't yet installed it myself, but the screenshots look disappointing. I am not dismissing the idea of removing skeumorphisms, but this particular implementation/execution seems like a step in the direction of less refined for Apple.
I have seen very few screenshots so far that made me say "oh that's so much better, wow". Several did make me say "Gosh, why would you reduce the font size there?!?! Why would you make the icon much less obvious?"
Just to note that I am not trying to be negative - I am certain with this much solid engineering talent, there will be features we'll love.
I hope I'm proven wrong once the OS is officially out and we're hooked in the following few weeks.
- Clock: Try tapping on the clocks: http://d.pr/i/yrmI
- About less contrast: You can turn on bolder fonts in the interface.
I really, really like iOS 7. Especially on the iPhone, somehow on iPad I had more of a meh reaction, and I installed it there first. But going back to my iPhone with iOS 6 made me realize how dated that OS looks and feels.
Forgetting the looks, all the little new features and improvements are great, like all the new Safari stuff, command center and the improved app switcher. Apple says there are 200 new features and I definitely believe them.
Isn't this simply emotion - based upon you already knowing that iOS 7 is newer?
If you showed iOS 6 and 7 to someone who had never seen an iPhone before, how would they figure out which was the newer design?
In the same way you would see something that you've never seen before and go "that's so 80s".
Considering that Apple didn't originate the flat trend, and that the web has been going flat (or flatter) for a while now, I don't think it would take a genius to figure out which is which.
It's like the fashion industry, what is out of fashion comes back in because somebody says so and the catwalk is then flooded with retro fashion.
People use this tired old argument on us too - "what? Why is IT building the website again? Don't we already have one? Welp, guess they have to justify their paychecks somehow...", it's tiresome, reductionist, grossly ignorant, and textbook HN: everyone is useless except me.
Fashion isn't a simple cause and effect - it isn't designers dictating taste to an unwilling public. The influence is circular - design influences public aesthetic influences more design. The fashion industry steals plenty of ideas right off the streets, it's far, far from a one-way relationship. "Fashion" is just an endless cycle of the public influencing products and vice versa. Sometimes it will retread familiar territory, other times it'll do something new.
And thank god we have it. I for one am glad we're rid of animated GIFs and fluorescent green text, or do you think that evolution is also bored designers justifying their paychecks?
But nah, none of the above can be true, everyone's a useless parasite except the vaunted Hackers, hallowed be their names!
Before it was 100% obvious what the icons meant at a glance -- a big yellow unmistakable sun, clear full clouds, etc.
The new ones are just outlines, you almost can't tell the white and yellow lines apart, you have to "decipher" them with your eyes to figure out the weather for the next few days. A huge step backwards in clarity.
The reviews don't mention this because frankly a lot of them are superficial - or they are focused on justifying a number or a thumbs up or down rating that they have assigned, rather than helping people to understand anything.
From what I saw in this review, the new Safari offers much more functionality than the prior version, devoting substantially more pixels to content and offering the iCloud Keychain feature.
I do agree though that the functionality hasn't improved significantly for most of the other apps. I'd be way more excited if the Control Center offered customization. My two most frequent settings (Cellular on/off, Location Services on/off) aren't in Control Center so it doesn't really give me much.
> It’s important to note that while AirDrop in iOS 7 and AirDrop in OS X share the same name and underlying technology (both work by transmitting files over a peer-to-peer Wi-Fi connection), they aren’t actually compatible with one another. You can AirDrop things from iOS to iOS and from OS X to OS X, but not from iOS to OS X or vice versa. All the reports I can find say that this situation doesn’t change with Mavericks.
With that said, it would be useful to have some of the iTunes/iPhoto functionality for wireless(AirDrop) a la carte file transfer, but most people will just use iTunes wifi sync to get this effect.
Quickly send photos I just took to put in email, IMs or on web forums. I used to do that constantly before I had an iPhone using Bluetooth, it was super-handy. Now I have to take a pointless long-cut through the internet with something like Dropbox. Royal pain when you're somewhere with spotty upstream internet.
