The Design of The iPhone

The iPhone is considered as a prestigious device among the smartphone enthusiast around the world. Apple became popular with the introduction of the iPhone than from their mackintosh business. Steve jobs, founder and the CEO of apple personally involved in the process of creating the iPhone. The latest iPhone model is cost around $1200.

When compared with other phones in the market, iPhones is a very expensive choice for a smartphone. Why iPhone is priced so higher? What does an iPhone have that other phones don’t? These questions can be answered simply. There are two main aspect of an iPhone that make it one of the most prestigious devices in the world.

1.     Physical Design

2.     iOS

Physical Design

The physical design of an iPhone is considered having the best build quality that is in a smart phone. The design and development of iPhone is mostly done in the United States, especially in California, where the Apple headquarters is located.

When iPhone first released back in 2007 it had the minimalistic metallic finish design that made it very popular. There were no smartphones in the market to compete with design of iPhone and this single phone made apple billions. Then apple released its second wave of apple phones (iPhone 4 & 4S). When they released iPhone 4 it was clear that they were after a simplistic design rather than a bulky one.

The 3rd generations of iPhones were released in 2012 and the design was awesome. They had it made thinner while securing the unibody concept. The colors and button architectures were perfect to use. They had considered that fact that, the phone should be able to use with a single hand.

The same concepts and more upgrades were visible in the iPhone version 6 and 6 plus released this year. It can be named as the most advanced iPhone ever made yet. The design of the phone can be considered as a huge win for apple. iPhone 6 was made ultra-thinner and the edges were curved. The whole body was made with aluminum.

The metallic finish of the iPhone makes it rich and durable to the fell overs and unexpected shocks. One person has claimed that his iPhone fell down accidentally when he was sky diving with his friend and he managed to find it on the ground with only a cracked screen. According to him it was still working and he could answer calls with it.

IOS – iPhone Operating System

Apart from the physical design, iOS is the most elegant entity that makes an iPhone superior. iOS made iPhone better looking than ever. iOS is the single most powerful reason for people to buy an iPhone. iOS is said to be crash free and faster. iOS was designed to be easy to understand Above all the design concept of iOS is awesome.

Back in 2007 when the first iPhone was introduced, the iOS had a 3D UI with attractive app icons with a glittering shine. This UI continued through iOS version 4,5 and 6. The iPhone fans started buying apps for the store and developers started contributing more and more beautiful apps store. The key factor was the design for these apps to be bought by users.

iOS evolved through years and today it has become a phenomenon mobile operating system that serves a top end device. Apple developed iOS 7 deviating from their current design ethics. They introduced a flat design model with iPhone 5. This was backward compatible with the iPhone 4 as well. The iOS 7 was remarkably attractive and with the design new icon packs were introduced as well.

The iPhone 6 & 6 plus were shipped with the latest apple iOS, 8. This is the most amazing design brought by apple ever. With an easy-to-use interface, amazing features, iOS 8 became the foundation of iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. It’s designed to look beautiful and work beautifully, so even the simplest tasks were more engaging. The simple-yet-beautiful home screen in iOS 8 invites you to discover each of the built-in apps. And no matter what you’re doing or what app you’re using, everything feels easy, intuitive, and even fun.

Above are some UI mockups of iPhone and iOS made by an iphone mockup tool online. You can see the design changes accordingly as you go through them. There many apps in the iTunes store having beautiful app icons of iOS 8. You can use these mockups and templates. Just click on the mockup and select use as a template. Enjoy!

Creating a Simple iPhone Application

Creating an iPhone app is considered as a time consuming task. The main reason for this is the different stages in the development process of a mobile application.  Creating an iPhone application may need the knowledge of programming, designing (implementation) and testing as well.  We take an iPhone app example for this particular article. iPhone applications became popular as many developers started working on the platform with the evolution of the smartphone industry.

Before creating an iPhone app you need to have the basic idea about what you are going to create and how it will be implemented. For this you need to have a prototype of the application created from iPhone mockup software. Actual implementation of the application may seem hard. But creating the initial prototype is easy when you can illustrate it with a wire-frame or mockups. We’re taking a sample application idea for the sake of this article and I will be describing how you can take it forward to make a prototype from an iPhone mockup.

The App Idea

We’re taking this simple example of an alarm clock to set the alarm to get up every day. With this clock you will be able to set a time to wake up and control the desired time along the week.

Functions

Main function of the alarm is to set a specific time and to trigger the alarm when that time is reached. Other than that, below functions are included in the app.

1.      User specific alarms

2.      Customize the time along the week

3.      Selecting alarm tones.

When creating the prototype for this application first you will need a login. This alarm application can be used by desired number of people. Since, you need to have a registration form as well. The first phase of the iPhone prototype is the welcome screen with the login. An illustration of step one is given in the fig 1.1 below.

For this screen I have used two buttons and two input text fields.

Thereafter you need to illustrate the screen after logging in. This screen usually shows the name of the person that is using the application with a nice greeting. This screen also shows information user needs to operate the application including controls to assign an alarm and change setting. You can see this screen in the figure 2.0 below.

As you can see the user is logged in and the last alarm time is shown at the top right side of the screen. The 3 main icons on the screen represent the corresponding functions in the app.

Now you can create the next screen which is the setup screen. The user should be able to setup the alarm at a desired time. The alarm should also be able to set on all 7 days of the week. This is a very interesting screen and the most important one as well. In this screen I have used a foreign object to illustrate seven days of the week. You need to be able to navigate to the specific screens within the app. A back button will be included to this page to return to the previous page.  See figure 3.0 for alarm setup screen.

Another important function would be to setup the alarm sound. In this screen you need a list to pick a sound to set the alarm. By using the web picker you can do this as it was done for the alarm picker. Figure 4 illustrates the sound picker.

The final screen is the history screen to show the history of alarms that a user had used. For this I’m going to use a list object in the prototyping tool to illustrate. I have also put a button to clear up the history in the list as well. You can see the final screen in figure 6 below.

It is not that hard to create a mockup of the prototype when you have a clear idea of what you are doing. You can develop your app idea into a usable prototype using an iphone mockup tool. Your mockup can be understood by anyone to develop a working prototype.