What we like (and do not do) until now

If I had to sneak into your home or office, put your hands on your iPhone and then surreptitiously install the public beta of iOS 12 on top, you might not even notice the next time you turned on your phone. Save for some remarkable features that we will discuss in a moment, iOS 12 feels like the latest version of Apple's mobile operating system.

It's actually a good thing. A decade in these iOS updates, and you hope that Apple would focus on tuning and improving things instead of drastically revising them. That's more or less what you get with iOS 12.

The biggest changes of iOS 12 are under the hood, highlighted by promises of promised performance that should keep iPhones even older. And we are eager to see if this release does a better job of reducing the bugs than the 11th, when each update seemed to introduce a new bug that needed to be corrected by a later version. That's the kind of improvements we'll be judging over time – certainly more time than we've had with iOS 12 so far. (While the public beta has just arrived this week, we have been spending time with the beta version of the developer since the beginning of this month. Our impressions with iOS 12 are based on our time with the two beta's.)

Still, iOS 12 leaves some first impressions – many of them positive, a little less – about the new and improved features you will encounter once the update is done. With the caveat that many things can change between the actual debut of today and iOS 12 later this fall, here is a glimpse of what caught our eye with the iOS 12 update up to Now.

Screen Time: a real game changer

No feature will allow people to talk more than Screen Time, the new addition of iOS 12 designed to help you understand how often you use your iPhone. Screen Time monitors how much time you spend watching this iPhone, and you can explore to see which apps are catching your eye. You can use this feature to set downtime when only certain apps are available and parents can limit content and place sharing.

The statistics will be revealing – at least they were for me. Did I really spend so much time playing PUBG Mobile this weekend? Oh yes, Screen Time's answers, you did it. It's one thing to consider spending less time on your phone; it's quite different to be struck with the actual data. And while some people might shrug their shoulders when they see these telltale bar graphs illustrating the use of the app, others might be inspired to use this data as a motivator to pick up their iPhone less.

"We've never wanted people to abuse our products," said Apple CEO Tim Cook during a public appearance at the Fortune CEO Initiative the same evening as the public beta of iOS 12 was landing on people's phones. Cook added that Screen Time has helped reduce notifications.

Credit: AppleScreen Time is not just about data. There are also tools at your disposal. The Limits feature of the built-in application on the Time screen allows you to limit how often you can use a particular application in a day. Yes, you can override this limit – I was not going to leave a limit of application between me and this chicken dinner I was winning on PUBG – but the functionality has added some discipline to my digital regime. When I see this gray application icon telling me that I have reached my limit for the day, I think long and hard to launch this application again. And most of the time, I do not do it.

Notifications: Order chaos

I tend to let notifications stack up in the notification center until the screen is only a long timeline of apps competing to get my attention. Worse, because my main phone is an iPhone SE, there is no trick 3D Touch-enable to clear all those annoying notifications with a long press.

iOS 12 takes a big step forward in making notifications much more manageable by grouping alerts from the same application into a stack. Press the battery and these notifications will be broadcast so that I can see them all at the same time or – more importantly – reject them en masse by pressing an X icon.

MORE: iOS Tips, tricks and secrets you need to know

Even better, in iOS 12, I can now manage notifications directly so that when YouTube keeps asking me about the videos I like, I can swipe to the left, tap the new Manage and disable option. notifications, without having to dive into the settings. Screen Time may have the biggest impact on how I will ultimately use my iPhone, but the improvements to notifications have an immediate impact on the way I use my phone right now.

Do not disturb: now sensitive to the location

Do not disturb is a small handy feature to minimize distractions, but only if you can schedule specific times when you do not want to be bothered by incoming messages or do not forget to turn on or off the feature . While iOS 11 has added automation features such as the Do Not Disturb activation when you're driving a car, iOS 12 goes even further by making the feature more responsive to the car. # 39; s location.

One of the options available when you tap and hold the Do Not Disturb icon in the Control Center activates the feature until you exit a specified location. This is especially useful when you are in a movie, a meeting or any other event where you do not want the buzz of notifications you sort of the moment. The feature also works for specific times if events are entered in your calendar.

Photos: best photos found

The Google Photos app does a better job of surfacing and sharing images than offering built-in photos of iOS, but the changes introduced in iOS 12 can make me re-evaluate that opinion. My favorite feature is an enhanced search function that incorporates several keywords to find the exact type of photo you are looking for.

If I start typing "thorns" in the Photos search box, the app will start making suggestions such as Portland Thorns specific football games where I took pictures with pictures of 39 other places I've photographed during these visits to Portland. Not only does it help you find specific photos, but you can also find images that you may have forgotten.

Speaking of discovery, previous versions of Photos have done a good job in automatically assembling collections of images taken on a specific day, in a specific location or with specific people (or a combination of all three), but these Assembled memories smelled a little buried inside the app. iOS 12 adds a tab for you that brings these collections to the foreground and center. There is also a sharing component in which people in these photo collections will be invited to share their images with you (provided that they are also upgraded to iOS 12). As it is still early for iOS 12, I have not yet had the opportunity to put this sharing feature to the test.

