You can remove almost all apps that come pre-installed on iPhone and iPad, set a wake alarm and change your file system (if you’re so inclined).
Monday’s keynote at Apple’s worldwide developers conference was fairly packed. The company’s various executives spoke for two hours about the watchOS, iOS, tvOS and the newly-monikered macOS, but while we were all wowed by the changes to Messages, the facial recognition introduced in Photos, and, er, Swift Playgrounds, Apple left almost as many interesting things unsaid as they announced onstage. So here are our picks for what would lead the Keynote That Never Was.
You can now remove the Stocks app
In fact, you can now remove almost all of the apps that come pre-installed on an iPhone and iPad. The only ones that are still mandatory are the App Store, Camera, Activity, Wallet, Find iPhone, Health, Messages, Phone, Safari and Settings. Contacts can be removed on an iPhone but is has to stay on an iPad, and News “will be removable in a later version of iOS 10 beta”.
Apple warns that removing the apps isn’t quite a panacea, erasing them from your home screen won’t actually delete them. But if you have a folder of “Apple Crap”, you might be happy to see the back of them anyway. Apple says: “The apps built into iOS are designed to be very space efficient, so all of them together use less than 150MB.”
The feature doesn’t quite feel fully baked yet, though, since there’s not actually any functionality built to let you mark replacements for the default apps. A mailto link, for instance, will still attempt to open the Mail app; if you’ve removed it, it will prompt you to reinstall, not open another mail app you may have installed.
RIP Game Center
You probably haven’t opened it for a few years, and if you’re unlucky, it’s been crashing almost every game since it broke for a high proportion of users a few months ago. Well, Game Center is dead, at least as we know it. The app has disappeared from iOS 10, with users managing friend requests in settings instead.
Wake Alarm
An extra little tab in the clock app will now help you get more sleep. Or at least, that’s the plan.
The next version of iOS lets you set a “Wake Alarm”: tell it what time you want to wake up, and it will ring at the appointed hour. So far, just a normal alarm, but it also asks how long you want to sleep for, and prompts you to go to bed too. For the quantified self fans, the app will also start tracking how much sleep you get, albeit just by assuming you’re asleep once you stop using your phone.
There’s a new file system for macOS
This may seem deep in the woods of geekiness, but it’s actually a feature that’s been high up the request list for developers for years.
The file system of a computer refers to the way data is actually stored on the hard drive. Disks on Apple Macs are currently formatted using HFS+, which was invented by Apple way back in 1998. At the time, it was state-of-the-art, but in the years since, it’s started to show its age: perhaps most obviously, it literally cannot handle dates past 2040.
So the company introduced a new file system, called Apple File System (inventive name), which it touts as “optimised for Flash/SSD storage”, of the kind found in most Mac laptops today. Among its new features are space sharing (letting two partitions share the free space available to them, rather than having to decide in advance how much each half gets), snapshots (which let the system make rapid read-only backups) and cloning of files, which lets the system copy files simply by rewriting the location, but pointing to the same underlying data – something which should save both time and hard drive space.
How does this affect you? Future Macs should feel faster, fit more files on their drives, and recover more rapidly from massive crashes.
Turn off read receipts for that one needy friend
Some people use read receipts. Some people don’t. It’s a rather contentious point. But if you do, and have one friend who’s just a bit too eager to ensure you reply the second you’ve read their texts, you can now turn them off just for that special person, or even for an individual conversation. Just tap on “details” in the top right, and you’d see a new option below Do Not Disturb that will let you toggle whether or not you send the read receipts.
source:theguardian.com
No comments:
Post a Comment