Vesper made its debut the week before Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference. But with Q Branch’s Brent Simmons in San Francisco for Apple’s annual conference, the time seemed right to talk about the new note-taking app for iOS.

In this latest in our series of video chats with developers, we ask Simmons on how Vesper’s flatter interface fits in with what we’ve seen so far from iOS 7. We also talk about the possibility of syncing features finding their way into future versions of the app.

When Apple unveiled the iPad in 2010, I immediately fell in love with its impressive battery life, and couldn’t wait until they day when the same longevity would come to my Mac.

With the upcoming release of OS X Mavericks and the latest round of revisions to the company’s laptop hardware, it looks like I (alongside, I suspect, many other Mac users) could finally get my wish, thanks to a few clever software tricks that have found their way into the latest incarnation of Apple’s desktop operating system.

Hardware and software

The obvious way to improve battery life in a laptop is to increase battery capacity and decrease the electrical consumption of the machine’s hardware components, both goals that Apple has been pursuing zealously for some time by changing the way that its computers are manufactured.

For example, the introduction of the unibody design allowed the company to fit its computers with custom-molded batteries that provide superior capacity in a relatively compact space. The company also continues to adopt the latest technologies, like solid-state drives and Intel’s newest CPUs, to make its hardware less power-hungry.

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Apple and Mavericks have been sitting in a tree since at least 2005; Macs shine in court; and how much flatter could a title be? The remainders for Tuesday, June 18, 2013 go to 11.

Apple’s love of ‘Mavericks’ has been around for a while (TUAW)

If you’d been paying close attention to Apple’s earlier software, you might have noticed a fondness for Mavericks, the surf location that’s become the name of the next version of OS X. It also appeared in 2005 promo materials for Aperture. Quick! Let’s see what else we can find in old marketing materials to clue us in on the next next version of Apple’s desktop OS. Uhhhh, OS X … Cute Kid?

Apple Executive Defends Pricing in Case on ebooks (New York Times)

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As is customary with just about all Macs, Apple offers a small number of standard configuration systems that you can buy off the shelf (these are the systems Macworld uses for review), along with a handful of optional upgrades that—for a price—allow purchasers to customize their new Macs. The 2013 MacBook Air is no exception: Apple offers more RAM, higher capacity flash storage, and faster processors. Macworld Lab put together an “ultimate” configuration of the new MacBook Air, and the performance gains are so significant that our configure-to-order (CTO) MacBook Air competes well against Apple’s current $1699 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro.

The standard configuration 2013 MacBook Air has 4GB of 1600MHz LPDDR3 RAM, a dual-core 1.3GHz Intel Core i5 (Haswell) processor that can reach speeds of 2.6GHz with Turbo Boost, and either 128GB ($999 for 11-inch, $1099 for 13-inch) or 256GB of flash storage ($1199 for 11-inch, $1299 for 13-inch).

Your configuration decisions on the MacBook Air are especially important due to the closed design of the laptop. RAM and CPU are not user upgradable, and it's unclear if third parties will offer internal storage upgrades to the 2013 MacBook Air. (The new MacBook Air has a new implementation of flash storage, so flash storage modules designed for the 2012 MacBook Air will not work.)

Configure to order

Doubling the RAM on the $1299 13-inch MacBook Air from 4GB to 8GB adds $100 to the base price, while increasing the capacity of the flash storage from 256GB to 512GB adds $300. Swapping out the standard 1.3GHz Core i5 processor (with 3MB of L3 cache) for a faster 1.7GHz Core i7 processor capable of reaching 3.3GHz with Turbo Boost (4MB of L3 cache) adds $150. Our ultimate CTO model puts all three options into a new 13-inch MacBook Air for a total of $1849.

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This week's roundup of accessories includes a new, fashionable way to keep your iOS screen clean, as well as ways to listen to (and make!) music and to power up your iPhone or iPad.

It’s no secret that trying to find things in Messages is a mess. It certainly came as no news to Flexibits co-founder Michael Simmons as he was trying to build a follow-up contacts app to the company’s popular Fantastical calendar offering and kept running into hassles when trying to search through old chat sessions.

Fortunately for Simmons, he was in a position to do something about it. Flexibits tabled its Fantastical follow-up to build Chatology, a log viewer and message search that Simmons describes as “kind of a way to filter and drill down into your search and find things within iChat and Messages.” The $20 Chatology arrived Tuesday.

