AppleInsider Staff
Apple announced iOS 12 at WWDC on Monday and we just finished installing the developer beta on our iPhone X. Let's take a look at some of the changes and what Apple has included in the first beta release.
Apple said they are doubling down on performance with iOS 12 and mentioned a few statistics comparing iOS 11 to iOS 12 using the iPhone 6 Plus. Testing two iPhone X's, iOS 12 is definitely launching apps faster than iOS 11 and it seems to run more smoothly as well.
One thing we are really excited about is group notifications. Multiple notifications are grouped together by type, we can clear them all at the same time and even change what kind of notification we get directly from the lock screen.
Do Not Disturb gains the ability to keep the feature enabled during specific time periods, when you leave your current location or when an event ends. At night notifications won't show up at all, so if you wake up and check the time you won't get distracted by bothersome messages.
Screen Time is a new feature that lets users manage the amount of time they spend on their iOS device. The information is extremely detailed, showing exactly how much time is spent on each app category, or even specific apps. The goal is to provide users data to make informed decisions on how they spend their time. You can set time limits or even block apps from Screen Time, and there are powerful parental controls that work through Family Sharing.
Animoji gains tongue detection and a few new faces, but the star of the show is "Memoji," a feature very similar to what we covered on the Samsung galaxy S9. You can create your own Animoji using a wide variety of template options, including accessories like glasses.
You can now add filters anywhere your camera is used, with content including shapes, AR Stickers and Animoji/Memoji to make photos a bit more fun. It's a bit buggy at this time, but we are looking forward to using Memoji heads when shooting outside in cool locations or to cover up a bad hair day.
Photos gains much better search capabilities with auto search terms, as well as multiple search capabilities that incorporate keywords, places and events. This will surely come in handy for those that have thousands of photos.
FaceTime now allows up to 32 people to chat at the same time, and has great tools for keeping the conversation sane. Unfortunately the first release is quite buggy but we'll cover it in detail a bit later.
Measure is a simple app that lets users capture the measurements of an object in three dimensions. It works shockingly well and picks up on shapes automatically. In our brief testing, measurements were extremely accurate. It also includes a level.
Apple books, previously iBooks, has a much cleaner re-designed look and shows you the page you left off on. Apple News receives a facelift that comes with a Browse feature that includes the Following tab and Search feature. For You is now on the "Today" page.
The Stocks app gets a new design and includes articles pulled from Apple News. Even better is compatibility with iPad and macOS. Voice memos is also redesigned with a cleaner look, doesn't prompt you to name your files and syncs to the cloud.
Unfortunately Siri Shortcuts, which lets users create powerful multi-action, voice-activated macros, is not included in the first release but we are really excited about its capabilities and hope to get our hands on it soon.
Andrew Orr
Amber Neely
William Gallagher
Christine McKee
9 Comments
I was able to create some simple shortcuts in the Siri menu.
Hi
Is there any update in facetime in ipads in Saudi arabia? they had cleared facetime for iphone but ipads are still not supporting facetime
Lot's of neat new stuff. But the one I will like best is: "Do Not Disturb Until I Leave This Location".
I have forgotten to turn off DND after leaving a meeting or theater far too often -- and then wondered why nobody likes me anymore -- until I realize that I still have DND turned on! LOL...
There are still some basic features for iOS, I'm deeply missing:
This is my Top 10:
1. Safari should use the general text-size settings for text on webpages. Apple talks much about accessibility, but this basic feature that every desktop-browser has, is missing in iOS. Many people get worse eyes when getting older and if you zoom into a webpage, you have to scroll horizontally, what is annoying.
2. Native swype-support on the iOS-keyboard without the need to install a third-party-app.
3. If you play a video (in an app or in a Safari-tab), the sound should keep playing when you switch to another Safari-tab, another app, the notification-center, the control-center, the homescreen, the multitasking-view and so on. Because there is no need to stop the video, only because you have a quick look at a notification or anything like that. And in many videos, the sound is much more important than the picture, like e.g. a lecture, a talk or anything like that.
4. The calculator-app should have a built-in converter for length, area, volume, weight, temperature and currencies.
5. The AirPrint-dialog should offer an option to choose between printing in color or b/w and to print 2,4 or 6 pages on one sheet of paper.
6. The contacts in the phone-app show your own contact at top. That's great. There is no need, to show your own contact between the others too.
7. The contacts in the phone-app should show all characters in the quick-navigation at the right edge and not dots instead of some of them.
8. Contacts that start with a punctuation mark shoule be sorted in the #-section at the end, similar like contacts that start with a number.
9. Safari should get a gesture to quickly switch between open tabs without opening the tab-view. E.g. swiping right/left in the URL-bar.
10. Apple Maps should get much better. There are still many parks and woods displayed grey instead of green. Many footpaths in parks and woods are missing completely. The footprints of buildings should be shown. Many points-of-interests have a wrong position (e.g. if a big POI like a mall, a museum, and so on is shown, the icon should be, where the entrance is, and not at a side of the building where is no entrance). The navigation should be much better. Etc. etc. etc. Apple Maps is so important, but should get so much better...