Last week I said I wasn’t interested in an iPod phone, unless it was something no one had even thought to expect. Well, it is. I am blown away by the iPhone. The thing runs Mac OS X.
The iPhone is really inspirational in terms of UI design polish. You can tell they put some years into it. I was playing with Tiger’s NSAnimation the other night (sort of a poor man’s Core Animation), and it reinforced for me the fact that UI effects are no longer optional pieces of software design. They can both visually supplement the user interaction and just make the application experience more enjoyable. Disco, for all the criticism as a glorified Disk Recording framework wrapper, is fun to use. Same goes for the just-released Snapshot 2.0, which has a really thoughtful single-window UI.
This is going to be another great year to be a Mac developer. And we haven’t even seen the rest of Leopard yet. Only bump in the road will be if iPhone is a closed platform. The comments over at Theocacao provide some interesting commentary on that question.
