When Apple showed-off the new, flat iOS 7 at this year’s Worldwide Developer Conference, everyone laughed hardest at one simple joke: “no more stitching? How does it all stay up there?”. The death of skeuomorphic design in iOS is just the beginning: what if apps like calculators and calendars looked nothing like their real-world counterparts and developers created new, out-of-the-box designs for time-trodden and traditional things? Meet the most beautiful calendar concept you’ll ever see: one that’s not anchored in the old design of cubes, pages and months — a modern calendar for a modern age.
What the boffins over at Teehan+Lax Labs have been experimenting with is the idea of a completely new way to illustrate upcoming appointments, meetings, dates and reminders by exploiting new ways of building apps. Using UICollectionView in iOS 6 to pull data and visualise it differently along with ReactiveCocoa, the developers began to realise how they could start illustrating data like meeting times differently.
Eventually, they landed on a question that they wanted to answer with their new toys:
“Could we represent event data in a way that departs from the paper calendar metaphor while pushing the envelope of iOS technology?”
After many sketches and different concepts, they came up with an idea to anchor the calendar around the passage of time and how it flows hour-to-hour rather than day-to-day, and created a concept app that showed each day flowing down the page in a linear fashion. Users wouldn’t scroll to see the hours as they spilled off the page, instead, 24-hours would be compressed onto the screen, and each appointment and hour would expand and shrink as the user scrubbed their finger down the screen.
A beautiful expansion and contraction of time as it affects you and your day.
What the devs came up with is a beautiful calendar app that reads more like a functional weather app than a to-do list. It’s contextual, beautiful and one that I want to run my entire life by, and best of all, it’s all Open Source.
Read more detail about the envelope-pushing build process over at the Teehan+Lax blog.