Looks like Apple is doubling down on at least two features that really seem like duds -- 3D Touch (which as far as I can tell nobody even knows exists), and Siri (which everyone raves about but nobody uses for anything).
I'd love to see UX improvements around minor inconveniences of the iOS experience:
- what the hell the volume button does in different contexts (sometimes it changes the ringer, other times the in-app volume, other times it just seems to go into a black hole)
- easier access to app settings for the app you're using (things like privacy settings and notification settings and revoking/re-allowing privileges (like camera access, etc.); maybe context-sensitive pull-up or pull-down things? I like that OS controls this, not the app, just need a better way to navigate to it.
- turn off buzzing and booping when I plug in a charger, and maybe some sort of wireless charging thing if the technology is where it needs to be yet
- stop showing album art on the lock screen (or make it optional)
- more uniformity on how lock screen notifications are acknowledged and dismissed -- sometimes there's an 'x' in the swipe-over, sometimes actions, sometimes just pressing the notification does something
The only feature that seems interesting to me is the voicemail transcription; previous services I've used for this have been pretty terrible, but hopefully this is better.
With Marshmallow's security model (of run-time grantable and revokable permissions) Android has become a lot more attractive to me -- my biggest pain point in using Android devices has always been the nightmare of looking at what an app wants in order to install.
Hold down the Option key and click on Airport or volume control to see what I mean in macOS. It gives you more information, and the information it provides is information you didn't necessarily need to have without holding down the Option key.
In airport, with the option key held, you see options to generate a wireless diagnostics report. Without the option key held, you can just switch networks.
In the volume control, with the option key held, you can see options to change speaker outputs and mic inputs. Without the option key held, you just see the volume controls.
On iOS, with regular touch on the camera you get the camera. 3D touch - you get the ability to specify the camera you want before loading the app.
3D Touch is for iOS power users.
Option key is for macOS power users.
> what the hell the volume button does in different contexts
If the app you're using right now has a handle for audio playback, it changes the speaker volume. If not, it changes the ringer volume. As far as I can tell, that's all, and in a half decade of using iPhones and iPods, I've never actually seen it misbehave.
Anecdotal, but I've found Siri to be quite helpful with Car Play, along with Google's equivalent (can't remember its marketing name) in Android Auto.
Just drive along, push to issue command, and "Siri navigate me to <address> in <city>" and boom. This might have existed in luxury cars for years, but its coming down into the mainstream ~$30k cars recently and I'm loving it.
I'm thankful for technologies like Siri in the context of driving at least.
I've heard this sentiment with 3D Touch and Siri before. I'm probably an outlier, but I use each about a dozen times or so a day.
3D Touch is one of the reasons I upgraded to the 6S. Lack of 3D Touch was the one thing that disappointed me the most about the new iPad Pro. I wasn't sure at first if it was something I'd end up using long-term, but it didn't take long for me to develop a lot of habits around it. Here are some of my daily actions through 3D Touch:
* When I go to Starbucks, I use 3D Touch to get to the app's Pay option.
* I use it on the Phone app to quickly dial the people I call the most.
* Same with iMessage.
* I use it on Sleep Cycle to quickly start my morning alarm.
* On Intercom to speed up launching/getting to the part of the UI I want (People vs. different support mailboxes).
* Day One to quickly record a journal entry.
* Drafts to jot down a quick bit of info (someone's name or something, or a thought) to later process/organize somewhere.
* Pandora to quickly get to my most-used stations (I only really have a few I often use, so it's perfect)
When I need to place a call and am in the middle of something (getting ready in the morning, looking something up, making dinner, etc.), I use Siri. Actually, I'd say most of my calls are placed with Siri unless I have the phone in my hand.
"Hey Siri, call <person> on speakerphone" is pretty common here.
I also use Siri to start timers for laundry or to remind me of something I need to think about later. "Hey Siri, in 4 hours, remind me to do <blah>".
I hate naps, but sometimes I need them. "Hey Siri, wake me in 30 minutes."
I ask her every day in the morning what the weather's going to be like. Even though I live in Palo Alto and it's not exactly hard to guess. Super handy when I'm going to go somewhere else though.
