Amongst today’s Apple’s WWDC historic announcements, such as the company’s switch from x86 to Arm processor architectures, we also saw the launch of the new…
Amongst today’s Apple’s WWDC historic announcements, such as the company’s switch from x86 to Arm processor architectures, we also saw the launch of the new iOS 14 and iPadOS 14 which bring new features to the company’s mobile devices.
Starting off with the home screen, for the first time in many generations we’re seeing some substantial changes to this part of iOS and iPhones. For many years Apple had been relatively stubborn in implementing a more flexible app management system that’s a bit more organised than simply having all applications spread over several home screens. Apple attempts to solve this issue by introducing the new “App Library” section of the home screen. This is essentially an extra page where the launcher will organise your applications by groups defined by their application type. On top of this UI addition, we’re also seeing now a linear alphabetical list of all applications that can be called up from the new app search UI, also allowing you to type in the name of the app you want to find and launch.
Another big addition is the addition of home-screen widgets. Undoubtedly some people will make fun of Apple for being more than a decade late to this feature, but now finally we can also have customizable widgets directly on the home screen. One question which I asked myself during the presentation is as to whether Apple will allow “empty space” in the home screen or if things will still be filled top-to-bottom left-to-right in terms of widgets and app icons.
iMessage has also seen very large updates that vastly improve the usability of the platform and bring it more up to date with other messaging apps. Group conversations can now be pinned at the top of the app, up to 9 of the most frequent chats can now be favourited with quick access to them instead of having to search through the list. We’ve seen big improvements in the customisations of the group conversations, naming or giving the group dedicated thumbnails, as well as new usability options as to show the most recent group members who wrote something.
Users will now also be able to tag people in the chats. This serves to directly address a person in a group chat all whilst remaining transparent to the other members. One big advantage of such a functionality is that a member can customise his notification settings, for example muting the conversation unless he’s been tagged in the chat.
It’s now also possible to do in-line replies to a specific message, creating conversation threads instead of a single on-going linear chat history.
