Users
of Apple’s iPhone, iPad and iPod touch devices got their first look at
the company’s newest operating system, iOS 7, earlier today. Not only
has Apple given iOS an entirely new look and feel, courtesy of head
designer Jonathan Ive, but it has also revealed a revamped suite of core
apps like Photos, Camera, Calendar, Weather and others, added new
services like iTunes Radio and features like AirDrop, while also making
it less lucrative for would-be thieves to steal your iPhone, and much
more.
During this morning keynote’s, company execs
walked users through some of the biggest changes arriving in iOS 7, which launches in beta for iPhone developers today, with a larger public release expected this fall.
Here are some of the best new features and updates you can expect when iOS 7 ships later this year.
A More Modern Design
Let’s get this out of the way first: love it or hate it,
the biggest change is the one we knew was coming – skeuomorphic design is dead. The new operating system has been redesigned from head to toe in a flatter — but not a
totally
flat — design as some had feared. Instead, there’s a transparency
effect in place in many screens, and when you move the device in your
hand, iOS now tracks the motion, allowing you to see behind the icons.
This is great for background wallpapers, for example, as you’ll get to
see more of your favorite homescreen photo previously hidden behind the
apps.
Overall,
the look is cleaner and simpler in many ways — the ugly green felt is
gone from Game Center, for example. It is one of the most-hated apps in
terms of being representative of the older, “skeuomorphic” design, which
attempted to make apps familiar to users by coating them with elements
from the
real-world
(like leather stitching, felt or yellow-lined notepad paper). The
company took several digs at the old style in the process of introducing
the new, as well. To be sure, there was no “evolution” at play here —
this was murder.
iOS Gets A Back Button (Sort Of)
With an idea borrowed from several third-party iOS apps and
BB10
(if you can believe it), the new version of the operating system now
has a “back button” of sorts. Except it’s not a button really, it’s a
gesture. Unlike on Android, where devices offer a dedicated software or
hardware button for the function that means “go back to the previous
screen,” the iOS back function is there when you need it but doesn’t
clutter up the screen when you don’t.
Instead of a button, you
swipe in from the left side of the screen (bezel to screen) to invoke
the feature. It works in places you would expect, such as the Safari web
browser, as well as in apps like Mail, and elsewhere.
Upgraded Default Apps
Apple
has responded to the growing number of apps meant to serve as an
alternative to Apple’s default set (think Calendar, Weather, Mail,
Messages, etc.) with an overhaul of all its apps that ship with iOS
devices out of the box.
Many of these seems inspired by some of the more popular applications in its own App Store, too, if not directly built by third parties, as the new Yahoo-powered Weather app is. Though not identical to
the Yahoo Weather app in iTunes
(which is arguably one of the highest-rated weather apps of all time),
the new native Weather app shares a lot of the design elements, but
replaces Flickr photo backgrounds for those of weather animations like
rain or snow — also much like Android’s live weather widgets allow for
today.
The native calendar app, now clean and white (
and a lot like Sunrise), lets you swipe between days, turn to landscape to see a week in advance and zoom out to see your month or year.
Mail,
meanwhile, offers big, edge-to-edge photos when used for photo-sharing
and lets you take action on inbox messages with a swipe, which is a
feature that earlier earned third-party app Mailbox an exit to
Dropbox for around $100 million.
Safari
got a big revamp too, with fancy 3D-esque tab-switching behavior,
improved bookmarking, one-tap access to favorites, and even Twitter
integration which lets you see which links your Twitter friends are
reading and sharing.
The
camera, meanwhile, has been updated with built-in Instagram-like
filters, and the ability to swap between the different camera modes like
“panoramic” or the new “square” camera view.
Photos & iCloud Photo Sharing
Though
technically another default app update, the revamped Photos app
deserves a deeper look because photo-taking is one of the iPhone’s (and
all smartphones, really) most-used features. The Camera Roll itself has
now been improved,
organizing photos
into “Moments” based on location and time – again, a feature inspired
by the work of a number of third-party apps including Cluster,
Moment.me, Flock, Tracks, flayvr, and others.
These collections
will be auto-labeled with locations you visit. In the demo, that
included venues like the Golden Gate Bridge and the Palace of Fine Arts,
as well as your home and your kid’s elementary school, for example. But
as you zoom out to take a broader view, the locations merge together by
date, letting you zoom all the way out to the year view where you can
scroll and scrub through the photos, then tap to go into any one.
