Nalashaa offers a full range of mobility product engineering services including outsourced mobile development, technical consulting, GUI consulting and an extensive testing as a service package.  As you read through this guide if any of these steps strike you as something you would like assistance, advice or even just a chance to chat with someone who has been through this process please don’t hesitate to contact us.

We will be covering step 1 of the transition process today, which would detail the GUI changes that you will come across during this transition.

Step 1: GUI changes

The first step we recommend is to create an automated inventory of all the GUI changes. Start up Xcode and run your iphone app in the simulator under both iOS 6 and iOS 7.  You can use the “View as” menu on the File inspector in Interface Builder to toggle between iOS 7 and iOS 6 or view them together. Screen by screen make note of all differences without stopping to judge whether these changes are desirable or not.

Here is an example of what happens for the elements application in terms of dropping graphical cues that existed in terms of buttons:

Underlying themes for the change to iOS7 are:

Deference — less competition between UI elements and application elements. What is expected is less noticeable
Clarity — text is legible at every size, icons are precise and lucid, adornments are subtle and appropriate, and a sharpened focus on functionality motivates the design
Depth — visual layers and realistic motion are used to assist users’ understanding

What are the changes to watch for?

Fonts – this has almost entirely been changed Gesture recognition — the underlying system has been changes so make sure your gestures are still recognized the same way there were. For example bottom up swipe will now invoke Control Center so if you were using this gesture, you want to make sure to note this since the behavior has often changed and you may likely need to replace it.
Popover background — translucency means that end users can still see the screen behind.
Bars and buttons — any drawn with UIKit are going to undergo a color and background shift. Similar shifts will be seen with scrollbars so check these as well.
Table view — cell separators, section indexes, grouping have all changed
Web views — these can paginate more effectively on iOS 7
Action sheets — not only has the color scheme changed considerably but the spacing as well

Here is our second part of the iOS 6 to iOS7 transition, where we look at specific details which need to be addressed when looking at hybrid iphone apps and the toolkit which should be employed under such circumstances.