Apple says the update will be available on all the same devices as the current iOS 11 release, and that the company is putting a particular focus on ensuring the update works smoothly on older devices such as the iPhone 6 family.
Shortcuts are essentially workflows. (And to anybody who used the iOS app Workflow, which Apple bought up last year, I mean that literally: the Shortcuts interface in many places looks like it’s been lifted directly from that app.)
But what Shortcuts empowers could in some cases be even more useful than letting third-party developers have access to a Siri API. Because Shortcuts puts Siri customization into the hands of users, with both positive and negative impacts.
An addition to Do Not Disturb is "Do Not Disturb During Bedtime," which will prevent barrages of overnight notifications creating distractions. Instead notifications will be muted until the morning, at which point people can tap their screen to see what they missed.
Notifications will also be grouped by app, topic, or thread, much as on Android. A swipe will open options to manage or clear items en masse. Another feature, "Instant Tuning," will let people press into a notification and choose to turn off alerts from a particular app or push them straight to the Notification Center without hitting the lockscreen.
Craig Federighi today announced ARKit 2 at WWDC 2018, which will include improved face tracking, realistic rendering, 3D object detection, persistent experiences, and shared experiences.
Apple is launching group FaceTime chats with iOS 12 that’ll be able to accommodate up to 32 participants. FaceTime will be integrated into Messages, so you can easily transition a group chat to a group video call. FaceTime will also feature filters and Animoji, as well as the company’s new Memoji.
While the description is rather vague, we’ve tested and confirmed that this allows up to two users to register their face with Face ID on iPhone X.
Now, you simply swipe up from the bottom and can immediately start closing apps – without the need for the pesky long-press.
This is similar to every other iPhone, where you simply double press the Home button and swipe up to close applications.
Starting in iOS 12 later this year, Apple’s CarPlay will no longer force you to use Apple Maps to get directions. Instead, you’ll be able to use navigation from any third-party app, like Google Maps, Waze, or whatever your mapping app of choice is.
There’s also [...] a new Apple Books store that appears to be inspired by the App Store redesign from iOS 11, with the same highlighted content for books and audiobooks that Apple’s already been offering with apps.
In iOS 12, gestures on the iPad will be updated to better match the iPhone X. You will be able to return home by swiping anywhere on the App Dock. And the Control Center will be accessed by swiping down from the top-right corner.
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When those SMS messages arrive with a one-time code, the code will automatically fill in the text field where it goes. So you won't have to memorize the code and enter it manually. iOS will do it for you.
The feature essentially forces users to unlock the iPhone with the passcode when connecting it to a USB accessory everytime the phone has not been unlocked for one hour. That includes the iPhone unlocking devices that companies such as Cellebrite or GrayShift make, which police departments all over the world use to hack into seized iPhones.
“That pretty much kills [GrayShift’s product] GrayKey and Cellebrite,” Ryan Duff, a security researcher who has studied iPhone and is Director of Cyber Solutions at Point3 Security, told Motherboard in an online chat. “If it actually does what it says and doesn't let ANY type of data connection happen until it's unlocked, then yes. You can’t exploit the device if you can't communicate with it.”
The next version of Safari will explicitly prompt you when a website tries to access your cookies or other data, and let you decide whether to allow it, a welcome step toward explicit choices about online tracking. Safari will also make a dent in defeating the so-called "fingerprinting" approach, in which marketers use publicly accessible information about devices—like the way they're configured, the fonts they have installed, and the plug-ins they run—to assign them an individual, trackable ID. In macOS Mojave and iOS 12, Safari will scrub much of this data, exposing only generic configuration information and default fonts. The browser will also stop supporting legacy plugins. The idea is to make your Mac indistinguishable from millions of others, muting the fingerprinting effect.
[...]
Though the new privacy mechanisms will potentially hinder all sorts of tracking, Apple specifically called out Facebook's massive ad network—which is known for employing an array of user tracking strategies, like its ubiquitous "Like" buttons. In one of the slides depicting an example of how Intelligent Tracking Prevention 2.0 will work, Apple's Federighi showed a Safari page open to Facebook with a popup notification reading "Do you want to allow 'facebook.com' to use cookies and website data while browsing 'blabbermouth.net'? This will allow 'facebook.com' to track your activity."
The update takes several cues from the iOS App Store, implementing lessons learned from that store’s successful update in iOS 11.
At WWDC, Apple announced that a brand new Mac App store would be launching later this fall. They also announced that apps will also be coming to the Mac App Store such as Microsoft Office 365, Adobe Lightroom CC, Barebones BB Edit, Transmit, and also new games. Transmit and BB Edit are notable because they used to be in the Mac App Store.
