Bump predated that and was available on both iPhone and Android which is what the OP in this thread was almost certainly referring to since that's the app they named.
It seems to be disabled by default in the latest version of Android. A shame, because it had potential.
If Google Nearby Share wasn't so... Googled up, it would be a great replacement. Instead, we get a local sharing mechanism that's connected to your Google account for some god-forsaken reason.
What I really miss is the weird, short period where WiFi Direct file sharing Just Worked between different brands. WiFi Direct still exists on modern Android but there's no cross-device file sharing platform anymore. It was just Bluetooth file transfers but faster, which is all it really needed to be. I'm sure Google Nearby Share works in a similar way except for the weird Google stuff.
Apples innovations are often in making things that other people have tried before and making them polished and usable.
So, despite it being failed in Android; it'll probably work well in Apples ecosystem. -- Apples true innovations (3D touch for example) have a much higher chance of not being used and going away.
That and the fact that there is one version of iOS, and Android has traditionally been very fragmented. Without widespread availability from "day one", these things just don't catch on.
See also: the resurgence of QR codes post iOS 11...
3D touch went away with the iPhone 11, and I'm still salty about it. The hold-spacebar-to-move-cursor thing is just ever so slightly less efficient than the previous force-touch-anywhere-on-keyboard-to-move-cursor. (But I get why they removed it -- that was pretty much the only good actual use of 3d touch. Elsewhere in the iOS UI, it just made things more complicated, and I was constantly accidentally force-touching things instead of long-pressing them, etc. Probably not worth the added hardware costs.)
> The hold-spacebar-to-move-cursor thing is just ever so slightly less efficient
The UX on that is terrible. If you’re reading this on an iPhone in safari, go to the URL bar and try to navigate to my user ID there. I’ll wait. Now try to do it on a site where the URL has a dozen parameters.
In addition Apple puts in a lot of effort towards educating users. And before they release a technology in the wild they make sure they build a lot of useful demonstrations for it.
So a user learns about the feature because Apple educated them well, and then immediately gets to practice it and commit it to their long term memory because they have some immediate actual uses for it.
The Android approach is to release a technology, do a bunch of non functional demos and/or PoCs demonstrating how it can be used, and by the time actual useful implementations of the technology have been created users have forgotten the technology ever existed.
No offense but the iPhone UX is notorious for having obscure features most users don’t know about and which are never exposed. Not that Android is better but as a distinction between the two that’s a poor one. They are both terrible when it comes to properly exposing features.
Reminds me of the very useful swipe-to-camera gesture that Android scrapped in favor of whatever they copied from Apple that year. Apple subsequently copied the swipe-to-camera feature, and Android never saw it again.
We have double-power-to-camera, which is arguably better than a swipe. Still, I'd like to see Android/Google have some confidence. Too often, we end up with half-assed "me-too"s from Google.
>… double-power-to-camera, which is arguably better than a swipe
Fully count me in as part of this camp. Wanting to quickly snap a photo and being able to launch the camera without looking at the screen is much more convenient.
Apple doesn’t do new hotness. It finds experimental tech and if it can make it great then it’ll grab it. It’s always at a minimum 5 years behind new developments. As you point out sometimes decades.
I consider that their greatest strength though. Taking something with potential and starting to realize that potential.
This part of the presentation reallllly bothered me. What a bunch of time wasting nothings and filled with establishing your "brand" and ego.
Sorry, but I do not want to see someone's Self advertising everytime I get a phone call. You know this will be used to show you ads when companies call, right? You think this will not be monetized?
Although it’s the least used app for many of us, with iOS 17, the Phone app will be upgraded with a feature Apple is calling “Personalized Contact Posters” so instead of just your name and number showing up on the iPhone of someone you’re calling, they’ll see a customized image (or memoji) and **text of your choosing which could help persuade them into answering your call***. Apple also promises the Contact Posters will “also be available for third-party calling apps.”
Wait, so this is for strangers too? That seems rather ill-advised. I suppose it's a way to make people buy iPhones so they don't get ignored by other iPhone users because of the missing picture?
Now the scam callers will not only be able to spoof the FBI's phone number, but show a badge and a threatening full screen message too!
Somehow iMessage scams have been getting popular lately. Every once in a while I get a few phishing messages a day through iMessages. Then after a week it stops (they got caught, exploit closed, I don’t know).
More worrying that they could grab a photo off FB and spoof a family member. Lots of people would ignore the number if the face and name were familiar. How many people actually memorize phone numbers any more?
I suppose they can, but it wouldn't be a very convincing scam without a good voice replicator. Grabbing pictures is easy but isolating and replicating voices is still quite difficult, especially with the heavy accent many scammers seem to have.
The time of video call scams will come, but I don't think we're there just yet outside very targeted attacks on people in power or with huge amounts of wealth at their disposal.
Yeah I was thinking this, too. Apple doesn’t do social networking in the modern sense, but they do have a connected and committed network. They could build some kind of publishing/feed app that leverages your contacts, group threads etc.
Actually, “group threads have a feed view / content publishing tools” is simple enough to work. Hm.
