iOS: The 15 most interesting new features in iOS 11

June 21, 2017, 4:50 am
iOS: The 15 most interesting new features in iOS 11
When
iOSApple iOS is a proprietary mobile operating system for the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch.
11, thenew, free iPhone/iPad OS upgrade comes this fall, you wont gain any big-ticket feature.Instead, youll get awholllllle lot of tiny nips and tucks.They seem to fall into fivecategories: Nice Tweaks, Storage Help,
iPadtablet made by Apple
Exclusives, Playing Catch-Up, Fixing Bad Design.
If there were one big lesson from the announcements at Apples developer conferenceMonday morning, its this: Itsgetting harder and harder to add Big New Features to a smartphone operating system.
Nice Tweaks
Expectations set? OKheres whats new.
A new voice for Siri.The new male and female voices sound much more like actual people.One-handed typing.Theres a new keyboard that scoots closer to one side, for easier one-handed typing.(You may now zoom in Maps one-handed, too.)The new one-handed keyboard.MoreQuicker transfer.once you get a new iPhone, you can import all your settings from the old one just by focusing the camera on the new phone on the old ones screen.Do not disturb while driving.This optional
featureSpecial attraction
sounds like a truly good one.When the phone detects that youre drivingbecause its connected to your phones Bluetooth, or in view of the fact that the phone detects motionit prevents any notifications (alert messages from your apps) from showing up to distract you.If someone texts you, they get an auto-response like, Im driving.Ill see your message once I get where Im going.(You can designate certain people as VIPs; if they text the word urgent to you, their messages break through the blockade.)No more distracting notifications while youre on the road.MoreImprovements to Photos.The Photos application offers smarter auto-slideshows (called Memories).Among other improvements, they now play welleven when youre holding the phone upright.Improvements to Live Photos.Live Photos are weird, three-second video clips, which Apple(apple.com) (AAPL) introduced in iOS 9.In iOS 11, you can now shorten one, or mute its audio, or extract a single frame from that snip to use as a still photo.The phone can also suggest a boomerang segment (bounces back and forth) or a loop (repeats over and over).And it has a new Slow Shutter filter, which (for example) blurs a babbling brook or stars moving astride the sky, as though taken with a long exposure.Swipe the Lock screen back down.You can now get back to your Lock screen without truly locking your iPhoneto have another look at a notification you missed, e.g..Smarter Siri.Siri does improved an anticipating your next move (location, news, calendar appointments).When youre typing, the auto-suggestions over the keyboard now offer movie names, song names, or place names that youve recently viewed in other applications.Auto-suggestions in Siri, too, include terms youve recently keep reading.And if you book a flight or buy a ticket online, iOS offers to add it to your calendar.AirPlay 2.If you buy speakers from Bose, Marantz, and a few other manufactures (unfortunately, not Sonos), you can use your phone to control multi-room audio.You can start the same song playing everywhere, or play different songs in different rooms.Shared Up Next playlist.If youre an
AppleTechnology company
Music subscriber, your party guests or buddies can throw their own what song to play next ideas into the ring.Screen recording.Now you can do more than just take a image of the screenshot of whats on your screen.You can create a video of it! Man, will that be helpful for people who teach or review phone software! (Apple didnt sayhowyou startthe screen recording,though.)Storage Help
Running out of room on the
iPhonecellular phone made by Apple
is a chronic problem.
AppleTechnology company
has a few
featuresSpecial attraction
designed to help:
Camera app.Apple is adopting new file formats for photos (HEIF, or High Efficiency Image Format) and videos (H265 or High Efficiency Video Codec), which look the same as they did before but consume only the half the space.(When you export to someone else, they convert to standard formats.)Messages in iCloud.When you sign into any new Mac, iPhone, or iPad with your iCloud credentials, your whole texting history gets downloaded automatically.(As it is now, when you sign in on a new machine, you cant see the Message transcript histories.) Saving the Messages history online also saves disk space on your Mac.Storage optimization.The idea: As your phone begins to run out of space, your oldest files are quietly and automatically stored online, leaving Download icons in their places on your phone, so that you can retrieve them if you need them.iPad Exclusives
Many of the biggest changes in iOS 11 are available only on the iPad.
