Unit 6 Reading Response

Reading the article on "Designing for iOS 7" made it clearer to me, as an iPhone 5 and iOS 7 user, that there really is a lot more than “simplicity” to Apple’s design aesthetic. I have subconsciously analyzed the interface before, every time I have opened my phone, but it all makes so much more sense to hear about the choices from someone else’s perspective. The transparent blurred boxes are a revolutionary new way to add content without completely separating it from the rest of the screen, and not to mention it looks pretty radical. The interface difference between the iOS 6 and iOS 7’s weather application was probably one of the most dramatic changes in the new iOS, and Apple did it justice because I, as a user, am 110% satisfied every time I open up my weather app; it’s just so simple, it gives me all the information I need, it looks sleek with the thin typeface (yet readable), and the animated depiction of the actual weather in the background raises the interactivity to a whole new level.

The “Long Shadow Love” article is interesting to me... And not all in a good way. I like how it looks, and in the 3-D age of movies and such, it might be the new thing, but I think it adds too much to the interface that it’s just distracting. Some application icons in the article looked good, like the “Photos” and “Camera” apps, but I felt it was just overdone with the Calendar, Notes, and Safari apps, among others which I won’t bother mentioning.

Here are three iPhone application developing tools I found and liked:

http://www.buildanapp.com/home

http://ibuildapp.com

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2013/11/22/four-ways-to-build-a-mobile-app-part1-native-ios/