Jony Ive, Craig Federighi chat with USA Today
In anticipation of Apple's worldwide iPhone launch this Friday, Apple executives have been hitting the interview circuit. Earlier today, we pointed to a Businessweek interview with Tim Cook, Craig Federighi and Jony Ive; and now comes yet another chat with Apple's higher-ups courtesy of USA Today.
In detailing why iOS 7 does away with the skeuomorphism so favored by Steve Jobs and Scott Forstall, Jony Ive explains:
When we sat down last November (to work on iOS 7), we understood that people had already become comfortable with touching glass, they didn't need physical buttons, they understood the benefits," says Ive. "So there was an incredible liberty in not having to reference the physical world so literally. We were trying to create an environment that was less specific. It got design out of the way."
On the same note, Craig Federighi explains that graphical improvements in mobile devices have somewhat negated the need for previous iOS mainstays like drop shadows.
"This is the first post-Retina (display) UI (user interface), with amazing graphics processing thanks to tremendous GPU (graphics processing unit) power growth, so we had a different set of tools to bring to bear on the problem as compared to seven years ago (when the iPhone first launched)," he says. "Before, the shadowing effect we used was a great way to distract from the limitations of the display. But with a display that's this precise, there's nowhere to hide. So we wanted a clear typography."
Ive jumps in. "Yes, we wanted to defer to the content, and just get out of the way."
There's a whole lot of interesting information in the interview, and seeing as how interviews with Apple executives are rather hard to come by given the secretive nature of the company, the USA Today piece is certainly worth reading in its entirety.
