While it's nice to be able to launch my iPhone from my Mac, I was surprised at what ended up being the most useful aspect of this feature: Notifications. Once you've connected your phone, its alerts pop up in your Mac's Notification Center, and it takes just one click to launch the app it's tied to. That's useful for alerts from Instagram, DoorDash and other popular apps that have no real Mac options, aside from launching their websites in a browser.
This latest version of the app adds album booklets for thousands of albums. Album booklets offer multi-language liner notes, composer biographies, information about the orchestra, conductors, and soloists, plus where relevant, sung texts and opera libretti, enriching listeners' understanding of the music.
Apple has also added separate Control Center connectivity controls for Wi-Fi and VPN connectivity. In prior versions of iOS 18, these controls were baked into an all-in-one connectivity button, but now they can be added to the Control Center.
Now, you can switch between the rear-facing iPhone 16 cameras and the front-facing selfie camera using Camera Control.
4GB will be the storage required to install and use Apple Intelligence features. This is on top of the storage required to install the iOS 18.1 update itself.
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The footnote at the end of Apple’s documentation notes: “Storage requirements for on-device Apple Intelligence models will increase as more features roll out.”
To keep this constructive, I’ll reiterate and add to my suggestion that Apple should be smarter about asking the user to continue granting permissions for various actions. First, a “Continue to Allow” prompt could appear a small but random number of days after an app was initially granted screen recording permissions. That would cause the user to think about the permissions while the app installation was still fresh and allow them to revoke permissions or delete the app if it was no longer needed. In the hypothetical scenario where a malicious recording app has been installed by a domestic abuser with admin access, a randomly scheduled second prompt would be harder to conceal or intercept.
I don't mean to suggest everyone is like me and I can get behind the idea that some people do need to be protected against apps getting this permission without their knowledge, but I am suggesting the current solution is obnoxious and is bad enough for me that I'm not upgrading for the time being.
With the feature turned on, the iPhone's Taptic Engine will tap and vibrate to match the audio of a song playing in Apple Music, Apple Music Classical, and now Shazam, as long as the device is connected to a Wi-Fi or cellular network.
With Obscura’s support for Camera Control, you can launch the app from anywhere as well as control zoom and exposure. There’s also support for adjusting focus, filters, and formats with the Camera Control in Obscura.
Silvio Rizzi, the developer who built the popular RSS app Reeder, wants to cater to the audience that wants to get away from the pressure of unread count with the redesign of the app. Reeder’s new avatar is more about being compatible with more sources like YouTube channels, Mastodon and Bluesky feeds, Reddit channels, podcasts, and comic strips.
I haven't use iPhone mirroring on my Mac for enough time yet, but I think I will probably soon agree that the tight integration of notifications between iPhone and macOS is a major strength of this new feature.
However, there is one thing that may well be bothersome for me: the iPhone mirroring app behaves just differently enough than the iPhone simulation app in Xcode that I have to occasionally remind myself which app I am in.
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Thanks for reading.