We caught up with Simmons during last week’s Worldwide Developer Conference in San Francisco. In the latest video chat with developers at WWDC, he gives us a quick preview of Chatology, explains why it’s available exclusively through Flexibits and not the Mac App Store, and shares his opinion on some of Apple’s WWDC announcements.

Apple didn’t try to fix or raise the prices of electronic books when it entered into the market in 2010, according to Apple senior vice president Eddy Cue. Rather, he says, the company was only working to ensure a profit for itself.

“We’re not willing to lose money in any business,” Cue told the court, referring to Amazon’s practice of 2009 to sell electronic books for less than what it paid for them.

But in doing so, the U.S. Justice Department contends, Apple violated antitrust laws by colluding with the five largest book publishers—HarperCollins, the Penguin Group, the Hatchett Group, MacMillan, and Simon & Schuster—to fix the prices of electronic books. As a result of their actions, the prices of electronic books rose in 2010, the DOJ contended.

While the five publishers have since settled with the DOJ out of court, Apple is defending its practices in a DOJ antitrust trial now under way at the U.S. District Court for the Southern District Court of New York, with District Judge Denise Cote presiding.

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Adobe has released its long-awaited and highly controversial Creative Cloud suite of applications for both longtime professional devotees and the newcomers it hopes to attract. Having historically operated on an upgrade schedule of every 12 to 16 months, Adobe is now releasing new subscription-only versions of its flagship Photoshop image-editing program—called Photoshop CC (for Creative Cloud)—along with more than a dozen of its other creative apps.

While the merits of Adobe's new subscription model promise to be a continuing topic of debate, the apps themselves are the same creative-suite products that photographers, artists, videographers, graphic designers, animators, and other people in creative fields have become attached to over the past 20 years. Although Adobe has dropped some software packages and consolidated others in the lineup since last year, the basic Creative Cloud suite will look familiar to veteran users.

As always, applications reside on your hard drive—you do not have to be connected to the Internet to use any Creative Cloud application after you’ve downloaded it. The system requires a connection every 180 days to double-check your annual subscription status (every 30 days for month-to-month subscriptions), but that is the extent of cloud involvement with typical app usage.

Old-timers are back

Released alongside Photoshop today are Illustrator, InDesign, Premiere Pro, Flash Professional, Audition, Dreamweaver, InCopy, After Effects, Prelude, and SpeedGrade, in addition to companion and add-on software packages such as Edge Animate, Bridge, and Media Encoder. Muse, the year-old visual Web-design program, has entered the mix. Edge Tools & Services, also part of Creative Cloud, includes Edge Animate, Edge Inspect, Edge Web Fonts, Edge Code (Preview), Edge Reflow (Preview), and PhoneGap Build. All are available with the basic $50 subscription. Fireworks is still around, but with minimal updates. Photoshop Extended is gone, folded into the main Photoshop program. Flash Builder Premium, Acrobat XI Pro, and now Lightroom are also part of the suite. Lightroom and Acrobat XI are available both in subscription format within Creative Cloud and boxed on their own the traditional way.

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One reporter tracks down her stolen phone, an influential judge passes on, and what Steve Jobs and Winnie the Pooh have in common. The remainders for Monday, June 17, 2013 are just the bear necessities.

Hot on the trail of a kidnapped iPhone (Los Angeles Times)

An L.A. Times reporter recounts the story of her iPhone being stolen, and how she finally tracked it down. Maybe there should be a CSI spinoff just about finding iPhones.

Thomas Penfield Jackson, Outspoken Judge, Dies at 76 (New York Times)

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In an open letter published to Apple’s website Sunday, the company outlined its policies for responding to government requests for information and promised to work to safeguard user privacy.

Early this month, The Guardian broke the story about a U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) program—code-named Prism—under which the NSA has reportedly been monitoring the Internet activities of Americans. The report claimed that the NSA has been directly monitoring the servers of major computing and technology companies such as Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft.

Since that tech-world bombshell, many of these companies, including Apple, have denied working with the NSA in any capacity other than that required by court order. Specifically, an Apple representative told the Washington Post that the company does “not provide any government agency with direct access to our servers, and any government agency requesting customer data must get a court order.” Other companies have issued similar statements.

These same companies have attempted to further assuage user fears by revealing exactly what cooperation has occurred, but they’ve reportedly been hamstrung by “gag orders” preventing them from revealing such details due to national-security concerns.

