So yesterday was the WWDC keynote, and I'm still kind of processing it. Not the whole thing: I don't really care about the new Mac Pro (though that trash-can shape is going to look ridiculous on a lot of desks) and I'm not in the market for a Haswell MacBook Air, nice as the battery life numbers sounded. What I can't stop thinking about is iOS 7, and specifically, the icons.
If you haven't seen the screenshots yet: it's flat. Really flat. Gone is the leather stitching, the green felt poker table on Game Center, the wood-paneled Newsstand shelf. In its place is this candy-colored grid of icons that honestly made me do a double take when the keynote photos started circulating. The new Game Center icon looks like a kid's birthday balloon. I'm not saying that's bad exactly. It's just a lot to take in after six years of the same visual language.
Jony Ive did the transition video, obviously, all hushed voiceover about how "when something is genuinely new, it can look strange" and how the redesign is "unashamedly digital." Which, fine, I get the philosophy. Skeuomorphism had run its course. Nobody needed a fake leather stitch to know what a calendar app was in 2013. But watching it live at my desk, streaming off a pretty overloaded connection (half of Twitter was apparently trying to watch the same feed and it kept stuttering right at the good parts), my first reaction wasn't "wow, brave new direction." It was "wait, why does Notes look like that now."
The font is the other thing nobody's talking about enough. A lot of the new UI text is set in this ultra-thin Helvetica Neue, and on the keynote screenshots at least, it's genuinely hard to read at a glance. I had to lean in toward my monitor a couple times just to parse a label. Maybe it renders differently on an actual Retina display in person and this is just a photos-of-a-projector-screen problem. I hope so, because as shown it looks more like a font a design student picked for a mockup than something meant for my mom to read her email.
Here's the part that actually has me thinking, though: Control Center. Swipe up from the bottom of the screen, toggles for brightness, WiFi, Bluetooth, a flashlight, music controls, all in one panel. I've had some version of this on my phone for probably two years now, because I've been jailbroken pretty much continuously since iOS 4, largely for exactly this feature — first through SBSettings, then Auxo once that came along. And now it's just... there. Stock. Built in by Apple.
Part of me is glad, because it means I might finally stop explaining to non-jailbroken friends why my phone can do things theirs can't. But part of me is already wondering what this does to the jailbreak scene generally. A big chunk of the reason people jailbreak is to get features Apple hasn't shipped yet, and every year Apple ships a few more of last year's greatest hits. Multitasking, Notification Center, now this. At some point the incentive to jailbreak just quietly erodes, tweak by tweak, until it's a niche thing for people who want deep system customization rather than basic quality-of-life stuff. I don't think that's this year. But I can see it from here.
Small side note: AirDrop is coming to iOS too, phone-to-phone file sharing over WiFi and Bluetooth without needing to be on the same network. I immediately thought of Bump, the app where you literally bump two phones together to transfer photos, and wondered how long that company's got left as a going concern once this ships in the fall. Rough timing for them, if so.
I'm not going to pretend I've fully made up my mind on iOS 7 after one day of screenshots and a jittery livestream. The developer beta is out today for anyone with a paid account, and I already know somebody's going to figure out a way to get it onto a non-dev-registered phone within a week, UDID restrictions or not — that always happens. I'm half tempted to hunt down a spare device and try it myself, mostly out of curiosity about whether the whole thing feels as jarring in person as it does in these keynote photos, or if it's one of those things you stop noticing after about two days of actual use.