By Andrew Cullen ’14 | Staff Writer

“I loved iOS 6,” said no one ever.

Face it, Apple’s operating system for the iPhone has hardly changed over the course of six years. Every update added in something small, but none of them were very groundbreaking. All of that has changed with iOS 7.

Evidently, Apple ran out of pixelated felt, so they replaced the old look of iOS with a flat, minimalistic, cartoony user interface. And honestly, I think it is a huge improvement. Everything has been revamped; from the way users can multitask to the look of the lock screen.

The first thing I noticed when I updated was the lock screen. Compared to the old one, it is much cleaner and better-looking. There is no more bulky slide to unlock arrow that takes up half the screen. Instead, the time is displayed at the top along with the date in a thin Helvetica text. At the bottom, in the same font style, the familiar “slide to unlock” flashes white.

The best part about the update is that it is actually different. Apple obviously put work into iOS 7. They managed to change it for the better, while still keeping the iOS everyone is familiar with. Everything is much smoother, and the animations are a lot different from the old ones.

For instance, double-tapping the home button no longer brings up a row of four recently used apps at the bottom of the screen. Instead, the current app you are on does a zoom-out animation, and all of the recent apps can be seen in a window format. It makes switching between open applications much more satisfying.

Another thing Apple did right was the ability to have background app refreshes. In the previous iterations of iOS, multitasking was not actually multitasking. If you switched from one app to another, the first app would just pause whatever it was doing; it would not run in the background.

Personally, my favorite part is the control center feature. Instead of having to jump through hoops to get to simple settings like brightness, the control center allows quick access to these things. All you have to do is swipe up from the bottom of the screen and walla! It’s there. This makes things so much easier, especially with the shortcuts for airplane mode, WiFi and do not disturb mode.

There are a few things I don’t like about the update, though. For one thing the parallax effect (that thing that makes the background move when you tilt the phone) is an annoying feature. It absolutely drains the phone’s battery life, and it really is a useless feature. Luckily, though, the parallax effect can be turned off in the accessibility settings.

The infamous Apple Maps app also remains in this update. It is nowhere near as polished as its competitors. At least Google was nice enough to make a Google Maps app for the Apple App Store.

All-in-all, iOS 7 is a fantastic update. Apple managed to fix most of the things that were wrong with the old versions. It is by no means perfect, but it is definitely a step in the right direction.