Apple's 7 Most
Immediately Useful New OS Features
On Monday at
its Worldwide Developers Conference,
Apple announced a truckload of new features for its four main operating
systems—macOS, iOS, watchOS, and tvOS. And some of those new features look like
bull's-eyes.
When Apple
demonstrates them onstage at a big press event, all the new OS
tricksall look dazzling. But when it comes time to download the
updates and start using them daily, only some of the new features prove truly
useful. This depends a lot on your own workflows and habits of course, but it's
safe to say that some features smooth out rough spots in the OS, remove steps
and clicks, or just do really cool stuff.
Assuming you use both an iPhone and a Mac,
these are the features you'll probably start using right away when macOS Sierra
and iOS 10 ship next fall.
Apple has been
trying to develop more and more "Continuity" features, which aim to
make the iPhone and the Mac work in concert. Universal Clipboard is among the
most useful of these yet. It lets you clip images, video, or text from within
the Safari browser on your iPhone, and paste
it into a document on your Mac, for instance. We consume
lots of different kinds of content on mobile throughout the day, but we still
often move to the Mac to do our more involved projects. So it makes sense to be
able to easily move useful content from mobile to the desktop. It works the
other way too; you can grab some content from your Mac and paste it to your
phone on your way out the door.
Apple made a
powerful move when it finally opened its Siri
voice-based personal assistant to third-party app developers. "Hey Siri,
call me an Uber" will now finally be possible when iOS 10 and macOS Sierra
arrive this fall. Apple has been working with a group of third-party developers
to develop Siri-enabled apps, but all developers will soon start building Siri
control into their apps, so the best uses of Siri in apps probably hasn't been
seen—or even thought of—yet. Such is the power of a strong developer
community—it's independent developers who usually build a platform's killer
apps.
Many (Apple)
devices, many files. Of course you want the file you need on the device you're
using right now. So the thinking goes that if we put our documents
in the cloud, we can access them from anywhere on any device. Yet somehow,
Apple's approach to cloud storage has seemed clunky in the past. It may have
just gotten better. The company made the very sensible move to leverage our old
friend, the desktop, as the central repository for our cloud files. So anything
you put in your desktop folder on one device, Apple says, can now be
automatically stored and updated in iCloud Drive, making it available on the
desktops of your other devices. Same thing is true with your Documents folder,
but it's on the desktop that most people (unless they're fastidious filers)
usually save stuff they want to keep.
Getting your voicemail on an iPhone is a
hassle, especially when you're really busy. Click phone app. Click voicemail.
Wait. Listen to message you don't want. Delete. Wait, listen, delete, wait. You
just want to know what the person who just called said when they left a new
message. Now Apple will transcribe the message for you so you don't have to
call voicemail at all. And, in another blessing, Apple is working with third
parties to make informed guesses about the origin of anonymous calls that come
in, so you can tell if it's a telemarketer or a robocall.
Siri is now five years old, and it's finally
coming to the Mac. The original focus of Siri was to provide an easier input
method for mobile device users. But, as it turns out, we have lots of things we
want to tell our Macs as well. Perhaps the most accessible use case is telling
Siri to go round up a certain type of content (files, photos, apps, music,
etc.) on your Mac. You'll be able to instruct Siri to go get all files with a
certain tag, for instance, or from a certain date range. If your search command
isn't specific enough, you'll be able to say something like "only the
files that Dave Johnson sent last week" to narrow down the results. This
form of nested conversation has been a major shortcoming in Siri, but Apple is
closing this gap in macOS Sierra.
For most of us,
online shopping is part of life. And so is fumbling with credit card
information on each transaction, or worrying about security when we let our
browser auto-fill the digits. It's been possible to use Apple Pay within some
apps since the platform's launch, but now Apple has integrated
its laudably secure payments platform into its
Safari browser—on the desktop and on mobile. So look for loads of online
retailers to add Apple Pay support to their checkout pages almost immediately.
In order to authenticate the payment on the desktop you'll have to use the
fingerprint reader on your iPhone, or double-click the side button on your
Apple Watch. After using Apple Pay within apps, and finding it easier than
using PayPal, I'm pretty sure many people will find the same to be true on the
web.
Apple has done an
impressive job of holding its own (versus Google) in the science of Computer
Vision. The term refers to the ability of a computer system to analyze,
understand, and act on the visual aspects of images. Like its competitor
Google, Apple has poured its know-how in this area into photo
management. The Photos app in both iOS 10 and macOS
Sierra can now run billions of computations on your photos to determine their
content. It then groups the images accordingly, making it possible to run
searches like "show all beach shots with the dog." Apple is also
catching up with Facebook by deploying facial recognition technology that
recognizes the faces of the people in your pictures, so that photos containing
specific people can be grouped and searched.
You'll note that I
picked no new
features in tvOS (Apple TV) or
watchOS (Apple Watch). That's only because
those features might matter to relatively smaller user groups—at least for now.
Also note that the features above were picked
based only on what we saw in the brief demos Monday at WWDC, and on the
somewhat more detailed descriptions at the Apple website. It's always possible
that a feature that looks extremely useful could come with enough unwanted side
effects to defeat their purpose. Some of them might not work as smoothly as
they did in the demo. The only way to really know the utility of the new
features is to try them out for yourself.
MARK
SULLIVAN
http://www.fastcompany.com/3060926/apples-7-most-immediately-useful-new-os-features
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