I also use her as an app launcher pretty frequently. Mostly in the morning when I want to kick off some music at home. I'll wake up, start getting dressed, and say "Hey Siri, launch Harmony." Since that takes a few seconds to launch sometimes, I do that while I'm otherwise occupied. Then when I can get to the phone, I just have to tap the item on the screen to get music going.
My car will let me know when I have incoming texts, but I can't respond through it, so Siri's also my dictation if I'm stopped at a red and need to fire off a message to someone saying I'm late.
So that's how I use 3D Touch and Siri. Consider me a data point :)
I am really curious how the features they said were activated by 3D Touch will work on a non-3D Touch iPhone. I'm guessing that, like iOS 9, you won't get the menus on the home screen, but what about the notifications on the lock screen? There's no semantic meaning for a long press, so maybe they'll make a long press activate the menu as well?
> 3D Touch (which as far as I can tell nobody even knows exists)
I think people know it exists. The problem is that it doesn't do anything remotely useful, except for the iPhone keyboard cursor thing.
> Siri (which everyone raves about but nobody uses for anything).
I use it all the time (at least once a day) to add a reminder, set a timer, set an alarm, check sports scores (I don't really follow sports, so this will probably end after the Warriors' run), call someone (I do this rarely enough that I'm incredibly slow trying to figure out the Phone/Contact apps), or do a Google search. I would love some basic improvements to Siri UI, like sending my Google search straight to google.com instead of reading my entire query back to me first.
> what the hell the volume button does in different contexts
I've never had a problem with this. Another commenter already covered it, but it's extremely predictable and fairly obvious.
> turn off buzzing and booping when I plug in a charger, and maybe some sort of wireless charging thing if the technology is where it needs to be yet
Charging cues have never bothered me in the slightest, but I see no reason not to have a setting for it. Wireless charging would be absolutely huge. It's probably my number one feature request. I'd probably pay for a brand new 6s if all they added was wireless charging. Heck, I don't even need it to be fast, just let me set my phone down at my office desk and bedside table and I'll be happy.
> stop showing album art on the lock screen (or make it optional)
Again, this is something I've never even thought about, but it's hard to argue against making it optional.
> more uniformity on how lock screen notifications are acknowledged and dismissed -- sometimes there's an 'x' in the swipe-over, sometimes actions, sometimes just pressing the notification does something
>looking at what an app wants in order to install.
I believe they request the same things in iOS as they do in Android in the case of multi-Platform apps like Facebook, but Google decided to show them in a different way that looks like it is worse than how Apple does it.
> - turn off buzzing and booping when I plug in a charger, and maybe some sort of wireless charging thing if the technology is where it needs to be yet
Does setting it to mute not work? My iPad 3 makes the noise on plug and unplug exactly when it is not muted.
> 3D Touch (which as far as I can tell nobody even knows exists)
Is this feature that bad? I'm an Android guy and it's probably the most appealing thing I've seen on the Apple side in a long time. At least as a replacement for the long press.
My main use of 3d touch is switching apps. That combined with swiping from left eliminates having to reach down to the home button or up to the back button when using the phone one handed.
Holy moly, Apple is very aware of the competing chat apps. iMessage looks amazing and they packed a lot of features in there, but I wonder how they're going to make it all easily discoverable.
It's really troubling to me that 3D Touch features are a big part of this release and yet their most recent phone release (the iPhone SE) has no support for it at all, and neither does ANY iPad, including the flagship iPad Pro 9.7 released in March.
I know many people are sceptical about 3D Touch. I myself found it to be quite useful if you build habits around it - until I got an iPad Pro 9.7 and found all those habits were useless. Since I had to break the habits on the iPad I rarely use it on the iPhone now.
If Apple wants people to adopt 3D Touch and make it useful it has to actually be available on anything other than the 6S.
Finally they managed to remove the weird intelligent selection behavior in safari!!! (The one that unpredictable marks blocks or the whole website). Thank you apple :)
They also ignore any viewport meta data so you can always zoom. My Cordova app doesn't like this :( I hope it can be disabled for WKWebView programmatically
How is object recognition possible on a (i)phone without a huge/massive dataset like Google uses on Google Photos' AI backend? It has to be worse AI than from Google Photos. Can someone clarify?