All the photos you just took are available via Photostream on all your other devices, assuming you have WiFi, which presumably you'd need for Dropbox. If you don't like firing up iPhoto or Aperture to see your photo stream on the desktop, there are "apps for that".
If you don't want an app, here's how to put a shortcut to your latest photos right on your dock:
http://howto.cnet.com/8301-11310_39-57555169-285/access-your...
I mean, it works. But it's not elegant nor efficient. The Dropbox method sucks too. I often don't have Wifi (or it's hotel/airport wifi where you're limited to 1 device), and then I wish I was back on my dumbphone...
Photostream doesn't count against iCloud capacity.
"Q. Does Photo Stream use my iCloud storage?"
"A. No. Photos uploaded to My Photo Stream or Shared Photo Streams do not count against your iCloud storage."
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4486
So the shared photo streams are effectively free photo album storage you can keep private or share with friends.
It also doesn't wait for a million photos to sync. It syncs the most recent one(s) you just took. It's hard to imagine more elegant or efficient than "it just happens without you doing anything".
It sounds like you're not very familiar with how Photostream really works. That's not unusual, a lot of my people I know complain about things that it turns out Photostream supports because Apple never really pushed or promoted it.
> I often don't have Wifi (or it's hotel/airport wifi where you're limited to 1 device), and then I wish I was back on my dumbphone...
You're in luck; iOS has a switch to turn off 3G data and become a dumb phone.
If you're in the mood for the dumb phone style manual management instead of an automatic photo stream , there are several really great apps for popping single photos over or sharing the clipboard. I personally use a clipboard app that I can "copy" a photo on the iOS device and on my Mac just "paste" it somewhere. That one works over ad-hoc WiFi so doesn't need a WiFi base. Others work over bluetooth.
It's still ridiculous that the answer to "I want to send this thing between these two devices in front of me" is "I have to send every photo I take to a server owned by a company somewhere".
Clearly Apple agrees, or they wouldn't have created AirDrop in the first place!
This sounds brilliant. Is it Instashare?
But several times a day I wish I could beam a photo, a Notes text file, etc., from my iPhone to my Macbook Air. In the end I'm just constantly e-mailing links/photos/etc. to myself, which never ceases to seem ridiculous in 2013.
On iOS it still uses multi-association wifi for the actual sharing, but it uses Bluetooth LE for the discovery. That allows it to be active at all times, which is very important given that on iOS most of the time AirDrop will be initiated while the app receiving the drop is completely inactive. The problem is that if Apple were to move Mavericks over to Blue LE discovery it would impact backward compatibility with existing AirDrop to Macs running older OSes, and it would have issues since some Macs that support AirDrop don't have Bluetooth LE compatible hardware. Not to mention you would have a lot more (and more confusing) use cases to deal with in the UI.
I expect them to move Mac OS over to iOS compatible AirDrop eventually, but it is not just a simple oversight. It is going to have to be a transition that has some thought put into it.
Just tested this, and my iPad doesn't show up until I open the "control panel". Still it'll save battery by using only bluetooth for the initial scan.
It's not uncommon for my phone to shut down after it's hit 8% remaining battery. Or I'll be watching a video with 45% left, and the next second it'll cut me down to 25%. There have been a few instances where I've gone from ~25% to completely empty in a flash, leaving me with a dead phone much earlier than I'd anticipated. So now I really can't leave my place for more than maybe 4/5 hours without my charger.
It usually gets fixed pretty quickly though.
I only ask because I recall reading some complaints during the beta cycle that were resolved in some way without changing the specific version of the pre-release they were running.
Once I downloaded the beta, I found myself with a dead phone at noon, having to fully recharge it at least once just to have a usable phone by the end of the work day. And I think I've only seen it actually hit <5% all of two times. It'll power down way before it gets that low.
For example:
"The issue with the battery drain on iPhone 4S was big and we saw the battery drain down in hours. However if you clean install first and then restore data, the issue doesn’t seem to occur."
http://www.sidhtech.com/news/ios-7-iphone-4s-battery-life-ip...