Apple has already been testing its new frameworks, with the recently revealed News, Stocks, Voice Memos, and Home apps that Apple introduced with Mojave all actually being ported versions of the iOS apps. According to Apple, the cross-platform porting is made possible by integrating elements of iOS’s UIKit frameworks directly into macOS, alongside the existing AppKit framework already used on desktop.
Now, with Mojave, HomeKit customers should be able to enlist their Mac as a way of managing their smart home devices.
The change will likely be warmly received by Mac owners, as it means they will no longer have to open the Mac App Store to check for and download system updates, which has been criticized for being a slow and clunky affair in current versions of macOS.
Apple has added support for yoga and hiking in the Workout app as well as a method to automatically detect what workout you are doing without you having to initiate it.
When you send a Walkie-Talkie message to a contact, what you’re actually doing is initiating a specialized FaceTime Audio call. It connects, and then you’re just talking to each other, but instead of a real-time phone call you’re pressing a button to send messages back and forth.
If both stop sending messages, it eventually ends the “call.” Right now that timeout is about five minutes, but Apple is still tweaking the timing.
The $49 Apple Watch band comes in 38 mm and 42 mm variants and sports a bright rainbow design on a white background.
tvOS 12 will bring support for Dolby Atmos audio and work with the Dolby Atmos soundboard, the only sound bar to support both Dolby Atmos and Vision.
On Monday afternoon, June 4, Apple handed out its annual Apple Design Awards on stage at its Worldwide Developer Conference in San Jose. The awards, now in their 21st year, are meant to highlight those apps that set a benchmark for high-quality design, taking into consideration things like the user interface and user experience, originality, and other factors that represent those types of applications that Apple would like to see more of in its App Store.
Apple’s Review Guidelines previously only laid out the process for free trials as they related to subscription applications. Now, however, the company is condoning free trials for all types of applications.
Non-Mac-App-Store apps will be notarized by Apple and offer better protections for the end user. This will help block malware before it gets distributed and help revoke app versions that are compromised. Apple was very clear that this is not app review, it's simply used to analyze apps for security purposes. Although this isn't currently a factor, future versions of macOS will require all apps to be notarized before they can be installed.
The new rules say that so-called remote mirroring apps, which beam the screen of a desktop computer to an iPhone, can allow purchases outside Apple’s control as long as the transactions are processed on the desktop device and not the iPhone.
The move is significant because it shows Apple protecting its practice of taking between 15 percent and 30 percent of the purchase price of software bought in the App Store.
Aimed at health researchers along with developers, the Health Records API should spur all-new apps that will give end-users even better experiences with various doctors and hospitals.
Apple says this change will now make it possible for patients to “share medical records from multiple hospitals with their favorite trusted apps, helping them improve their overall health.”
Core ML 2 is 30 percent faster, Apple says, thanks to using a technique called batch prediction. Furthermore, Apple shared the toolkit will let developers shrink the size of trained machine learning models by up to 75 percent with quantization.
The Universal Scene Description file, or USDZ for short, will offer the ability to display 3D rendered AR objects within a single file, optimized for sharing.
It is just a matter of time until older apps using these technologies will no longer function — but they will still work for at least a year without updates. Apple also says that active development has ceased on OpenGL and OpenCL on the Mac, and the API's will only get "minor changes" going forward.
"The things mentioned in the Times article about relationship status, all these kinds of things, is so foreign to us, and not data that we have ever received at all or requested — zero," Cook told NPR's Steve Inskeep and Laura Sydell during the company's annual conference for developers in San Jose, Calif.
"What we did was we integrated the ability to share in the operating system, make it simple to share, a photo and that sort of thing," Cook added. "So it's a convenience for the user. We weren't in the data business. We've never been in the data business."
Apple argues that it has always been one of the more high-minded of the big tech companies, so it shouldn’t be lumped in with outfits like Facebook.
But that argument has always been a little complicated. Apple benefits from our obsession with social software; people buy its powerful phones to use Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat and WhatsApp. Google pays Apple billions of dollars a year for the privilege of being the iPhone’s default search engine.
Just delivering on the promise of better performance on the same devices will be enough to entice me to upgrade all my iOS devices. Siri shortcuts is the icing on the cake.
By the way, the shortcuts will also be available to people like me who don't want to speak to Siri, right? I am imaging buttons in the widget view that will trigger shortcuts, just like buttons in the widget view today that will trigger workflows?
I don't have 31 friends that I can facetime simultaneously.
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As they say, you put your iTunes in my store, and I'll put my Office 365 in yours.
It seems to me, at least, the rebooted Mac App Store is promising, especially given that Apple is able to entice new and returning apps into the store. But, it also seems to me, it's a do-or-die for the macOS team. Developers and customers are willing to give the Mac App Store a second chance for being relevant, but that may not be a third.
Oh, and yet another macOS/Mac OS X name that I have no idea how to pronounce.
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It’s not called Xcode X?
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Thanks for reading.