What I want to know is when I open the new Google maps, how the hell do I enable traffic view? Where is it? The help points to clicking links that I do not see. This is the most important feature to me, I had to revert back to the old maps.
I don't see it, I commented against apple in minutes some one immediately quoted a comment from another post which seemed anti-apple. Yea I'd say HN is pro Apple.
I find this funny. IOS 7 is the same as IOS 6 except for a few re-arrangements of features and a new look. I feel like Mugato from Zoolander.. Am I taking crazy pills? Their all the same! Ios 6, 7.. iphone c.. s.. it's really the same thing with tiny changes. And everyone is reviewing them like they are new phones or new OS.
> "I find this funny. IOS 7 is the same as IOS 6 except for a few re-arrangements of features and a new look."
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.
Interesting, we had very few issues with API changes moving to iOS 7 (mainly dealing with the status bar, especially double-height, which in some places still needs an OS-specific check). All our work has been in getting the iOS 7-style UI looking right and working well. And we have code in our app dating back to iOS 3.
Depends on how stock your UI is. The app I work on is very heavily customized (e.g., lots of subclasses of UIButton, UITableViewCell, etc etc), and iOS7 broke a lot due to underlying implementation changes. We're also pretty graphically intense, so iOS7 also likewise broke a lot of optimizations.
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.
Interesting. We do a lot of custom drawing as well (like I said, our app dates back to iOS 3, so we even have a messy custom transition animation layer that wouldn't have been necessary with newer OSes) but it sounds like we've sidestepped some of the issues you've run into just by chance.
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.
- 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.
They don't know anything about it. But a lot of new APIs were made available to developers that will make great apps easier to make. I think that's better for users than a new OS toy.
iOS 7 changes the backgrounding model, which has been a giant point of contention since the app store was introduced, and also has a brand new facelift. It was also one of the main differentiators aside from data sharing between apps between iOS and android. It is not a trivial update technologically or a small update from a marketing and direction standpoint.
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.
> 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.
I disagree. Having owned all those phones; I felt the 3GS->4 was a much bigger update to the iPhone compared to 3G->3GS. The 4 introduced the retina display which was far more noticeable than the 3G to 3GS performance increase.
poolpool. I get what your saying, but exactly what are you saying? Data sharing between apps between IOS and Android?
Ive and Cook are just riding on concept from Jobs, there is nothing new here. If any other hardware vendor put out phones with this level of "same old" they would be burned for it. In the future people will look back at this Apple craze and laugh. Apple put out the iphone 5, with a new case and blogs are reviewing it! Are you kidding me? IOS 7 is the same damn OS as 6! Airdrop is nothing new feature wise. Almost every other feature has been out on other OSes for a long time. Apple struck gold in 2007.. and they been re-regurgitating since. Scared to wipe the slate because there will never be another Steve and they will never hit another winner like the initial iphone. But it's tired now. IOS 7 was supposed to be something different, and bottom line it's the same OS that consumes more battery and more resources. Whatever additional battery life they added to the iphone 5s hardware is cancelled out by the new requirements.
"Let's see where Microsoft is vs where Apple is in 3 years. Apple has 0 innovation going on. OS X and IOS are stale as anything. They are riding on earlier success and eventually will fizzle out."
That's not really fair. Some would say some fanboys think no matter what other companies do it is right away awful. MS did try the flat look.. looks like at least that caught on a little.
I don't know who you mean by "we", but generally users expect something new with a new OS, new hardware, or basically anything with the word "new" in front of it. Apple didn't announce IOS 7 by calling it the next IOS, they called it the new IOS.
iPhones have existed for more than six years with largely the same UI style. While it may be mostly a reskin, iOS 7 is a dramatic departure from the circa-2007 style.
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.
