Finally, ios 14 is here was just revealed at WWDC and I've had this beta on my iPhone this very early developer beta for about a day now and after using it for that time, there's actually a lot here both big and small. So this is the first look and hands-on at the features and what to expect for this OS. So right off the top. I just want to say the memes were pretty strong about Apple taking a lot of old features from Android in this release. I made the jokes. We all made the jokes, but aside from all that I think we should ask ourselves why now? Like why are we just getting widgets instead of like eight years ago when I could have added widgets to iOS and after actually using it. I'm feeling like the answer is they wanted to get a couple extra things right to put on top of it and it's not like it's better than the Android version but there's some stuff that they do their own way.

New Home Screen

So first up is the new home screen. We've all heard about it. We've all seen the widgets by now, but let's just go over everything. First of all, there's the new app Library which is a space all the way at the end to the right of all the home screens. That's literally just a big list of all your apps, but automatically organized add this is basically the first time IOS has had like an app drawer. Everything is in one place. It took a decade, but it's finally here. And inside of that there was just a straight-up alphabetical searchable list. If you're into that too now, you can still pull down to search from anywhere on the home screens. If you want to find apps that way and actually adds more results from the web and from Siri, but hopefully you'll need to use this a lot less

Home Screen Widgets

Now finally we talk about widgets, it's still not quite an Android level where you can put them like anywhere you want and change them to whatever size you want. It's not the same thing. Like you can't put a widget in the middle of the home screen. It has to be either on the left side or the right side, which is kind of a bummer and you can't put it alone on the right without anything to the left of it. So it's still restricted in a very iPhone way as you can tell but at least you can long-press hit that plus button and break out into all these new widgets and add them to any home screen with some degree of Freedom. We see there are different sizes all the widgets here in IOS 14 off the bat are all first-party Apple apps And there's a nice variety with different sizes and functionalities, but we are expecting third-party apps to become as well and that to me is exciting to finally be coming to the iPhone and I'm looking forward to having my Tesla widget where I can unlock the trunk of my car just from the button or open a charge port or even just have a widget of my Google Calendar instead of an Apple calendar. So okay now apples added the fundamentals of widgets are on the home screen. So now on top of that, they've added a couple interesting little Dynamic and new extra things you can do with that

First of all, there's a widget you can add called smart stack where once you add it. It's basically a carousel of several common widgets and you can scroll through them manually or have them change automatically based on predictions. It's made for you and while that's neat. I didn't really think I would use this until I found out you can edit smart stacks and remove unwanted or useless widgets from this Carousel, but I think even cooler is the method of adding for creating your own smart Stacks. You can do this any time.

You want so if you want to create a stack you can add to widgets on top of each other that are the same size. So hold and drag that second widget on top of the first widget drop it on top and it becomes a scrollable stack and then you can continue to add more and then you can edit to make it a smart stack or just keep it this way that is pretty nice.

App Drawer

There is another thing long overdue from IOS that you can now do because you have an app drawer is hiding home screens. So let's say you have a A couple apps that you don't use that much as classic iOS bunch of apps you don't use but you don't want to delete them just in case you want to use them once in a while. Okay, so instead of putting them all in like a random folder that just sits at the end of one of our home screens now that there is an app drawer and iOS, you can just hold down to edit. Click the dots at the bottom and then just uncheck to hide an entire page. Boom. Now. You never have to see those apps taking up space on your home screens again. You can now actually make a whole iOS home screen setup with no apps and just one page of widgets if you wanted to so overall this home screen stuff is definitely the biggest change in iOS.

Compact UI

So we have a bunch of changes in this category that will call compact UI.So in previous versions of iOS, there are plenty of things plenty of actions that just unnecessarily take up the entire screen now, they're all things. So how will you get a phone call or a FaceTime call? For example, it won't just dominate the whole screen anymore. It'll just give you another drop-down notification from which you can easily hide it and keep doing what you're doing. It'll keep ringing or you can accept or reject right away. That's a good compact UI and then once you're actually on a FaceTime, you can actually swipe up to go home and do. other things and a FaceTime continues doesn't pause your video. It keeps the camera up and working. You can look something up grab a phone number whatever you're going to do. It doesn't have to pause and you can move around that picture and picture as long as you're doing all that and speaking of picture and picture. It's just generally more widely supported throughout the entire OS now. So whether you're watching a movie and Apple TV and that app or just any video and Safari really because pretty straight forward once the video is a full screen just swipe up to go home and that shrink down and keep playing in this little picture in the picture window and then you can play with the size of that window move it around to any corner and just keep doing whatever you're doing behind that picture. You can even swipe it over to the side to get rid of the visual for a minute, but the audio keeps playing in the background, and then you can bring it back whenever you want. Keep going. It really does feel more like true multitasking

New Siri Update

Lastly for compact UI Siri which in all previous versions of iOS used to always be this full screen take over now in iOS 13 is just a little animation here at the bottom again.

