Tuesday 30 August 2011

Apple’s iOS : origins and brief

Unveiled in 2007, the iOS has since then captured the imagination of the people. The first version of iPhone took the world by storm and more success came by.

iOS is the world's most popular mobile operating system brought about by Apple. It was originally made for iPhone but Apple has now extended it to support their other devices including iPod touch, iPad and Apple TV too. Apple, Inc. has not set up a licensing structure to let third party software use iOS. More than 500,000 iOS applications can be found in the Apple store and has been downloaded more than 15 billion times in recent years. Till the end of 2010, it had a smartphone market share of 26%, behind Google's Android and Nokia's Symbian.

The user interface of iOS involves direct manipulation concept, and makes use of multi-touch gestures. The best part about it is that the response to user input is quick and immediate and the navigation is pretty seamless. You can swipe, tap, pinch, and reverse pinch on the screen to get different events done within the context of the app and the interface. Internal accelerometers are also used by some iOS applications wherein shaking the device will result in different actions and also to switch from portrait to landscape mode.

The iOS platform is derived from Mac OS X and hence it is like a Unix-like OS by nature. There are four abstraction layers within the iOS which are the Core OS layer, the Core Services layer, the Media layer, and the Cocoa Touch layer. About 650 MB is consumed for the latest iOS 4.3 platform in the device's storage, approximately.

The latest version which is expected to be launched is iOS 5 and is about to turn up next month in September 2011.

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