Jacob Baytelman - Web and mobile development

iOS7 released... my feelings


I loved Mac. Since our first very meeting more than 20 years ago. I was a student and owned my first 486 with DOS and Windows 3.1 so the university's Macs impressed me with their perfect GUI design. I regret I moved to Macs only a couple of years ago. Being a developer I spend half of my life in front of the screen and Mac's environment differs from all others in the same manner as a plasma HD TV differs from black-and-white sets of the middle of the past century. This gap seems to grow each year.

I loved iOS. Its GUI was “deep”, both in optical perspective and in understanding of how objects have to interact with human fingers. I loved the look and touch, but suffered the feel. I felt almost physical pain each time I had to copy pictures or music to and from my iPod touch. I completely gave up the idea to use it as an external flash storage, though with their lots of memory and USB connectors iDevices have no excuses to behave in such an unfriendly manner. If I can move files to and from my Android device in the most straightforward way, why not to have this functionality in iOS? I forgive Apple for this pain, love infers forgiveness. For all these years iOS has been sparkling with its beautiful GUI, I couldn't help admiring it. It has also been complimentary convenient and intuitive. My two-year-old daughter got “slide to unlock” concept from the first attempt.


Humans can handle any interfaces, from spades and spears to unbelievably crazy amounts of switches in a space ship cockpit. Yes, we can. But there's a difference between can and love. This difference has been measuring the gap between Apple products and the rest.

I have been dreaming about the new iPhone. The plastic cover is naughty but nice, the golden metal one is respectable, choose whatever you wish. The hardware is fantastic. The price is quite usual for Apple's stuff, they successfully educated us to pay more for style and beauty. Don't get me wrong, I am not happy about their prices at all, I merely take it as a fact and to be true, the luckiest of us benefit from getting free (or almost free) devices from carriers or employers.


Today I upgraded to iOS 7. No, it's not awful. It's just as flat as Windows 3.1, but with a better resolution. It does what it is expected to do the way Apple understands it, which is OK. It's as normal as a seat in a bus, you can and will use it but you shall not love it, which is probably OK too. As far as I understood Apple's approach, being OK never satisfied them. Probably now it does. Or it is a part of a plan. Or there's nobody around there who really cares.

I am not dreaming about the new iPhone any more. I am dreaming about a downgrade to the previous version. I realize all the misery of this thought. Of course, I will keep calm and get the new iPhone because I need to develop new mobile apps. But I will always remember how special previous iOS were for me. Unfortunately now it's over.

PS: It reminded me as we children placed coins on the tram rails and waited for a tram to pass and flatten them so the images could be hardly recognized. We risked to be punished by our parents, but who cared. Apple does not seem to care either.

J.Baytelman

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