A Look at iOS UI Elements Over The Years

Comments (2)Next week at WWDC, Apple will unveil the sixth iteration of its mobile operating system, iOS. Although Apple has added a lot of features over the course of these five years, the layout of iOS has remained almost consistent.

That, however, doesn't mean that every element in the user interface has remained exactly the same throughout. Apple has tinkered around with the look and feel of several standard UI elements over the years.

Rene Ritchie over at iMore writes about the evolution in Apple's design principles, which has mostly been introducing more and more skeumorphic interfaces into apps. Skeumorphic design, in the digital world, is trying to make digital interfaces look like objects from the real world. The wooden shelf in iBooks is a pretty good example of skeumorphic design.

Skeumorphism wasn't a big part of the first few versions iOS (called iPhone OS back then). With the exception of the Notes app, which was inspired by the yellow legal pads, most of Apple's apps followed a  standard, purely digital design philosophy, which Rene calls the "world of pinstripes." Pinstripes continue to appear in many of Apple's in built apps even now.

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