I would love to see this. There seems to be a really interesting opportunity for Apple to provide a privacy-respecting replacement for social media as we know it today. Somewhere between group texts/shared albums and private Instagram, with everything being end-to-end encrypted and meant to be shared in small groups.
While I don't purport to know how it works, there's no indication this is any more automatic than the ALREADY EXISTING shared contact photos in Messages.
The keynote says you will set your own design which other people will see you when you call them. So it’s not based on the contact photo you have saved in your phone for someone, it’s based on the information they set to be shared with you. It was not explicitly mentioned whether or not this will apply to everyone or only people you have already had contact with. I can imagine it being like airdrop where it only shows you all of that if you’re in each other’s contact list rather than just for every single inbound phone call from some random person. The video demonstration also showed there were some settings that could be tweaked, so possibly you might be able to set an override for someone in your own contact list and display what you want rather than what they provide. But none of that was clarified in the video. So unless this gizmodo article has access to more details, they’re probably just describing their interpretation of it, and I will take those details with a grain of salt, until we have a developer beta for more detailed documentation to clarify.
Step 1: set your profile picture or whatever they call it as an ad. Use the free form text entry to customize the add for your target audience.
Step 2: start calling people. Doesn't matter if they answer, their dialer will show your ad.
The only workaround for this I can think of is to install an alternate dialer that doesn't implement this feature. I'm not sure it iOS has user replaceable dialers, though, that may just be an iOS thing.
Step 1: set your profile picture or whatever they call it as an ad. Use the free form text entry to customize the add for your target audience.
Step 2: start calling people. Doesn't matter if they answer, their dialer will show your ad.
The only workaround for this I can think of is to install an alternate dialer that doesn't implement this feature. I'm not sure if iOS has user replaceable dialers, though, that may just be an iOS thing.
I feel like accepting the spam call is far more painful than receiving it. This feels like it'd be an improvement, assuming the volume of spam doesn't increase with it substantially, since it's now much more obvious what's crap and what's not
I imagine this will be tied to an Apple ID and you’ll lose your account pretty quickly if you abuse it. Or the customisation will be limited in some way. There’s no way Apple will let someone call thousands of random numbers showing porn for example. I imagine someone has thought about this.
It'll depend on how well Apple handles abuse reports. If they become too aggressive, killing someone's Apple account (including their precious memories on iCloud) could be a real risk for mass fake reports. If they become too lenient, scammers will strike.
For just $15 per account [1] you can buy your way into someone else's iCloud, no manual phishing or credential stuffing needed. You'll need to ban quite a few per day to get rid of all of them, and even then innocent people may lose their accounts.
most spam callers use some VOIP hack to imitate other phone numbers, but this will surely require linking that phone number to an iCloud account. I don’t know how spammers would do it, but I’m guessing this will actually be used to hide their identities behind iPhone accounts.
it’d really be funny for spammers to suddenly start showing up as Karen from Des Moines instead.
Actually thinking this through, it could be used to Dox people too.
I don't know how spoof resistant the feature will be. Hopefully Apple has thought about this, they probably have at least considered it.
Whether or not this is doxing will depend on the way this feature works. If it works like WhatsApp (where anyone with your phone number can look up your profile picture and status and that's considered Works As Intended) then it won't be long until every phone number has been mapped. If it works push-only, with new image URLs being generated for each call, I'm not so sure if it can be abused.
I'm sure security researchers will have some very interesting blogs about this system in the months to come.
I care about it, but I also understand that hell will freeze over before Apple stand up on the stage in front of their worldwide developer community and tell them that the Apple Store fees and the Apple Developer subscription cost aren't necessary after all. If they do allow side-loading for legal compliance, it's practically guaranteed that the option to switch it on will be slid into a minor-point release in a difficult-to-find menu with no fanfare whatsoever. It makes no sense for them to advertise the capability and I would be surprised if it even makes it into the release notes.
Not much of a surprise. Apple won't introduce installing downloaded apps unless they're forced, and the EU law that'll force them to enable external sources won't be enforced until next year.
I feel like way too many of my notifications are iOS letting me know I'm being tracked by AirTags belonging to people I know. It'll be so nice to clear those out.
I really want to see decent grocery shopping features in Reminders. I'm using Grocery right now, which uses Reminders but has continual problems talking between my Watch and My Phone and has way more features than I need...but it's still (in my experience) the best shopping list app out there.
Some of the smaller updates will be a nice QOL bump for me:
> For easier and more secure password and passkeys sharing, users can share passwords with a group of trusted contacts. Everyone in the group can add and edit passwords to keep them up to date. Since sharing is through iCloud Keychain, it’s end-to-end encrypted.
>Maps adds offline maps, so users can download a specific area and access turn-by-turn navigation, see their estimated time of arrival, find places in Maps, and more while offline. Maps also makes it easier than ever to discover thousands of trails in parks across the United States, and supports electric vehicle drivers with real-time charging availability information.
>AirTag can be shared with up to five other people, allowing friends and family to keep track of an item in Find My. Everyone in a group will be able to see an item’s location, play a sound, and use Precision Finding to help pinpoint the location of a shared AirTag when nearby. This also works with all other Find My network accessories.
