It's not a good sign when the best iOS features are imaginary ones designed by people who aren't getting paid to do it instead of, you know, Apple. Like this revamped vision for iPhone multitasking. Apple, steal this now.
Australian designer Jesse Head cooked up this rendering, which imagines a beautified, more versatile iOS that lets you jump between live apps via tiles. Yes, it's a lot like WebOS used to be, rest its soul. Yes, there are Cydia apps for jailbroken iPhones that can give you a pretty good approximation of this stuff—although that's excluding almost all normal people. And yes, Head's notion of jumping between apps like this isn't completely original, nor is multitasking bar that also lets you switch off WiFi and change screen brightness. But there's no bloat, which is nice:
As for the music controls, a scrubber was excluded as it would begin to blur the line between the switcher and an actual music app. My opinion, is that the switcher should provide important controls… accidentally start a loud song in the middle of a church service? Use the switcher to pause or lower the volume. Scrubbing through a song isn't quite as necessary.
Still, we've seen these ideas before. In bits and pieces.
But we've never seen them look so good, or look so real—this looks like it could've come straight out of Cupertino. Head admits that the rendering might not completely jibe with Apple's design ethos at the moment, but it's not any kind of a reach to picture iOS 7 looking a lot like this, at least functionally. So for the love of god, Apple, please pay attention to this, and maybe hire Jesse Head, because he's doing a better job making iOS 7 than you are. [Jesse Head via TechBlock]