A new patent design uncovered by Patently Apple today gives us a hint at some interface elements Apple may implement in future versions of iOS, perhaps as soon as iOS 5 is released later this year. The patent doesn’t provide many details and the mockups realized by Apple are nowhere near the final style of an iOS product, but they can let us speculate on the interface changes several apps will likely go through.
In this patent, Apple has focused on browsing the iTunes Store and accessing the Address Book. The main concept seems to be that raw lists of items – songs, artists, and even contacts – should evolve into a visually richer experience based on “tiles”, rather than vertical lists. Does that ring a bell? Yes, at first I thought of the Windows Phone 7 UI – but the implementation Apple is envisioning here is quite different. From what we can see in the sketches posted online, the design looks like a mix of the Finder’s standard icon view and the iTunes album art screensaver: there’s a grid containing albums and songs in the iTunes Store and a different contact visualization in Address Book with a series of thumbnails for all your friends, and a bigger one in the foreground for the contact you’re currently talking to / editing in the app. Apple is calling these things “Segmented Graphical Representations”, and from a first look it sounds like they’re aiming for a more visual interaction with the OS based on thumbnails and graphics, rather than lists of text. Read more