You only need large datasets to train a model - the result can be shipped around pretty easily. My company builds an app http://forevery.com/ which actually runs a neural net on your phone to organize your photos.
Is this the death of hybrid apps? Seems all the announcements were focus on the deep integration that apps can now have with the OS. For a long time, the big knock against hybrid development was that performance was never as good as native, but it seems that this new wave of integration presents a far more compelling case for native development, no?
It's always easy to say that things are inspired from a different company or product, but always keep in mind that these features don't always come ready before a year or two of work. First person to announce it working and integrated gets the merit, but a lot of time, the same things are being worked on in parallel in different places :)
Since they’re tweaking copy/paste to work between devices, hopefully they are also working on the phone UI for text selection. Before I care about cloud-sharing any text, I need to be able to SELECT IT properly, and frankly iOS fails completely at this right now. They need to remove the second-guessing, over-selecting, contextually-smartly-selecting code, or whatever it is doing now.
Am i the only one thinking that Steve Jobs would have refused most of the things that were introduced this morning? Apple sure has changed over the years.
Always wondered if they'd stall at iOS 10 and just start moving up minor versions like macOS. 10.1 etc. Another change that doesn't make a ton of sense but I guess looks nice.
I've got iOS 10.0 installed and there is nothing you can do from my lock screen except access the camera. Settings has you completely covered if you want to disable those things.
That was my first thought, too, but you'll most likely be able to toggle what information is visible when the the device is locked, the same way you can now with Messages, Mail, etc.
iOS 10. 10 Features that I think they had a hard time to convince the audience that were so important.
I've been using iOS since v3 and it's going ^2 complicated every year. Come on guys, nobody expects that you can deliver a revolution with every WWDC. Just don't make the interface more complicated.
Siri, 3d touch, home kit? I barely know anyone using those and everyone these days has an iPhone. The focus is shifted from usability to features. So sad.
>> "Siri, 3d touch, home kit? I barely know anyone using those"
Shouldn't Apple improve them so that they become useful for more people then? I used Siri very occasionally but with the SDK I can see myself using it quite often when I'm at home and need to, for example, order an Uber. I can just yell it at my phone without stopping what I'm doing. With 3D touch do you expect them to just throw out years of development? No, they work to improve the UI and more people will use it - the glance able info on a force press on a home screen icon looks great to me.
Siri is great in a car and other hands free situations. In a car is when I used it the most. Mostly for music control, navigation, calls and text messages.
All of these things will improve usablity. Right now you have to fumble around inside apps for many common actions that will be much more readily accessible.
Third party integration and inter-operability with third party apps has been one of the areas Android fared better than iOS. Now with Siri, Maps and Messages third-party APIs and keyboard updates, apple can completely shed its walled-garden image.
Anyone know if Siri will still only respond when plugged in? I wish it were an option to turn on at all time. I realize battery would be drained considerably.
[+] [-] andrewla|9 years ago|reply
I'd love to see UX improvements around minor inconveniences of the iOS experience:
- what the hell the volume button does in different contexts (sometimes it changes the ringer, other times the in-app volume, other times it just seems to go into a black hole)
- easier access to app settings for the app you're using (things like privacy settings and notification settings and revoking/re-allowing privileges (like camera access, etc.); maybe context-sensitive pull-up or pull-down things? I like that OS controls this, not the app, just need a better way to navigate to it.
- turn off buzzing and booping when I plug in a charger, and maybe some sort of wireless charging thing if the technology is where it needs to be yet
- stop showing album art on the lock screen (or make it optional)
- more uniformity on how lock screen notifications are acknowledged and dismissed -- sometimes there's an 'x' in the swipe-over, sometimes actions, sometimes just pressing the notification does something
The only feature that seems interesting to me is the voicemail transcription; previous services I've used for this have been pretty terrible, but hopefully this is better.
With Marshmallow's security model (of run-time grantable and revokable permissions) Android has become a lot more attractive to me -- my biggest pain point in using Android devices has always been the nightmare of looking at what an app wants in order to install.
[+] [-] jedanbik|9 years ago|reply
Hold down the Option key and click on Airport or volume control to see what I mean in macOS. It gives you more information, and the information it provides is information you didn't necessarily need to have without holding down the Option key.