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A week that began with a flurry of Worldwide Developers Conference announcements from Apple is ending with its once-fiercest rival making a little news of its own. Microsoft on Friday announced a mobile version of its Office productivity suite for the iPhone. The software giant’s move answers a longstanding demand for a version of the world’s most widely used office software for one of the world’s most popular mobile platforms—though there are a couple of big caveats that could limit just how widely this iOS-friendly version of Office gets adopted.

Microsoft’s Office-for-iPhone announcement couldn’t have been more low-key than if it had sent company representatives door to door to quietly spread the news. Microsoft broke the news on a Friday—that’s the day in the news business when you typically let people know that you’ve been indicted, or that those rumors about you are true and that you and the intern hope everyone respects your privacy—posting the announcement in its Office 365 blog and not, say, at a high-profile press event. That’s a significant choice by Microsoft.

It’s also a lot to digest for iOS users, especially with our heads still swimming from iOS 7 previews and promised Siri announcements. Still, here’s a quick breakdown of everything we know about Microsoft’s new iOS offering so far.

Microsoft

What’s the app called?

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By now, you’ve no doubt heard that Microsoft Office Mobile for iPhone is now available for iPhone. (Yup, you read that right: It’s iPhone-only.) The question is: Should you care?

That depends largely on whether you’re already a subscriber to Microsoft’s Office 365 and Skydrive services, which (for personal use) cost from $100 to $120 annually. (If you want to give the app a test run, Microsoft offers a 30 day free trial of Office 365, which you can set up at the Office 365 website.) Because, really, Microsoft Office Mobile is a front-end to that service, not a standalone productivity suite.

Getting connected

Office Mobile does give you access to the three legs of the Microsoft Office suite: Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Each of the three iOS apps is able to read and edit documents created using their related PC, Mac, or Web applications; if you want to create new documents on the iPhone, Office Mobile lets you do so with Word and Excel, but not PowerPoint.

When you sign in with your Office 365 account from the mobile app, you should also have access to your SkyDrive folder and be able to see any of the files you have stored there. But, after installing the app on two different devices, I found that only one automatically connected to my SkyDrive. For the second install, I needed to use the app’s Add a Place tool and choose SkyDrive. Add a Place is also the way you connect to your business’ or school’s Office 365 SharePoint.

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As someone who makes a Mac app for tracking the differences between files, you’d expect developer Patrick Burleson to have some thoughts on the changes Apple has announced for its operating systems during this week’s Worldwide Developers Conference. So that’s what we talk to him about in our latest video chat with developers attending WWDC.

Burleson runs BitBQ, and he also works on Briefs, a Mac app for iOS prototyping. His Mac app for tracking differences between files, Changes, may well benefit from the changes coming in OS X Mavericks, the update to the Mac OS announced by Apple this week. And his iOS app Fitness Tracker will need some updating to look at home on the forthcoming iOS 7.

In this video, we talk to Burleson about his work on Briefs, his plans for his own apps, and his reactions to Apple’s recent announcements.

The free Bonnarooo brings you every part of this famous music festival, except perhaps for a very particular kind of secondhand smoke. If you’re at Bonnaroo, you can use the app to see which stages your favorite artists are playing on, views schedules for other acts, and share info through Facebook. If you’re not there, the updated stream of news stories and videos will make you feel like you are.

Bluetooth enhancements are among the big changes to be found in the next versions of iOS and OS X, according to a Bluetooth trade group. Unveiled at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference, iOS 7 andOS X 10.9 Mavericks will, among other things, allow Bluetooth-connected devices to use Notification Center. The changes are part of an “unprecedented” effort to more fully integrate the wireless technology into the Apple ecosystem and accessories such as game controllers, keyboards, and wearable health monitors.

Bluetooth SIG, a trade group of more than 18,000 companies that work with the short-range wireless technology, pointed out the development in a blog post and press release.

“This sets the table for some incredible innovation developers can bring to market,” Bluetooth SIG’s Suke Jawanda wrote in the blog post. “For example, my favorite sports app will seamlessly push an alert to my Bluetooth Smart watch every time my beloved Seattle Seahawks score a touchdown.” That means less time spent checking one’s phone for updates, Jawanda said.

OS X Mavericks and iOS 7 will include other Bluetooth-related enhancements, as well:

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If you enjoyed this week's roundup of iPhone cases, check out the previous edition, Dalek Dreams.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark office has confirmed four claims of Apple’s overscroll bounce patent, including a claim that played a crucial part in Apple’s $1.05 billion dollar lawsuit against Samsung, according to a document filed with a Californian court on Thursday.