Shared passwords/passkeys comes pretty close to eliminating my need for a 1Password subscription. But it kinda depends on what other login-associated details Apple lets you put together with the password.
The offline mapping is huge since I went to big bend national park in texas and rerouting in one of the massive areas without a network would get a precise location using GPS on a black map that couldn’t download. Also, I make sure to have a full tank of gas in the desert as the next gas station may be 90 miles away
that's not true. it can navigate without internet as long as you have downloaded the maps ahead of time. i have definitely used it in a few parks including Death valley NP and it worked fine. maybe your download got corrupted somehow or expired?
Not if the entire area is within the downloaded map. I've been using google maps this way for a while now since I live in a rural area without solid coverage.
It does not. You can navigate perfectly fine fully offline. In your case either the maps weren't downloaded correctly, or the phone was reporting that it had internet connectivity so the app was trying to use it over the offline cache. Putting it in airplane mode may have fixed it.
HERE Maps by Nokia had offline maps, including search & navigation, over a decade ago. At the time Google had only offline maps with tiles and some POIs, no navigation or similar things.
i loved the HERE Maps when i had a Windows Phone. we navigated two countries in Europe without ever needing to turn on data roaming. this was back in 2013 i think? it was mind-blowingly good to navigate from one end of the country to the other end using just offline maps.
I tried that at the time, I did plan for this eventuality in Nov 2020, but I remember that this didn’t work for that area. I forget why, but I was also trying to route towards gas stations since we were taking the scenic route and the stations were much further apart than I had expected. I also had a ham radio, but no programmed frequencies. It was like time traveling to the 1990’s except I had XM radio
PSA: for environments like that you really should have a paper map and a compass for the same reason you should make sure your tank is full.
You don't have to be a wizard navigator or anything but those will operate when you have no signal and also show you a bigger picture of how to get where you want to go when you find you aren't where you want to be.
> AirTag can be shared with up to five other people
Finally! Every time either me or my wife goes out of town we have to remove the luggage airtags from one account and add them back in to the other one. When my kid leaves his jacket somewhere at school, only his phone can find it. Super annoying.
Well, Netflix used to have a page[1] that specified how, but it's since been dumbed down. It used to say it uses a combination of IP addresses (and geoip), device IDs, and account activity from devices signed into your Netflix account.
Finally! We bought an AirTag to put on the dog, and it was disappointing that only one of us could see it. Hopefully, they also solve the issue with it beeping randomly to alert of tracking so that it doesn't beep when it's with anyone in the family.
... and this all but completes transition from Jobs' Apple of "we know what's good for you" to non-Jobs' Apple of "the more the merrier, let's just stuff it with all we have".
The pattern is repeating except now there's no Steve to take the company back and smack some opinionated design sense into it.
autocorrect and the swipe keyboard on ios has gotten progressively worse with each release, to the degree that i've reverted to typing with my thumbs because it's faster. additional languages seems like a bridge too far right now
They claim this new version has a fancy transformer-based text production model. Assuming that same engine powers swipe prediction, we might finally see an improvement here. Here’s to hoping. Voice dictation has also gotten worse over the past couple of years, I’m very excited that they claim they’ve got a new transformer-based architecture that works a lot better now. These two features alone might dramatically improve my quality of life using iOS. Android from a decade ago was better at text entry than iOS is currently.
This is so weird to me. I use both every day and they seem totally fine. It even picked up my child’s unique nickname (even though spellcheck still flags it)
I would be happy if the stupid thing stopped capitalizing every occurrence of "and", and stopped replacing "is" with "I'd". Those two alone turn swype-typing from a convenience into a frustrating slog.
The swipe keyboard on iPhone is bad, but it is usable. Android is definitely better.
Coming from Android, I find typing and editing generally painful on iPhone even after 6 months and fiddling with settings. However I have yet to swap back to Android to see the pain points there.
They mentioned using generative transoformer technology for the new autocorrect. I hope that means very soon we will be able to have much more natural conversations with Siri
I'll be happy if they can correctly capitalize/autocomplete my last name, which is on my address card (and that of many of my relatives in my address book). It is incomprehensible to me that it suggests three wrong things when I type my name, and does not ever offer to capitalize it.
I am beginning to dread every new iOS version as they seem to just make it worse and worse as times goes on. Examples:
1. Copy and Paste. When first introduced, it was great. You got a magnifying glass to be precise. It basically just worked. Yet somehow they kept changing it and every change makes it less usable. Currently, you can't really place the cursor at the end of a line (seriously, go into iMessage and try it). It's trying way too hard to snap to where it thinks you want the cursor. The only way to get this is to put it at the beginning of the next line and delete back. Pressing on a word brings up the "select" menu instead of just placing the cursor half the time.
2. Safari tab groups. I liked the old version where you toggled between tabs and private. But now you have to go through an extra step: selecting a tab group. Some people may want this. I'm not one of them. There is absolutely no way to opt out of this.
3. On an iPad hitting the top center of Safari brings up some split screen functionality that I have never used, don't care about and don't want. It's a natural place to press to go to the top of the page so this happens all the time.
I don't have the same problems in #1 that you do (copy/paste + selection). Only mentioning this because you say to go try it, and I did just these things prior to reading your comment. Also, if you aren't aware of long pressing / holding the space bar to navigate, it's very useful.