In airport, with the option key held, you see options to generate a wireless diagnostics report. Without the option key held, you can just switch networks. In the volume control, with the option key held, you can see options to change speaker outputs and mic inputs. Without the option key held, you just see the volume controls.
On iOS, with regular touch on the camera you get the camera. 3D touch - you get the ability to specify the camera you want before loading the app.
3D Touch is for iOS power users. Option key is for macOS power users.
[+] [-] throwanem|9 years ago|reply
If the app you're using right now has a handle for audio playback, it changes the speaker volume. If not, it changes the ringer volume. As far as I can tell, that's all, and in a half decade of using iPhones and iPods, I've never actually seen it misbehave.
[+] [-] filereaper|9 years ago|reply
Just drive along, push to issue command, and "Siri navigate me to <address> in <city>" and boom. This might have existed in luxury cars for years, but its coming down into the mainstream ~$30k cars recently and I'm loving it.
I'm thankful for technologies like Siri in the context of driving at least.
[+] [-] chipx86|9 years ago|reply
3D Touch is one of the reasons I upgraded to the 6S. Lack of 3D Touch was the one thing that disappointed me the most about the new iPad Pro. I wasn't sure at first if it was something I'd end up using long-term, but it didn't take long for me to develop a lot of habits around it. Here are some of my daily actions through 3D Touch:
* When I go to Starbucks, I use 3D Touch to get to the app's Pay option. * I use it on the Phone app to quickly dial the people I call the most. * Same with iMessage. * I use it on Sleep Cycle to quickly start my morning alarm. * On Intercom to speed up launching/getting to the part of the UI I want (People vs. different support mailboxes). * Day One to quickly record a journal entry. * Drafts to jot down a quick bit of info (someone's name or something, or a thought) to later process/organize somewhere. * Pandora to quickly get to my most-used stations (I only really have a few I often use, so it's perfect)
When I need to place a call and am in the middle of something (getting ready in the morning, looking something up, making dinner, etc.), I use Siri. Actually, I'd say most of my calls are placed with Siri unless I have the phone in my hand.
"Hey Siri, call <person> on speakerphone" is pretty common here.
I also use Siri to start timers for laundry or to remind me of something I need to think about later. "Hey Siri, in 4 hours, remind me to do <blah>".
I hate naps, but sometimes I need them. "Hey Siri, wake me in 30 minutes."
I ask her every day in the morning what the weather's going to be like. Even though I live in Palo Alto and it's not exactly hard to guess. Super handy when I'm going to go somewhere else though.
I also use her as an app launcher pretty frequently. Mostly in the morning when I want to kick off some music at home. I'll wake up, start getting dressed, and say "Hey Siri, launch Harmony." Since that takes a few seconds to launch sometimes, I do that while I'm otherwise occupied. Then when I can get to the phone, I just have to tap the item on the screen to get music going.
My car will let me know when I have incoming texts, but I can't respond through it, so Siri's also my dictation if I'm stopped at a red and need to fire off a message to someone saying I'm late.
So that's how I use 3D Touch and Siri. Consider me a data point :)
[+] [-] kylec|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] criley2|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] baddox|9 years ago|reply
I think people know it exists. The problem is that it doesn't do anything remotely useful, except for the iPhone keyboard cursor thing.
> Siri (which everyone raves about but nobody uses for anything).
I use it all the time (at least once a day) to add a reminder, set a timer, set an alarm, check sports scores (I don't really follow sports, so this will probably end after the Warriors' run), call someone (I do this rarely enough that I'm incredibly slow trying to figure out the Phone/Contact apps), or do a Google search. I would love some basic improvements to Siri UI, like sending my Google search straight to google.com instead of reading my entire query back to me first.
> what the hell the volume button does in different contexts
I've never had a problem with this. Another commenter already covered it, but it's extremely predictable and fairly obvious.
> turn off buzzing and booping when I plug in a charger, and maybe some sort of wireless charging thing if the technology is where it needs to be yet
Charging cues have never bothered me in the slightest, but I see no reason not to have a setting for it. Wireless charging would be absolutely huge. It's probably my number one feature request. I'd probably pay for a brand new 6s if all they added was wireless charging. Heck, I don't even need it to be fast, just let me set my phone down at my office desk and bedside table and I'll be happy.
