14 DAY TRIAL // iOS 7 is not even in beta, but that’s not stopping us from speculating on its potential new offerings, especially with Jonathan Ive (Apple SVP of Industrial Design) at the UI helm.
iOS concept whiz Sentry writing for The Verge thinks the same. After designing an application switcher concept that’s currently being baked into a jailbreak tweak, he decided to work up a new one, envisioning what Jony Ive could do to facelift iOS 7 a bit.
He looked at the ancient pop-up alerts that continue to exist more than five years into the launch of the first iPhone, despite iOS featuring a much more comprehensive Notification Center.
Why are these pop-ups still used? No one knows for sure, but many believe it might have something to do with a certain Scott Forstall.
“…alerts don’t show an app icon indicator, which banners do despite taking up less space,” he explains, adding that they’re visually outdated and that they “visually segregate the app-based notifications into two unique UI styles (opaque white vs transparent dark blue).”
He proposes to “unify the visual forms, and in the process finally get rid of the circa-’07 alert pop-up.”
For any type of app that deals with messaging (email, iMessage, Facebook etc.), the banners could include a “compose” icon which, once tapped, would further expand the banner to create a compose sheet (envisioned in the first screenshot).
System alerts, such as the camera app asking for your location, could look something like the second image, according to Sentry. Here’s the original .GIF version, so you can see it in action.
Ever since Tim Cook fired his iOS chief – the aforementioned Forstall –, a lot of faith has been put in Jonathan Ive, the company’s design guru and now head of the Human Interface division as well.
iOS 7 and the next Mac OS are expected to bear pleasant aesthetic alterations thanks to Ive’s keen sense.
