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The Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) which took place last week on June 5-9 showed some of the company’s latest updates on both software and hardware. Their new Homepod, which is targeted to rival other assistants such as Google Home and Amazon Echo was unveiled, along with a new lineup of Macbook pros fitted with a new Kaby lake processor and there was also a teaser of the new iMac pro, which is a very powerful workstation computer meant for professionals and a new iPad with a brand new Apple Pencil, which will be even faster and better than before. Although no word of a new iPhone was officially announced, Apple did announce a new operating system for iPad and iPhones, called iOS 11. It is not officially released to the public, but for those who have a developer account, you can get the beta version for iOS 11 now and I gotta say, they’ve made some major improvements in the new iOS.
For the iPhone, the first thing which you will notice is just how clean everything looks! I mean this is obviously expected, but when you compare it to the old iOS, the new one looks a lot more polished. Small details like the fact that the icons and the way the dock rearranges itself looks way better than before.
As you pull up the control center, you will immediately notice that it looks completely different and even though it looks like it might take time to get used to it, after using it for a few minutes, you will quickly get used to using the new layout and it feels a lot more intuitive and the best part is that the control center can now be customised by adding your own apps! I honestly didn’t expect this feature, but being an android fanboy and having all the possibilities of customisation according to your style, it feels great to know that Apple has embraced this upto a certain degree and has given the users the ability to customise. There is also a new button to quickly start screen recording as well, which is a nice touch. Another great feature is the new screenshot system, if you take a screenshot, a small thumbnail of the image will now appear on the bottom left side of the screen and you can tap that to bring it up and add custom markups or doodles before sharing it. This is awesome because it really is a pain having to go to another app just to add annotations. And speaking of annotations, the new notes app now supports tables, along with a ton of other features which includes the ability to change the background. The App store also got an upgrade and it now has a section called “Today”, where the latest apps will be highlighted and Games also have their own section now, finally!
There are a lot of new features on iOS 11 for the iPhone, but the one place where Apple really shined was with iOS 11 for iPad. The biggest and the most awesome feature would be what Tim Cook called a “drag fest”, meaning you can now multitask a lot faster. When you have two windows open side by side on the iPad, you can simply tap and drag contents from one window to another. For example, if you are writing an email and have a browser window open on the side, you can simply tap and select hyperlinks from the browser and drag it into the email and it will automatically create the link on your email. The same thing can be done with photos, gone are the days when you have to go to attachments and browse for a photo or document, you can simply drag it from another window. This single feature makes the iPad function more like a regular computer and it is certainly looking like it might replace a laptop in the future. There is also a new file manager both for the iPad and the iPhone and this is a feature which has been requested time and time again by everyone for many years so its good to see it in the new iOS. The dock on the iPad also got revamped and now you can place a ton of apps which you use frequently, much like the dock on Mac OS and it works like that too, because you can now open the dock from anywhere on the screen simply by swiping up from the bottom and if you keep swiping upwards, the multitask window and control center will appear, giving you access to all the open apps along with the same type of control center as the iPhone on the right side. The best bit is that if you have docked several windows side by side, it will not disappear even if you go to the home screen or the control center and you can easily resume your work at any time. Another great feature for the new iOS would be the selection system. if you have to select multiple files, you simply tap on the first one with one finger and then use another finger to simply tap on the rest of the files which you want to select. This feels a lot more natural, compared to the old style, where you had to tick mark each file.
There are a lot of awesome features for the new iOS and it’s like Apple finally took a step forward in the tech world this time, because let’s face it, for the past few years, the only thing they did was to make their phones and other devices slimmer. Sure, they still need to work on Siri to make it as good as Google Assistant, but seeing the progress they made this time in the developer conference, Apple fans can finally hold their head up high and say that their new operating system just got beefed up.