Notes on iOS 7

I’ve been using iOS 7 for a while now — for a couple of months on my iPad and about half that on my iPhone — so thought it was worth a quick summary of my experience. I’m certainly not going into the depth that Arstechnica have; I’ll do it all in a few bullet points.

The good

  • Control Center. Switch on and off BlueTooth and WiFi without having to go into Settings. I’ve been wanting this since iPhone OS 1 so this is more than welcome!
  • The look. It is controversial and it does take a bit of getting used to but overall I like it and it works well
  • I didn’t find the new look to be as jarring as I thought it would be based on what I saw in the screenshots
  • The “Today” view in Notification Center. All your notifications and stuff that’s happening shortly in one place. Felt like nice PowerPoint (Keynote, I suppose) material when I first saw it but I actually find it quite useful
  • The “back swipe” gesture in navigation views that goes back to the previous screen. I noticed how useful it was when I started trying it in apps that don’t support it. Tweetbot I’m looking at you!

The bad

  • Some of the animations look cool the first two times you see them, then they get really annoying as they take too long. Let me tap the frickin’ icons already!
  • Some “old” apps do look pretty bad. Hopefully they’ll get updated soon

The ugly

  • Glitchy, especially the iPad version. Nothing that makes it unusable but lots of little details — such as the keyboard not working on the iPad lock screen sometimes — that makes me a little surprised that they released it when they did
  • As a developer I’m not sure what I think about the auto-update feature for apps. I think I already get pretty high adoption when a new release comes out. However I’ve also had some rough x.0 releases that I’ve been happy have not been adopted super-quickly

Yes, there’s a lot of other stuff but these are the things that I can remember! However, as I said last year, some of the best features are those that blend into the background so much that you forget about them…