Apple announces iOS 10
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
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.
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 can sort of imagine why. Google "knows" me better. What is awesome/scary is that I have tried this on other people's iPhones and Google Now still does better than Siri.
My family's English pronunciations have a very strong Indian/Punjabi accent. For people with accents, Siri works very unreliably to the point that we've given up on it, whereas Google Now "magically" works all the time.
Well there are some problems.. If I have it set to English, I can't really get it to grasp Norwegian names for streets etc. I wish it could have a mix of some sort.
This is kind of hilarious, because there have been complaints that Google didn't name it's voice recognition assistant (it's just "Ok Google").
I could hit the "call" button and it would launch Siri and I could say "message my wife" or a plain "read me my messages".
Despite loads of mucking about, installing and buying 3rd-party utilities, I could never get Android to do the same (and Google Now would never "read me my texts" and often "text my wife" would say it had sent but would never arrive).
I'm sure it's easy with Android Auto, but I have old cars and I'm not shelling out for a head unit that costs almost as much as the car itself.
>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.
But historically, apps on iOS can only ask for permissions at run time, not at installation time, and you can refuse any permission if you choose (and restore it later if you want). So if an app wants to use a camera, it can either (terribly) ask you the first time you run it, or (nicely) ask you when you do something that uses the camera, and app store guidelines say the app has to not break horribly when it is told no.
In Android (historically) at installation time you get a list of requested permissions, and you either accept them all ("can access the microphone", "can access your contacts", "can access your browser history", "can control your phone", "can implant thoughts into your mind") or you can opt out by not installing the app. That's the scary thing; you go to install a todo app that wants to access your contacts -- what do you do? Is it malware? Will it be changed to be malware in the future?
From what I can tell, the interface in Marshmallow is still annoying in that the app tells you what it is going to ask for at install time, but doesn't get granted those permissions until it asks explicitly and you say yes.
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.
That's a design choice, and there're arguments to be made for and against, but it seems hardly likely to surprise anyone more than once or twice.
My phone is permanently on vibrate (have young kids in the house and don't want to wake them), so changing the ringer is frustrating at most.
1) Press volume button to bring up volume controls
2) Tap the arrow on the right to expand
3) Adjust ring/music/alarm volumes as needed: http://core0.staticworld.net/images/article/2015/05/android_...
Android's system of adjusting media volume when media is playing and ringer volume when it isn't seems like a reasonably clean solution. It takes a single tap to expand to the three sliders.
Maybe a shortcut where where pressing volume up/down simultaneously mutes everything?
So you reduce the volume, but it only reduced the ringer for calls, which isn't what you want.
As the sibling answer says, newer Androids can do this. One click to display the volume, a touch to see the individual controls and then slide.
This is exactly what I want.
Honestly, the most intuitive option for me would the audio controls should never touch the ringer, bury that behind a menu, rather than switching based on context.
You can always adjust the ringer (something people rarely do -- for quite times there's the "silent" mode anyway) from the UI, and always use the volume buttons for the system's (music, video etc) audio volume.
You can touch the screen to drop the selector, click on which volume you want, and go ahead with using the rocker for that volume selector.
To silence app-audio, I use just: volume-rocker, click on down arrow, click on music icon to mute. That's it.
Consider this scenario:
- Use iphone at max volume to power speakers (pseudo line-out)
- Switch to sensitive IEM's later, attempt to change volume before starting... can't. Just changes notification volume.
- Begin playing music, rupture eardrum if IEM's in.
Fortunately iphone doesn't push enough current to damage the hardware (which can be replaced), but it is plenty enough to damage hearing (which can't be replaced).
I have yet to find a way to change headphone volume without initiating playback.
Android's volume control is a mess but at least it is possible to change these volumes.
Blackberry 10 handles the situation best: It remembers the volume for line-out usage and remembers the headphone volume used last. If Apple can detect headphones are unplugged they can detect line impedance vs. headphone impedance.
