After a long hesitation, I finally decided to install iOS 7 on my iPhone 5. Today afternoon, as I downloaded the OS, my only concern was how many of the apps will run properly in iOS 7. And to top it all, the question, how I can put up with the new ugly icons was killing me. If not now, its going to be the end of September. One or other day, these icons will find their place in my iPhone and I’m just gonna have to deal with that. So, I thought no more. I went ahead and did the necessary to get iOS 7 up and running in my phone.
iOS 7 is a complete overhaul over the existing iOS. Make no mistake, this still doesn’t support widgets on home screen or other features you wished it had. But its a lot closer now and in some cases even better than what you thought it would be.
The Icons:
The icons haven’t really got a make over to be honest. Instead they look more vivid, less solid than before and cartoonish as I would call it. It’s a lot similar to the Touchwhiz icons on Samsung phones. Many people like the new icons, at the same time there are a bunch of people like me who’re not really happy with it. The Settings icon, the iTunes Store icon, the AppStore icon, the Safari icon etc look horrible while others are tolerable.
But one thing I noticed here is that, once you install all your third party apps and rearrange icons according to your preference, you’ll find the icons ok. The total outlook changes which is a good thing. And from the look of things, we’ll see a lot of major changes in the UI in the upcoming betas as well. The current look and finish just doesn’t look as if its quite ready.
Control Center:
Controls like Airport Mode, WiFi, Bluetooth, Music Widget, Torch light or adjusting brightness are features you use frequently, but not always. And for that very reason, they don’t have to be in your notification centre all the time consuming space which otherwise could be allotted to notifications from apps and the OS itself. And this doesn’t mean that they need to be buried deep under the OS either. Apple has wisely found a way to place them all in one place called “Control Center”
Control Center is located on the iPhone screen regardless which app you’re on. A swipe from the bottom to top calls up the Control Center menu which brings up a nonsense menu with all the necessary controls one might quickly want to access. This includes Airport Mode, WiFi, Bluetooth, Do Not Disturb, Lock Orientation Control, Brightness Slider, Music Player, Air Drop, Torchlight, Clock App, Calculator and Camera app launcher. This is in fact much better than what you see on Android. And like I said, it does not eat up the space in the Notification Center. The only option I wished they added was the 3G/4G option. And some of you may also wish if you could add the Cellular Data switch as well. That aside, Control Center is one of the exciting features in iOS 7.
Notification Center:
Notification Center is pretty much the same with a slightly revamped drawer. The drawer is now translucent and shows a blurred view of the icons beneath it. So if you pull the drawer down while you are in any app, it then gives you a blurred view of those items. Another thing new in the notification centre is the three new tabs- Today, All and Missed. Today of course shows all the notifications due for that day, All will show all the notifications that are due today and in the upcoming days. And finally, the Missed tab will shows all the missed notifications like Calls, Messages etc.
The weather is now shown as a description. Again, not a big fan of that. One has to really look into it to see the weather whereas previously a quick glimpse revealed the weather level. You can also configure stocks to see as a list of stocks you’re tracking in the notification centre. And that’s pretty much about the Notification Center in iOS 7.
Multitasking Menu:
iOS handles background running apps in a decent way currenty. But it has its on demerits. First, you have to double click home button. This brings up the multitasking screen with icons of the apps running in the background. Next you have to press and hold until each icon gets a quit icon on them. The problem here is that, you only see the app icon. You may remember what you were doing on one or two apps. But there will be a lot of apps open and you can’t really remember exactly what you were doing or where you left of. So if you’ve paused a game or a video, that’s lost when you quit it. However, with the new multitasking menu, we can see all the apps in resized window which gives you glimpse of what you were doing.
To quit apps, you just have to swipe up and its exited. This procedure also saves time as the whole process is limited to double clicking Home button and then swiping up on the apps you want to quit.
Phone App, Messaging & FaceTime:
Phone app is pretty much the same except for the dialler which has got a small UI makeover. The numbers are now bigger and rounded in shape and the call button is long flat button than the previous tiny rectangular call button. Trust me, it makes things a lot better now. Another thing I noted in the dialler was, when you press each number it becomes translucent to give you a blurred view of the background. Not something huge, but a tiny little neat feature. Because, that can be considered as an indication to whether the number was pressed or not.
Its apps like messaging that makes you feel that Apple used cues from Windows Phone OS to develop the iOS 7 UI. It looks a lot similar. So is the case with the multitasking UI discussed above as its rip off of the Palm OS multitasking menu. As usual, the blue box indicates iMessage and green represents Messages. Luckily, now you can block contacts and also see avatars of people in group chats. What shocked me the most was, the photo transfer speed. Photos actually went faster now than before. And its a remarkable improvement. Its surprising to see that Apple took this long to speed the process of photo transfer. I often use Whatsapp with people who I share photos frequently even though I know that it kills quality. But from iOS 7 onwards, I guess I don’t have to switch often.
FaceTime is now a separate app on iOS. It has been so on Mac for a while now and its not that surprising to see the same change in iOS. The only use so far is that you get to see the list of recently FaceTime’d contacts now. As you can see in the screenshot, the window has live video background. I’ve got to say it, features like these makes the OS looks so advanced and stylish.
Music Player:
Remember when you were wowed each time she you tilted your phone to landscape mode when in Music Player ? The amazing Cover Flow is now history. Its been replaced with three rows of music album art of all the music in your library. Tapping on each album art zooms that album with all the available tracks in it.
The Now Playing screen has also received its fair share of UI changes. For some it may look like black over white against the previous white over black UI. But if you look carefully, some options have been moved here and there. And Yay to continued lyrics support. Note, lyrics were added manually.
Portrait view is the same as you see above whether you’re in Artist tab, album tab or Songs tab.
Safari:
Apple has finally learned. Bookmarks are now on Safari’s launch screen instead of dedicated menu inside Safari. Apple has its on strengths in app design, but sometimes they come with the most stupid design. The address bar is now also the Google search bar thus making it one big long box on top. A pretty welcomed change.
Tab view is now more graphical and three dimensional. And the limits on tabs have been removed. You can also see that private browsing option is now inside Safari which previously was hidden inside Settings. Again another example of how stupidly Apple designs certain apps.
Camera:
Camera now has filters inbuilt. So for all those die hard Instagram fans, this is going to be a really lovely feature. Come on, there has been times when you wished if you could apply some filter on to a photo but not post it online. Unfortunately, Instagram does not allow that. Well, that’s solved now.
If that’s not enough for you, you can now take photos in Square resolution as well. That’s just perfect for taking photos for your profile picture.
iOS is not like you know it anymore. While the basic actions/operations continue to be same, the new UI and some controls may put you in doubt. iOS, which has been famous for its simplicity is now a little advanced for normal people. Its however far from being Android complex, but its still not as simple as it used to be. But the good news is, its just a matter of getting used to. With 3-4 days of continued use, one may master it.
So that’s pretty much everything new in iOS 7. Not to forget, these are some visible changes. There are even a lot more changes within the OS. Well, I will let you discover them as you start using the OS hopefully by end of September.