With the launch of iOS 7 yesterday Apple made some bold steps to ditch the rich textures, shadowing, and other skeuomorphic elements that have been a staple on the iPhone since 2007.

Thanks to the departure of iOS Software Chief Scott Forstall back in October, Sir Jony Ive was given a bigger role in iOS software development, so to hype up the launch of Jony’s first software masterpiece, he and Apple’s new SVP of Software Engineering, Craig Federighi, sat down with USA Today to give some details on what went into the creation of iOS 7.

According to Jony, the decision to strip iOS of all its shadows and physical references was pretty easy once they got Forstall out the door:

Calling it the “first Speed MOBA (Multiplayer Online Battle Arena),” Zynga released Solstice Arena to the iOS App Store this past June. The game garnered many awards and some fairly good reviews from around the web.

Tuesday, Zynga announced that Solstice Arena was available in the Mac App Store, bringing the streamlined real-time action battle arena game to OS X.

Good news, Google Wallet users — you can now access your account on your iOS device with an official Google Wallet app. You can use it to make payments to friends, track your loyalty cards, and access nearby offers. One feature you won’t find, however, is tap-to-pay, which relies on NFC connectivity.

If you love tanks but find your standard-size garage and local laws too restrictive, you might want to check out Boom! Tanks, a free-to-play armored combat game by developer Codemasters.

This love letter to all things treaded and turreted tells the story of one group of people with tanks squaring off against a less-good group of people with tanks, and — look, it’s called Boom! Tanks. You can probably guess what you’re signing up for.

Combat in Boom! Tanks works like this: At the beginning of the round, you drag and hold an aiming cursor over your enemy in order to lock it into your targeting system. Once this is done, you will always hit; the question becomes how hard. And you figure that out with a timing-based minigame in which you try to stop a marker as close to the middle of the meter at the bottom of the screen as you can. Stopping it directly in the middle grants you a “Perfect Shot” which does more damage. Meanwhile, the game drives your tank around; you don’t even have to worry about that.

One of the things that makes typing long-form text on the iPad bearable is TextExpander Touch, the iOS version of Smile Software’s amazing snippet-substitution app for the Mac. Sadly, iOS7 has broken the clever hack Smile was using to let it share its snippets with any app on your iDevice.

But happily, there’ a new hack, and it just requires third-party developers to make some tweaks to their own apps.

With iOS7, Apple has upped the cap for app downloads over cellular to 100MB, meaning that if you carelessly hit “update all” for your apps when you’re out of the house, and you have a bunch of game updates pending for your iPhone, then you could potentially burn through your entire month’s bandwidth allowance in one go.

It’s not just you: iOS 7 has seemingly killed off support for some unlicensed, third-party Lightning cables.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncyN-LTKTMw&feature=youtu.be

Just after CES wound down back in January, I was part of a (relatively) small group of journalists and bloggers present at the Disney media event that revealed Disney’s Infinity game universe to the world. Problem was, I had no clue why I’d been invited, as all the hoopla was about the console game. Toward the end, I bumped into Bill Roper, Disney’s product development chief, and asked why I was there as I gulped down a delicious, miniature milkshake.

His answer was cryptic. But the reason I’d been invited has just made its entrance onto the app store today — it’s the Disney Infinity: Toy Box iPad app, a virtual sandbox mashup that allows anyone with an iPad to take a variety of Disney characters and play with them in different Disney worlds. And it’s free — for now.

Facebook updated its iOS app today with one of the biggest redesigns since the switch from HTML5 to native last year. Arguably the most popular third-party app in the App Store has been rethought for iOS 7, and Facebook believes that it will be incredibly well received. Why? The social giant has been quietly testing aspects of the new app with millions of unsuspecting Facebook users for awhile.

iOS 7 has been out for less than one day, and already has an adoption rate of over 13 percent, according to analytics firm, Mixpanel. Compare that with Google’s latest version of Jellybean for Android devices, which hovers around an 8.5 percent adoption rate after a month.