Dark Mode
It’s a feature that people have been asking for a long time. Users can turn it on from the control centre or one can automatically turn it on at sunset and it gets automatically disabled at sunrise. Apple has updated every part of the system to reflect Dark Mode. The wallpaper automatically changes to what is appropriate for dark environments, notifications change and widgets have been updated. Also, all the apps have been updated and they look beautiful. It’s hard to see where the software stops and the hardware begins. News, calendar… Apple has picked a whole new colour palette. Though many users have been asking for the feature for a long time but you know how Apple works… it doesn’t release a feature until it’s perfected. There are no half measures.
Memoji Stickers
One of the other features that’s certain to find many takers is Memoji Stickers. In the past, you needed to have a phone with a TrueDepth camera system to be able to use and create and record expressions. This year the company has extended the ability to create Memojis to any iPhone that has an A9 chip, which is a lot of devices. And Memoji Stickers can automatically come up with expressions for you. It has been built into the system keyboard, so if you are composing a mail, you can use it right from the keyboard. Also, you can use it in third-party apps, like WhatsApp, which, of course, is very popular in India.
Easy-to-use keyboard
A feature users have long wanted is the ability to swipe a response. It’s something simple and here it is. Now you don’t have to download third-party extensions because you can do this natively. Also, there are some great keyboard enhancements for India. There are 15 new keyboards, which have been built into iOS, and also included are the existing keyboards. In the Hindi-Latin keyboard, if you are typing Hindi in Latin characters, you now get suggestions. And if you are using the traditional Hindi keyboard and you start typing, you get suggestions in Hindi as well.
Siri… our style
Apple is now giving us two new Siri voices that have been rebuilt from the ground up for India. Try saying, “Who won the last match in the cricket World Cup?” “India beat West Indies by 125 runs in the cricket World Cup match yesterday.” The goal was to make it sound natural. It’s easy to change if you want to switch to the female voice. Apple has added a lot of details as to how Siri works for India. As a simple example, it has taught the system about relationships and the terms we use for our family. For example, if you have saved your mausi’s number as ‘Mausi’, you can say, “Call Mausi.”
Siri will now allow users to play their favourite Bollywood music just as easily as a Beyonce title. Or, find directions to your favourite local chaat shop.
Changes to the Photos app
Some users want to see every image they have taken. You can just zoom in or zoom out and navigate the way you want to. Among the big changes is a way to do away with clutter. If you select all photos, there will be screenshots, receipts, whiteboard and also dupes. The app now uses a lot of intelligence — look at the composition of the photo, who is in it and where it was shot — to come up with a layout that’s automatic; you don’t have to do anything. The best picture pops up, the app identifies emotions in videos and photos. We capture so much stuff using the phone camera and now you can enjoy it. It’s intelligent about aspect ratios and displays photos in a way that it makes sense. The photos are grouped by days, months, events (like a trip or a birthday or a concert; the software looks at the calendar, location, it knows about events and identify landmarks).
Some cool changes have been made as to how photos are edited on the iPhone. If you are someone who wants to touch up a photo, there are enough tools for it. Exposure, highlights and other things can be manually controlled. There is a lot of fine-grain control available. And many of these tools are available for video as well. You can also rotate a video. It’s kind of a basic feature but it’s something that has been missing.
New direction
Maps in India now helps you find the way to your destination with turn-by-turn directions. Along the way, it can factor in real-time traffic information, so you’ll know exactly how long until you arrive. The app now searches a vastly expanded list of places in India to help you find just what you’re looking for. There are improvements in autocomplete, including faster performance and better spelling correction. And there is an Indian English voice when using turn-by-turn directions. This voice will be selected by default for the Indian market.
Invested in your privacy
Apple has been talking about privacy for years. Now it’s becoming more important for users. Unfortunately, many people don’t know what’s going out there, about the buttons that are there, collecting information and tracking you. You can now sign in with the Apple ID. If it’s an app that doesn’t require your name or email address, you can simply use Face ID to sign in. Some apps do need your name and requires an email ID to communicate with you. Now you will be asked whether you want to share your name, your email address. You can use a hider email. If you do that, the software generates an email address and it’s done for each app, meaning each app can have a different email address. This ensures that developers can’t track you.
The iPadOS Picture: Apple
Apple has taken iOS 13 and used it as a foundation to build the iPadOS, which is really interesting because the experience of using the iPad is so distinct — there are features like multitasking, optimisation for a bigger screen — that it’s worthy of its own OS. All the features on the iOS 13 are here — Dark Mode, Photos experience, sign in with Apple and so on. There are also some distinct features, like a tighter grid on the homescreen, so that you can have more apps, widgets can be pinned so that you can see it at all times, your favourites and so on. The company has been investing on the software side for long. Now you can expect the company to push the capabilities of the iPad more than before.
Editing and shortcuts
Another fundamental change as to how you use the iPad involves navigating documents and text. Most use shortcuts to go to the top of a document. Now you can grab the scrubber and quickly scroll. Selecting text is also easier. There are new gestures for copy-paste and undo. The old techniques still exist on the system but a lot of users are now going to go for the gestures.
The improvements on Safari involved a lot of work. Simple things, like using Google Docs, now work beautifully. These apps were made for keyboard-and-mouse, so a lot of work went into it. The company took the apps and created a whole new layer to translate the interface into touch. Also, there is a download manager, so you check the progress of downloads.
For India, four new system fonts (Gurmukhi, Kannada, Odia and Gujarati) have been added. And there are 30 new document fonts (for Hindi, Marathi, Nepali, Sanskrit, Bengali, Assamese, Tamil, Telugu, Gujarati, Kannada, Gurmukhi, Malayalam, Odia and Urdu).
Video streaming apps like Hotstar and Netflix in iOS13 and iPadOS can optimise the time of day to download your content, helping to avoid congested networks and peak cellular data prices.
More multitasking
One of the big things showcased at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference this month was multitasking. There are huge improvements, like Slide Over, which lets you keep apps — like messages or music or calendar — on the side, so that you can get to it anytime. With Slide Over, you can have more than one app on the screen. Swipe from the bottom so you can see the entire stack and then pick an app. And then you can have multiple windows for an app, in different spaces too.
And a request fulfilled
Finally, iPads can finally read external storage drives. In other words, you can plug in your pen drive or portable hard drive to an iPad and copy/paste files.
Apple has released the public previews for iOS 13 and iPadOS, the new software that it will launch for iPhones and iPads in the fall
