Note: This is a guest post written by Ashish Bhatnagar
The grand unveiling of next iOS is approaching and Jony Ive, the Senior VP of Industrial Design and Chief of iOS Design Team is working hard on the overhaul of the upcoming OS.
According to 9to5mac, Ive has been working on a black, white and overall flat design for iOS 7. It has been heard that rather than chasing for several new features, Ive has been working on a design that’ll focus more on the look and feel of the software.
Reporting further, 9to5mac says that heavy textures will be dropped from the OS and several new black and white UI elements will be added. The sources also said that over the course of past few weeks, Apple has been trying several new looks and features for the new OS. So it won’t be a big deal if they drop this architecture by the time of launch at WWDC and pick something new.
On the topic of heavy texture based design, Jony Ive has a totally different point of view. Some people who attend the meetings of Ive have reported about his view on the heavy texture based design. According to Jony,
Software designs filled with physical metaphors do not stand the test of time.
So it’s clear that Jony isn’t in the favor of heavy texture based architecture that was introduced by Apple co-founder Steve Jobs and was carried over by the former iOS chief Scott Forstall. But now when more than half a billion iOS devices running on the Jobs’ architecture have been sold, people have become comfortable with the current design.
Every time when a new version of iOS goes live, they usually already know the usage of every function and UI doesn’t feel confusing to them at all. Those half a billion users have become habitual with that design.
In such a situation it’ll be a challenging task for Ive to introduce a flat architecture on iOS while maintaining the required simplicity to resonate with customers. Let’s see what comes out.
