Apple’s iOS 7 Release Delayed Due To Completley New User Interface
The idea of an iOS 7 delay might confuse most of you and for good reason. The next version of Apple’s mobile Operating System was not officially announced and there was no news about it. So how can it be delayed, then? Well, first of all, rumors that Apple is working on the next iOS version have surfaced for quite some time. And even though Apple is still fixing bugs for the sixth version of iOS, it is said to be already hard at work on the next version of its mobile Operating System. However, recent rumors suggest that Apple encountered problems in developing iOS 7, problems that might translate in delays and missed deadlines.
It is said that development of the next iOS version is behind schedule and is having so many problems that Apple had to get engineers that were part of the team working on Mac OS X 10.9 and reassign them to the iOS 7 development team. This leads us to believe that Apple might want to unveil and maybe showcase iOS 7 on its own Worldwide Developer Conference. The conference will be held in early June and it is the place where Apple usually unveils and offers developer versions of its programs.
Rumors of this supposed delay are not the only rumors that surfaced about the next version of iOS. There are also rumors about the design of the next version of Apple’s mobile OS. Jon Ive, vice president of industrial design at Apple, is in charge of interface development for the California based company. Apparently he has a few surprises for the user interface of the next iOS version and he does not want them to be accidentally released to the public by Apple staff that already have version 7 of iOS on their iPhones. According to John Gruber (from Daring Fireball), “Word on the street is that iOS engineers with carry privileges all have some sort of polarizing filter on their iPhone displays, such that it greatly decreases viewing angles, thus making it difficult for observers to see the apparently rather significant system-wide UI overhaul”
The same John Gruber mentioned that he received the same information that Rene Ritchie (from iMore) received, confirming that “Ive’s work is apparently making many people really happy, but will also apparently make rich-texture-loving designers sad.”. This apparently has something to do with the fact that (supposedly) Jon Ive does not like skeuomorphism, which is actually the technique of making something that imitates a physical real world object or material – as an example of skeuomorphism, think of an user interface for a calendar app that mimics a paper desk calendar.
As we already mentioned in the first paragraph, rumors of the next version of Apple’s mobile Operating System have appeared for quite some time; as early as January this year actually, when software for version 7 of iOS apparently started to appear in developer logs. Even so, rumors are rumors and they need to be treated as such – for now there is no official statement related to a possible iOS 7 so we do not know for certain when iOS 7 will be announced or released.
