NewImageLoren Brichter, the creator of Letterpress and Tweetie, sat down with GigaOm to talk about developing iOS apps, the App Store, and more.

Brichter was a member of Scott Forstall's iPhone team early on, and though he didn't have much to say about Forstall's ouster from Apple, Brichter did have positive things to say about Ive's promotion:

"I’m excited about Ive" taking over the Human Interface group at Apple, where he will lead both industrial design and the design of the software that runs on it. "He has good taste." He paused. "But more important than good taste, he has the ability to" — he points to the MacBook Air in front of me — "he’s true to the materials, to the medium he’s working in. One of my complaints about design of iOS is it’s doing things that aren’t true to the hardware."

"My design goals with Letterpress were to do things that the graphics hardware was really good at. [Ive] is the kind of person who has the same aesthetic. It’s not superficial — he’d think about [the design of iOS and an iOS device] all the way through" not just make something that looked good, he said.

Brichter also disclosed that Letterpress has been downloaded more than 1 million times. Additionally, he developed his own version of the user interface framework -- bypassing Apple's UIKit -- because he "wanted to try."

Top Rated Comments

TouchMint.com Avatar
166 months ago
Please ohh please fix the iPhone App Store!
Score: 12 Votes (Like | Disagree)
dizastor Avatar
166 months ago
Perhaps the design evolution of iOS is no longer (For)stalled?
Score: 11 Votes (Like | Disagree)
ConCat Avatar
166 months ago
I don't see radical changes to the current springboard icon system. It's just too iconic now.

I don't know if that pun was intended, but I loled.
Score: 6 Votes (Like | Disagree)
illegalprelude Avatar
166 months ago
I'm all for I've but lets not forget what Forstall has done for Apple and iOS. It's as if suddenly everyone is like "holy crap, iOS UI is garbage, OS X is garbage."
Score: 5 Votes (Like | Disagree)
martial900 Avatar
166 months ago
I want Ive to make iOS become another reason why we all get the next iPhone. I mean when I saw a windows 8 phone the UI was looking good. And iOS has been stuck on this Android 2.3.5-like hiatus. Yeah we got iOS 6 but its all Forstall appearance that we all grew fond of because art we thought stayed in phone's physicality not UI as well. Ive needs to make our fonts, keyboards and et cetera look jawdropping.
Score: 4 Votes (Like | Disagree)
Mike MA Avatar
166 months ago
I hope iOS 7 will at least seed Ive's idea for a modern operating system design though.

I would also love to see some more serious harmonization efforts between the iOS and OS X design - beginning with the removal of skeuomorphism used in the contact and calendar apps for OS X.
Score: 2 Votes (Like | Disagree)

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