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Ars Technica Reviews iOS 7
Ars Technica has posted a pretty thorough review of iOS 7, which brings a few radical changes to at least the visual design of the system. From the article: "In one sense, iOS 7 changes nearly everything about iOS. A couple of wallpapers have made the jump, but otherwise you'd be hard-pressed to find anything in iOS 7 that looks quite like it did in iOS 6. In another sense, iOS 7 is the latest in a string of incremental updates. It adds a few new features and changes some existing ones, but this doesn't radically alter the way that you use the OS from day to day."
Breaking with the design trajectory of the last few releases of most of Apple's software, the oft maligned skeumorphism of the interface has been considerably toned down.
IMHO, all operating systems follow design trends. First it was just plain buttons. Then 3D buttons in the early 1990s. Then color and graphics.
Now, the cycle has begun anew and we are back to flat buttons. Next thing we will see will be NeXTStep style black/white icons with a philosophy of "the content in the app is the stuff with colors, everything else is black/white/grey to support it."
Most of the reviews I've read just parrot what Apple said which is sad.
Been using it for a couple months. The control panel is great. They killed the calendar, much less usable. I don't use siri so I can't comment there. Being able to have more than 9 icons in a folder is nice.
The rest is fluff. They exchanged textures for a bunch of superfluous animation and transparency. It looks a lot different obviously. No easier or harder to use though. I'm not a big fan of the new look but was tired of the old look. Other than getting used to a different look, I didn't notice a big improvement or drop off in the other apps.
In the end, if you already have an iphone, I would recommend it for the control panel.
I'll agree with you that I don't see a problem with the way it happens, but it's not just a semantic argument.
There are an awful lot of people here on slashdot who would assert that "full multitasking" means that every app has full access to its entire code path all the time, and can do anything in the background that it could do in the foreground, like desktop apps on a Linux system. That switching between foreground execution and background execution isn't even something an app has to notice.
The reality is basically that the app can only fully run in the foreground. In other situations it, in practice, can set up little scripts or daemons to handle specific enumerated things on its behalf when it's not in the foreground.
Some of that code fires off when a trigger condition comes up, and then have a limited time to do their business (eg. geofencing). Some keeps running in the background as long as its fulfilling a specific purpose (eg. background audio).
Has iOS got multitasking? Yes. Has it got multitasking that's more than enough for most normal users who aren't doing exotic things? Yes.
Has it got full multitasking? No, it really really doesn't. Just try running a Jabber client that lets you stay logged in all day long, or a mail client that downloads your mail before you open it without push notifications.
(Of course this isn't a bad thing, as long as the multitasking it's got is sufficient. True full multitasking would actually be a bad thing.)