Two days ago Apple showed off iOS 7 at WWDC and I've had it looping in a browser tab ever since, going back through screenshots because I honestly can't decide how I feel about it.
I wasn't in the room obviously - I watched the keynote stream Monday morning with coffee getting cold next to my keyboard, and by the time Craig Federighi got to the software demo I'd already seen half of it live-blogged anyway. Software demos never look as good live-blogged as they do on video, and this is one where the video actually matters, because so much of what changed is exactly the kind of thing a text liveblog can't capture. The way the lock screen background shifts a little as you tilt the phone. The parallax thing on the home screen icons. You have to see it move.
Let's talk about the icons though, because that's the part everyone's been arguing about since Monday night. Gone are the brushed metal gears and the leather stitching and the green felt poker table backgrounds - years of Apple skeuomorphism, just gone. Replaced with flat colored squares, thin lines, and a font (Helvetica Neue Ultralight, if you go digging) that looks gorgeous on a Retina display and genuinely rough on anything older. My mother's iPhone 4 is going to look like a ransom note if she updates this fall.
Some of the new icons are fine. Safari's compass is fine. The redesigned Camera icon is fine. But Game Center now looks like somebody spilled a bag of marbles, and Newsstand still looks like nobody on the design team wanted to touch it. I don't blame them honestly - it's a fake bookshelf, there was never going to be a good flat version of a fake bookshelf.
The stuff underneath the icons is the actually interesting part, and it's getting buried under all the "does this look like a kid drew it" debate going around today. Control Center - swipe up from the bottom of the screen and there's your flashlight toggle, brightness slider, AirPlay, without digging through four layers of Settings. That's the thing I actually want on my phone tomorrow, not in September. Multitasking finally shows real app previews in cards instead of a row of tiny icons along the bottom, which is such an obvious improvement I'm almost annoyed it took this long. AirDrop is coming to iOS too, so you can sling a photo to somebody standing next to you without emailing it to yourself like an animal, which is genuinely how I move photos off my phone right now and I'm not proud of it.
Then there's iTunes Radio, which is Apple's answer to Pandora - free with ads, unless you're already paying for iTunes Match, in which case no ads. I'll believe it's good once I've actually used it. A free streaming radio product from a company whose entire business model has been selling you the song afterward is a strange pivot to watch happen live on stage.
None of this ships until fall. Developers get a beta starting this week; everyone else waits. So all anybody outside Cupertino can do right now is squint at screenshots and have opinions, which, fair enough, that is exactly what the whole internet is doing today.
Small tangent because I can't not mention it: the biggest crowd reaction of the entire keynote wasn't the phone software at all. It was when Phil Schiller pulled the sheet off the new Mac Pro, the little black cylinder thing, and said, completely deadpan, "can't innovate anymore, my ass." The whole room lost it. I've watched that clip four separate times today and it still gets me, mostly because it's such an un-Apple thing for an Apple executive to say on a stage in front of cameras. That machine is not for me or anyone I actually know - it starts well north of two grand and nobody I know personally edits enough 4K footage to justify it - but I respect a company that lets an exec drop a mild swear on stage instead of having legal scrub every syllable out beforehand.
I'm reserving final judgment on iOS 7 until I've held it in my own hand instead of watched it move on a livestream, and that's not happening for a few months yet. Right now I'm stuck somewhere between "this is the redesign iOS actually needed" and "somebody left the color picker set to whatever's brightest." Both feel true depending on the screenshot I'm looking at.