I also think Apple already does remember headphone volume? It seems to for me?!
Thanks for the tip about ringer volume though. Creates a new problem but at least it's not a problem that involves hearing damage.
Including the sibling replies, there's several solutions to this problem if you dig.
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.
It just flopped on Android like it's now doing on iOS. Push-hold / long-click / whatever you want to call it is just easier / more intuitive, I suppose. I believe the only big hit pressure sensitivity had on Android was on the Samsung Note type devices (which used it as pressure sensitivity on their pen) as well as the various Wacom-style drawing tablet things.
The things you see in the news about "X new Android smartphone will come with an Android version 3D touch!" are basically just marketing hype / PR. Provably, and beyond a doubt, Android has had 3D touch for 7 years now.
The most extensive place I use 3d touch is when browsing... don't use it elsewhere much.
Replace the long press, and the experience degrades nicely on older hardware.
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.
I don't understand why we tolerative having shift, fn, control, alt, option, and command, not to mention ⌘ whatever that is. Is it really necessary? Do I need to be an Apple historian to be able to understand the primary input device on a Mac?
Command makes sense. And we need shift for capital letters. Let's just leave it at that.
There's Control, Option/Alt, Command, and Shift. Four modifier keys. This is the same set you have on other OSes, except there, Command is called Windows Key or Super.
Yes, Apple has symbols as abbreviations for Control, Command, Option, and Shift. Yes, Option is also called Alt. But it's not really all that complicated.
As for the characters ⌘, ⌥, etc. they are printed on the key themselves...
Edit: Also, ⌘ historically denotes a place of interest. ⌥ is visually taking an alternative path... it's a straight line which goes parallel. It's the key for alternative functions... alt on pc.
I've always wondered why they don't put the symbols on the US keyboards yet use them in the UI anyway.
The only one that's really strange is ⌥, which by elimination is Option.
You don't want to be looking "where's the key with the Alt sign" or whatever key you want to find every time you need to hit it.
Ideally a keyboard could even be totally black -- and fancy touch-typing key-switching keyboards are.
That is way easier to remember than "Swedish Campground", which we only got because there otherwise would be too many apples on the screen (http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Swedish_Campgroun...; the Apple 2 had 'closed Apple' and 'open Apple'. See http://www.macworld.com/article/2867994/think-retro-open-app...)
It's for "⌥".
Yes, that's not ideal, and it's a striking UX failure on Apple's part that the keycap says "option" while the menu says ⌥ - all the more striking given Apple's generally well deserved reputation for getting that kind of thing right.
Same goes for control and ^ - granted, Unices have represented Control as ^ since forever, but part of the appeal of a Mac is supposed to be that you don't have to be a grizzled hacker to understand it.
That said, how does it take (more than) a decade to learn these correspondences? Not that I don't understand your complaint here, and I agree it should be fixed, but...I mean, this stuff doesn't seem all that hard.
https://qph.is.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-6f64cb39bfdaae2f7e097f...
Only on American keyboards, apparently.
Because it only comes up maybe once every two months and by the time I need the knowledge it has fallen back out of my brain.
A few of the symbols are still printed on Apple's keyboards in a few locales, but it looks like the confusing ones (option, escape) are gone in all locales on their most recent keyboards.
[1] Apple follows the popular convention from *nix here, rather than the ISO standard, which is a sort of a dharma wheel thing that I can't find in Unicode.
[2] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:ISO_9995-7_symbo...
Sure enough: https://www.amazon.com/WhatKeys-Keyboard-Shortcut-Stickers-W...
$8 would have been instant click. I program for a living on a Mac and still can't remember the damn 'option' symbol in shortcuts.
$20...? Hmmm. Not so much. Where's that silver sharpie...