Suggestions Siri: Still a work in progress

My colleague Jason Snell says that Siri Shortcuts will be a real game changer with iOS 12, probably the most powerful feature of the update. With shortcuts, application makers will be able to create actions in their applications that Siri can recognize. Siri will also notice when you perform the same actions at certain times of the day – make a phone call or place a meal order – and he will begin to suggest these actions proactively at the appropriate time. And a standalone Shortcuts application will allow you to link a bunch of actions together into a Siri voice command.

None of this is there at this early stage of development of the iOS 12 beta. Apple did not plan to include the Shortcuts application with the public beta and developers need time to reshape their applications to take advantage of Siri shortcuts. So, this feature is a bit of a non-starter at the moment.

At the present time, when you press the Siri & Search option in Settings, the only thing you'll see in the My Shortcuts section is the latest actions you've done in various built-in apps, whether it's on a specific web page. in Safari or by sending a particular text to someone in Messages. You have the option to turn this action into a Siri shortcut triggered by a voice command of your choice. Some of them would not be very useful – I do not need to create a recurring Siri shortcut to text my wife the same shopping list again and again – but some actions might lend themselves to shortcut processing. I've created a voice command that allows Siri to show me all messages from a specific email account in Mail, which avoids having to launch the application and manually switch to. an inbox to the other.

That said, iOS 12 digits to get better suggestions on the more you use your phone with the new operating system installed. After a little use, Siri realized that I like to watch Google News in the morning, so a link to this web page in Safari now appears below the suggested apps. It's a good start.

Still, I agree with Jason that there are many promises in Siri Shortcuts. But the promise is all there is really at this point.

Memoji: Even better than AR Emoji

Nobody has ever convinced me that Animoji are nothing more than a clever, impractical board game. Maybe I am not the perfect person to evaluate Memoji, the attempt of iOS 12 to augment Animoji with customizable human avatars. But I can at least compare it to the feature AR Emoji Samsung introduced with this year's Galaxy S9, and I think Apple continues to enjoy a considerable advantage with his taking on animated faces.

I think that Apple succeeds here with little effort to recreate your face thoroughly. Instead, these are caricature characters, and I think we are more apt to forgive than they are not particularly realistic. Emoji ARs strive to achieve a certain degree of realism, which makes them all the more visible when they are not up to par.

Apple also gets the wink here to make its Memoji more customizable. There is actually a staggering number of features you can change, not very different from the Nintendo Mii. And while Emoji ARs are rather static and simple, Memoji comes to life with subtle animations, such as hair reacting dynamically to real-time motion. It's the attention to detail that really sets apart Apple's digital avatars (and the added support for language detection, of course).

The memoji are just as consistent as Animoji, which is not saying much. But at least they have a degree of varnish that the AR avatars clearly lack, even at this early stage of the iOS 12.

Facetime: More faces, same problems

I rarely use FaceTime, the Apple video chat application, because I think the experience is subpar. Video stuttering, face freezing and audio often do not sync with what's on your screen. I end up feeling more bored than connected to the person with whom I am FaceTime.

The answer of Apple for iOS 12? Let's add more people to this experience.

Even taking into account the whims of a beta, a group discussion under iOS 12 was an exercise in frustration because the people I was talking with froze or gave up the call. I've found the main FaceTime group discussion screen, where the one who speaks goes up to a place of prominence, to be particularly distracting. And it was just with three people – I can not imagine the horror show packing the upper limit of 32 people on a call.

PLUS: 12 best iOS apps that you do not use (but should be)

There are nice touches to the new FaceTime. My colleague Adam Ismail was able to swap his real head against a Memoji from an iPhone X under iOS 12. So, maybe that suggests that FaceTime is better used as a group video meeting place where people can go in and out at their way. A serious video conferencing application, that is not it.

AR: Meet the new Measure app

Apple has not hidden its interest in the integration of augmented reality into its mobile devices. But you will not see much of that on display in iOS 12 at this point. And this is not surprising, since AR's features will come from the latest version of ARKit, which is now making its way into the hands of the application makers. These applications powered by ARKit will come – but not now.

Instead, what iOS 12 has to offer is Measure, a new integrated application that turns your iPhone's camera into a virtual tape measure. I've been able to measure height, width and depth using Measure on an iPhone SE and an iPhone 6s under iOS 12 beta. The measurement also includes a level feature in case you would like to snap a photo and you only have your iPhone on hand to make sure it is aligned properly. The application is certainly easy to use if it's not particularly exciting.

Perspective

From Siri shortcuts to other tweaks and fixes, Apple still has a lot of work before iOS 12 is ready for a wider audience. And this public beta is meant to help with a lot of this work, putting the update in the hands of more people to determine exactly what needs to be repaired and polished.

The good news for both Apple and iPhone owners is that this iOS update is quite advanced in some areas. The notifications get some needed improvements in iOS 12, and Screen Time is a real step forward for the platform.

The public beta is stable enough to be used on a spare iOS device, but you should still not install it on a device you depend on for daily use. Even if you do not plan to upgrade to iOS 12 before the update is ready for the general public this fall, you can at least be reassured to know that iOS 12 is poised to dramatically improve your experience without force you to accept a radical overhaul.

Credit: Tom's Guide