Why Siri, which in all previous versions of iOS used to always be this full screen take over now in iOS 14 is just a little animation here at the bottom again, they've sort of adjusted it but it's not perfect. So you can call up Siri the same way long, press the power button and it's this smaller animation at the bottom of the screen. You ask it a question. It pops up an answer at the top of the screen where it can but it doesn't let you interact with anything underneath directly without exiting. So while yes, the animation is smaller and it doesn't take up the whole screen anymore. It still doesn't quite feel as much like the true multitasking or if they let me scroll and article underneath my Siri answer nevertheless. You can still see what's underneath there. If you need a reference it while you're talking to Siri then from there.

Emoji

There are a lot of little things useful things but little things I think to categorize them will put them into two buckets straight from Android and genuinely new stuff that Google should copy so straight from Android that the stock keyboard now finally has added Emoji search.

So instead of typing a word in hoping the right suggested Emoji pops up. Now. You can just search for any Emoji want any time which has revived the age-old question. Is this Emoji prayer hands or a high five apples keyboard does not service it when you search for high five, but Google's does apple team prayer hands.

Translate App

There's a new stock translate app, which is nice to see it. Only supports a smaller number of languages looks like about a dozen right now, but I expect to see that list grow over time and it works great for quickly translating conversations between two people

Default Email And Browser Apps Update

Then finally default email and browser apps will be able to be changed in Iowa's 14. Finally, now it is it's just email and browser apps. But you know, those are the two that most people most often want to sit as a different default. So I'm excited to get Chrome as my default browser and I am very excited to have something other than the useless to me mail app as my default mail app.

Then we also saw app clip which is like Little Snips of apps that you can click the temporarily use when you don't have the whole app installed but need to use some of its functionality a lot of good stuff there, but then we'll move on to the super unique features that I haven't seen some of the stuff wasn't even talked about on stage. But you know as people dig through the bait as we found some of it and it's good.

Accessibility Settings Double Tap

I want to start with some accessibility settings if you go into settings>accessibility touch and then back tap you can now map a double.or triple tap of the back of the phone to a shortcut. So I've mapped double-tapping the back of my phone to open up Siri. So literally all I do is double-tap the back and after about half a second Siri pops up and then I think I did triple tap to take a screenshot. And there it is. It's a slight delay, but it does work and it's kind of neat to have an extra thing map to the back of the phone. You can actually set a series shortcut to run on that double-tap of the back of the phone and then you can set that shortcut to point to any number of things. So this point I literally have the shortcut set to open Google assistant on a double-tap which is pretty hilarious. You could also have it open the camera or whatever else you really wanted to okay?

And then while we're at it, here's another really interesting accessibility feature settings> accessibility>sound recognition. This will let you turn on notifications if the phone's Mic recognizes a sound that might be important. So it's meant for people hard of hearing but could still be useful to anyone if it picks up a doorbell or a fire alarm or a faucet running that you forgot to turn off. That's pretty sweet. There are more Emoji customizations. They still don't quite look exactly like me, but at least you can add face coverings like masks another sign of the times along with that hand washing detection from the Apple watch

And then a privacy feature anytime literally any time an app starts using the camera iOS shows a little green light to let you know that something is accessing the camera and anytime the microphone is accessed a little orange light and then in the improved faster camera app When taking a night mode photo it gives you a gyroscopic guide to help you keep the phone still to take a better handheld picture. Another one is if your face timing and the AI detects that someone in that group FaceTime call is using sign language. It will move them up to the most prominent biggest spot. So everyone on the FaceTime can see the sign language. There's also a ton of other things on Apple site from the pin conversations and messaging to cycling directions and easy navigation and Maps but clearly, really most of the good stuff is in the details.

List Of The iOS 14 Compatible Devices

Here's a list of all the iPhones getting iOS 14 in the fall again, likely around September like they do every year and so that's every iPhone since iPhone 6s. But overall, I think it's looking pretty good. I mean, it's still it's not like a drastic UI overhaul. It's very clearly still an iPhone half the people who get this update will probably never use most of these features, but there's a lot of good ones baked in there for the Nerds like who wanted to dig in and actually use that stuff. Let me know in the comments which one's your favorite

Or if you're an Android person which One you'd like to see Google copy. Anyway until the next one. Thanks for reading.

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