Apple recently announced iOS 7 and with it a completely redesigned stunning new user interface for iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch users.  iOS 7 has hundreds of great new features, including Control Center, Notification Center, improved Multitasking, AirDrop, enhanced Photos, Safari, Siri, and iTune Radio.  In addition, iOS 7 has been engineered with deep technical and design integration with both iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c.

iOS 7 is completely redesigned with an entirely new user interface and over 200 new features, so it’s like getting a brand new device.

Building it faster

Aside from massive changes, enhancing almost everything about user experience and iOS, Apple has claimed that iOS sales were approaching the 700 million mark for this month. This has created the perfect storm of opportunity for developers making apps for Apple’s platform.

Apple engineered iOS 7 to take full advantage of the advanced 64-bit processor, including the native 64-bit kernel, libraries, and drivers. In-built apps have also been re-engineered for 64-bit. The Apple team has provided a seamless developer transition with Xcode support and the ability to run both 32-bit and 64-bit apps. When compiled for the 64-bit runtime, apps may run faster because of the availability of extra processor resources and it uses the same LP64 model that is used by OS X and other 64-bit UNIX systems, which means fewer problems when porting code.

According to Springpad, iOS7 has given them an interface more nimble than its predecessors as it includes many small but beneficial improvements to enhance the development process.

Apple also introduced a major upgrade to its Xcode suite of development tools. Xcode version 5.0 features a new compiler, source-code-level debugger, performance measurement instruments, linker, simulator, and other utilities. The IDE interface allows developers to write better, faster, and less bug free applications. Xcode 5 also provides better support for source code control that make life easier for developers to improve better source control, faster codes and builds and improved automated testing to keep the bugs away.

Prettier to use

Springpad shared that many user interface widgets in iOS 7 have been polished and modernized with a great look and feel. Most widgets include many new options for customization in terms of colors, patterns and sizing.

Gentry Underwood, the co-founder of Mailbox and a former IDEO designer, said developers used to spend a lot of time in designing and giving polishing touch to apps.

“In previous versions of iOS, the idea was just the start. Then you had to spend a lot of time creating a visual polish on top of that function that was very specific to the medium,” Underwood explains. “It required a lot of trickery. You had to know how to use all sorts of esoteric features of Photoshop.”

The visual style of iOS 7 is likely to change that. The new design makes it simpler to build a great app than ever before. The new simplified visual language puts a premium on genuinely thoughtful design where content and interactions are pushed to the forefront.

“In the early days, you’ll see a lot more unification, where devs are taking what they’ve seen Apple do and using that very literally,” says Jamie Hull, Product Manager for the new iOS 7 version of Evernote. “But I do believe that will be temporary. You used to see that a few years ago, back in iOS 4. The apps that were up to date felt very much like they sat on the same platform. Everybody started picking up those same tap bars and tables, and they looked fairly similar. Then there became a lot more freedom for figuring out what that meant for you.”

In addition to the visual style, iOS 7’s new emphasis on animations will offer a new axis of user experience for developers and designers to explore. Translucency, refined visual touches, and fluid, realistic motion would provide new dimension to clarity, depth, and vitality to the user experience.

Content is king

Prior to iOS 7, Springpad like most other apps with intricate UIs had to custom-build widgets to achieve special effects on the Apple mobile OS. In iOS 7, Apple made less chrome for toolbars and buttons with most UI controls lack borders and are translucent.

The new interface seems struck a delicate balance for developers. Buttons, tabs, navigation bars, and other controls are translucent, which allows the screen to display more content.

The Xcode’s automatic layout feature can handle the positioning of the UI elements on the screen by itself. The extra screen pixel can then be used to support better typography. iOS 7 has dynamic type typefaces that can scale to all sorts of sizes and still retain their shape and weight.

“Because you don’t have to worry about building a bunch of extra pseudo-physicality, it creates these opportunities to create these beautiful, simple, truly digital first experiences that are unlike anything in the real world,” Underwood says. “Not only does iOS 7 free designers from focusing on the tiresome details of the old visual language; it liberates them from thinking about real world analogs for their designs entirely.”

Developers can take advantage of the aesthetic break by creating a new palette of color, using translucency and dynamism in the app and taking advantage of the backgrounding APIs to deliver faster apps.

For some developers, this iOS change represents opportunity. Text Kit is another set of features in iOS 7 for managing text and fine typography. Text Kit can lay out styled text into paragraphs, columns, and pages; it easily flows text around arbitrary regions such as graphics; and it manages multiple fonts. Text Kit based controls can enable apps to create, edit, display, and store text more easily—and with less code than was previously possible in iOS.

As Springpad noted, if a developer wants to include a photo, they don’t need to bother about frame or border. The less shadows, gradients, simpler color palettes can let the content speak for itself.