Dynamic Island on iPhone 14 Pro is a brilliant design

For the wise man, even a grass straw is a weapon

During Apple’s 2022 iPhone event, what stood out for me was the new notch replacement and they’ve got a name for it too, “Dynamic Island”. The notch lived for 5 iterations of iPhone before they found an ultra brilliant replacement. The notch area is important for Apple to house their Face ID hardware and front camera unlike other smartphones. Dynamic Island takes advantage of OLED deep black pixels, combined with the black filled hardware to form a pill-like shape at top of the screen. The notifications animations around this no-display area with beautiful interfaces and animations that are cleverly designed. This is truly, Apple and how the brings in some of the best user experiences eventually become standard for modern hardware and software.

This reminds me of a story about Apple’s Dock design as written in Steve Job’s biography.

Jobs got an email from a young man and invited him in. The applicant was nervous, and the meeting did not go well. Later that day Jobs bumped into him, dejected, sitting in the lobby. The guy asked if he could just show him one of his ideas, so Jobs looked over his shoulder and saw a little demo, using Adobe Director, of a way to fit more icons in the dock at the bottom of a screen. When the guy moved the cursor over the icons crammed into the dock, the cursor mimicked a magnifying glass and made each icon balloon bigger. "I said, 'My God,' and hired him on the spot," Jobs recalled. The feature became a lovable part of Mac OSX, and the designer went on to design such things as inertial scrolling for multi-touch screens (the delightful feature that makes the screen keep gliding for a moment after you've finished swiping).

The new Dynamic Island reminds of this story where some clever designs stayed through the history of Apple. Take a peak at Dynamic Island.

P.S The pill still stands out when we watch videos. This looks a bit more intrusive than the existing notch design when watching video in wide resolution.