Hey guys
whatsup, As we all know that IOS 14 is here it was just revealed at WWDC and
i've had this on my Iphone for about 3 weeks now and after using it for that
time there's actually a lot here both big and small so this is the first look
and hands-on at the features and what to expect for this OS that will
eventually hit all your Iphone’s in fall and September around then when it
comes out.
I just want
to say the memes were pretty strong about Apple taking a lot of old features
from Android in this release. I made the jokes, we all made the jokes but aside
from all that I think we should ask ourselves why now like why are we just
getting widgets instead of like eight years ago when they could have added
widgets to IOS and after actually using it I’m feeling like the answer is they
wanted to get a couple extra things right to put on top of it and it's not like
it's better than the Android version but there's some stuff that they do their
own way you'll see what I mean.
So first up
is the new home screen we've all heard about it we've all seen the widgets by
now but let's just go over everything first of all there's the new app library
which is a space all the way at the end to the right of all the home screens
that's literally just a big list of all your apps but automatically organized.
This is basically the first time IOS has had like an app drawer where everything's in one place. (Uh it took a decade but it's finally here) and inside of that there's just a straight up alphabetical searchable list if you're into that too now you can still pull down to search from anywhere on the home screens if you want to find apps that way and actually adds more results from the web and from SIRI but hopefully you'll need to use this a lot less and then of course finally widgets now it's still not quite Android level where you can put them like anywhere you want and change them to whatever size you want it's not the same thing like you can't put a widget in the middle of a home screen it has to be either on the left side or the right side which is kind of a bummer and you can't put it alone on the right without anything to the left of it so it's still restricted in a very Iphone way as you can tell but at least you can long press hit that plus button and break out into all these new widgets and add them to any home screen with some degree of freedom
This is basically the first time IOS has had like an app drawer where everything's in one place. (Uh it took a decade but it's finally here) and inside of that there's just a straight up alphabetical searchable list if you're into that too now you can still pull down to search from anywhere on the home screens if you want to find apps that way and actually adds more results from the web and from SIRI but hopefully you'll need to use this a lot less and then of course finally widgets now it's still not quite Android level where you can put them like anywhere you want and change them to whatever size you want it's not the same thing like you can't put a widget in the middle of a home screen it has to be either on the left side or the right side which is kind of a bummer and you can't put it alone on the right without anything to the left of it so it's still restricted in a very Iphone way as you can tell but at least you can long press hit that plus button and break out into all these new widgets and add them to any home screen with some degree of freedom
You see
there's different sizes all the widgets here in IOS 14 off the bat are all
first party Apple apps and there's a nice variety with different sizes and
functionalities but we are expecting third-party apps to be coming as well and
that to me is exciting to finally be coming to the Iphone. So okay now Apple's
added the fundamentals of widgets are on the home screen so now on top of that
they've added a couple interesting little dynamic nuances and extra things you
can do with that.
First of
all there's a widget you can add called smart stack where once you add it, it's
basically a carousel of several common widgets and you can scroll through them
manually or have them change automatically based on predictions it's made for
you and while that's neat I didn't really think I would use this until i found
out you can edit smart stacks and remove unwanted or useless widgets from this
carousel but I think even cooler is the method of adding or creating your own
smart stacks you can do this anytime you want so if you want to create a stack
you can add two widgets on top of each other that are the same size so hold and
drag that second widget on top of the first widget drop it on top and it
becomes a scrollable stack and then you can continue to add more and then you
can edit to make it a smart stack or just keep it this way that is pretty nice
And then
another thing long overdue from IOS that you can now do because you have an app
drawer is hiding home screens. So let's say you have a couple apps that you don't
use that much as classic IOS a bunch of apps you don't use but you don't want
to delete them just in case you want to use them once in a while okay so
instead of putting them all in like a random folder that just sits at the end
of one of our home screens now that there's an app drawer in IOS you can just
hold down to edit click the dots at the bottom and then just uncheck to hide an
entire page. Boom, now you never have to see those apps taking up space on your
home screens again. you can now actually make a whole IOS home screen setup
with no apps and just one page of widgets if you wanted to. So overall this
home screen stuff is definitely the biggest change in IOS.
We have a
bunch of changes in this category that we'll call compact ui so in previous
versions of IOS there are plenty of things plenty of actions that just
unnecessarily take up the entire screen now they're all fixed so now when you
get a phone call or a facetime call for example it won't just dominate the
whole screen anymore it'll just give you another drop down notification from
which you can easily hide it and keep doing what you're doing it'll keep
ringing or you can accept or reject right away that's a good compact ui and
then once you're actually on a facetime you can actually swipe up go home and
do other things and the facetime continues doesn't pause your video it keeps
the camera up and working you can look something up grab a phone number
whatever you're going to do it doesn't have to pause and you can move around
that picture and picture as long as you're doing all that
And
Speaking of picture picture-in-picture it's just generally more widely
supported throughout the entire OS now so whether you're watching a movie in
Apple TV in that app or just any video in safari really and it's pretty
straightforward once a video is full screen just swipe up to go home and that
video will shrink down and keep playing in this little picture-in-picture
window and then you can play with the size of that window move it around to any
corner and just keep doing whatever you're doing behind that picture you can
even swipe it over to the side to get rid of the visual for a minute but the
audio keeps playing in the background and then you can bring it back whenever
you want keep going it really does feel more like true multitasking.
