Touch-a-touch-a-touch me

There is an awful lot to be said about how Apple approached the user interface and something known as user experience. I'm not an Apple fanboy by any stretch of the imagination (not that you'd guess if you've seen my desk recently!), and designing for iOS can be torturous at times, but I doff my cap to them on how it feels.

A former colleague of mine (who was an Android advocate) once said that he would be buying his parents an Apple iPhone 5S over the latest Samsung phone. The reason was that while Android is extremely powerful, for the end user, Apple wins every time. It just works.

When you examine any iOS application from start to finish, everything is designed to follow a familiar and friendly style; even in some of the more poorly designed and constructed apps, this familiarity and friendliness is still there. The graphics are bright, buttons all have soft edges; everything is designed so that the end user has the best possible experience, irrespective of the...