3 iOS 14 features I'm excited for that nobody's talking about yet
iOS 14
Apple kicked things off with the official announcement of iOS 14, which brings a variety of new features to the iPhone and iPad. Most notably are a handful of major changes to the home screen for the first time ever.
iOS 14 adds a new App Library view for organizing all of your apps. Apps are automatically organized in the App Library, and you don’t have to keep all of the icons on your actual home screen view. There is also a new list view as well as features for sorting applications based on usage patterns and more.
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Next up was iPadOS 14, which adds many of the same features as iOS 14 — such as home screen widgets and Apple Maps improvements. In iPadOS 14, there is also a redesigned Music app that brings full-screen lyrics, new tabs, and easier access to your library.
Apple also touted that search on the iPad has been completely revamped to improve app launching, brings a less intrusive interface, adds deeper Files integration, and much more.
Following iPadOS, we took a trip to the Apple Park Fitness Center, where Kevin Lynch walked us through many of the new features coming to Apple Watch this year. watchOS 7 brings additional tools for developers, allowing them to create more advanced types of complications.
The Workouts app has also been updated with new dance workouts as well as improved calorie tracking for things like core training, cooldowns, and functional training. In conjunction with watchOS 7, the Activity app on Apple Watch has been completely redesigned, and actually renamed from Activity to Fitness.
watchOS 7 also brings support for watch face sharing. This means a few different things. First, you can now create and share watch faces with other people, but developers can also offer preconfigured faces in their application, while you can also add watch faces from the web.
For the rest of the WWDC keynote, attention shifted to the Mac. Apple unveiled macOS 11 Big Sur. This update brings all sorts of visual changes and redesigns that largely bring many iOS and iPadOS design elements to the Mac.
For example, the Dock has been designed with rounded corners and all-new app icons. There’s a new translucent menu with an all-new Control Center and Notification Center. Messages on the Mac is completely new with more powerful search, a redesigned photo picker, Memoji integration, messages effects, pinned conversations, and group iMessage enhancements.
In fact, the new Messages app is a port of the iPad version of Messages using the Mac Catalyst technology. Apple also added a new version of the Apple Maps app, which has also come from the iPad through Mac Catalyst.
Speaking of Catalyst, Apple is also making some improvements to the platform itself to make it easier for developers to bring iPad apps to the Mac. There are a variety of new tools for developers, such as improved access to menu and keyboard APIs, new controls for checkboxes and date pickers, and much more.
Safari has also gotten some major enhancements in Big Sur, including dramatic improvements to performance, with Apple touting that web page loading is 50% faster than in Google Chrome. There’s also a new Privacy Report button in the toolbar to see how a webpage is using your data and what trackers Safari is blocking, as well as support for translating webpages from the toolbar.But the news on the Mac did not stop there.
Apple Silicon transition
Apple concluded today’s event by officially confirming its plans to shift from Intel processorsin the Mac to its own ARM-based Apple Silicon. This shift has been rumored for a while now, and Apple officially outlined what it all means for the Mac at WWDC today.
Apple emphasized that using Apple Silicon in the Mac will bring improved GPU, high-performance storage, improved efficiency, and much more. The company is in the process of designing a family of Mac processors specifically for the Mac hardware lineup. This will mean a common architecture across all of Apple’s product lineups.
For emulation, macOS Big Sur will include a new version of Rosetta to translate existing Intel apps to work on Apple Silicon, with the apps being translated at the time of install to ensure the best performance possible.
Even further, because the iPhone, iPad, and Mac will all share a common chip architecture, Apple Silicon means that you will be able to run iPhone and iPad applications on the Mac. Most apps will work without any changes, and they will all be available to be downloaded via the Mac App Store.
For developers, Apple is launching a Quick Start program that provides them with documentation and sample code to help ease the transition from Intel to ARM. There will also be a Developer Transition Kit hardware package that includes a Mac mini powered by the Apple A12Z processor. Developers can apply to receive this Mac mini for $500 via Apple’s Developer website starting today.
Wrap-up
As you can see, WWDC 2020 was full of announcements for every Apple platform. Here at 9to5Mac, we are digging into it all, and we’ll have additional coverage of everything that we discover throughout the rest of this week and through the rest of the summer.
What was your favorite announcement at WWDC this year? What are you most excited to try out? Let us know down in the comments!
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