"The "⌘" symbol (the "looped square") was chosen by Susan Kare after Steve Jobs decided that the use of the Apple logo in the menu system (where the keyboard shortcuts are displayed) would be an over-use of the logo. Apple's adaptation of the symbol — encoded in Unicode (and HTML) at U+2318 ⌘ (HTML ⌘) — was derived in part from its use in Scandinavian countries to denote places of interest. The symbol is known by various other names, including "Saint John's Arms" and "Bowen knot"."
Thinking back, I can only remember once instance of the sign and it happens to be just around the corner from where I grew up.
And just for kicks, if someone wants to see it in action: https://www.google.co.th/maps/place/Guml%C3%B6sa+Kyrka,+288+...
Linux has control, alt, and meta (aka "super" or "the Windows key").
I am still not sure why PC keyboards have a context menu key. I've only ever pressed it by accident.
You just blew my mind. I've been using Macs for nigh on 10 years and this is the first time I've heard of this. This is going to make so many common tasks (choosing sound output) so much easier!
Until I forget it exists 2 hours from now.
Every time there's a thread about 3D Touch on HN, I learn new things. Which tells a lot about the discoverability of the 3D Touch features...
Does setting it to mute not work? My iPad 3 makes the noise on plug and unplug exactly when it is not muted.
Buy yes, it makes total sense to do it automatically if not on the ear. The logic seems simple enough to program.
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.
That's enough for me to never want to miss 3D touch again.
>I use it all the time (at least once a day)
I use it almost daily too, you get used to that things so quickly. The thing that annoys me with Siri is that it is slow. I want to say: "Hey Siri, how is the weather today?" and not "Hey Siri" wait, wait, wait, bling, bling, wait, wait, wait, "How is the weather today?".
I've used 3D Touch about 20 times today in the 4 hours I've been awake. None of those have been the keyboard cursor either.
(Workflow, LINE, Messenger, Buffer, Camera, ...)
Also, its faster to tell Siri to remind me __________ or, create an appointment for ____ on ____ than to (unlock, find icon, tap +....)
First thing in the morning: How's the weather?
In the car: Navigate to work. Play NOFX shuffled.
At work: Remind me to fix Monit on the Kafka cluster.
Before bed: Wake me up at 7am.
I check the weather with one touch on the home screen.
I don't need to navigate to work, because the trip is short enough and there won't be any heavy traffic.
The alarm is set to 6.30 anyways, I don't have to change it daily, so I just left the standard weekday setting.
Not hating on your use case, but I am always around people and I think I would get several odd glances, when talking to my phone like that.
- 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
This is super helpful because I don't need to look at the screen to check that it is charging. I hope it stays.
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 :)
"Wake me up in X minutes" "Call <person>" "Remind me to ... [in X hours, in the evening, when I get home]" "What's the weather like today", when I'm getting ready in the morning "What's on my agenda today?", while driving to work
I rarely use Siri to query for specific data, which seems to be the thing Google Now does well. Siri for me is just a way to operate the phone faster.
I already find the SMS app on iOS confusing. Am I sending a paid SMS or a free message?
I dare say one of the major advantages of messaging apps in general is the certainty that the receiver will receive the message in the same shape as the sender send it.
With MMS you never know if the picture can be opened, and people just gave up.
I don't find those features confusing, just annoying.
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.
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
I'm hoping it can't - being unable to zoom a web page means it goes on the shit list because then I can't read it how I want to.
(Purely from a personal perspective, I'd prefer that people who made web apps didn't because they're a much less good user experience.)
But what I like about it is that neural networks can be transferred between different architectures, and the whole process of training a neural net can be sped up by starting from a previous result.
I swear it's going to take forever for the last half dozen zealots on either side to just shut up.
No thanks...
But there is a ton of stuff in iOS 10 that's 'copied':
iMessages looks like WeChat/SnapChat/some other stuff had a baby
A lot of the photos features seem right out of Google Photos
3rd party apps have done the Mac unlock thing before
Android has had the ability to add plugins for some apps for quite a while, no? Or at least things like keyboards weren't sandboxed the same so they could do similar things to what iOS is now getting.