See also:
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3605927?start=0&tstart=
I made the same mistake with iOS5beta and it was a nightmare. Power usage was the least of my issues. WHen iOS5 finally came out, I noticed most of my issues had disappeared (the rest got resolved by 5.1).
tl;dr: The use of iOS betas for your daily driver are inadvisable.
This worries me. If it's because of the background downloading then at least it has a benefit (and is disable-able), but if it's the extra GPU cycles for the UI then that's a real shame.
They found that battery life was degraded mostly in standby mode (with iOS7 losing 12% of battery after 16 hours of standby time, compared to 7% on iOS 6.1.4).
With a more active usage pattern, they found the differences were smaller: their iPhone 5 running iOS 7 lasted 16 hours, compared to 17 hours on iOS 6.1.4.
This would suggest the increased consumption is more likely to come from background stuff than from visual UI effects.
[1] http://tweakers.net/nieuws/91361/accu-iphone-5-sneller-leeg-... (Dutch)
I'm guessing it's something similar to you – a wonky app draining my battery that is handled better on 7.
I've heard someone suggest that perhaps background sync actually might help battery life in some situations since it is done in batches. this would mean that users are spending less time looking at a power hungry screen that's just showing a loading spinner, assuming that some of this saved time is spent not using the phone at all, there might be a gain.
edit: To expand, although I am unfamiliar with everything that could be/has been done to maximize battery life:
Is it possible that "tweaks" are made in ways that are more relevant to actual usage patterns? (And perhaps ways that sacrifice battery life in the for speed in other areas, in the hopes of maintaining the baseline or improving battery life overall while still improving perceived performance)
What might these kind of changes be?
I'm not trying to be an apologist, genuinely curious about how what sort of optimizations might be made, and trying to make sense of the difference between what Ars is seeing and the anecdotal evidence.
When you compare the apps currently out that have been updated, you can see a lot of companies are struggling with flat design. Something that seems simple, is actually very complex to pull off, but when done right, can be fantastic.
I think it will be a while before the ecosystem fully recovers and most of the best apps around have figured out how to execute flat design well.
I am reminded of the days of Microsoft vs Apple where Microsoft had better backwards compatibility. I think that the use of these devices in the business world will echo the days past and the cheaper device, Android, will be the go to business device.
Sure, but having seen the 3GS usage numbers on my own app (which, granted, is hardly a gold standard of representative demographics), I think this will be a rounding error. Despite Apple selling the devices until relatively recently, there are actually very few out in the wild. A developer can now effectively develop for iPhone 4 as their baseline.
Granted, you might have uniqueness in your demographic that will skew 3GS usage higher than the general population.
> "This also means that we have to be backwards compatible with yet another version of the OS. In code, this is where Macros come in."
Ah, but you can't use macros, since a single binary will have to work on all devices - there aren't multiple binaries built with multiple flags. What you will have is a lot of runtime checks against either the OS version or specific featuresets.
Be prepared to write a whole lot of if ([obj respondsToSelector@selector(...)])
The worst part about this isn't just supporting new features - that part's easy since you can simply test for the presence of necessary bits, mostly with respondsToSelector. The worst part are the undocumented behavior changes in UI components that will break between iOS6 and 7. For example, it looks like there are large implementation changes in UITableView and UITableViewCells. This means you must necessarily test against the version string and branch from that. Annoying at best, code-quality-destroyer at worst.
The redesign of the messages app limited itself to removing the graphics. The app still shows messages as bubbles, it's just bland now. I can think on a couple better design solutions for chat threads by looking at other apps and Adium themes.
The Newsstand is another example of redesign-WTF. It still has bad usability and small thumbnails, it just replaced the background with some random grey background.
Noteworthy are also those icons on the home screen. There's no consistency between them, as pointed by multiple designers already [1][2]. I can't believe Apple is pushing these as final.
Overall, it looks like a rushed job, not something I would expect from Apple. I see no compelling reason to update.
