Apple hires designer Jan-Michael Cart praised for his iOS interface concepts

9to5 Staff | Dec 13 2011 - 12:01 am PT

Apple is hiring dozens of talented people on a daily basis, but this one deserves your attention. Jan-Michael Cart, a mass media arts student from Georgia, is the brains behind a bunch of very insightful iOS interface concepts you’ve likely seen on the web, as noted by iPhoneinCanada.ca. This includes the notification center and application switcher mockup videos below.

As Apple is always on the lookout for young blood, Cart’s work caught the company’s attention and they decided to hire him as an intern, he announced in a blog post:

Soon I will be embarking to California, where I will be interning at a fruit company for seven months. I will be updating this to chronicle my adventures and misadventures in the Bay Area for my family, friends, and followers online. Stay tuned, I leave in less than a month!

“And like that, my time has come — I am now a member of the Apple community”, he confirmed on the front page of his personal web site. Congrats to Cart on his new gig! We sure are looking forward to seeing some of his great concepts implemented in iOS.

Heck, even the BlackBerry maker Research In Motion hired the Astonishing Tribe design shop to make the PlayBook tablet’s operating system aesthetically appealing. Watch Cart’s Dynamic Icons and Speech Recognition user interface concepts right after the break and don’t forget to check out his YouTube channel.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rn4wt-6KRI0]

Little has changed in terms of the interface design since the original iPhone debuted in the summer of 2007. In a typical Apple fashion, the Cupertino, California-headquartered gadget designer has been sticking to its simplicity mantra and refusing to bring major cosmetics changes to the iOS user interface. When Steve Jobs announced the original iPad, for example, he highlighted its user interface akin to iPhone, saying that millions of people who already use the iPhone will be instantly familiar with the iPad. Building on the success of the iOS platform, Apple even brought some of its prominent interface solutions to Mac OS X Lion, such as Launchpad, an application switcher akin to the iOS home screen. Tech watchers are expecting more iOS-ification of the Mac operating system in the future, with one prominent analyst predicting that Apple’s desktop and mobile operating systems will soon unify, pointing to the aforementioned iOS-like features in Lion as a proof of things to come. Taking into account whispers of an ARM-based A5-drive Mac notebook, this actually makes sense, especially considering that Apple’s flagship MacBook Air (J.P. Morgan’s Mark Moskowitz projects sales of 1.6 million units a quarter in 2012) can’t run the whole day on a single charge, unlike iPad’s 10-hour rated battery performance.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLy7gN3Okc4]

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVRRMsmZ_Kg]