That's progress. Someone makes a cool feature, if it works out well other companies start integrating it. Google has 'stolen' from Apple, Apple has 'stolen' from Google. Everyone borrowed stuff from Palm.
In the end, we all get better phones.
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.
I'm not surprised we're seeing diminishing returns on smart phone UX though...
Who cares what Steve would have done? He doesn't, not any more.
Anyone who says this is basically just complaining about something they don't like, and invoking a ghost to back up the argument.
[1]: http://images.techhive.com/images/article/2013/06/photo-jun-...
Currently, you can toggle off access to Siri, Notifications, Today View, Message/Relies to Message, and Wallet.
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.
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.
'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.
Every time you feed a parking meter, I recommend this feature.
Which is why, by now, the idiotic and unfunny jokes Siri makes almost every time I do that are really fucking annoying (even though it doesn't say them out loud, and I just have to see them printed on the screen).
The features look really good. I use siri daily, but with 3rd party integrations that could be hourly.
Yyyes, rrright...
Craig touts specifically that we don't need to press the home button for all this to work...
provides a link labelled "Video Posted: A direct link to the video file is now available, with no spoilers." The direct link is: http://p.events-delivery.apple.com.edgesuite.net/16faohbadfv... - Hopefully you can just click it and it'll work.
----------------------------------------
If you want to download the above video. (In my case, on Windows, VLC has trouble with that so I used the instructions here to actually download it: http://stream-recorder.com/forum/livestreamer-m3u8-error-no-... )
The exact thing I did was:
1. Get dl-youtube.exe from here: http://youtube-dl.org/ (save the fourth link for windows, labelled youtube-dl.exe, to your desktop)
2. Option One: Download Highest-Quality Version
From the command-line execute, in my case. The following line downloads the best quality version:
C:\Users\User\Desktop>youtube-dl.exe http://p.events-delivery.apple.com.edgesuite.net/16faohbadfvoihjbadfvljhbphjb06/m3u8/hls_vod_mvp.m3u8 --hls-prefer-native -o output.ts
------------------------------------------
2A. Option Two: Choose Quality
Instead you can run -F to list formats. The following line outputs possible settings:
youtube-dl.exe http://p.events-delivery.apple.com.edgesuite.net/16faohbadfvoihjbadfvljhbphjb06/m3u8/hls_vod_mvp.m3u8 --hls-prefer-native -F
[info] Available formats for hls_vod_mvp:
format code extension resolution note
meta mp4 multiple Quality selection URL
786 mp4 480x200 786k , avc1.4d401f, mp4a.40.2
1406 mp4 640x266 1406k , avc1.4d401f, mp4a.40.2
2029 mp4 640x266 2029k , avc1.4d401f, mp4a.40.2
2806 mp4 960x400 2806k , avc1.4d401f, mp4a.40.2
3849 mp4 960x400 3849k , avc1.4d401f, mp4a.40.2
4967 mp4 1280x532 4967k , avc1.640028, mp4a.40.2
6581 mp4 1280x532 6581k , avc1.640028, mp4a.40.2
8728 mp4 1920x800 8728k , avc1.640028, mp4a.40.2 (best)
C:\Users\User\Desktop>youtube-dl.exe http://p.events-delivery.apple.com.edgesuite.net/16faohbadfvoihjbadfvljhbphjb06/m3u8/hls_vod_mvp.m3u8 --hls-prefer-native -f 2806 -o output.ts
This one is only 2.3 GB, which is good enough for me. At 2-3 MB/sec it took me twenty minutes to download.
VLC plays this one just fine.
More philosophically, you're looking at it all the wrong way. Learn the fundamentals and an understanding of new features comes easy.
DID APPLE FINALLY MAKE WEB PUSH AVAILABLE IN iOS THE WAY THEY HAVE IN MacOS?
Anyone know?
Now they're a generic computer company like Compaq and Gateway. Shareholders are running their business into the ground, and they're making terrible products, from head to toe.