Release Candidate One with Chris Clark

This mockup from Max Rudberg is right on the money. My first thought when I saw iOS 5’s notification shade with its linen texture was that linen is supposed to be under the UI. It’s the multitasking drawer, the springboard folder, the flipside of the weather app, the surface behind your page in iWork. Notification Center puts linen atop the UI in a direct lift of Android’s UI. Rudberg’s approach here isn’t just more consistent with iOS conventions than the official one, but is also more novel and interesting to use.

The whim of Jobs is a strange thing.