I cant figure out how to paste something in many contexts without a long press, which will select text - so the paste will replace that text. So if i want to insert something, I will write a couple of chars of garbage, long-press-select, then paste-replace.
iOS strangely is full of these little hickups, it sometimes feels like back in Windows. (Also the auto correct is so annoyingly dumb and broken)
You reminded me of another iOS UI/UX fail: the long press (and Force Touch).
Apple famously for many years avoided adding a second mouse button. Steve Jobs was against it. Why? Because it lacked discoverability and consistency. He ultimately lost this because the context menu on Windows became pretty consistent and universal.
But his ultimatel point applies to long presses (and similar): where is the discoverability? Most people don't realize this can do something different. If they do, there's no consistency to it.
Even in your example, why would I expect to move the cursor around by long pressing the space bar? They added a non-intuitive gesture to make up for the failure they created by messing with the original copy and paste that worked just fine.
Both apple and Google created a similar problem with the address bar on browsers. Notice how hard it is to delect part of a URL? Why would you want to do this? Example: removing the stupid text fragment on Google search results so you can copy and paste the URL.
Click (or press) once and you select the whole URL. Click (or press) again and it brings up a menu with options like cut, copy and translate. To get rid of the selection you have to click outside the selection area. Now you can click the text like the search term but it snaps to word endings. What if I want to just correct spelling without re-typing the whole word?
All I want is to finely select in the URL and they've added so many extra steps and barriers to make this as difficult as possible in the name of "usability".
I'm a fan of the space bar navigation. It's not a replacement, it's an additional way to move the cursor. Feel free to tap to the position you'd like, or long-press-and-drag the cursor directly.
Not just iOS. That's all mobile OS's, as they all keep trying to re-invent the wheel each year so they can have something big to unveil to shareholders and customers.
"That's why this year, we're again focusing on the core features. Phone, messages, voicemail. We literally have no ideas beyond what was already here when we arrived."
For point number one, you just tap in the empty space at the end of a line, so I'm not really sure what you mean. You can also hold your finger down and get the "magnifying glass" experience with the cursor just like you've always been able to.
If the URL (or search term) exceeds the address bar box size, this is either impossible or very difficult. You'll hit the clear button instead and delete the URL.
But even if this works (which it doesn't consistently), how is that intuitive?
I'd love to be able to update apps without going to the App Store. Just long-hold an app and have an update option, or at least a "see update in App Store" option. Most of the time I go to the App Store, I have to wait for it to load a bunch of ads, then click search, then type the app, then hit update.
I believe all iOS apps get updated automatically based on apples app rollout process.
But you can still go do it via the App Store using fewer steps. Just click on your profile pic (top right) and you should see all available app updates.
I have auto updates turned off. I realize I can go into the update area and pick apps to update, but if I'm looking to update a specific one, it's usually faster to search and update that way.
It is incredible how poor the correction is on a regular basis. What’s most frustrating when you correct the correction and Apple will redo it yet again.
My expectations are low too. I haven't had any major negative experiences with iOS autocorrect in years, so it's seems likely that that'll be a downgrade for me.
As someone else said, they mentioned that swearing is finally coming to autocorrect during the keynote. But if you want a fix faster than that (janky as this fix is), go to Settings > General > Keyboard > Text Replacement.
Write down each swear you want and then write the same word for what it should be replaced with. So write “fucking” and “fucking” in the two boxes, and then iOS will know that “fucking” is a word it should look out for and it’ll recognize it for both autocorrect and swipe typing.
Excited for the journal app! I was always uncomfortable trusting any of the existing apps and inevitably censor or give up writing my thoughts.
I’ve even tried building several (4(!)) journaling apps in the past and it’s still an unsolved problem for me. Right now i use a mix of obsidian and a self built journal app but that obviously has some drawbacks on its own.
Microjournaling, photo context and able to share (along with local e2e) are on top of my list. Looks like it solves many of it.
> I was always uncomfortable trusting any of the existing apps
I still cannot understand why people are so trusting of things they put on their phone. It is so much easier for anyone to get into your phone as opposed to your house or a safe in your house.
You all are giving so much up just for this convenience, which will one day become inconvenient.
Probably because I've had my house broken into, but I've never had my data stolen off of my phone. Even when I have lost my phone, no one has been able to take anything out.
You seem to be conflating exfiltrating data from cloud services that the phone syncs with (which many state actors probably do en masse), with exfiltrating data held only on the device itself (which is something that you'd only expect from people who actively care about your data, e.g. police looking for evidence after you've been arrested, criminal gangs who want your crypto-wallet keys, etc.)
Modern phones are pretty good at stopping the latter class of attack; this is self-evident from the fact that this type of attacker is looking for specific things in order to use them in a timely manner (use the evidence against you at trial; drain your crypto wallet to spend the funds themselves before you can move the funds elsewhere), and yet we rarely see people reporting that someone made use of their exfiltrated data in this way.
PCs are much more vulnerable to this type of attack. There are tons of computer viruses that steal your crypto wallet.
Apples to oranges imo. We’re talking about a journal (with photos and audio and whatnot) here.
