Apple iOS6 Preview
apple.com
apple.com
Also, turn-by-turn navigation has this "overview" mode--tap it and you exit the forced-point-of-view navigation and get to pan around the map in 2D mode. This is critical for being able to inspect the area for improvised routes. In the past, this has not been easy to do on all my old-school GPS navigation devices, including a Tom Tom hardware unit of a year ago. Cannot compare to Google Navigation or Tom Tom on the iPhone, so it would be great if anyone familiar with those can chime in.
Fully vector maps (no more f'king double tap to get that shit at pixel-perfect view) and much more legible traffic marking (such that it doesn't kill the name of the street) are two minor changes that will have a major impact for me personally.
The one thing that did break in my case was the feature of my app that opened up a walking route in the old Maps app. On iOS 5 this is done by redirecting any maps.google.com URL requests to the Maps app but of course this doesn't work with the new method. Thankfully they've replaced this with a generic API that allows you to programmatically create a routing request (no more string concatenation!) and pass it to any app which implements the required protocol for handling it, right now that's just the Maps app but I'm sure that selection will expand once iOS 6 is out.
I don't doubt that Apple has been working on their own database to use for turn by turn and it wasn't until now that they had it ready to go. Stuff you need that isn't "normally" in a GIS database are driving restrictions, road quality metrics, etc. There are also 'quirks' exceptions for this data like "In theory you can get from A->B->C in Portland on this route but you really want to go A->D->C." some of the "roads" in SE Portland would challenge dune buggies :-)
(Not that I have a green card anyway.)
Frequently, you would need to rotate and transform the data to get it close enough that the geometry could be snapped together. This usually required some manual intervention; nothing like the human eye for detecting an array of streets suddenly had a 1 degree kink where it crossed some stitching line.
Our licensing for the data sets was very strict, and deformed the products in interesting ways, as you might imagine.
My fondest memory of working with that group was inserting POIs - we all got a POI, provided it wasn't obscene or something. I named a feature close to where I grew up; sadly, the POIs were culled every edition.
Of course Navteq would allow them to use map data for turn-by-turn navigation, but Google didn't want to pay the price they were asking for license fees.
Earlier Navteq and Tele Atlas had a duopoli in worldwide map data - no-one else had as good coverage as they had. And they used tiered licensing structure. On lower tiers, you were allowed to display maps, but you couldn't use them for turn-by-turn navigation or for example dynamically show locations of your friends.
Now that may have been a misstatement, but it was presented as a large part of the rationale for the whole project which encompassed getting rights to satellites, driving data, broadcast source locations, etc etc. Things like "we bought Keyhole and got great satellite imagery but we're forbidden from image processing that imagery into a map, so we bought a satellite and took our own damn pictures." It played well with the whole 'think bigger than that' mantra that Larry Page embodied.
I'm guessing iOS6 doesn't add support for IndexedDB either. So we're stuck using the deprecated WebSQL until mid 2013 or later.
As opposed to the desktop world where IE 8 is still your best-case minimum browser?
For what it's worth, my BlackBerry Curve from 6+ years ago supported form uploads. Apple was just years behind on this.
But Passport, that's a fantastic feature. Adding in the geofencing (so my airline ticket shows up when I get to the airport) is genius.
But more than anything else, you know that everyone is going to integrate into this. Every brand already has their own app (some with this sort of functionality). That's going to be a HUGE block of users.
Android apps can't easily fill that space, because they'll all have different standards. The fact that there is only one standard on iOS now is very convenient. Google could add one, but that would take dev time, not to mention how long it would take to get 5.0 on a reasonable number of devices.
It wasn't a headline, but it could easily be one of those features that everyone ends up loving and using all the time.
The downsides to the Windows Phone approach is that it's for specific apps and specific airlines.
What do you mean by "Android apps can't easily fill that space, because they'll all have different standards." ?
Passport looks very similar to part of the features already available in things like Google Wallet and Square's Card Case.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that this doesn't have the potential to be great for Apple, iPhone users, retailers, and iOS app developers ....
Bring your iPhone with a coupon, have iPhone based POS recognize it wirelessly or via QR code.
competition is a wonderful thing. this is the right way to do it (not with a lawsuit)
Reply via text has been a popular feature in custom Android ROMs for a while. Setting a reminder is new to me, though.
The reminder looks very cool. I use iOS reminders every day. Often with location info too.
Many current mobile usage ideas, like e.g. location based reminders, Nokia had in design board or development internally already in early 2000s. Many ideas are common sense. At the end of the day, ideas don't matter that much, it's the execution that matters.
If HTC and/or Samsung were to get their own versions of the "slide-to-unlock" nonsense past the the USPTO, that would substantially affect at least the US theater of the mobile patent wars.
I'm sure the transit providers would be happy to provide the same feed to Apple and Google, but it looks like Apple want to make something new and incompatible.
(haven't tried this myself, asked a friend of mine who installed the beta)
http://www.usingenglish.com/reference/idioms/dead+in+the+wat...
I had an idea similar a while back and then found... http://keyringapp.com/
Apple is in a much better position to launch something like this, as it needs quite a few relationships difficult for a new start up to establish and scale.
<img src="http://images.apple.com/ios/ios6/images/title.jpg"
width="667" height="221" ...>We still can't search for businesses in the UK
I can't see how using a photograph of SF requires this disclaimer.
And since major iOS releases are tied to new iPhone releases, you're looking at sometime this fall.
And also the market potential, there are still lot of demand of iOS devices, Mac OS devices, more than North America.
Apple is lucky Google is having so much trouble getting ICS out there.