Built-in to this new experience is something called
Air Drop,
which is a new way to share photos with other iPhone users. (The poke
at Android users: “there’s no need to wander around the room bumping
your phone.”) Instead, photos and videos can be shared peer-to-peer over
Wi-Fi connections with nearby users on newer iOS devices; they can also
be shared via Facebook, Twitter, email, and into iCloud photo streams.
The
photo stream was one of iOS’s lesser understood features among
mainstream users, but the update makes it more accessible, allowing
multiple users to contribute both photos and video, as well as comments
to a shared stream.
iTunes Radio
Everyone had been calling it “iRadio” ahead of today’s announcement, but
the feature’s official debut
is worth noting even if the surprise was spoiled. As expected, iTunes
Radio is very much a Pandora-like experience built on top of the iTunes
music catalog and forged through new deals with the major record labels.
Like most streaming music apps on the market, you can play pre-loaded
stations by genre or create your own “artist radio” station, skipping
and favoriting songs to teach the service your own likes and interests.
What
Apple’s iTunes Radio does differently is that it also ties you back to
the iTunes store, allowing you to “wishlist” your favorites, and
purchase those tracks you want to hear on demand. The app is free and
ad-supported, but ads are removed for iTunes Match subscribers.
Siri Gets Smarter
There wasn’t as big a focus on Siri as is needed (
at least in the keynote demo),
but the feature has gotten new male and female voices, which can now
speak French and German with more languages coming “in time.” Notably,
the service can now control more of your device, including playing back
your voicemails, turning on or off things like Bluetooth, increasing or
decreasing screen brightness and more.
It has also now integrated
Twitter, Wikipedia and search results from Bing, so it can do things
like read you Wikipedia entries or pull up web results.
Anti-Theft Features
The
iPhone’s popularity and high resell value has led to it being one of
the most stolen devices, too, but Apple’s new security upgrade is meant
to make at least petty crime involving stolen
iOS devices
not worth criminals’ time and effort. Apple said that hundreds of
millions use “Find my iPhone,” but as we know, thieves simply turn off
devices and wipe them before re-selling them.
With a new “Activation Lock” setting, a thief won’t be able to reactivate an iPhone without hacking your
iCloud
user name and password, too. Although no security mechanism is
bullet-proof, this makes it just hard enough to deter casual criminals
or crimes of opportunity — like the phone that gets left behind at a
bar, maybe?
A Better Notification Center
The
notification center drop-down has also gotten a makeover, but
considering how often users check this screen it’s surprising it didn’t
get more show time this morning, when its new feature set was revealed.
That being said, the center now splits your notifications more
intelligently between top-level categories like “All,” “
Missed,” and “Today,” the latter giving you a day-at-a-glance view into your
To-Do’s, plus Stocks,
Calendars,
Weather and a small preview of Tomorrow at the bottom.
Easy Access Controls
A
new gesture — a swipe up from the bottom of the screen — will now
launch a “Control Center” interface which is like an easier-to-access
Settings area. The ability to quickly dive into your Settings is a
feature that Android phones have had forever, and iOS users have been
clamoring for. Here, you can quickly tap things like “Airplane Mode” or
access your Wi-Fi controls, for example, as well as a built-in
flashlight (hooray!) and media player controls.
Intelligent Multi-Tasking
Before,
the multi-tasking interface accessed by a double tap of the home button
brought up a small rack of app icons running in the background. Today,
it displays large windows showing the app’s interface in action instead.
More importantly, multi-tasking has gotten smarter without damaging
battery life, Apple claims.
Now
all
apps are able to run in the background, and iOS 7 learns from your
patterns of app usage which ones deserve a more regular update. For
example, an app you check often like Facebook will be updated more
regularly than one you check once or twice per day. In addition, the
apps update this information based on other factors, too, like whether
you’re in an area with good cell coverage or whether or not you tend to
respond to that app’s push notifications. All these things tie in to
train iOS 7 to learn which apps are most important to you.
…And More
There
are a number of new features which Apple didn’t have time to go through
today, including FaceTime and iMessage blocking, per-app VPN
capabilities for the enterprise, and more, but these are “icing on the
cake” type of features on top of those given special attention today. In
the weeks ahead, we’ll know more about some of these minor upgrades, as
developers begin their beta tests of the new operating system and other
details emerge.
Source
RapidPRotect-- A best family tracking mobile appRapidsoftsystems-- A software and Hardware development Caompany, USA
