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Posts tagged with "iOS 17"

Home Widget Unlocks HomeKit Device Control That Apple’s Home App Doesn’t Offer

You might have wondered what would become of widget-focused apps like Home Widget when Apple announced at WWDC that a Home widget was coming to iOS 17, iPadOS 17, and macOS Sonoma. I did too. But, even though the Home widget works well, it’s limited, leaving room for developers like Clément Marty to take their widgets to an entirely different level.

If you’re a home automation nerd, you’ll quickly run into the Home widget’s limitations. For instance, it’s great for toggling lights on and off, but it can’t dim your lights or change their color. Home Widget goes beyond the binary choice of on or off across a spectrum of features, making it indispensable for home automation fans.

Let’s see what it can do.

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Timery’s Updated Widgets Enable Starting and Stopping Timers, Pagination, and More

It’s interesting to compare Timery 1.6, Joe Hribar’s time tracking app for iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Watch, with Widgetsmith. David Smith’s app uses interactivity across a wide range of different types of widgets, allowing for a highly personalized approach to your Home Screen. Timery is a little different. It’s just as customizable, if not more so, but in a deep, focused way that makes it hands-down the most customizable and useful way to track time from a widget.

If you had asked me how I used Timery in the spring, I would have said I primarily use the Mac app. That’s changed drastically over the summer. My answer now is that I’m primarily a Timery widget user.

What I love about the app’s widgets is that they allow you to create a set of widgets that work how you use the app and nothing more. One of Timery’s strengths has always been its rich set of features that make it valuable to a broad cross-section of users. However, that means there is more to Timery than most people need. But with the app’s widgets, it’s possible to pare the app down to just the components that are essential to you, which is the ultimate in customization.

That doesn’t mean you won’t use the main app ever again. Some people may, but I certainly haven’t. Instead, it’s been more of a focus shift that allows me to continue whatever I’m working on, switching timers as needed on the fly from whichever device I have handy at the moment without opening the app most of the time. Timery’s update is a stellar release, which also comes with a new watchOS app that fans of the app are going to love.

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Widgetsmith Pushes the Boundaries of Widget Interactivity

It’s clear from David Smith’s iOS 17 update to Widgetsmith that he intends for the app to hold its position among the most customizable widget creation tools available. That’s exactly what he’s done with a long list of new widgets, customization options, and features that push interactivity to the limit of the technologies Apple provides.

The new widgets focus on weather, calendar events, photos, and a game. The number of permutations available is vast because there’s so much to customize. The image at the beginning of this story is just a small sample of what is possible, but with adjustable colors, fonts, and other elements, the combinations that can be created are nearly endless. So, let’s dig into the highlights.

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iOS and iPadOS 17 Review Extras: eBook, Special Editions of MacStories Weekly and AppStories+, and Two New Obsidian Plugins

Today, Federico published his iOS and iPadOS 17 review. As in past years, we’re releasing a wide variety of perks exclusively for Club MacStories members throughout the week, including an eBook version of the review, a special ‘making of’ edition of MacStories Weekly, a behind-the-scenes AppStories+ segment, and two new Club-exclusive Obsidian plugins.

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iOS and iPadOS 17: The MacStories Review

In the year when the vision is elsewhere, what do you get the OS that has everything?

Well, last year was weird.

For the first time since I started writing annual reviews of Apple’s two mobile operating systems – iOS and iPadOS – I published a review without the iPad part. Or rather: I had to publish it a month later given the mess Apple found itself in with Stage Manager for iPadOS 16 and its half-baked, embarrassing debut.

I don’t want to go over the specifics of that entire saga again and how we got to a shipping version of Stage Manager for iPadOS 16 that didn’t meet my expectations. Spoiler alert: as we’ll see later in this review, Apple listened to feedback and fixed the most glaring issues of Stage Manager in iPadOS 17, striking the balance between “guided multitasking” and freeform window placement that was missing from last year’s debut. Stage Manager for iPadOS 16 will remain another blip in the iPad’s long and storied history of ill-fated multitasking features. There’s no need to talk about it again.

