Earlier this year, I spent some time in Italy. Despite a lack of any familiarity with Italian, by the end of the week I'd managed to become more or less proficient at navigating public transportation, figuring out street signs, and even ordering a meal. Because, different though the language might be, all of those were tasks I could map onto familiar experiences.
The experience of switching to iOS 7 is kind of like that: Some things might look wildly different, but underneath them are the same old familiar experiences we've become accustomed to over the last six years. It'll take some time to get used to the changes—just as many of us struggled to adapt to Apple's "natural" scrolling back in OS X Lion—but after about a week, you'll be back to tapping and swiping like an expert.
That's not to suggest that iOS 7 is just a face-lift of Apple's mobile operating system. As busy as Apple design chief Jonathan Ive and his team of designers have been creating a new visual language for iOS, the company's software guru, Craig Federighi, and his group have been equally hard at work crafting new features and ways for users to get more done with less effort.
Design may be the watchword of iOS 7, but as Steve Jobs once noted in a sound bite destined to be repeated as long as history remembers him: "Design isn't just how it looks. Design is how it works." iOS had in some ways reached a plateau over the last six years, with successive updates reduced to picking off the increasingly sparse low-hanging fruit. So Apple has done more than just change the way iOS looks and feels. It has also reimagined the way iOS works.
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