iOS7 Features Breakdown

By Matt Powers

Design

This is a long due overhaul for iOS – which presents and promotes a flat UI design paradigm.  With iOS7, there is more depth to the user experience and an emphasis on simplicity and a new take on the common UI elements, most are accustomed to.  Because of this, any application with custom elements specific to iOS6 will need to be updated. Targeting your application for iOS7 will take care of the native UI elements, but any apps which promote custom UI elements will want to do total UI refreshes.  Our recommendation is to support iOS7 and leave iOS6 by the wayside (due to high adoption rates), but if you must support iOS6 there are asset management tools which will allow developers/designers to seamlessly support both.

Engineering/QA

There are many new features in the development environment (Xcode) developers will need to familiarize themselves with:

• An autoconfiguration manager that will scaffold integration with GameCenter, iCloud, Passbook, which in turn saves developers time.
• For test driven development there are new features to facilitate test coverage (extremely important for the long-term maintenance of products.)
• If you don’t do continuous integration and are focused on development just for iOS, there is a continuous integration component and workflow on the OSX server. For companies that support multiple platforms, they need to weigh the pros and cons between this solution and sticking with a pre-existing system like Jenkins that serves multiple platforms.
• There are new debug and profiling tools that make Xcode comparable with some of the Android tools out on the market. For example, the developer now receives visibility into memory consumption and CPU spikes

There are 1500+ new APIs in iOS7 with 6 brand new frameworks and a number of deprecated APIs. While the deprecated APIs do not need to be addressed right away, they may be removed entirely moving forward.  Major deprecations include changes to the MKOverlayView, the entire AudioSession API and the ability to identify your devices via a MAC Address. Two of the more interesting frameworks include: o   MultipeerConnectivity –facilitates the discovery of services and encourages the distribution of information between iOS7 users who are nearby one another.  This should breed a new type of social networking app, and its also based on Bonjour. o   JavaScriptCore – according to the limited documentation this is a framework, which among other things should used for parsing JSON data. There are new animation libraries surrounding the UIDynamicIItem protocol where development time can be drastically reduced to address things like collision behavior, gravity models and object-to-object animation relationships Additionally there are new multitasking capabilities on iOS7.  Apps can now register to have the ability to update content periodically in the background.  For example, in fetch background mode the system will determine when the best time is to wake up.

Product Teams

There are a multitude of new features within the following:

• Game Center
• Maps, there is now support for rich 3D maps in the SDK, as well as directions and routing
• Inter app audio features allow the user to send audio between two apps, which should foster a suite of applications like GarageBand coming soon.

 

Conclusion

Per usual apple is being secretive as to when the final release will hit, but expect it coming sometime this fall, in the meantime 2 beta versions have been released in less than a month, I highly suggest you get a beta version installed on your phone and check out what’s new for yourself!

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Filed under: Product Engineering | Topics: apple, iOS, mobile, platforms