The other day I was scrolling through my contacts in my iPhone when I noticed the animation for transitioning between one letter and the next. The letter separator docks at the top of the screen, becomes translucent and then the first contact starts scrolling underneath it. It fascinated and amazed me.
I think it's part of what made the iPhone so amazing and revolutionary, everything was looked at, everything thought about. And every now and then you notice something like the phonebook scroll which is delightful.
The separators are always translucent, but I love how the new one pushes the old one up and out of view. I play with this a lot, even though I only realised it when you mentioned it.
Hmm, odd, not on mine. Are you looking at the Contacts app? If you're looking at something that has a non-white background, it might be because of the blending.
"everything was looked at, everything thought about"
When I went to WWDC this year, the lead UX guy from Apple said that one of their major design considerations is how to make the interface seem like a real thing with which you're interacting directly (known as a NUI in some circles).
If you keep this mind it explains a lot of their UI decisions... For example, the letter headers pushing each other out of the way as if they could not occupy the same space at the same time.
I think it's part of what made the iPhone so amazing and revolutionary, everything was looked at, everything thought about. And every now and then you notice something like the phonebook scroll which is delightful.