I want to explain, however, why the past 12 months have been different than usual in iOS and iPadOS land beyond the fact that I couldn’t work on my iPad Pro for the first half of 2023.1

Following the launch of iOS 16 with its Lock Screen widgets and after Apple wrapped up work on the last big-ticket item on the iOS 16 roadmap (Live Activities for the Lock Screen and Dynamic Island, which launched in late October), it felt like the entire Apple community only started thinking about one product for the next six months: the headset. What would later be known as the Vision Pro and visionOS platform became the topic of conversation in Apple-related publications, podcasts, and YouTube channels. Leading up to WWDC 2023, anticipation surrounding the upcoming headset eclipsed anything related to other platforms.

And rightfully so. As I explained in the story that I wrote after I was able to try a Vision Pro at Apple Park, the excitement was justified. It’s always a rare occurrence for Apple to introduce a new hardware product with associated software platform; but to do so with a mind-blowing experience unlike anything I ever tried before in my life is truly something special. Apple had been working on visionOS and Vision Pro for years, and we were all thinking about it and waiting for it at WWDC. And the company delivered.

This context is necessary because the visionOS/Vision Pro development timeline explains what’s going on with iOS and iPadOS 17 this year. Both OSes are grab-bag style updates with a collection of welcome enhancements to different areas of experience. I quipped years ago that modern iOS updates need to have a little bit of everything for everyone; that has never been more true than with iOS 17, albeit for a different reason this time: most likely, because Apple didn’t have time to also deliver big, vision-altering upgrades on the iPhone this year.

iOS and iPadOS take a bit of a secondary role in 2023, happily conceding the spotlight to a new software platform that hasn’t launched yet, but which developers around the world are already testing in person.

To be clear, I am not complaining. iOS and iPadOS 17 may not have an industry-defining, obvious tentpole feature, but in their approach to offering miscellaneous improvements, they’re fun and interesting to cover. Of the two, iPadOS is the one that suffered from lack of development resources the most and whose strategy could be easily summed up as “it’s iPadOS 16, but we fixed Stage Manager”. Which, again, given the circumstances, is absolutely fine with me.

While Apple was busy with visionOS this summer, I was having fun exploring iOS 17’s collection of app updates and, as we’ll see in this review, extensive upgrades to one system feature: widgets.

As always every year: let’s dive in.

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  1. Did I ever tell you the story of how I used a Microsoft Surface in secret as my main computer from January to June 2023 until Apple unveiled the new Stage Manager for iPadOS 17 and everything was good with the world again? How I spent six months in computing wilderness and questioned every single one of my tech decisions? And how I ultimately accepted that I prefer Apple platforms because, at the end of the day, they're made by people who care about great design and user experience? I did, and you can listen to the story here. ↩︎

The Weather App Adds More Detailed Data in iOS 17, iPadOS 17, and macOS Sonoma

Apple’s Weather app is packing more data than ever before on iOS 17, iPadOS 17, and macOS Sonoma. The thing about weather is that beyond the basics, everyone cares about different things, and some people care about it all. With Apple’s latest version of Weather, there’s more weather to nerd out on than ever before.

Hourly precipitation predictions for a full 10 days.

Hourly precipitation predictions for a full 10 days.

The Weather app includes hourly precipitation predictions in its 10-day forecast detail view. Is there really a 45% chance of rain in Nashville a week from Monday? Probably not, but if that sort of precision is what you’re looking for in a weather app, Weather has it.

The wind animates on the new radar map overlay.

The wind animates on the new radar map overlay.

Wind map overlays have been added to Weather, too. The overlay looks excellent and animates to show you which way the wind will blow over the next 24 hours. It’s a great addition if you’re going out to fly a kite or a drone, sail a boat, and more.

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iOS 17, iPadOS 17, and macOS Sonoma Expand Password Management and Access System-Wide

Passwords permeate our lives. With an ever-growing number of sites, services, and apps to log into, people need help generating, managing, and accessing them. There are excellent third-party apps that can help, but the reality is that most people aren’t going to download a third-party app, and even fewer are likely to pay for one. That’s why Apple’s work with passwords is so important.

