iOS

iPhone 11 render based on alleged prototype

News today from Bloomberg lines up with previous reports we’ve heard that this year’s iPhone 11 will feature a triple-camera system and potentially USB-C, but also offers much more. We could see the 2020 iPhone lineup using laser-powered 3D camera systems. Some other fresh exciting details include iOS 13 bringing a Dark Mode and iPad specific improvements, news about an updated 10-inch iPad and iPad mini 5, when we’ll see the next iPhone design changes, and more.

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Popular iOS PDF app, GoodReader, is out with a major update today for its 10th anniversary. The new release brings a brand new UI and PDF viewer, a continuous scrolling mode, 256-bit encryption, Split View support on iPad, Apple Pencil 2 support, Secure Photocopy redaction, and much more.

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Apple is releasing the first public beta of iOS 12.2 later today, three days after releasing its first iOS 12.2 developer beta on Thursday.

With its first developer beta, we found evidence of a new generation of AirPods, the Apple News subscription service, new iPads and iPod touch, and many other changes and improvements. It’s likely that tvOS 12.2 public beta 1 and macOS 10.14.4 public beta 1 will also become available; we will update the post if they are released.

For customers, iOS 12.2 introduces support for the recently announced AirPlay 2 and HomeKit smart TVs while introducing a handful of other changes and improvements.

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The most significant change to Apple’s developer ecosystem this decade has been the introduction of the Swift programming language – and we’ll probably see the next big change come during this year’s WWDC with the introduction of third party UIKit apps on the Mac.

As for Swift, the new language was announced at WWDC 2014. With contributions from both Apple engineers and the open-source community, it has seen constant updates and is now in version 4.2.1.

An important aspect of Swift that has been affecting users since its first version is that its application binary interface, or ABI, is not stable. What that means in practice is that Apple can’t include the Swift language support in its operating systems, because an app written with Swift 3 won’t work with the language support binaries for Swift 4. The solution to that is to include the Swift language libraries inside the app bundle that gets downloaded from the App Store, increasing the bandwidth and storage required by the app.

That’s finally changing for Apple and Swift soon…

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Apple released the first beta of iOS 12.2 earlier this week and we’ve already highlighted a lot of new features. One small but useful feature that hasn’t yet been widely noted is more granular control of Screen Time’s Downtime feature.

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Apple released the first iOS 12.2 developer beta today, and in tow is support for Apple News in Canada, finally branching out from the initial launch countries: US, UK and Australia.

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Update: Developer betas are now available including iOS 12.2, watchOS 5.2, tvOS 12.2, macOS 10.14.4, and Xcode 10.2 beta 1.

Now that Apple’s bug fix beta updates to iOS 12.1 are now available to all users, it’s time for the next big point release of iOS 12. Apple will release iOS 12.2 developer beta 1 today. watchOS 5.2 beta 1 for developers is also arriving today. The software update should be available at the top of the hour. We’ll update and report back any changes that we discover inside.

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Two weeks after releasing the latest watchOS 5.1.3 developer beta, Apple is releasing its final version for consumers later today. The release notes only mention bug fixes, but we’ll update if anything notable is discovered on the new release. iOS 12.1.3 is also coming out to all customers.

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There has long been debate over the extent to which macOS and iOS will converge. Some think we’ve already gone too far down that route, with Launchpad coming in for particular criticism as an unnecessary child-like interface (though it can be made more useful). At the other extreme, some think Apple should go as far as touchscreen Macs and enable people to run either OS on both Macs and iPads.

Apple itself has consistently said that it considers Macs and iPads to be different categories of device, a message somewhat diluted by ads referring to the iPad as a computer.

But I was struck by a suggestion of two iOS features that might work on Mac …

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One of the biggest shake-ups we’ve seen in the iOS user-interface was the replacement of skeuomorphism – making things look like real-life objects – with the complete opposite in iOS 7. Where once we had realistic looking 3D representations, we instead got a ‘flat’ UI which goes out of its way to remain 2D.

While some feel that skeuomorphism looks old-fashioned these days, the approach still has its fans even now – and Apple has shown signs of beginning to adopt a new take on the look using something called anisotropism …

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We want a lot out of iOS 13, but there’s one issue that’s becoming increasingly problematic on iPhones for a lot of customers: spam calls. This is something any future version of the iPhone software should tackle — iOS 13 or a point update like iOS 12.1.3 — if only by giving customers more control over how phone calls are treated.

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Security has been a huge topic of debate over the past several years. Most modern tech companies use some form of two-factor authentication to add a layer of security. Recently, the trend of USB keys has made its rounds, requiring a physical connection to unlock your accounts.

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