Apple’s “list scrolling and document translation, scaling, and rotation on a touchscreen display” patent describes a way to scroll past a document’s border. When a user reaches the edge and stops scrolling, the screen bounces back to the nearest display area.

The most important claim in the patent is claim 19. During the Apple/Samsung billion dollar patent trial, the jury found that 21 accused products infringed claim 19, and the jury awarded damages regarding 18 of these products. Samsung's Galaxy S II, Galaxy Tab, Galaxy Tab 10.1 (WiFi), as well as the Droid Charge and the Nexus S 4G were among the infringing devices.

While the USPTO rejectedclaim 19 of the patent in a decision called a “Final Office Action” in April, the USPTO now has informed Apple that it intends to reverse that decision in a notice of intent to issue an ex parte reexamination certificate of the claims, according to a document filed by Apple with the U.S. District Court, Northern District of California, San Jose Division.

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One exciting aspect of the new MacBook Air release is the prospect of greater Wi-Fi speed and performance. That’s because Apple’s updated laptop sports built-in compatibility with the newest draft networking standard, 802.11ac, an upgrade of the current 802.11n. That draft standard (established by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) is also built into Apple’s newly released AirPort Extreme Base Station and AirPort Time Capsule hard drive. The new MacBook Airs are among a handful of laptops with internal 802.11ac Wi-Fi adapters shipping to date.

New radio spectrum

Here’s what makes this new technology so fast: The 802.11ac standard uses the unlicensed 5GHz radio spectrum, which is considerably less crowded than the 2.4GHz spectrum, where devices ranging from cordless phones and baby monitors to microwave ovens can stomp all over your network. What’s more, the 5GHz spectrum provides many more available channels: 21 nonoverlapping channels in the United States versus only 11 in the 2.4GHz spectrum (and only 3 of those 11 channels don’t overlap).

The 802.11n standard uses channels with 20MHz of bandwidth on the 2.4GHz frequency band and channels with 40MHz of bandwidth on the 5GHz band. In contrast, the 802.11ac standard uses a channel with 80MHz of bandwidth.

Operating in the 5GHz spectrum isn’t the only factor that makes the new 802.11ac standard so attractive. Networks based on this standard also carry more data, thanks to its more robust encoding scheme. An 802.11n network using a 20MHz-wide channel can transmit data at 75 mbps over a single spatial stream, 150 mbps over two spatial streams, or 225 mbps using three spatial streams. An 802.11n network using a 40MHz-wide channel can double those numbers. But an 802.11ac network using an 80MHz-wide channel can deliver even higher throughput: 433 mbps over a single spatial stream, 867 mbps over two, and a staggering 1.3 gbps over three spatial streams.

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Apple senior vice president Eddy Cue offered only short answers in testimony Thursday in federal court when questioned by U.S. Justice Department prosecutors trying to solidify their case that Apple, along with five of the largest book publishers, worked together to illegally set the prices of electronic books for the market.

Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, who was instrumental in the negotiations, cast an even larger shadow across the proceedings. Cue, who is senior vice president of Internet software and services, led the effort in late 2009 through 2010 to get publishers to release their titles on Apple’s iBookstore reader for the soon-to-be-launched iPad, and consulted frequently with Jobs.

“Steve and I worked very closely on this,” Cue said.

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iOS 7's more than just a pretty face. Though the mobile operating system’s look and feel has gotten a significant overhaul in the newest version, that doesn’t mean Apple skimped on the features.

There are plenty of new enhancements and capabilities in iOS 7, and I run down just three of them in this video. For more, check out our FAQ on everything you need to know about Apple’s latest iOS update and our hands on impressions of iOS 7.

The keynote event that kicked off Apple’s 2013 Worldwide Developer’s Conference was jam-packed with announcements: iOS 7, OS X Mavericks, a new Mac Pro, new MacBook Airs, new apps like iBooks and Maps for Mac, and more.

But with great announcements come great opportunities for disappointment about the things that Apple didn’t announce this time around. Whether they were simply features we’d been hoping for or whispers that dominated the rumor mill, here are some announcements we wished we’d heard about, but didn’t.

Apple TV and other rumors

Whither the Apple TV SDK? Developers are antsy for an official way to get their programs onto the Apple TV alongside Apple-approved apps like Hulu. Unfortunately, right now the only way they can do so is via AirPlay. A true Apple TV SDK—accompanied, of course, by an Apple TV App Store—seems in some ways inevitable, but Apple apparently isn’t in any rush to make it happen.

