iOS

Some interesting Screen Time hacks here. Here’s just a taste:

His son, a seven-year-old, deletes the games he’s been locked out of and then re-downloads it from the App Store. With iCloud, he doesn’t miss a beat, as all of his games are stored on a server waiting for him to resume play. Apple, unfortunately, overlooked this clever hack entirely. Once the game is re-downloaded, it starts the clock over again for the day.

Kids!

Jeff Carlson, writing for TidBITS, digs into what’s changed with the iOS 12 version of Photos.

At the core is that new For You tab. Good stuff.

Fun story, in which someone who runs a popular guitar chord and scale calculator website finds themselves part of Apple’s iOS Shortcuts rollout. A pleasant surprise, and a terrific example of the power of Shortcuts.

Kirk McElhearn:

One of the more interesting apps in iOS 12, which Apple released this week, is Measure. It uses augmented reality (AR) to calculate the length, width, and area of items. This is a complex process, which involves having the iPhone or iPad calculate the distance between its camera and the object your are measuring in order to determine the object’s dimensions.

The problem is that it is not very accurate.

Kirk and I went back and forth on Twitter about the Measure app yesterday. I love the concept, but as Kirk (and a number of other folks) weighed in, it became clear that the app was not accurate, at least for us.

Read Kirk’s post, check out his examples. Better yet, grab yourself a tape measure and try the app out for yourself.

My hope is that Apple figures this one out quickly. Measure could be an incredibly handy app to have. But if it doesn’t work, it has the potential to cause problems, especially if you are making decisions based on its measurements.

iOS 12 is coming later today. If you haven’t already, follow the advice in Dave Smith’s headline and back up your device before you dive into the new shiny.

One comment on the iCloud backup process. I believe the proper path is:

• Launch Settings
• Tap your name
• Scroll down and tap your phone name (for me, the first line in the 3rd section)
• Tap iCloud Backup
• Tap Back Up Now

Enjoy iOS 12.

Marc Settle, writing for the BBC on mobile journalism, digs into iOS 12. Good read. A couple of highlights:

iOS 12 will run on every device that currently runs iOS 11. This will therefore include iPhone 5s from way back in 2013 – now something of a dinosaur.

This also means that for the second year running, the oldest iPhone is not being left behind, bereft and unable to download the latest version of the operating system.

And:

But the fact that iOS 12 can actually run on such an old phone is part of the reason why I write these reviews when I don’t produce something similar for Android despite it being the world’s most used operating system – on about three and a half billion smartphones globally, compared to 800 million or so for iOS. The reason is that Androids aren’t uniformly updated in the way iPhones are. Depending on the make and model, you might get the latest version of Android immediately, eventually, or quite possibly never – even on relatively new devices.

And:

It’s taken me a long time to understand what I can do with Shortcuts and each time I think I’ve got it, I find new aspects to get my head around. But once users have got the hang of it, the likely result will be that they will be spending less time using their phones as numerous consecutive taps on the screen will be replaced by – at best – just one and possibly even none, given that Siri can be used to get things going.

And:

You could set a Shortcut up so that it gets hold of your most recent screenshot from the camera roll, opens it with tools for annotating and then add the annotated image to an email which you can then send before, finally, the screenshot is presented to you to be deleted.

And:

Another [Shortcut] could work like this: the system looks up on a map where you are, it then asks Apple Maps for directions and estimated driving times, it then creates an iMessage to a specific contact, based on your calendar, showing both where you are now and how long it should take to get to your destination. And it sends it.

Terrific read. These nuggets were just the tip of the iceberg.

Gruber is on a roll. In this Daring Fireball post, he digs into the iOS “Shake to Undo” gesture, an inelegant solution to a reasonably common and complex problem.

My favorite bit:

Here’s an anecdote I heard years ago about how Shake to Undo came to be. Scott Forstall charged the iOS team with devising an interface for Undo — everyone knew the iPhone should have it,1 but no one had a good idea how to do it. One engineer joked that they could just make you shake the iPhone to invoke it. Forstall said he loved the idea, and what was proposed as a joke has been with us as the Undo interface ever since.

My biggest issues with Shake to Undo are that it breaks flow (you have to stop whatever you were doing and shake your device like a maniac) and requires a physical action that is difficult for many people. I’d love to see this addressed as part of the architecture, as Undo is for the Mac.

