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It's the Friday of WWDC23; I'm amazed and elated; Apple announced the Apple Vision Pro and visionOS.
I'm impressed because it looks like the Vision Pro does everything. It runs apps, apps that look beautiful and familiar to what we know today. It uses your eyes how is that even possible to let you do things by looking from here to there. And you can watch movies in the Cinema Environment. And the apps are made with SwiftUI. And windows in visionOS can cast shadows on your living room table. And, and, and. That's how I would sum up Apple Vision Pro: an invention that came out the gate living the definition of and.
I think Apple Design did an incredible job this year with everything from StandBy to visionOS to macOS widgets and the watchOS 10 revamp.
On this newsletter, we love to look at the design details that Apple places into its products. We get inspired by the work of Apple Design, and after this week of announcements, we have plenty to talk about for the summer.
This week, we'll look at an overview of designs that featured in WWDC23 and enjoy the beautiful big picture. After this week, the next issues will go through each platform. Here's the schedule:
June 9th: visionOS
June 16th: iOS
June 23rd: macOS
June 30th: iPadOS
July 7th: watchOS
July 14th: tvOS
I hope you find something here that you can mix into your own design work. Thank you for reading UI Designer Weekly. —S
New Standards
I'm Looking for the Apps
Here it is, the Home Screen of the visionOS operating system. Apps as they look on this futuristic platform. Each icon is 3D with multiple layers that lift and fall as your eyes move from one icon to the other. Check out the beautiful switcher on the left side. I think it looks wonderfully familiar but also different. Cues might have been taken from the early watchOS honeycomb Home Screen. We're going to dive in to a lot more about visionOS in next week's issue.
Do You Have the Time?
StandBy on iOS 17 lets you turn your phone into landscape to display big, beautiful clocks, widgets, and Live Activities. This is playful design at its best. If you watch this section, take a look at how obvious it looks now, after the fact, that the Dynamic Island's Live Activities would show up here... because what is an iPhone turned landscape but a big Dynamic Island? In the coming weeks, we'll take a look at the different StandBy designs and more from iOS 17.
I'll Glance at It
Smart Stack on watchOS 10 reminds me of the best parts of the original Apple Watch launch. Seeing interfaces shrunken down into these small, personal, glanceable pieces was eye-opening. Now, on the 10th iteration of watchOS software, the design has put glanceability at the top of the list. In the coming weeks, we'll take a deeper look at the new corner-to-corner watchOS 10 app designs.
They're Hanging Out in the Back
Widgets on macOS Sonoma can now live on the desktop. Now your Mac desktop can be a much more informative dashboard 😉. I think this is a clever design idea that balances out a want with a need: we want to be able to use widgets more easily on the Mac, but we need to be able to focus on the current window even if widgets are going to be always visible. We'll take a look at this and a lot more in the upcoming macOS issue.
We've Got That One on Tap
Widgets on iPadOS 17 and iOS 17 can now be interactive, letting you tap to play songs, check off reminders, and more. This change might seem simple, but it's going to open the doors for widget design way open now that you'll be able to do something with an open without even opening it up. Plus, widgets now animate between states. We'll take a deeper look at this and updates to Stage Manager in an upcoming issue.
Hi Mom, I'm on TV!
Wow, FaceTime is on tvOS 17 and you can SharePlay side-by-side with your FaceTime call. It's going to be fascinating to look at the ways FaceTime is designed differently and the same on the big screen. tvOS 17 gets a new Control Center design and more that we'll look at in our tvOS issue.