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The new look in iOS 7 means some of your favorite iOS apps could be in line for a makeover. In our ongoing video chats with developers, we catch up with Paul Haddad, lead developer of Tapbots, to find out how his company’s apps—the popular Tweetbot client for Twitter, in particular—might be affected by iOS 7.

“Some things will take on an iOS 7 look, some things will have our custom look,” Haddad tells us, noting that much of Tweetbots is based on customized code.

In this video, Haddad also talks about future updates to Tweetbot and Calcbot.

iOS 7 won’t come out until the fall, but since its unveiling at Monday’s WWDC keynote it's been the talk of the Apple world.

Right now, we have four sources of information about iOS 7: What Apple said about it at that keynote; Apple’s own iOS 7 website; what we gleaned from our conversations with Apple executives on Monday; and the preview version of the operating system itself that was delivered to iOS developers on Monday.

That preview version was released under Apple’s confidentiality agreement with developers, which means that they’re not supposed to talk about the beta or show the beta to anyone. But developers are people too, and the changes to iOS 7 are so dramatic that everyone’s been passing around phones running iOS 7 this week, to see where the mobile OS is headed.

At this point, we don’t think anyone’s really served by detailed, page-by-page screen shots of iOS 7 right now: It’s just a first beta and (if you ask us) the OS is going to change a whole bunch before it sees the light of day.

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Apple on Monday updated the MacBook Air with Intel’s fouth generation Core processors, code named Haswell. Macworld Lab has the new MacBook Air and the results are interesting, to say the least—the 2012 and 2013 13-inch models received the same overall system performance score in Speedmark 8, but individual tests tell a different story.

There are four standard models of the MacBook Air, but all four share many of the same internal parts. Each MacBook Air comes with a 1.3GHz dual-core fourth generation Core i5 processor, capable of reaching speeds of 2.6GHz using Turbo Boost. Not mentioned in the marketing materials is that Hyper-Threading is supported on these i5 processors, allowing multi-threaded applications to address four virtual processing cores on these dual core systems. All of the standard MacBook Airs ship with 4GB of 1600MHz LPDDR memory and use Intel’s new HD Graphics 5000 integrated graphics.

As you’d expect, the new 11-inch and 13-inch MacBook Airs’ performance was practically identical. Just one Speedmark point separated the 13-inch and 11-inch models and the individual test results between them were similarly similar.

The new 11-inch MacBook Air was 9 percent faster overall than last year’s 11-inch 1.7GHz Core i5 Ivy Bridge model. The individual application tests (listed at the end of this story) show that many results were very close, with seven tests (including Photoshop and Aperture) within 3 percent of each other. The biggest differences were in graphics and storage tests. The Intel HD Graphics 5000 in the new system pushed 24 percent more frames per second in Cinebench’s Open GL test and produced an 8 percent higher frame rate in Portal 2. The faster flash storage in the new MacBook Air lived up to the hype, transferring 6GB of files and folders 51 percent faster than last year’s Air. We ran Black Magic’s Disk Speed Test on the two systems and found the read speeds for the new 11-inch model were 667.7 MBps, versus 141.1 MBps on the 2012 11-inch Air’s 64GB of flash storage. Write speeds on the new 11-inch model hit 726.8 MBps, compared to 393.7 MBps on the 2012 Air.

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If you work with audio, you’re probably familiar with Rogue Amoeba and Audio Hijack Pro, the Mac software maker’s flagship product. Get ready for a new Audio Hijack Pro, though: Rogue Amoeba is working on an update of the decade-old program that CEO Paul Kafasis says is “flipping [Audio Hijack] on its head.”

We caught up with Kafasis at this week’s Worldwide Developer Conference, and in this video, we talk about the new version of Audio Hijack Pro—due out before the end of the year—and how it will simplify the program while making it more powerful. We also talk about some of Rogue Amoeba’s other offerings and how the company came to specialize in audio software.

Apple’s newest Mac OS, Mavericks, is still several months away. But if you’re itching for information, we’ve put together everything we currently know about the operating system to give you an idea of what you have to look forward to in the fall.

Why call it Mavericks?

Apple’s finally run out of cat names for its OS X updates—sorry, lynx, bobcat, and liger—so it’s on to a brand new theme. Instead, the company has chosen to base subsequent OS X updates on locations in its home state of California.

The first of these is Mavericks, a famous surfing location just southwest of San Francisco.

I missed the keynote: What did Apple introduce?

