iOS 12 doesn’t really have any huge new standout features. It’s more a collection of really solid improvements to iOS 11. It sounds odd to say that my favorite new feature is Do Not Disturb during Bedtime, but it’s made a big difference in how I use my iPhone.
Likewise with today’s Pro Tip. iOS markup for screenshots, PDFs and Photos was already good, but new options for the pen tools make it great.
Even if you never make a voice memo, you might be interested in Apple’s updated Voice Memos app. Powerful new features in iOS 12 make it much more than just a way to record voice snippets.
In fact, in iOS 12, Voice Memos morphs into a full-fledged audio recorder and audio editing app. As such, it’s useful for people recording interviews, and for musicians working on ideas. Let’s take a look around.
In iOS 11 and earlier, importing photos from a camera to your iPad photo library was always a bit clunky. You plugged the SD card in using the Lightning SD card reader, or hooked up the camera to a USB adapter, and then the Photos import took over your entire screen.
Also, all the images you imported wound up dumped right into your main photo library, leaving you to manually select them later if you wanted to add them to albums.
In iOS 12, Apple improved all of this. Let’s take a look at the great new photo import features in iOS 12.
iOS 12’s best new feature may be Do Not Disturb at Bedtime. That sounds boring, but ask anyone who has been using it and they’ll tell you that it rocks. Apart from being active overnight, the main difference between regular Do Not Disturb and the new “at Bedtime” flavor is that all notifications are hidden from the lock screen until you deliberately swipe up on the screen to reveal them.
Regular Do Not Disturb suppresses audio and vibrating alerts, but the notifications still appear on the lock screen. You’ll see them any time you pick up your iPhone or unlock your iPad. This can make the difference between enjoying your hooky afternoon at the beach in peace or worrying the whole time because you accidentally saw that Slack message from your boss.
Wouldn’t it be great if you could take the regular Do Not Disturb and make it hide your alerts all day long? The good news is that you totally can.
“Instant Tuning” is the rather odd name that Apple gave an excellent new iOS 12 feature. You know how some apps on your iPhone keep popping up notifications you never want or need? And you keep telling yourself that you will dig into the Settings app and switch them off? Only you never, ever get around to this annoying busywork? Instant Tuning is for you.
Now, when a notification comes in, you can access the notifications settings for that app right there in the notification itself. This is huge, and makes culling your notifications way easier. Which in turn makes your most important notifications, like text messages or that sweet eBay auction you’re following, stand out more.
The new iOS 12 Battery information section brings a massive improvement over the previous version. Whereas before you could see which apps used how much battery, and for how long, now you can see the charts that look like the Tim Cook section of an Apple Keynote. You can see your battery use in incredible detail, broken down by such categories as Screen On Usage and Screen Off Usage.
But that’s not all. You can see how fast the battery ran down, how the levels were at any time during the last 24 hours, and also a longer-term overview that shows your usage over time.
It’s so detailed that it can be a bit intimidating, so today we’ll take a look at how to read those charts, and how to get the best out of them.
iOS 12 was clearly designed for an iPad where Face ID replaces the Home button. Apple has revamped the tablet’s gestures for iOS 12, bringing us an easy way to return to the Home screen, and an iPhone X-style gesture to access the Control Center.
If you’re a long-time iPad users, these changes will seem a little jarring at first. You’ll soon get used to them, though, and even learn to love them. The new Control Center gesture, in fact, is a lot better than the old one.
Shortcuts is Apple’s new automation app for iOS 12. It integrates with Siri and lets you build all kinds of amazing automated workflows, from shutting your house down when you go to sleep, to downloading videos from YouTube and saving the them to iCloud.
Shortcuts is really just the new name for Workflow, an iOS automation app that Apple bought a year or so back. Let’s take a look at what Apple has put in Shortcuts.
iOS 12 adds a great new feature in the Photos app. Now, when you share a photo, you can choose to copy a link to that photo, and share that instead. This is a lot like sharing a file from Dropbox. You can even copy a link to a whole slew of files and share them by sending a single URL.
Shared photos are stored in iCloud, and the link is accessible to anyone that has it, for up to a month. Let’s see how it works.
Photos already has a pretty decent search function on iOS 11. Thanks to Apple’s machine-learning tech, and AI categorization, you can search for thousands of “scenes.” These include the places you took the photo, but also anything from abacus to zucchini, people in the images, and times the images were taken.
This has gotten even better in iOS 12. You can still search on many thousands of categories and keywords, but now you can combine searches. For instance, you could search for several different people, and see photos only containing them all. OR you can combine search terms like Christmas, Food, and 2015, for instance. Let’s take a look.
