iOS7 has been the greatest change to Apple’s iOS almost since its introduction. And iOS 7 differs quite a lot from its previous version. It’s easier, brighter, bolder and flows better than its predecessors. It has not only the updated user interface but also it’s packed with a great deal of new features.Let’s take a look at iOS7 and compare its major changes to iOS6.
Lock screen: One of the nicest features of iOS 7 is parallax effect: when you move the phone, wallpaper appears to move as well. iOS 7 gets rid of the black bars and becomes lighter. At first this may seem unusual but you get used to it quickly and won`t move back to the old look and feel. Also iOS 7 has four swipeable bits: unlocking, Camera, swiping down from the top of the screen to see notifications, and swiping up from the bottom to bring up Control Center.
Control Center: iOS users have been waiting for it for agesJ now there is no need to jump through endless Settings screen. Control Center is the answer: it provides quick access to the most important key features: Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Airplane Mode, Rotation Lock and Do Not Disturb. It also provides media playback controls, Airdrop file sharing, and quick access to the phone’s LED light and the Clock, Calculator and Camera apps.
Notification Center: Last year iOS 6 introduced the Notification Centre – offering little gobbets of information from your email, or stocks, or Twitter, or games. It was pretty basic. Now it’s split into three elements – Today (a calendar and weather update), All (the things you used to find in the old Notifications) and Missed (appointments, calls). The calendar element is like Windows Phone, though more useful (you get a day view). You can decide what is visible in the lock screen – it won’t show all your notifications if you don’t want.
AirDrop: Thanks to AirDrop it became easier to share files from iOS devices. Now a “sharing” icon in an app lets you send your data to those willing to receive it. You choose AirDrop and you get a list of people in the vicinity. Press their icon, and it’s done. Nice, isn`t it?
If you don’t plan to use this feature in iOS 7 then turn it off to safe battery life.
Camera and Photos : Have also experienced great changes. Camera app now four kinds of shooting: video, photo, square (for Instagram-style shots) and Pano (for panoramas) and a number of pleasant new features.. As for Photos app, it`s became easier to search for photos as they are organized into collections. Your photos can be sorted by date or by location (when using GPS)
Safari/Search: It has also been updated: interface became simpler : it disappears completely when scrolling through pages, and the interface for switching tabs became more visual.
Mail: Mail application got some great new features: mail management became easier. There appeared gesture control for messages and smart mailboxes
Multitasking: Now you can double-click the home button in iOS to get you to a number of recently used apps. What is more iOS 7 learns when you like to use your apps and can update your content before you launch them. So if you tend to check your favorite social app at 9:00 every morning, your feed will be ready and waiting for you.
That was an overview of the main updates that experienced iOS7. Many things have changed and many users that updated to iOS 7 say that they will never return to iOS 6 🙂
And what about you: have you already updated to iOS 7 and can share your experience?
Interesting to know your thoughts.
Anna Kozik
Business Development Manager
I’ve read that support for Kerberos user authentication has been introduced to the mobile platform, with iOS 7[1]. Though I understand that Kerberos might not be a widely popular user auth framework, and there was some grievance with regards to Microsoft’s adoption of Kerberos[2] within its vendor-branded Active Directory framework (which, I’ve heard, uses LDAP, DNS, and so on, existing specifications namely) but certainly. Keeberos is still as technically viable for user auth as it was the day when MIT first released it. They even publish a nice, comprehensive tutorial about the Kerberos user auth protocol[3], in all its symmetric key enabled, message-oriented architecture. Kerberos can be integrated with web-based applications, in regard to SPNEGO [4] and is supported in enterprise frameworks such as SAP NetWeaver[5]
Personally, after having read of what sounded like it may have been a “Glitchy start” for iOS 7, bugs wise, in its eeriest revisions – cf. the Sophos blog – then after seeing the new “Line art” style in some individual app upgrades, my rather preferring the previous, I think less visually ambitious UI style, I’ve been reluctant to upgrade my phone or tablet. The Kerberos support, however, I think could be “Big”.
In this epoch when so much online traffic, so to speak, has served to indicate perhaps that security models are of some non-trivial significance with regards to protecting user data – though perhaps that has been misunderstood, in some quarters of the industry – then considering Kerberos’ scalable user auth model, such that may not lock the organizational user into developing a full X.509 PKI framework, though supporting secure communication across org-network “realm” zones, I think it’s a win.
Frankly, though, I’m not sure if I’ll adjust we’ll to the new UX in iOS7 – the “line art” style, I don’t understand why they’ve taken HCI design along such an ambiguous arc, as it seems to me, presently.
[1] http://loumiranda.com/2013/06/13/ios-7-and-kerberos-single-sign-on-sso/
[2] http://m.slashdot.org/story/11482
[3] http://www.kerberos.org/software/tutorial.html
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPNEGO
[5] http://help.sap.com/saphelp_nw70ehp1/helpdata/en/43/4bd58c6c5e5f34e10000000a1553f6/content.htm