Also, i think keeping it in a physical format is more vulnerable from others accidentally reading it than in a phone which is the most private to me as an individual.
Yeah no, I started self-hosting when I realized that I really didn’t want anyone reading my thoughts. I’ve been using a regular note-taking app: iA Writer on my phone and Sublime Text on my computer.
At one point in the past I even had a beautiful WordPress site first online and then locally, but gave up when I started writing more on my phone.
This is awesome! I'm excited to see the update! I wish there had been an update to the camera though. It's great I just use it a lot and would love to see how they improved pieces of it!
Usually they announce camera updates at the September event when they announce new iPhones and other products. Today was about software and operating systems and developer platforms. Some hardware, but the bulk of hardware announcements come in a few months.
Apple blew me away with what they are doing for personal communication. Everything else felt like a refinement or new product trial balloon. But what Apple is doing to make mini-creators out of people here is jaw dropping.
I'd go so far to half-jest VisionPro launch was pushed up to smokescreen how big the iMessage changes are, what ecosystem dominance Apple is getting with iOS/MacOS. Apple is never going to participate with anyone else ever, after this. Apple is off executing incredible big advancements.
Users create a little avatar that shows up across products, with some solid flare & artistic effect gratis. Great first impression building, lots of enduring personality.
But the day to day is wow. Being able to positionally drag drop emoji into group chat is huge flair from the start. Drop in locations easily, nice, useful. Creating custom emoji really really impressed me, really let's folks develop repetoir & humor in their interactions with each other over time. ActivityPub/Mastadon impl MissKey has a very barebones custom emoji that I like, but the authorship tools here look really really friendly & helpful to really DIY, to go beyond being a meme bank.
Other communications tech touches were everywhere. Live Voicemail live transcribing is dead simple & sensible, albeit receive only. Shared CarPlay Sessions is tech Google has in Cast/Android but which no one uses (including YouTube Music): hugely prosocial connected computing. Journaling is incredibly compelling as a synthesis tool, a way to pull together a variety of computing bits & encourage user content generation, to make a shared computing space around the user.
Apple also situated into the home far better than Google. Android's widgets have been stagnant for years & crude, and Apple has gone from having nothing to relentlessly driving forward with microexperiences atop shared computing spaces. These ideas, of shared computing spaces, and shared interpersonal spaces, are massively on display here in a way no one else is computing is showing off, and it's incredibly compelling to me. And scary, as it's so purely Apple's space; the world needs some principled loyal opposition to the Cupertino Way, that keeps the path of computing available for open innovation.
I think I stated my reasoning here throughout. Two major themes, platform control & shared computing/social spaces, seem evident to me, we're such strong & rich themes.
Doesn't seem to be working for anyone else though, woe. Getting hammered on three fronts: Apple fan boys that hate my platform dominion messages, Apple haters that hate to hear how well Apple is executing, and people who accuse me of being a chatgtp. I assure you I have the bonafieds to prove this is me at my regular. I wish people didn't have such nasty trigger fingers.
That was the main thing I was looking for as well. They could have either owned it or what seems more likely, they will flip a flag for EU users in a few months.
I can’t see them ever announcing that in a keynote. I don’t think it’s a feature that most users are asking for or would make them want to switch to the platform.
I’m not denying it’s good for users, just that I don’t think it would be good for what is (highly) a marketing presentation for them at this point.
I would expect that to be talked about in the developer state of the union this afternoon, or perhaps not even at all at this point.
The only people who care about that are a handful of nerds who are deluded enough to believe that people want to sysadmin their phones, and surveillance capitalism and gambling companies such as Facebook and Riot who are desperate to bypass privacy and security controls.
I believe the core apps have so much tech debt / tentacles throughout the OS that sadly they will never get to having say Messages update from the App Store. For example, the new Messages can pop up Photos overlay to generate a sticker. This would need to be an API to see if you have the latest Photos app with the sticker capability.
Maybe, but for Apple yearly releases are just free PR. It wouldn’t be terribly difficult to write “if photos.app doesn’t have getStickerablePhotos API, tell user to update”
Sep 12, 2017 — Apple announces iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus, featuring a new glass and aluminum design, Retina HD displays, A11 Bionic chip and wireless ...
Sep 12, 2017 — “iPhone X is the future of the smartphone. It is packed with incredible new technologies, like the innovative TrueDepth camera system, beautiful ...
6 years old and it still performs pretty well, I’m really sensitive to slow tech but I don’t have major complains with my iPhone X in 2023. This is the longest I’ve ever owned a phone definitely buying the 15.
Every time a UI update is pushed for the calling and messaging interface, there is a group of seniors that no longer know how to call or message family and friends.
Can you download zoomed-out maps of the flight you're on? I always like to try to put the phone up against the window to see where you actually are (the maps on airplanes IFE are comically out of scale and hard to read with a 4inch poorly rotating airplane icon overlaid on them)
I don’t know about the receivers in phones but my understanding of gps is that it’s actually very slow to initialise if you don’t already have a rough idea of where you are. Roughly, I think you try to guess where you are and do some dsp work that will successfully separate signal from noise if you guessed correctly. You do this first for the ‘coarse navigation signal’ and again for the fine one. I think there are ways to improve it, eg testing multiple locations in parallel but I don’t know how much phones do those vs having good guesses (nearby cell towers, Wi-Fi, flights in your calendar can all be relevant signals to start with good guesses).
