App Store icon

It’s always a pleasure to talk to Kostya Gorsky, lead designer from Yandex and my good friend.

We’ve been discussing the future of browsers, apps and the Internet lately and have formed a vision of how all this stuff should work. I’ve been convinced that the address bar is not necessary and will die some day, and that there won’t be any meaningful difference between apps and websites. This simplification raises some questions and causes some problems at first, but they are all technical. People won’t care. We can make it.

Today one can find a site with Google from the Spotlight page on an iPad and add it to their home screen — all without knowing anything about web addresses. Even if you can explain the difference between an app and a website to your grandpa, this will not be of any value to him. Why bother, it’s all just coloured rectangles.

Kostya have recapped it all well: “You should have a screen with the coloured rectangles and a way to add them to it”.

And so I’ve coined a new design for iPad’s home screen. See the App Store icon. Before:

After:

Of course, manual updates will die, too.

We’ve went into much more detail with this, having talked for about an hour. And I wanted to publish this picture.