> stop showing album art on the lock screen (or make it optional)
Again, this is something I've never even thought about, but it's hard to argue against making it optional.
> more uniformity on how lock screen notifications are acknowledged and dismissed -- sometimes there's an 'x' in the swipe-over, sometimes actions, sometimes just pressing the notification does something
There's no reason not to fix this.
[+] [-] Steko|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrfusion|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] afarrell|9 years ago|reply
This is super helpful because I don't need to look at the screen to check that it is charging. I hope it stays.
[+] [-] Frank2312|9 years ago|reply
>looking at what an app wants in order to install.
I believe they request the same things in iOS as they do in Android in the case of multi-Platform apps like Facebook, but Google decided to show them in a different way that looks like it is worse than how Apple does it.
[+] [-] JadeNB|9 years ago|reply
Does setting it to mute not work? My iPad 3 makes the noise on plug and unplug exactly when it is not muted.
[+] [-] ultramancool|9 years ago|reply
Is this feature that bad? I'm an Android guy and it's probably the most appealing thing I've seen on the Apple side in a long time. At least as a replacement for the long press.
[+] [-] uriah|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wener|9 years ago|reply
- volume button can control all in all context with a same ui
- long press the app title
- I don't have a buzzing yet
- never get into this
- just swipe to dismisse or slide down to get more info or action
[+] [-] orbitur|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paperpunk|9 years ago|reply
I know many people are sceptical about 3D Touch. I myself found it to be quite useful if you build habits around it - until I got an iPad Pro 9.7 and found all those habits were useless. Since I had to break the habits on the iPad I rarely use it on the iPhone now.
If Apple wants people to adopt 3D Touch and make it useful it has to actually be available on anything other than the 6S.
[+] [-] bowlingx|9 years ago|reply
They also ignore any viewport meta data so you can always zoom. My Cordova app doesn't like this :( I hope it can be disabled for WKWebView programmatically
[+] [-] therealmarv|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rcpt|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nardi|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChicagoBoy11|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sidcool|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tasoeur|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] clord|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] windsurfer|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] makecheck|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JayHost|9 years ago|reply
As long as the money is coming in they don't have to change a thing.
But it begs a different question. What's all the money for if you're not going to have any fun?
At least do some live drop / break / blend tests or something to spice things up.
[+] [-] prrrnd|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JustSomeNobody|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marricks|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amaks|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sushid|9 years ago|reply
Currently, you can toggle off access to Siri, Notifications, Today View, Message/Relies to Message, and Wallet.
[+] [-] ilyanep|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zimpenfish|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] robbyking|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drinchev|9 years ago|reply
I've been using iOS since v3 and it's going ^2 complicated every year. Come on guys, nobody expects that you can deliver a revolution with every WWDC. Just don't make the interface more complicated.
Siri, 3d touch, home kit? I barely know anyone using those and everyone these days has an iPhone. The focus is shifted from usability to features. So sad.
[+] [-] k-mcgrady|9 years ago|reply
Shouldn't Apple improve them so that they become useful for more people then? I used Siri very occasionally but with the SDK I can see myself using it quite often when I'm at home and need to, for example, order an Uber. I can just yell it at my phone without stopping what I'm doing. With 3D touch do you expect them to just throw out years of development? No, they work to improve the UI and more people will use it - the glance able info on a force press on a home screen icon looks great to me.
[+] [-] stevep98|9 years ago|reply
'Set a timer for 20 minutes' is faster for me than using the clock app.
'Navigate to the nearest gas station' is faster.
Setting reminders is usually faster with Siri. Especially geofences ones.
Finding pictures in a location is much easier with Siri.. "Find pictures at Lake Tahoe"
The main problem is that you have to remember what you can do.
[+] [-] mahyarm|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zepto|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bytesandbots|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cm2187|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eknight15|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] giarc|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] franciscojgo|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pducks32|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] KuhlMensch|9 years ago|reply
The features look really good. I use siri daily, but with 3rd party integrations that could be hourly.
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
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