IOS 7 Will Shorten Time-to-Market for Developers
Another Gold (Champagne?) Rush
When iOS 7 was first announced to developers this Summer, I was there, at WWDC. I gave my initial impressions, and they were less than enthusiastic.
I’m still upset about those icons, but a lot of the usability issues were fixed in later releases. I’ve been focused solely on targeting iOS 7 since then, and after a few months of using it, I feel I understand where it’s going and what its benefits are.
I’ve gone all-in for this version as well, as I quickly came to realize that trying to support backwards-compatibility in design wasn’t worth the effort. Besides, there’s just too many benefits in targeting iOS 7, which I’ll discuss here.
When iOS 2 came out, and the App Store was announced, I was ecstatic. I knew touch-friendly mobile was the future, and I couldn’t wait to get my first app on the store. That turned out to be a bigger challenge that I’d expected, but I stayed the course, and have been creating apps ever since.
Back then, all you had to do was think of a simple idea, and build it to the best of your ability, and you were golden. Big companies hadn’t yet gotten their hands dirty with Objective-C, and there wasn’t a great deal of competition. Once you had the basics of the Cocoa Touch framework down, and knew a bit about concurrency and memory management, you could build the simplest of apps and reach a large new audience.
In the years past, people became overwhelmed with apps, and as a developer, defining a new look for yours was of paramount importance. You could no longer expect to make a splash with off-the-shelf components, no matter how tried-and-true they were. Usability in many ways took a back seat to veneer. As an indie, you might have spent as much time getting your drop shadows pixel-perfect as you did debugging. It was kind of a shame, really.
iOS 7, no matter what your opinion on its design choices, is fresh. And apps that target even the most common components will feel new in the eyes of most consumers. As a developer, it’s a great opportunity to build something light and fast, and not have to waste time on veneer.
I’ve been working a lot faster these past few weeks. I love not having to feel guilty about using the standard Cocoa Touch framework. As fun as it is to build custom components, I know I don’t have the resources that Apple has had to debug and user test interactions. I just want to validate ideas as quickly as possible. If they work, then I can go back and really tweak the design. For now, it really is a joy to develop for iOS 7.
The design is so very different that it will take some time to figure out where to go with it—what its limitations are, what its good for. It will take time for it to settle in and become standard, before the limits need to be pushed again.
Who knows what the future will bring? The App Store, instead of being full of heavy shadows, reflections, and etched text, may soon be full of bright pink and gaudy interfaces. Or perhaps there will be a backlash and skeumorphism will rule, though I doubt it.
It’s only a matter of time before the new facade is old again, and the sweet spot as a developer is over. That’s a good thing for users. Hopefully, apps continue to defer to their content and don’t become too weighed down with UI any time soon. I hope to see things continue to be light and fast, and new breeds of applications come out to take advantage of reduced development times.
If you have an idea, now’s the time to build it.
And if you’re on Twitter, you should follow me.