[1] http://tristanedwards.me/what-ios7-should-look-like [2] http://ianstormtaylor.com/whats-wrong-with-the-ios-7-icons/
I don't like that buttons turned into labels. I don't like that my screens now look more cluttered without clear delineations between UI elements. It looks a bit like a toy now as well. It also feels a bit more sluggish on my 4s.
I don't know, maybe it will grow on me.
The N5 is also far more likely to match the N4's launch price than it's final price.
(nb: i love apple. used an iphone for 4 years. use only macs.)
Ars is known to every major release of iOS and OS X in this fashion, just as Anandtech reviews the new hardware in great detail.
It is also the first major OS update under Ive and Cook's direction.
The phones are a minor update, as to be expected like every S release.
There have been two S releases prior to the 5S/5C release. The 3G->3GS was a bigger change to the phone than the iPhone->3G update. And the 4->4S update was a bigger change to the phone internals than the 3GS->4 update, though the display stayed the same.
Really, all the S releases have been major phone updates, and of the non-S releases only the 4S->5 update was.
As someone who's spent the last 2 months porting code from iOS6 to iOS7, I disagree. The API changes (documented or otherwise...) are large enough that this really was more of a port than it was a simple update.
It may look like simple rearrangement (I disagree with that assessment, but whatever), but under the hood a great deal has changed.
- You wouldn't expect Apple to change core apps like Phone dramatically. It's a very mature feature that isn't going anywhere and is practically identical on every smartphone. You get a numpad, you get your contacts list, your voicemail, etc. All of which has been given a new coat of paint, but fundamentally hasn't changed much.
- You see deeper changes in the built-in apps that aren't quite as mature/core. There is for example a large change in UX in iOS to move away from hard, distracting transitions towards more subtle transitions that imply information hierarchy. For example if you tap on a date in a calendar, instead of hard-wiping you to another piece of UI altogether to show you appointments, it dynamically expands the day-view from the date itself. If you tap on an album in Photos it will dynamically expand that album to fill the screen with additional photos. All of this goes towards better educating the user on information hierarchy and is much, much less jarring than before. As a third party dev that's been working with Apple on iOS7 prep, I know for a fact that they're pushing this new UX hard - you will see more 3rd party apps go towards this model in the coming months. You see some uses of this in first-party apps, but users will notice most when 3rd parties start adopting this.
- Many of the most substantial changes are under the hood and aren't being (visibly or ostentatiously) used in the stock apps, mostly because there really isn't a place for them. They will, however, power a new generation of apps in the coming months - things like a new backgrounding model will let apps do more while not in use, and also in some types of apps greatly reduce the loading/refresh time when you return to them. Or even more subtle things like dynamics, which will make scrolling feel very different in apps.
In short, users will feel some of these changes immediately, but ultimately the deep changes in iOS won't be felt until third party dev adoption is there.
Quick examples:
- The entire way iOS handles text rendering has changed (makes sense, CoreText), so methods that calculate text rendering now return different results than they did before. More crucially, text measurements can now return non-round numbers, so if you're using the results without rounding them off, you will get pixel alignment problems galore. Previous versions of iOS rounded off results before returning them to you (though this is not guaranteed via documentation, or even addressed).
- Text rendering has also changed, so even if you're not using the system fonts, the exact same font will render with subtly different widths and heights. In densely packed UIs this can be problematic.
- UITableViewCell's underlying implementation has changed. More specifically, backgroundView is now by default a plain white view, where it was nil before. If you have table views that are transparent, surprise, they are now all white. There are also some subtle differences that can cause trouble if you've heavily customized UITableView - I suspect personally that UITableView now has a UICollectionView (or UICollectionView-esque) based implementation (it seemed entirely separate before), since some of the behavior now aligns.
For instance, we already had custom text metrics code since our app's font is italic, and that code already rounded to non-retina boundaries. And I think nearly all our tableviews already had custom backgroundViews.
Our biggest incompatibility was a progress HUD popup that subclassed UIAlertView, and that drawing broke completely in iOS 7 (it just turned into a little blurry white bar in the middle of the screen.
-puma1