iOS 7 Concepts – iPhone Lock Screen Drawer

It is at this stage not so long until the 2013 WWDC shall take place and things are all the more hectic now with this big event soon coming up. It is actually also expected that something big shall there happen – and everybody is very much excited about a potential preview that Apple is expected to provide there. To cut to the chase – this big preview in question is of the iOS 7, and we are really looking forward to it. But while there is no certainty on this right now, we have already started to witness a few concepts of the UI designers, so let’s look a little bit more into this and see what is new.

We will mostly refer to the Lock Screen Drawer in this article. If you have not yet heard of it, then just stay with us through the article and you shall be a little bit more enlightened and really enjoy it, we hope. Well, what the Lock Screen Drawer is – is a newly created concept and the responsible person for its creation is Jean-Marc Denis. What the Lock Screen Drawer basically does is to allow you to quickly access the Settings toggles on the Lock Screen, and this is very cool I think.

Now that we got the main idea out of the way, let’s get even more into detail, it is really worth it, I promise.

iOS 7 iPhone Lock Screen Drawer concept

The Lock Screen Drawer is a very innovative concept that gives you easy access to the  Settings toggles on the Lock Screen, as mentioned above. And let’s see how it came to life. It basically started out from one of the inconveniences that the iOS has, and that is no available way to easily access the Settings toggles from the Lock screen or from any app as a matter of fact. No way can you do this either easy, or in a fast manner. So there’s a lot involved behind your actually succeeding to achieve your purpose. Firstly, in order to change the settings from the Lock screen, there are a few steps to be performed which makes it so inconvenient! You will have to first unlock your iPhone, then also launch the Settings app and only after you have done all these actions can you navigate to the toggle to enable or disable it. Moreover, let’s say that you are using an app. Well if this is the case then you definitely also need to exit the app.

So as you can see and most likely also experienced, it is lacking in efficiency and is not an easy way for something that can be enabled or disabled with a single tap (or even swipe).  Hence it needs improvement! Big time. Also, it can be even more nerve- breaking if you have performed a jailbreak on your iPhone and therefore used tweaks on it (like SBSettings for instance) that gave you the chance to access this utility starting with the early months of 2009.

So this is what UI designer Jean-Marc Denis has noticed and tried to improve. He took the matter into his own hands in order to find a solution and came up with a way to address the issues – the concept of the Lock Screen Drawer. What the concept allows at a larger scale is immediate access for users to  toggles by simply swiping down on the clock in the Lock screen just to reveal a drawer of toggles. The toggles are available for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, AirPlane and Hotspot. The concept is very straightforward and simple and perhaps this is what makes it so cool. It has that Apple flair as well and its simpleness reveals great functionality. If we think of something else we would like to add to the concept, then we can enumerate the capacity to configure your preferred toggles and also to be able to scroll through them on the lock screen. I am sure these could become real advantages to the concept and provide an overall improvement to its spectrum of utilities.

But Jean-Marc Denis is not necessarily the only one who has taken it upon himself to address this lacking, and we have a similar concept created by the YouTube user BlogB13 who presents us with another (similar, as I mentioned) concept that allows users to access toggles via the Notification Center, and it can thus be reached either from the Home Screen, or from withing any app, which makes it cool. There are a series of similarities to other concepts however, and we can mention for instance that it resembles IntelliScreenX’s quick Settings toggles feature, while on the other hand makes us thinking about the NCSettings tweak as well in terms of design and feel. But they are mostly used in the cases when a setting needs to be enabled or disabled, so they are not that similar in function. It is pretty much the Notifications that should be the ones in the Notification Center, and toggles shouldn’t really take up this space basically.

So now that we have brought to your attention once more one of the most important and also common problems that almost all iOS concepts encounter, we are really happy that things are being more and more looked into and clear attempts geared to their improvements are made. Why shouldn’t there be a quick and fast way to access the Settings app. Through his Lock Screen Drawer, Jean-Marc Denis has really come up with something genius (if we feel like giving it a dramatic touch) to fix or at least improve this issue. We are really happy that more and more UI designers strive to bring innovation and solutions to the problems, and it would be great if the upcoming rumored iOS 7 would also address this particular problem and make it so much easier for all of us users around the world to have a better experience! We salute the Lock Screen Drawer solution in the meanwhile and can’t wait to see what he has in store for us next. Though we hope that Apple can meet our needs from the beginning when it comes to this type of detail.