Great points by David Barnard:

There is nothing inherently authentic about anything created digitally. There’s nothing genuine about 0’s and 1’s and any particular sequence that describes pixels on a screen. Humans created the hardware and software that sequence those bits, and unless we’re talking about some sort of futuristic research project, everything created digitally is created for some ultimate form of human consumption.

Software doesn’t have to use realistic textures to be “physically authentic”.

Matt Alexander has a good piece on the hypocrisy behind some people’s reactions to iOS 7:

One of the most trite and oft-spoken philosophies in the technology world — originating from hockey’s Wayne Gretzky and popularized in our community by Steve Jobs in 2007 — is that companies ought not to skate to wear the puck is, but where it will be. That is what both Apple and Microsoft have sought to do in recent weeks.

We responded, however, with premature dismissals and cries that our technology is changing.

It’s embarrassing.

And Harry Marks has some solid counterarguments, but especially this bit:

Apple may or may not pay attention to the complaining about the icons in the beta. It may or may not read all the scathing editorials about how Helvetica Nueue Light was the wrong font choice because something something zzzzzz…sorry, I dozed off for a second. What it will do is make iOS better. It will change the way we use our phones and tablets whether we like it or not.

So, you can either upload your alternate stock icon designs to Dribbble, or you can adapt your app to better suit the coming change. Which will it be?

Winning apps won’t merely take Apple’s default look and mimic it. Think about how boring it would be if all of our apps looked like iOS 7 Calendar or Settings. It would get old really fast. But that’s nothing new. Think about if all the apps on iOS 6 looked like iOS 6 Calendar and settings… Yep, it would be really boring.

Jeremy Olson has some great thoughts on how designers and developers should respond to iOS 7 in the coming months. From what I’ve seen so far, this summer will be an interesting one.

Then one day, on a trip to my local arcade, I saw something completely new: Virtua Fighter. The first ever 3D fighting game sacrificed a lot of visual detail in order to achieve real depth rendered via multiple polygons on a projected z-axis.

When I first saw Virtua Fighter I was not impressed. The graphics were terrible compared to my favourite at the time, the also just released Mortal Kombat II, but it was the start of a new era that still continues today: the vast majority of new videogames are first or third-person perspective 3D.

James Russell has come up with an interesting analogy for Apple’s prioritization of depth in iOS 7 (and, as an old-time watcher of the Nintendo vs. Sega wars, one that I can understand and reminisce).