However, what makes that work impressive is the lengths to which the company has gone to make good password practices easy for users. The password updates to iOS 17, iPadOS 17, and macOS Sonoma are fantastic examples, making it easier than ever to share passwords and for users to begin adopting passkeys, a superior method of authentication compared to traditional passwords.

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iOS 17’s Check In Feature Simplifies Making Sure Friends and Family Get Home Safely

We’ve all been there. You say goodbye to a friend or family member after a late evening and then begin to worry if they’ll make it home safely. You ask them to share their location and text you when they get home, but it’s late, and you know they’ll probably forget to text, so you finish your fun evening together, anxiously checking Find My Friends over and over.

Check In is a new iOS 17 feature that helps eliminate that anxiety by automating the process of letting your family or friends know when you arrive somewhere safely. I finally had the chance to try Check In recently with my son Finn, who’s the only other person in my family who is currently on the iOS 17 beta. The testing conditions were a bit contrived, but what I found was that Check In is fast and easy to use and does an excellent job of explaining the information you’re sharing and how it works before you leave for your destination.

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These Are the iOS 17, iPadOS 17, and macOS Sonoma Features Coming Later This Year

Next week, Apple will begin releasing its new OSes, which are packed with a lot of new features. However, those updates won’t include everything you may have heard about over the summer. For the past few years, OS features that are announced at WWDC have been increasingly released after the fall release of major OS revisions. Sometimes, those later releases are signaled at WWDC, but often they’re not, so we’ve compiled a list of features that won’t be available in Apple’s fall OS updates but have been promised to come in a later release. Unless otherwise indicated, the following features will be coming later to iOS 17, iPadOS 17, and macOS Sonoma:

  • One of the tentpole features of Messages this year is the ability to create stickers using every OSes’ ability to lift subjects from a photo. The option to share stickers from Messages’ ‘Plus’ menu is already in this fall’s updates, but later, you’ll also be able to send stickers using the Tapback menu, too.
  • Messages will also sync settings, like text message forwarding, SMS filters, and send and receive accounts, via iCloud in a later release.
  • The ‘catch up’ arrow button found now on iOS 17 that takes users to the top of new messages in a busy thread will come to iPadOS 17.
  • The News widget will add playback controls for Apple News podcasts and News+ audio stories on iOS and iPadOS 17.
  • AirDrop will add the ability to finish a file transfer using the Internet if a local peer-to-peer connection drops.
  • A lot of Music’s promised updates are coming later, including:
    • Collaborative playlists that will allow a group to add, rearrange, and remove songs.
    • Emoji reactions to song collaborative playlist song choices in the Now Playing view.
    • A new Favorite Songs playlist, something which I’ve maintained as a smart playlist forever, will be available automatically in your Library and via Siri.
    • Marking items as favorites is expanding to include songs, albums, playlists, and artists. Favorites will automatically be added to your Library, eliminating what is now a two-step process, and will be used to improve your recommendations.
    • Also, Music will add a macOS Sonoma widget to allow users to play or pause a song or album or see a list of top charts and, for Apple Music subscribers, recommendations.
  • Intelligent PDF form detection with enhanced AutoFill will be available systemwide in apps like Files and Mail, as well as for scanned documents.
  • The Fitness app will allow you to prioritize the volume of trainers’ voices or the training session’s music on iOS and iPadOS 17.
  • Proximity sign-in using the particle cloud used by devices like the HomePod and Apple Watch will be expanded to make it easier to use a signed-in, trusted iPhone or iPad to sign in to other devices.
  • Your iPhone will add the ability to tap to unlock Matter-enabled smart locks with a home key or set up a PIN code in the Home app on iOS 17.
  • Finally, there’s no word yet on when Journal, Apple’s journaling app, will make its debut.

Of these features, I’m especially looking forward to the updates to Music, checking what Journal is capable of, and sending stickers using Tapback, which I expect will increase my use of them a lot. There’s no word yet when these features debut, but I expect we’ll see them trickle out starting later this year.