I generally don’t have any problem doing this on Google maps on my domestic Australian flights, in fact I almost always do it - great to see what’s underneath me and just how fucking much nothing there is.
Although the Qantas map when I’m flying on a plane with IFE does a pretty good job as well
> New protections encompass safer wireless connectivity defaults, media handling, media sharing defaults, sandboxing, and network security optimizations.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 242 ms ] threadCould you update it?
Bump lives!
I wish Web NFC had a publish mode where we could web hack something like this.
Which means the "bump to see this video" turns into "hang on, go into settings and hunt for nearby share, probably hidden in the 'Other' menu..."
If Google Nearby Share wasn't so... Googled up, it would be a great replacement. Instead, we get a local sharing mechanism that's connected to your Google account for some god-forsaken reason.
What I really miss is the weird, short period where WiFi Direct file sharing Just Worked between different brands. WiFi Direct still exists on modern Android but there's no cross-device file sharing platform anymore. It was just Bluetooth file transfers but faster, which is all it really needed to be. I'm sure Google Nearby Share works in a similar way except for the weird Google stuff.
So, despite it being failed in Android; it'll probably work well in Apples ecosystem. -- Apples true innovations (3D touch for example) have a much higher chance of not being used and going away.
See also: the resurgence of QR codes post iOS 11...
3D touch went away with the iPhone 11, and I'm still salty about it. The hold-spacebar-to-move-cursor thing is just ever so slightly less efficient than the previous force-touch-anywhere-on-keyboard-to-move-cursor. (But I get why they removed it -- that was pretty much the only good actual use of 3d touch. Elsewhere in the iOS UI, it just made things more complicated, and I was constantly accidentally force-touching things instead of long-pressing them, etc. Probably not worth the added hardware costs.)
The UX on that is terrible. If you’re reading this on an iPhone in safari, go to the URL bar and try to navigate to my user ID there. I’ll wait. Now try to do it on a site where the URL has a dozen parameters.
So a user learns about the feature because Apple educated them well, and then immediately gets to practice it and commit it to their long term memory because they have some immediate actual uses for it.
The Android approach is to release a technology, do a bunch of non functional demos and/or PoCs demonstrating how it can be used, and by the time actual useful implementations of the technology have been created users have forgotten the technology ever existed.
We have double-power-to-camera, which is arguably better than a swipe. Still, I'd like to see Android/Google have some confidence. Too often, we end up with half-assed "me-too"s from Google.
Fully count me in as part of this camp. Wanting to quickly snap a photo and being able to launch the camera without looking at the screen is much more convenient.
Apple doesn’t do new hotness. It finds experimental tech and if it can make it great then it’ll grab it. It’s always at a minimum 5 years behind new developments. As you point out sometimes decades.
I consider that their greatest strength though. Taking something with potential and starting to realize that potential.
Sorry, but I do not want to see someone's Self advertising everytime I get a phone call. You know this will be used to show you ads when companies call, right? You think this will not be monetized?
https://gizmodo.com/best-ios-17-features-iphone-apple-wwdc-2...
Although it’s the least used app for many of us, with iOS 17, the Phone app will be upgraded with a feature Apple is calling “Personalized Contact Posters” so instead of just your name and number showing up on the iPhone of someone you’re calling, they’ll see a customized image (or memoji) and **text of your choosing which could help persuade them into answering your call***. Apple also promises the Contact Posters will “also be available for third-party calling apps.”
Now the scam callers will not only be able to spoof the FBI's phone number, but show a badge and a threatening full screen message too!
Do they do that now with iPhones? It seems like the requirement to be using an Apple account would significantly hinder the scammers.
The time of video call scams will come, but I don't think we're there just yet outside very targeted attacks on people in power or with huge amounts of wealth at their disposal.
If it was permissioned it would have a lot more utility, for us
Like bring back google plus circles, for ios contacts
Actually, “group threads have a feed view / content publishing tools” is simple enough to work. Hm.
It also looks like a new way for spam callers to display the image of a nice girl to persuade you to answer.
Imo that feature in fact makes me believe even more that it won’t be available on calls from people you don’t know — way too ready for spam and abuse.
Step 2: start calling people. Doesn't matter if they answer, their dialer will show your ad.
The only workaround for this I can think of is to install an alternate dialer that doesn't implement this feature. I'm not sure it iOS has user replaceable dialers, though, that may just be an iOS thing.
Step 2: start calling people. Doesn't matter if they answer, their dialer will show your ad.
The only workaround for this I can think of is to install an alternate dialer that doesn't implement this feature. I'm not sure if iOS has user replaceable dialers, though, that may just be an iOS thing.
For just $15 per account [1] you can buy your way into someone else's iCloud, no manual phishing or credential stuffing needed. You'll need to ban quite a few per day to get rid of all of them, and even then innocent people may lose their accounts.
[1]: https://www.computerworld.com/article/3261128/criminals-pay-...
it’d really be funny for spammers to suddenly start showing up as Karen from Des Moines instead.
