Apple’s iOS 7 gets first showing at WWDC

Apple showed up at the Worldwide Developers Conference with  a host of new offerings, but the one that could make or break the company’s vast mobile fortunes, iOS 7,  stood out the most. As expected, Apple has torn itself away from skeuomorphic iconography and design.

In fact, all corners of iOS have received spit and polish. Besides changing the look of the core apps to a ore minimalistic interface- even the slide-to-unlock lockscreen has been dumped for a pull-the-screen-up style lockscreen-Apple has added a Control Center that mimics Android’s quick toggles drawer, has a music and brightness controller, and app shortcuts. The Camera app has received effects filters, while multi-tasking has been spriced up with a card-based view of all open apps.

  Apple also launched  !Tunes Radio, a music streaming service like Pandora, besides showing a new version of Siri, which can now do both male and female voices. The OS is currently in beta and is available for registered Apple developers. There’s still a lot that could change between now and the final version, and it will be interesting to see how Apple reacts to some of the initial criticism.

In addition, Apple also showed off the new OS X Mavericks operating system for its desktop products. The new OS brings deeper integration with iOS as well as the desktop versions of Apple Maps and !Books. There was also an announcement for !Work for !Cloud, which brings Google Docs-like productivity apps for word processing, spreadsheets and presentations through Safari.