iOS 12 launch - page 2

You’ve long been able to take photos inside the Messages app on your iPhone, sending pictures directly into a conversations without saving them to your camera roll first. And you’ve also been able to grab photos from your library. But in iOS 12, both of these features are way better. Especially the camera. Not only does it ditch the stupid thumbnail-sized camera view, but you get access to some awesome new filters, and even AR stickers. Let’s take a look.

iOS 12 packs a whole host of significant improvements that Apple didn’t get a chance to showcase during its WWDC preview. One of those, according to one developer, is a greatly-enhanced Portrait mode for compatible iPhone models.

The image below highlights the impressive difference between a Portrait photo taken with iOS 11 and another taken with iOS 12.

Apple is making it easier for iPhone users in the United States to be located by the emergency services with iOS 12.

When the update rolls out to everyone this fall, users will be able to automatically and securely share their location data with 911 first responders to help reduce emergency response times, Apple confirmed today.

Do Not Disturb gets a few great additions in iOS 12. These new features are very simple. However, they will make a big difference in how we use our phones — and how we interact with other people. Let’s take a look.

Apple is giving the iPhone a more fluid UI with some tiny tweaks in iOS 12 designed to shave tenths of seconds off each interaction.

You may not even notice the changes once iOS 12 launches to the public, but in a session at WWDC last week, Apple revealed how you can now perform actions without waiting for UI animations to finish. It sounds like an insignificant update, but once you see it in action you’ll be swooning for iOS 12’s release.

Prepare to be wowed:

Apple fans that have been complaining for years that Siri is dumb might be a little creeped out by how much better the digital assistant is in iOS 12.

With the new Siri suggestions Apple introduced this week, your iPhone will now be able to prompt you about events you haven’t even told it about. One developer posted his experience of Siri learning about a lunch just through iMessage.

Prepare to be impressed:

It’s 2018, and yet Safari still wouldn’t show you website icons, aka favicons, in its tabs. But that has — finally — changed. In both iOS 12 and macOS Mojave, Safari can now display favicons. All you need to do is toggle one setting.

Who cares? Well, favicons make it much easier to identify the site you want among a whole mess of open tabs. You can simply look for a site’s colorful logo icon, instead of squinting at a few letters of truncated text when trying to find the right tab.

Maybe the most important new feature of iOS 12 is something that helps you to do less with your iPhone, not more.

If any other company had introduced Screen Time, the new system-wide toolset for limiting phone distractions, then it would (rightly) be dismissed as a gimmick, a sop to the increasing worries about phone addiction. But as is typical of Apple, Screen Time looks like it took a lot of work to get just right.

Screen Time may seem to be about combatting app addiction, and reducing the amount of time “wasted” on your iPhone. However, taken together with the new Do Not Disturb settings in iOS 12, it’s more about putting users back in control of their iPhones.

These are the devices that can run iOS 12 and macOS Mojave

There’s good news and bad news for fans of keeping old hardware running. While iOS 12 will run fine on any device that currently runs iOS 11 — and may even make older hardware run faster — macOS 10.14 Mojave is dropping support for older Macs.

Let’s take a look at which machines will work with iOS 12 and macOS 10.14.

The just-released beta of iOS 12 can be set to partially deactivate the Lightning port after an iPhone hasn’t been used for an hour. This is a clear attempt to make useless the unlocking tools employed by law enforcement.

Police across the country are purchasing a tool called GrayKey. When hooked to an iPhone’s Lightning  port, this swiftly enters thousands of passcodes until the correct one is reached. Deactivating the Lightning port would block its use.

Tim Cook finally got his way — the Stocks app will appear on iPad in iOS 12. And the app also gets a bunch of improvements, so that Stocks might no longer be the first app you hide away in a “junk” folder when you get a new iPhone.