Actually thinking this through, it could be used to Dox people too.
Whether or not this is doxing will depend on the way this feature works. If it works like WhatsApp (where anyone with your phone number can look up your profile picture and status and that's considered Works As Intended) then it won't be long until every phone number has been mapped. If it works push-only, with new image URLs being generated for each call, I'm not so sure if it can be abused.
I'm sure security researchers will have some very interesting blogs about this system in the months to come.
The difference here is that phone numbers can be spoofed much easier than iMessage accounts, so you can (maybe??) spoof this system.
With this in mind, does anyone care?
>Reminders features a grocery list that automatically groups added items into categories to make shopping easier.
That's cool
> For easier and more secure password and passkeys sharing, users can share passwords with a group of trusted contacts. Everyone in the group can add and edit passwords to keep them up to date. Since sharing is through iCloud Keychain, it’s end-to-end encrypted.
>Maps adds offline maps, so users can download a specific area and access turn-by-turn navigation, see their estimated time of arrival, find places in Maps, and more while offline. Maps also makes it easier than ever to discover thousands of trails in parks across the United States, and supports electric vehicle drivers with real-time charging availability information.
>AirTag can be shared with up to five other people, allowing friends and family to keep track of an item in Find My. Everyone in a group will be able to see an item’s location, play a sound, and use Precision Finding to help pinpoint the location of a shared AirTag when nearby. This also works with all other Find My network accessories.
Note there is a IETF draft for credential transfers:
* https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-secure-credential-tra...
Apple and Alphabet/Google as authors.
I drove through Death Valley and thought I was super smart by pre-downloading the whole area…
The great difficulty of keeping a map up to date from outside the country would be enough.
Apple is a bit late to the game here, but obviously this isn't a make it or break it feature for the success of a mobile platform!
You don't have to be a wizard navigator or anything but those will operate when you have no signal and also show you a bigger picture of how to get where you want to go when you find you aren't where you want to be.
Finally! Every time either me or my wife goes out of town we have to remove the luggage airtags from one account and add them back in to the other one. When my kid leaves his jacket somewhere at school, only his phone can find it. Super annoying.
Apple: And here's how you can securely share those passwords.
Is it just two devices accessing the same profile?
how does it handle legitimate scenarios like the kid away at college or someone traveling?
1. https://help.netflix.com/en/node/123277
Now if only the Contacts team would do the same.
Such as the FBI and the Chinese Government!
It's end-to-end encrypted, and the encryption key is safely stored in the same data center for authorities to use.
No thanks, I'll stick to my self-hosted VaultWarden.
awesome
The pattern is repeating except now there's no Steve to take the company back and smack some opinionated design sense into it.
it works now? also if they could fix mobile hotspot, that’d be great
It barely works.
Sometimes the other device never appears despite having proper settings configured. Usually I’m trying to move a large video file.
Yet I bet they still won't add any additional languages for the swipe gesture, or allow multiple language predictions...
Coming from Android, I find typing and editing generally painful on iPhone even after 6 months and fiddling with settings. However I have yet to swap back to Android to see the pain points there.
Hate that iPad doesn’t have swipe.
1. Copy and Paste. When first introduced, it was great. You got a magnifying glass to be precise. It basically just worked. Yet somehow they kept changing it and every change makes it less usable. Currently, you can't really place the cursor at the end of a line (seriously, go into iMessage and try it). It's trying way too hard to snap to where it thinks you want the cursor. The only way to get this is to put it at the beginning of the next line and delete back. Pressing on a word brings up the "select" menu instead of just placing the cursor half the time.
2. Safari tab groups. I liked the old version where you toggled between tabs and private. But now you have to go through an extra step: selecting a tab group. Some people may want this. I'm not one of them. There is absolutely no way to opt out of this.
3. On an iPad hitting the top center of Safari brings up some split screen functionality that I have never used, don't care about and don't want. It's a natural place to press to go to the top of the page so this happens all the time.
Please just stop with this, Apple.
iOS strangely is full of these little hickups, it sometimes feels like back in Windows. (Also the auto correct is so annoyingly dumb and broken)
Apple famously for many years avoided adding a second mouse button. Steve Jobs was against it. Why? Because it lacked discoverability and consistency. He ultimately lost this because the context menu on Windows became pretty consistent and universal.
But his ultimatel point applies to long presses (and similar): where is the discoverability? Most people don't realize this can do something different. If they do, there's no consistency to it.
Even in your example, why would I expect to move the cursor around by long pressing the space bar? They added a non-intuitive gesture to make up for the failure they created by messing with the original copy and paste that worked just fine.
Both apple and Google created a similar problem with the address bar on browsers. Notice how hard it is to delect part of a URL? Why would you want to do this? Example: removing the stupid text fragment on Google search results so you can copy and paste the URL.
Click (or press) once and you select the whole URL. Click (or press) again and it brings up a menu with options like cut, copy and translate. To get rid of the selection you have to click outside the selection area. Now you can click the text like the search term but it snaps to word endings. What if I want to just correct spelling without re-typing the whole word?