This started with Twitter user Paul Alvarado asking @AppleSupport why Siri could not do something basic and useful like turn on the flashlight.

@AppleSupport Why can’t I ask Siri to turn my iPhone flashlight on or off? Seriously, it’s inexplicably inane limitations like this that make me deeply despise Siri. cc @tim_cook @pschiller @cue

As you can see, Paul cc’ed Tim, Phil, and Eddy.

When I read this, I recognized the usefulness of the request. Asking Siri to turn on the flashlight would be an incredibly useful feature, especially when you are on your hands and knees trying to look under the couch for the only battery in the house that of course rolled under there.

So here’s the kicker, Phil Schiller’s response to the tweet:

https://twitter.com/pschiller/status/1032095824170250240

Yup. In iOS 12, Siri can turn on the flashlight. If you’ve got the beta, try it for yourself. And props to Paul Alvarado for asking the question and for his appreciative response to Phil.

Nice work from Will Hains.

Sarah Perez, TechCrunch:

With the upcoming release of iOS 12, Apple is introducing a new app called Shortcuts that will allow users to build custom voice commands for Siri that can be used to kick off a variety of actions in apps. While some apps will directly prompt users to add a Shortcut to Siri, the new Shortcuts app will offer more shortcut suggestions to try, plus the ability to create your own shortcuts and workflows. Now, there’s a new resource for shortcut fans, too – Sharecuts, a directory of shortcuts created and shared by the community.

The site is still very much in the early stages.

Shortcuts is an incredibly important addition to iOS, an evolution to the app architecture that gives you finer grained access to an apps functionality.

Sharecuts is a playground that lets you download useful Shortcuts built by the community but, in my mind, Sharecuts brings something more important to the table:

If you have the Shortcuts app installed, jump to the Sharecuts page (and bookmark it for later reference) and tap one of the Shortcuts. When it opens, you’ll be able to see, and change, all the elements that make up that Shortcut. To me, this is an invaluable learning tool, a wonderful community resource.

Tim Hardwick, MacRumors:

As part of its digital health initiative in iOS 12, Apple has introduced some improvements to the way app notifications can be managed, enabling users to more easily reduce the number of daily distractions their iPhone or iPad throws their way.

One of these new features is called Instant Tuning, which allows you to quickly adjust the future behavior of app notifications whenever they appear in the Lock Screen or the Notifications Center. Here’s how to make the most of it.

This is a short read, talks through an interface that is relatively hidden, but useful and easy to get to. Good stuff.

Leif Johnson, Macworld:

Many past iOS releases let you look up definitions with a built-in dictionary with “Look Up,” but with iOS 12, we get access to a built-in thesaurus as well. As a writer, I find this a godsend. My beloved Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus was one of the casualties of iOS’s transition to 64-bit apps, but now it’s part of the operating system itself.

Even better, the feature works with most iOS word processing apps. The only catch is that you’ll have to turn it on. Here’s how to do it.

Not sure why, but my Thesaurus was enabled already. It might be something I did long ago to add the Thesaurus to my list of iOS dictionaries.

No matter, Leif does a nice walkthrough and if you write on a regular basis, a Thesaurus is a handy thing to have.

Federico Viticci lays out his favorite new iOS 12 shiny. All worth reading, but my favorite:

Previously available only on 3D Touch-enabled iPhones or with a two-finger swipe on the iPad’s keyboard, trackpad mode can be activated in a much easier way in iOS 12: just tap & hold on the space bar until the keyboard becomes a trackpad. This mode (seemingly inspired by Gboard and other custom keyboards with a similar implementation) gives owners of iPhones without 3D Touch a way to more precisely control the cursor in text fields.

This is one of my favorite new features and, to me, feels much more responsive, the cursor much easier to control.

This is a long read, with an accompanying long video. I truly don’t know how Rene Ritchie finds the time to do all this, but he does, and it’s good stuff.

I’d start off by scrolling down, just a bit, to the section titled iOS 12 In Brief. Rene breaks down his review into 12 (cause iOS 12, get it?) key takeaways. Read those, and you’ll have a good sense of what’s coming, can cherry pick your way through the rest of the piece, dive deep into the areas that interest you.

Nice job, Rene.