iPhone X pre-orders are in, and reviews are out. There’s drama surrounding both.
On this week’s episode of Connected, I also explain why I recently bought an Nvidia Shield and we discuss how our iPhone X preorder plans worked out. You can listen here.
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Ahead of the iPhone X’s launch on November 3rd, Apple today released iOS 11.1, the first major update since the OS’ debut in September. While iOS 11.1 doesn’t sport noteworthy enhancements to the iPad’s multitasking and drag and drop experience – arguably, the marquee functionalities of version 11.0 – it still contains welcome additions and fixes for every iPhone and iPad user.
An interesting tidbit from Steven Levy’s first impressions of the iPhone X: by default, the content of notifications on the Lock screen is hidden, and it’s only displayed once you look at the iPhone and thus authenticate yourself.
Alternatively, a good way to see when you’ve been recognized is to notice the generic messages on the lock screen saying “you have a notification” from Facebook, Gmail, or wherever. When you and your iPhone X make that turn-on connection, those flesh out with the actual content of the message. (This feature—withholding potentially private alerts until the phone was unlocked—had previously been available as an option but now is the default.)
What I find intriguing is the fact that – if I’m reading this right – the feature has been turned on by default for the iPhone X, as if to underline the role of Face ID. This option, in fact, isn’t new: on any existing device running iOS 11, you can go to Settings ⇾ Notifications ⇾ Show Previews and enable When Unlocked to achieve the same effect. On the Lock screen, the content of notifications (titles, preview messages, and media attachments) won’t be shown until you place your finger on the Touch ID sensor.
It seems like Apple sees Face ID as not only technically superior to Touch ID (more secure, powered by machine learning), but also as a better user experience for dealing with notifications – otherwise, why would they make it the default setting? I’m curious to play with this and see if I revert to the old option or not.
Gladys, developed by Pavlos Tsochantaris, is one of the shelf apps we’ve been covering on MacStories since the release of iOS 11 and, as I wrote last week, the one I’ve been using on my two iPad Pros. Not only does Gladys implement many of the ideas I would have liked to see in a native shelf for iOS 11, but the app has gone beyond my expectations with the ability to save multiple data types for dropped items, as well as a file provider extension to view all your saved items in iOS 11’s Files app.
With today’s version 1.1, Gladys is also gaining a permanent spot on my iPhone’s Home screen (which I shared in Issue 100 of MacStories Weekly for Club MacStories members). Gladys is now a universal app for the iPhone and iPad, and it can sync items across devices thanks to built-in iCloud integration. In my early tests with the app, everything worked as expected: CloudKit-based sync is fast and reliable, with changes made on one device (such as a link dragged from Safari into Gladys on the iPad) propagating in less than two seconds to the other.
Geeky macOS Apps In this first episode of a mini-series on long-form writing on iOS, Fraser and Federico go deep on one of their favourite applications: Ulysses.
On this week’s Canvas, we talk about Ulysses for iOS and explain its unique take on Markdown, library organization, writing tools, and more. You can listen here.
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Member Requests Question: I have an existing workflow where I POST using the Get Contents of URL action in order to create a new entity in a NoSQL database. I know that the POST fails under some circumstances, such as when a new entity is POSTed and the name attribute is not unique. What should my next...
A Todoist Template for This Week’s Tasks Every week on Monday, we (John, Ryan, and I) start planning the next issue of MacStories Weekly to be released on Friday. And because this newsletter is comprised of regular, but rotating sections assigned to different authors each time, my responsibilities shift on a weekly basis depending on the sections I’m in charge of....
Gladys When iOS 11 was announced at WWDC in June, I received several emails from developers who, disappointed by the lack of a shelf feature for iPad (as I imagined it in my concept), told me they were going to make their own based on the new drag and drop APIs. For the past few...
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