All I want is to finely select in the URL and they've added so many extra steps and barriers to make this as difficult as possible in the name of "usability".
"That's why this year, we're again focusing on the core features. Phone, messages, voicemail. We literally have no ideas beyond what was already here when we arrived."
But even if this works (which it doesn't consistently), how is that intuitive?
[1] if you are in the EU :^)
But you can still go do it via the App Store using fewer steps. Just click on your profile pic (top right) and you should see all available app updates.
As an Australian I find that really ducking ridiculous and an afront to my national bloody identity.
Write down each swear you want and then write the same word for what it should be replaced with. So write “fucking” and “fucking” in the two boxes, and then iOS will know that “fucking” is a word it should look out for and it’ll recognize it for both autocorrect and swipe typing.
Very stupid fix but a stupid fix is still a fix.
I hadn’t seen the full keynote until after my comment so hopefully the new autocorrect really is better in general.
I’ve even tried building several (4(!)) journaling apps in the past and it’s still an unsolved problem for me. Right now i use a mix of obsidian and a self built journal app but that obviously has some drawbacks on its own.
Microjournaling, photo context and able to share (along with local e2e) are on top of my list. Looks like it solves many of it.
I still cannot understand why people are so trusting of things they put on their phone. It is so much easier for anyone to get into your phone as opposed to your house or a safe in your house.
You all are giving so much up just for this convenience, which will one day become inconvenient.
How would you know? In fact, you do not know this for certain. It is just wishful thinking. Marketing.
Modern phones are pretty good at stopping the latter class of attack; this is self-evident from the fact that this type of attacker is looking for specific things in order to use them in a timely manner (use the evidence against you at trial; drain your crypto wallet to spend the funds themselves before you can move the funds elsewhere), and yet we rarely see people reporting that someone made use of their exfiltrated data in this way.
PCs are much more vulnerable to this type of attack. There are tons of computer viruses that steal your crypto wallet.
Also, i think keeping it in a physical format is more vulnerable from others accidentally reading it than in a phone which is the most private to me as an individual.
At one point in the past I even had a beautiful WordPress site first online and then locally, but gave up when I started writing more on my phone.
New iPhone models and their changes, like the camera, will be held until the iPhone event that is traditionally in September.
That event often contains more iOS 17 features that they didn’t want to mention today for strategic reasons (might give away hardware changes).
I'd go so far to half-jest VisionPro launch was pushed up to smokescreen how big the iMessage changes are, what ecosystem dominance Apple is getting with iOS/MacOS. Apple is never going to participate with anyone else ever, after this. Apple is off executing incredible big advancements.
Users create a little avatar that shows up across products, with some solid flare & artistic effect gratis. Great first impression building, lots of enduring personality.
But the day to day is wow. Being able to positionally drag drop emoji into group chat is huge flair from the start. Drop in locations easily, nice, useful. Creating custom emoji really really impressed me, really let's folks develop repetoir & humor in their interactions with each other over time. ActivityPub/Mastadon impl MissKey has a very barebones custom emoji that I like, but the authorship tools here look really really friendly & helpful to really DIY, to go beyond being a meme bank.
Other communications tech touches were everywhere. Live Voicemail live transcribing is dead simple & sensible, albeit receive only. Shared CarPlay Sessions is tech Google has in Cast/Android but which no one uses (including YouTube Music): hugely prosocial connected computing. Journaling is incredibly compelling as a synthesis tool, a way to pull together a variety of computing bits & encourage user content generation, to make a shared computing space around the user.
Apple also situated into the home far better than Google. Android's widgets have been stagnant for years & crude, and Apple has gone from having nothing to relentlessly driving forward with microexperiences atop shared computing spaces. These ideas, of shared computing spaces, and shared interpersonal spaces, are massively on display here in a way no one else is computing is showing off, and it's incredibly compelling to me. And scary, as it's so purely Apple's space; the world needs some principled loyal opposition to the Cupertino Way, that keeps the path of computing available for open innovation.
I think I stated my reasoning here throughout. Two major themes, platform control & shared computing/social spaces, seem evident to me, we're such strong & rich themes.
Doesn't seem to be working for anyone else though, woe. Getting hammered on three fronts: Apple fan boys that hate my platform dominion messages, Apple haters that hate to hear how well Apple is executing, and people who accuse me of being a chatgtp. I assure you I have the bonafieds to prove this is me at my regular. I wish people didn't have such nasty trigger fingers.
asking if someone’s post was written by gpt is just a new way of being rude that internet mods haven’t yet had the balls to ban people for.
I’m not denying it’s good for users, just that I don’t think it would be good for what is (highly) a marketing presentation for them at this point.
I would expect that to be talked about in the developer state of the union this afternoon, or perhaps not even at all at this point.
Sep 12, 2017 — “iPhone X is the future of the smartphone. It is packed with incredible new technologies, like the innovative TrueDepth camera system, beautiful ...
6 year old phone
> The expanded Lockdown Mode increases security to help protect against sophisticated cyber attacks.
No support article updates or mentions in the Platforms State of the Union.
> New protections encompass safer wireless connectivity defaults, media handling, media sharing defaults, sandboxing, and network security optimizations.
Hopefully a session will cover the details.