Top Features of iOS 12 to Take Advantage of Today
Feeling left behind because you don’t have the latest iPhone or iPad? Don’t because Apple has a present for you in the form of iOS 12. The new operating system promises to increase performance, particularly for older devices as far back as the iPhone 5s and iPad Air.
But iOS 12 offers more than just a speed boost. Apart from adding fripperies like new animoji, text effects and camera effects in Messages and FaceTime, iOS 12 helps you use your device less. That’s important as it becomes increasingly obvious that many people spend more time than they’d like on addictive social media apps, games and cat videos.
Screen Time
The marquee feature for helping you control device usage is Screen Time. Found in the Settings app, Screen Time reports on how much time you spend using different apps, how often you pick up your device and how many notifications interrupt you. You can check it anytime and get weekly reports and use this information to help you reduce undesirable usage.
Screen Time has two helpful options; Downtime and App Limits. With Downtime, you can specify a time period when you can only receive phone calls and use specific apps you set in Always Allowed. App Limits let you set how long you may use certain categories of apps. You can ignore the limit extending it for 15 minutes or for the rest of the day but that’s cheating, right?
Even better you can set Downtime and App Limits for a child’s iPhone or iPad ensuring that they can’t play games after bedtime or text their friends during dinner.
Notification Management
It’s easy to become overwhelmed with notifications especially if you have chatty friends in messaging apps. iOS 12 can reduce the impact of non-stop notifications. On the Lock screen iOS 12 now groups message threads and multiple notifications from the same app. Tapping a group expands it so you can see the details.
Plus with a feature called Instant Tuning, you can change notification settings for an app right from a notification. Swipe left on a notification and tap Manage. Instant Tuning also lets you send notifications to Notification Center silently so they don’t interrupt you but are available later.
Do Not Disturb
In the “it’s about time” department iOS 12 beefs-up Do Not Disturb so it works more the way people do. When you bring up Control Center and force-touch the Do Not Disturb button it expands to let you turn on Do Not Disturb for 1 hour, for the rest of the day or until you leave your current location. The beauty of these new options is that they disable Do Not Disturb automatically so you don’t have to remember and potentially miss important notifications. Plus a new Bedtime option in Settings > Do Not Disturb dims the display and silences overnight notifications until you unlock your device in the morning.
Siri Shortcuts
Another new feature Siri Shortcuts aims to help you use your device more effectively. As Siri learns your routines it will start suggesting shortcuts for common actions either on the Lock screen or when you pull down on the Home screen to search. You can see its suggestions in Settings > Siri & Search > All Shortcuts and for those that seem useful, record a custom phrase that will invoke the shortcut. Plus a new Shortcuts app lets you create more complex shortcuts that can run multiple steps at once.
Smaller Changes
Those may be the most significant changes in iOS 12 but they’re far from the only ones. Here’s a sampling of other refinements you’ll notice:
- Apple has redesigned the iBooks app and renamed it Books.
- The News, Stocks and Voice Memos apps also received redesigns. Stocks and Voice Memos are now available on the iPad and all three have made the jump to the Mac in Mojave with their data synced via iCloud.
- A new Measure app uses augmented reality to help you measure objects in the real world.
- In Settings > Battery, iOS 12 shows graphs of battery usage and activity for the last 24 hours or the last 10 days.
iOS 12 has even more minor improvements that we’ll be sharing in the coming months so watch this space!
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Additional iOS 12 tidbits we picked up from various reviews
Automatic software updates (presented as 'Keep Your [Device Name] Up to Date' at setup) is the recommended default option as suggested by the large 'Continue' button highlighted in blue. According to Apple, iOS devices will send a notification before automatic software updates are installed overnight, presumably giving users the chance to delay installation until later. Automatic software updates can be disabled at any time by navigating to Settings ⇾ General ⇾ Software Update.
The best part of the iPad's revised gestures is that you can now accomplish everything – be it closing apps or entering multitasking – with just one finger. This gesture feels great in use and makes each interaction more natural and less disjointed than before. This gesture change isn't explained in the interface, but you can even quickly swipe up and immediately move to the right (a semicircle, effectively) to navigate the app switcher horizontally, like an iPhone X.
The main addition to Do Not Disturb in iOS 12 is the ability to enable it for different time periods suggested in Control Center or throughout the OS via Siri. Pressing on the Do Not Disturb icon in Control Center reveals an expanded platter with buttons to activate it for 1 hour, until the evening/next morning, or until you leave the current location. If a calendar event is occurring at the time you open Control Center, the Do Not Disturb platter will also offer you an option to activate it until the event is over.
When your device is in Do Not Disturb During Bedtime mode, waking it will show you a dimmed, and empty lock screen with a single Do Not Disturb notification. The approach works well as it helps you spot the time more easily at night (the white clock stands out against the dimmed background) and prevents the anxiety of being inundated with a barrage of notifications. Out of sight, out of mind.
App limits! These are timers that you set for individual apps or entire app categories to define how much you can use them every day. Effectively, they are personal allowances. App limits can be created from a standalone app category in Screen Time, as well as by drilling into individual app statistics. App limits reset every day at midnight; they can be entered with a standard time picker, and they apply to all devices signed into the same iCloud account.
The Downtime feature lets you schedule periods during which only particular apps (along with phone calls) can be accessed. App Limits enables you to restrict time spent on whole categories of apps and those apps' associated websites, like "games" or "social networking." Moreover, the Content & Privacy Restrictions menu lets you micromanage every aspect of your phone's functionality and content, like restricting whether the user can delete or install new apps, use location services, or see advertising. You can even apply a hard audio volume limit if the clashing and clanging in your kids' games drives you crazy.
Tap & hold on the space bar until the keyboard becomes a trackpad.
Turn on Dictionaries and Thesaurus in Settings > General > Dictionary.
In iOS 12, Apple is making Markup mode more powerful by adding new drawing options and a color picker with 120 color choices.
CONCLUSION
What iOS 12 does is make older devices more usable. Also, it deploys an array of tools that developers might use to create much more impressive and powerful apps in the future.
SUPPORTED MODELS
iOS 12 supports the same devices that iOS 11 did, starting from the iPhone 5s and 6th generation iPod touch up to the latest iPhone and iPad models
Supported iPhone models
Supported iPad models
Supported iPod models
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