But they've left the door open for competitors, in my opinion. If Google had the distribution issues plaguing ICS sorted out they would be in trouble, IMO, particularly because the iOS UI conventions are more awkward on tablets and that's currently Apple's stronghold.
iOS 6 is not compatible with: iPad 1
The iPad 1 does not have contract lock-in and is not actively being sold by Apple. Apple is not facing serious tablet competition right now so what incentive do they have to support the iPad 1? What are people going to do, throw out the iPad 1 for a Kindle Fire? Maybe if Windows 8 or Android get their act together, but right now, Apple is chasing demand and has little incentive to support old hardware when they can push you into the new one. This is why the tablet space needs some real competition.
Bingo. Apple still sells new 3GS phones, so it would directly impact customers that may be buying their products today. This isn't the case with the iPad1.
Apple rarely does things (solely) based on technical requirements or some architectural vision. It may be frustrating, but it is consistent - they are primarily customer focused, not specs-focused or vision-focused. Yes, there is attention to specs and an underlying vision of computing, but they are 2nd to the (paying) customers.
But yeah, that's a big downer. I'm still lovin' my iPad 1, and won't be able to swing a replacement anytime soon (assuming the new iMacs show up, which to the surprise of many didn't today).
Just because iPad 1 can't run iOS 6 doesn't mean it's suddenly "trash".
Also, the first iPad is woefully underpowered – thanks to the display, it's quite memory and graphics constrained. It's entirely possible Apple wasn't willing get new iOS features working well on that hardware, especially considering iPad 1's install base is a rapidly decreasing percentage of the overall iPad market.
What I do care about is the web browser on my iPad not receiving any software updates... ever. That's a serious problem. Without any software upgrades ever, the iPad will become the future IE. In fact, this is worse because of Apple's closed system they also won't allow 3rd parties to upgrade the software either. That means no new web browsers, audio players, or any other new type of software which might threaten their platform.
Apple wants to pretend that software can't be upgraded because you're using old hardware, which not only is completely retarded, it defeats the purpose of software.
If they had a viable reason to put resources into the iPad 1 and have it meet their performance and usability requirements, they would have.
http://store.apple.com/us/browse/home/shop_iphone/family/iph...
The processor has to wavelet compress the audio and ship it off to Siri for processing. Apple might not be happy with the performance on the original iPad.
I recall that someone got it running on a jailbroken device. I don't remember how well it worked.
Recording is easy. Dump the ADC output to a buffer and call it a WAV file. Or an AU.
Sending it to Siri requires chunking the audio into small pieces, compressing them with a wavelet table (I'm assuming here, my DSP knowledge is a bit dated), and shipping them off to North Carolina.
If this can't be done quickly, Siri appears to suck. Apple is religiously conservative about enabling features on hardware that might cause the experience to suck.
Audio compression was a slow thing on desktop computers when desktop computers had similar specs to the first iPad. I'm no authority, but this seems like a relevant detail to me.
Huh? Citation needed. Apple didn't suddenly cut off App Store updates to iPad 1. Developers are free to support (or not support) iOS 5, just as they were with other iOS updates.
Furthermore, are you remotely surprised by this? iPhones prior to iPhone 3GS aren't supported by iOS 5.
Do you have the same issues with Android? There's a platform that's destined to be the "future IE". How many Android users are stuck on 2.2 or 2.3, with a horribly crippled browser?
Finally, Apple does allow other browsers, audio players and other new types of software. They don't threaten Apple's platform, the bolster it.
I'm not sure where you're digging up this FUD, but it's way off base.
The answer is: most of them. ~90.2% are on Android 2.3 or below as of June 1, 2012[1].
[1] http://developer.android.com/resources/dashboard/platform-ve...
You do realize that there are third party browsers on Android that have their own rendering engines that you can install right? You don't have to ever use the built in Android browser if you don't want to. I've found Firefox works quite well actually.
But they don't have an incentive to do that, and it would mean more work for them supporting a shrinking user base.
However, customer loyalty may have been increased quite a bit by providing updates for more than 2 years. I'd have much less of a problem with Apple dropping iOS 7 support on the iPad 1, for instance.
My parents have an iPad one, and I've used an iPad 2 at work. I've got to say I'm not that surprised, as the thing is clearly constrained as it is. It's over 2 years old, so it's not like they just suddenly abandoned it. And you can still get iOS apps for it for quite a while. I know there are apps I use that still support iOS 3.
So far the main reason Apple has not supported new OS updates on old hardware is due to hardware requirements, usually memory. I agree it seems odd as the 4th gen touch is basically the same spec as the iPad 1, but in general their record in this area is unmatched by any of their competition. Nobody else even comes close.
Of course, forced obsolescence is a fact of life with commercial, proprietary products, and of course you're not entitled to software updates apart from bugfixes.
But it's very different world compared to the PC world where companies like Microsoft and other OS vendors have an incentive to stretch compatibility as far back as possible.
As more and more developers drop support for iOS 5, an otherwise perfectly working device becomes less and less valuable, which is a shame. Of course an option is still to jailbreak it.
Many if not most of the new features in iOS 6 doesn't require more processing power.
"I'm disappointed that I have to wait for at least iOS 7 for that..." Couldn't agree more.
When I worked for Yell/Yellowbook, one of the most common requests was for anything that we could develop that could "Allow a shop to know when you were walking by, and offer deals and enticements to get you either into the shop fully or to push you towards the items that they most want to sell to you.".
This never didn't horrify me. May be good for them, but terrible for consumers.
If Apple have managed to package the functionality such that consumers are excited by it then it is a gold mine for Apple.