The three biggest changes in Apple’s iOS 11 update

source: ft.com

YESTERDAY by Tim Bradshaw Apple’s operating system updates tend to fall into one of two categories: radical overhauls that leave users bewildered and upset, or bundles of incremental updates that smooth out the kinks of the previous year’s bombshell. Your response to iOS 11, released this week, will depend largely on whether you are using an iPhone or an iPad. While there are relatively modest changes for iPhone users, Apple is hoping iOS 11 transforms the iPad into a full-featured productivity machine. iPad owners might feel like someone has swapped their tablet for a MacBook (minus the mouse). By and large, that seems to be a good thing. Here is a quick guide to iOS 11’s three biggest changes. 1. iPad multitasking For the most part, the iPad version of iOS has always felt pretty much the same as it did on the iPhone.

That started to change a year ago when Apple first allowed two different apps to split the screen between them. But that feature was just a warm-up for iOS 11, which brings a new file manager, the ability to “drag and drop” photos and other items between apps, and a bunch of improvements to windowing and multitasking. If this all sounds a bit Windows 95, well, it is. Compared with the likes of a Microsoft Surface or even a Samsung Note smartphone, these changes are overdue. But now they are here, they work rather nicely.
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The most obvious change is the Mac OS-style “dock” of your favourite apps, which appears when you swipe up from the bottom of the screen. If you already have a full-screen app open, you can now drag another up from the dock to run alongside it. At first, this opens in a hovering window, but you can also drag it further to place the two apps side by side. The dock can hold up to 13 of your most-used apps. If you do not fill up that many, iOS suggests three that it thinks will be most useful at any given moment, based on things such as your recent usage or time of day. The whole system reduces your reliance on the home button, either for switching between apps with a double-press or having to return to the home screen every time you want to do something new. Apple seems to be preparing us for a day when, as it has with the all-screen iPhone X, the iPad loses its physical home button. 2. ARKit On the iPhone, iOS 11’s flagship feature is its platform for new “augmented reality” apps. For now, most ARKit apps are use-once-at-a-party novelties. A few point to the promise of AR in shopping, gaming and utilities. Trying out virtual furniture in my real living room with the Ikea Place app worked well — chairs appeared to be the right size next to my existing chairs and table. 8i’s Holo app put realistic holograms of Spider-Man and a tiger in my kitchen. A game called Egg, Inc let me build a chicken farm on my coffee table. One of the most popular kinds of apps so far is a virtual tape measure, allowing you to draw a line between two or more points to see how many inches apart they are. Of those I tried, MeasureKit and TapMeasure were the most accurate and easy to use. The best party trick, though, is Magic Sudoku, which combines AI, AR and character recognition to solve instantly any number puzzle you point it at. 3. Control centre Both iPhone and iPad share a redesigned Control Centre: the quick-access shortcut pane that appears when you swipe up from the bottom of the phone’s screen. The old control centre had three different panels, two of which were dedicated to music playback and HomeKit smart-home switches, respectively. Now it is all on one screen, about half of which can be customised to the tools you use most often. That could be a flashlight, calculator, camera or timer. For the moment, though, only Apple’s own features can be accessed this way; in the future, it would be great to be able to create a shortcut to the Instagram camera or a Lyft pick-up. Making the most of the new Control Centre depends on discovering that long presses and “3D Touch” open up another hidden layer of shortcuts. Pressing firmly on the camera icon, for instance, brings up extra options for selfies and videos, whereas tapping lightly just opens the standard camera window. These extra pushes and presses may not be as intuitive as a clearly-labelled button, but they do make the system faster, once discovered. As these hidden actions, ARKit and iOS 11’s new iPad controls show, Apple’s “multitouch” interface continues to evolve, even 10 years after the iPhone was first introduced.