A decent amount. Mavericks has a mix of under-the-hood features, enhancements for expert users, and new capabilities. Among the highlights are better support for multiple monitors and Finder tabs; improvements to performance and battery consumption; new Maps and iBooks apps; and updates to Safari and Calendar.

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Usually, a CPU that offers more processing power also requires more energy—and in a laptop, that results in shorter battery life. But with Haswell, Intel’s fourth-generation Core processor, the company promises to boost processing power and graphics performance while using less energy.

Apple

Haswell made its Mac debut in Apple’s new MacBook Air, released at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference on Monday. So far, Apple has released only two versions of the Haswell ULT processor for both the 11- and 13-inch models: a 1.3GHz dual-core Core i5 processor capable of Turbo Boost up to 2.6GHz and 3MB shared L3 cache in the standard configurations; and a build-to-order 1.7GHz dual-core Core i7 with Turbo Boost up to 3.3GHz and 4MB shared L3 cache. And the question isn't if Haswell will be in other Macs, but when.

Macworld Lab has the new MacBook Air, and benchmark results, battery life tests, and a full review are in the works.

Better power management

With the sales of tablets biting into laptop sales—and with Intel’s lack of presence in the tablet market—Haswell was designed to help laptops better compete with tablets, a point reiterated Monday by Apple Senior Vice President Phil Schiller during the introduction of the new MacBook Air at the WWDC keynote. (Schiller actually referred to the “age of the iPad” instead of tablets in general, but the point remains the same.)

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There’s a lot to be excited about after Monday’s announcement of iOS 7. Flashy new design! Panels! Automatic app updates! Voice calls over FaceTime! Such system-wide changes aside, some of the biggest changes to iOS are found in Apple’s own mobile apps. Several of the stock Apple apps for iOS are being revamped, gaining new features and deeper integration with the Apple ecosystem.

But a more full-featured mobile platform wasn’t music to everyone’s ears this week: As details of iOS 7 unfolded, the only thing some third-party app developers could hear was a sad trombone. That's because many of the features their apps provide will now be built into iOS 7 or its apps. Here are some of the apps that could be made redundant when iOS 7 arrives.

Streaming radio apps

iTunes Radio is Apple’s first dive into a streaming music service for iOS. Users can listen to stations inspired by a particular track, artist, or genre, and specify songs they like and songs they never want to hear again. Apple has also created 200 featured stations, including Songs Trending on Twitter, Summer Songs, and Artists on Tour. Now there's a concept we’ve never seen before!

Oh, wait. Yes, we have. It’s called Pandora.

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Though both operating systems are set to arrive this fall, we know a lot more about iOS 7 than we do about its Mac sibling, OS X Mavericks. But with a little digging through the keynote slides and through Apple’s OS X preview website, we were able to find 12 things you may not have heard or noticed about the company’s next operating system.

The Finder goes full screen

OS X’s new Finder Tabs option got some love during Monday’s keynote, but there are a few other new perks coming to your new, tabbed Finder in the fall.

Window merge: If you’ve accidentally opened too many Finder windows, don’t panic: A quick shortcut will merge your windows into one easily-managed Finder window, organized by tabs.

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In taking the wraps off iOS 7 at this week’s Worldwide Developer Conference, Apple CEO Tim Cook called it the most significant overhaul of Apple’s mobile operating system since the company got into the smartphone business back in 2007. The Alabama-born Cook isn’t just whistling Dixie: iOS 7 is a dramatic re-invention of its mobile software that goes beyond mere additions and enhancements. Apple is changing the very look of iOS itself.

Something as different as iOS 7 is going to raise questions. Fortunately, we have some answers. While there’s still much to be learned about the new OS between now and its arrival later this year, we can still provide an overview based on what we’ve seen and heard so far from Apple.

The basics

What’s the biggest change with iOS 7?

Where to begin? The entire look and feel of the system has been overhauled, with flatter icons, less skeumorphism, and thinner typefaces. That said, anybody who’s used iOS will probably feel mostly at home: Apple hasn’t changed the home screen much, and the basic gestures and interactions are largely the same, with a few new exceptions.

So how is the new look different from the old look?

How did you feel about green felt? Wood bookshelves? Stitched leather? I hope the answer is “not great,” because they’re all gone in iOS 7. Instead they’ve been replaced with a new cleaner design that’s largely about simple lines and icons. While there are elements reminiscent of Microsoft’s recent Windows Phone design, iOS 7 clearly has its own distinct style. These aren’t just subtle enhancements either; they permeate every bit of the interface.

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