Apple announced lots of exciting new features for the coming watchOS 5 (available this Fall).
I have to say, I was delighted by Walkie Talkie, the watch to watch communication mechanism. It appeals to the kid in me. Brought back memories of camping out and late night whispered walkie-talkie conversations, as well as road trips where we used walkie-talkies to communicate between cars. If you’ve never experienced walkie-talkies, this is not the same as making a phone call. It’s more instantaneous and, to me, more fun.
I also love the progress Apple made on the Siri watch face:
> Using machine learning, the updated Siri watch face on Apple Watch is an even better personal assistant. It now offers more predictive and proactive shortcuts throughout the day based on routines, locations and information such as heart rate after a workout, commute time with Maps at the appropriate time of day or sports scores for a favorite team. The Siri watch face will also show actionable content from favorite third-party apps such as Nike+ Run Club, Glow Baby and Mobike.
The ability to create your own Siri Shortcuts and tie them to a complication on your Apple Watch is no small thing. Not exactly sure how Automator, and then Workflow, fits in to Shortcuts, but I’m guessing this is a rebranding and that Shortcuts is the new name for all of this automation. Please ping me if you know the backstory/details.
As to the Apple Watch Pride band, check out the video embedded in this tweet (tap the tweet to see it):
So much richness in this keynote.
I really like the Pride face (which we all have on our watches now). It’s well designed and quite handsome.
FRS radios (the modern walkie-talkie) are quite popular for campers and hikers and the like.
I was pleasantly surprised by everything announced yesterday. Some stuff is nice to have, some is more than that but it felt substantial and useful. Yeah, I’m not going to use the Memojis… but I have a friend who for some reason hates being on camera on FaceTime calls and she loves the feature.
Shortcuts look like they could really fundamentally change how I use Siri – can’t wait to get my hands on that. And I was shocked that they are still supporting my old Mini 2 with iOS 12… and even perhaps making it a bit faster.
I’m confused. The Apple’s twitter above (embedded version) and when I clicked on Apple’s main twitter page – it stated that Apple hadn’t tweeted? How did that happened?
Apple seems to only use paid Tweets/Ads for it’s main @Apple account, so they will show up in timelines and can be linked to but don’t show up on their account page.