The Dynamic Island Island
Introducing The Dynamic Island… Island for the iPhone 14 & 14 Pro Max.
The Dynamic Island has to be one of my favourite feature names in an Apple Product. It's laughable the first time you hear it, but it's also quite aptly named. It's a free-floating void of pixels (aka island) that cleverly hides the front-facing camera and FaceID sensor. It also fluidly morphs (aka dynamic) to display miniaturized bits of information (scores, timers, calls, audio, etc.). Apple went so extra to over-engineer this little dead space, to the point that it even developed new sub-pixel anti-aliasing to ensure every bubble and pop is silky smooth. Whereas the notch was inert, the dynamic island is anything but.
This was also a feature that I was so delighted to see announced because it was beyond what anyone was expecting. Leakers had been talking about a pill-shaped cutout and whether it would be one cutout or two, yet no reports leaked that behind this cutout (it is two, but disguised as one) lurked this delightfully new & dynamic way of interacting with your phone.
The first island meme came (I think) from @avstorm shortly after the Apple Event, showing the Dynamic Island as a... literal island. It was cute, and it did its viral thing, but then the internet moved on. Then in October, @iPhone15Ultra tagged me in a tweet about making such a wallpaper, and well, one thing led to another, and here we are.
Deny’s photograph from Thailand from 2016.
The photo asset came from Denys Nevozhai's photo of Ao Nang, Krabi, Thailand, from Unsplash. I modified the colours, erased the other islands, and moved the boat around a bit before I got to work constructing the island around the Dynamic Island itself. The version I hastily released on Twitter looked fine enough, but I've taken a few days to spice up the offering. Most notably, I got rid of some graininess and added a little more underneath the part that lives underneath the cutout, a little oasis eclipsed by the Dynamic Island. I know that it's not perfect and that the illusion breaks as soon as an app utilizes the dynamic island to display content, but it works enough of the time that I'm happy with the end result.
So there you have it, the Dynamic Island Island. Available for the iPhone 14 Pro & 14 Pro Max. Enjoy.
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