Apple's promise of better security and other highlights from WWDC 2018
Apple kickstarted its Worldwide Developers Conference 2018 with a keynote by Tim Cook. As far as keynotes go, this was a pretty uneventful one, and it won't be an exaggeration to say that it set the tone for what eventually turned out to be one of the dullest and uneventful WWDCs in Apple's history.
As expected, the event saw the tech giant refraining from making blockbuster announcements, and focus its efforts on announcing software that is secure and works as it should. And thankfully so. The past year has seen Apple make some serious errors that have hampered its position in the market. In a departure from routine, these high-profile blunders even forced the company to come down from its high horse and publicly apologise to its users for releasing bug-ridden software.
Having said that, WWDC 2018 still brought with it a long list of features and announcements that may not wow but will still define how millions of users use their Apple devices this year.
iOS 12: All about the performance
The latest operating system for Apple's mobile devices, iOS 12, will be available across all the devices that ran iOS 11 and as vice-president Craig Federighi explained, the focus with iOS 12 will be to improve performance, especially on the older devices.
Apple claims iOS 12 will help the iPhone 6 Plus launch applications up to 40 per cent faster, the keyboard up to 60 per cent faster and the camera app can open as much as 70 per cent faster compared to ioS 11. With the new operating system, Apple is also making a strong push for improving performance under heavy load.
Apple claims that iOS 12 will help its range of mobile devices deliver great performance and also help prolong battery life.
Push for augmented reality with ARKit 2.0
The operating system also focuses heavily on what many, in Silicon Valley, believe is the next big thing: Augmented Reality (AR). In its efforts to do so, Apple has created a new file system for AR called the UZDZ. The file system, the company claims, is lightweight and uses a compact single file and as such is optimised for sharing across applications, Safari, and even mail.
UZDZ will also be supported by applications such as Photoshop, and via Adobe's Creative Cloud, Apple is also bringing the editing feature to AR files.
Another interesting application that Apple has introduced to highlight ARKit 2.0's capabilities is the "Measure" app. The application, the company promises, can help easily measure the dimensions of real-world objects. Though nothing groundbreaking, this again is the kind of implementation of AR tech that will find many takers.
Further, ARKit 2.0 now also supports shared experiences, allowing multi-player gaming in augmented reality.
Digital wellness
With iOS 12, Apple is also pushing for greater balance between gadgets and healthy living. Core to its efforts here is the new digital health dashboard that the company hopes will help users curb smartphone overuse.
This new dashboard will help the operating system take note of user behaviour and generate a weekly report based on the user's device usage. The new digital wellness features now allow the user to see how much time they have spent on their phone or iPad, and even check how much time they have spent on individual applications. Users can now also set a timer for how long they want to use apps daily.
There are also new tweaks to the Do Not Disturb mode for when you’re going to bed. These tweaks will be of great help to users who have the habit of waking up in the middle of the night and finding themselves overwhelmed by excessive notifications.
There will also be a new morning wake-up screen that will also be extremely light on unnecessary notifications so you are “gently eased into your day.”
The crusade against unwanted notifications doesn't just end there. Siri, as Apple explained, will now even suggest to users the notifications that they can choose to turn off based on their usage patterns. Apple is also adding support for grouped notifications that will help clear your deck by arranging notifications by topic and thread.
Siri not smart enough
With Google Assistant and even Amazon's Alexa becoming smarter than ever, and the former being equipped with the capabilities to place calls and get appointments on a user's behalf, it was expected that Siri's code too would be updated to reflect some major blockbuster feature to help it deal with competition.
That hasn't happened yet. The only new capability worth noting is the Shortcut app that lets users add custom actions that can be executed by Siri by simply activating a shortcut. For example, users can ask Siri to start playing a particular radio station, turn on the AC at home, send a pre-written text message to certain contacts and start other tasks — all this by simply asking Siri to trigger the particular shortcut.
Though extremely handy, this feature is nothing in the league of what other voice-based smart assistants currently offer.
Privacy
In a year that's seen high-profile data leaks and the likes Facebook and Google mired in controversy, it was no surprise that Apple chose to show off some features that focus on improving data privacy.
With the new iteration of the iOS and MacOS, Apple is making its operating system the most secure place for browsing the internet. With the addition of new features, Apple claims that Facebook will now not be able to follow a user's digital footprint across third-party websites; the technique used to do this is more commonly known as Pixel tracking.
That's not all, Apple is also looking to end fingerprinting, a practice that allows companies to identify your device based on data like fonts, plugins and configurations on your computer. For this Apple will now limit the amount of configuration data devices share with websites, thus helping individual Macs blend in the crowd.
For long, Apple has touted its data privacy standards to be the strongest, and the addition of these features will only strengthen that claim.
Apart from this, Apple introduced some small but meaningful additions to the photos and other existing applications.
Facetime, Memoji and more
Apple’s video calling platform, Facetime, which is extremely popular with users, is also getting a revamp and is getting group video chat that will support up to 32 participants. Group FaceTime is also being integrated into Apple Messages to make it easier to transition from a group chat to a group video call.
Another popular feature, AR-based Animoji, is also getting significant upgrades. These 3D animated emojis, which were first announced alongside the iPhone X, are now Memojis which, simply put, are personalised animated emojis. Apple is also equipping the Animojis to track not just the user's facial expression, but also their tongue (yes!) to create some truly hilarious 3D emojis.
Mac Mojave
The tech giant also announced the latest version of the MacOS, the 10.14 — which it calls Mojave.
Much like the new iOS, the new MacOS, too, is not a major redesign, but still comes packing a number of interesting features.
In line with leaked screenshots, the new version of the MacOS brings with it a new dark theme that could be very appealing to a number of users.
There is also the desktop stacks feature which allows users to organise icons on the desktop into piles, rather than having them spread across the entire desktop.
Apart from this, MacOS' Finder app also gets some love with a new "Gallery" view mode.