The predicted rebirth Susan Kare’s original black-and-white OS design, it ain’t. Actually, let's just ban using the term "flat" altogether for this post. The iOS 7 we met today was full of what Jony Ive called “new types of depth.” Alongside a poppy, neon-and-pastel color scheme, the icons, apps, and homescreen of iOS 7 are full of layering and dimensionality. There are also entirely new types of animation: from a screen that uses the accelerometer to adjust in parallax, to beautiful new animated weather icons.

The visual treatments in iOS 7 seem to have polarised people, though we should remember that this is a first (and beta) version of a fairly major visual redesign. We'll see refinements to this both before release, and in subsequent years. What ought to be clear is that it provides a design framework for much greater sophistication than we've seen so far in Apps. This will be doubly true on the iPad, and I can't wait to see how it plays out there.

I've more to say on the WWDC announcements, but I think we've just seen the first real clues of how iOS will evolve into the primary working environment for a whole new set of people.