Mac features.In general, the big news here is the iPad behaves much more like a Mac.For instance, you can drag-and-drop pictures and text between apps.The Dock is now extensible, available from within any app, and perfect for switching apps, just as on the Mac.Theres a new Mission Control-type feature, too, for seeing whats in your open appseven when youve split the screen between pairs of apps.The iPad now offers a Mission Control, showing whats going on in all your apps.MorePunctuation and letters on the same keyboard.Now, punctuation symbols appear above the letter keys.You flick down on the key to type the punctuationno more having to switch keyboard layouts.No more switching keyboards just to type punctuation.MoreA file manager! A new app called Files lets you work with (and search) files and folders, just as you do on the Mac or PC.It even shows your Box and Dropbox files.A Findera desktopcomes at last to iOS.MorePencil features.If youve bought Apples stylus, you can tap the Lock screen and start taking notes right away.You can mark up PDFs just by starting to write on them.A new feature lets you snap a document with the iPads camera, which straightens and crops the page so that you can sign it or annotate it.Handwriting in the Notes app is now searchable, and you can make drawings within any Note or
emailE-mail (electronic mail) is the exchange of computer-stored messages by telecommunication
message.The iPad grows ever closer to becoming a legal pad.MorePlaying Catch-Up
With every new OS from Google(google.com) (GOOG, GOOGL), Microsoft(microsoft.com) (MSFT), or Apple, theres a set of us, too! features that keeps them all competitive.This time around, its:
Lane guidance.When youre driving, Maps now lets you know which lane to be in for your next turn, just as
GoogleTechnology company
Maps does.Lane guidance.At last.MoreIndoor Maps.The Maps app can now show you floor plans for a few malls and 30 airports, just as
GoogleTechnology company
Maps does.Siri translates languages.Siri is trying to catch up to Google Assistant.For instance, it can now translate phrases from English into Chinese, French, German, Italian, or Spanish.For instance, you can say, How do you say Wheres the bathroom? in French?Siri understands followup questions.Siri now does better at understanding followup questions.(Who won the World Series in 1980? The Phillies.Who was their coach?)Person-to-Person payment within the Messages app.Now, you can send payments directly to your friends your share of the pizza bill, for==example right from within the Messages app, much as people do now with Venmo, PayPal, and their its ilk.(Of course, this works only if your friends have iPhones, too.) When money comes to you, it accrues to a new, virtual Apple Pay Cash Card; from there, you can send it to your bank, buy things with it, or send it on to other people.iCloud file sharing.At long last, you can share files youve stored on your iCloud Drive with other people, just as youve been able to do with Dropbox for years.Fixing Bad Design
Some of the changes repair the damage Apple made to itself in iOS 10.For example:
Redesigned apps drawer in Messages.All the stuff they added to Messages last year (stickers, apps, live drawing) cluttered up the design and wound up getting ignored by lots of people.The new design is cleaner.Redesigned Control Center.In iOS 10, Apple split up the iPhones quick-settings panel, called the Control Center, into two or three panels.You had to swipe sideways to find the control you wantedtaking care not to swipe sideways on one of the controls, thereby triggering it.Now its all on one screen again, although some of the buttons open up secondary screens of options.And its customizable! You can, for instance, add a Record voice memo button to it.The new, customizable, somewhat ugly Control Center.MoreRead MoreApp Store.The application store gets a big redesign.One chief fix is breaking out Games into its own tab, so that game and non-game bestseller lists are kept separate.behind nine years, the
App StoreAn app store (application store) is an online portal through which software programs are made available for procurement and download
gets a new look.More Coming this fall
There are also dozens of improvements to the features for overseas iPhones (China, Russia, India, for example).And many, many enhancements to features for the disabled (spoken captions for videos and pictures, for example).
So whats the overarching theme of the iOS 11 upgrade?
There isnt one.Its just a couple hundred little fine-tunings.All of them welcome and all of them aimed to keep you trapped within Apples growing ecosystem.
 
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