Lastly for
compact UI SIRI which in all previous versions of IOS used to always be this
full screen takeover now in IOS 14 is just a little animation here at the
bottom again they've they've sort of adjusted it but it's not perfect so you
can call up SIRI the same way long press the power button and it's this smaller
animation at the bottom of the screen you ask it a question it pops up an
answer at the top of the screen where it can but it doesn't let you interact
with anything underneath directly without exiting SIRI so while yes the
animation is smaller and it doesn't take up the whole screen anymore it still
doesn't quite feel as much like the true multitasking where if they let me
scroll an article underneath my SIRI answer nevertheless you can still see
what's underneath there if you need to reference it while you're talking to
SIRI then from there there are a lot of little things useful things but little
things .
I think to
categorize them we'll put them into two buckets straight from Android and uh
genuinely new stuff that Google should copy so straight from Android that stock
keyboard now finally has added emoji search so instead of typing a word and
hoping the right suggested emoji pops up now you can just search for any emoji
you want anytime which has revived the age-old question is this emoji prayer
hands or a high five Apple's keyboard does not service it when you search for
high five but Google's does Apple is team prayer hands Google is team high five
which team are you on
Also
there's a new stock translate app which is nice to see it only supports a
smaller number of languages looks like about a dozen right now but I expect to
see that list grow over time and it works great for quickly translating
conversations between two people and then finally default email and browser
apps will be able to be changed in IOS 14.
Finally now
it is it's just email and browser apps but you know those are the two that most
people most often want to set as a different default so i'm excited to get
chrome as my default browser and I am very excited to have something other than
the useless to me mail app as my default mail app then we also saw app clips
which is like little snips of apps that you can quickly temporarily use when
you don't have the whole app installed but need to use some of its
functionality a lot of good stuff there but then we'll move on to the super
unique features that I haven't seen some of this stuff wasn't even talked about
on stage but you know as people dig through the betas we found some of it and
it's good
I want to
start with some accessibility settings so in IOS 14 if you go into settings
accessibility touch and then back tap you can now map a double tap or triple
tap of the back of the phone to a shortcut so i've mapped double tapping the
back of my phone to open up SIRI so literally all I do is double tap the back
and after about half a second SIRI pops up and then I think I did triple tap to
take a screenshot and there it does it's a slight delay but it does work and
it's kind of neat to have an extra thing mapped to the back of the phone I kind
of wish opening the camera was one of the available shortcuts.
Whats
interesting in the new IOS update is that you can actually set a SIRI shortcut
to run on that double tap of the back of the phone and then you can set that
shortcut to point to any number of things so at this point I literally have the
shortcut set to open Google assistant on a double tap which is pretty hilarious
you could also have it open the camera or whatever else you really wanted to
okay back to the video and then while we're at it here's another really
interesting accessibility feature settings accessibility sound recognition this
will let you turn on notifications if the phone's microphones recognize a sound
that might be important. so it's meant for people hard of hearing but could
still be useful to anyone if it picks up a doorbell or a fire alarm or a faucet
running that you forgot to turn off that's pretty sweet.
There's
more memoji customizations they still don't quite look exactly like me but at
least you can add face coverings like masks another sign of the times along
with that hand washing detection from the Apple watch and then a privacy
feature anytime literally any time an app starts using the camera IOS shows a
little green light to let you know that something is accessing the camera and
anytime the microphone is accessed a little orange light and then in the
improved faster camera app when taking a night mode photo it gives you a
gyroscopic guide to help you keep the phone still to take a better handheld
picture another one is if you're facetiming and the AI detects that someone in
that group facetime call is using sign language it will move them up to the
most prominent biggest spot so everyone on the face time can see the sign
language and there's also a ton of other things on Apple's site from the pinned
conversations and messaging to cycling directions and EV navigation in maps but
clearly really most of the good stuff is in the details
Every
Iphone since Iphone 6s will get the new IOS 14 update but overall I think it's
looking pretty good I mean it's still it's not like a drastic ui overhaul it's
very clearly still an Iphone half the people who get this update will probably
never use most of these features but there's a lot of good ones baked in there
for the nerds like who want to dig in and actually use that stuff let me know
in the comments which one's your favorite or if you're an Android person which
one you'd like to see Google copy.