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Posts tagged with "iOS 27.3"

“Introducing Adaptive Dark Mode”→

As part of the 27.3 betas released yesterday, Apple also introduced a new Safari feature:

We’re excited to announce Adaptive Dark Mode in Safari 27.3 beta. When enabled by a user, Safari adapts light websites and presents them as dark.

In the spring of 2019, Safari 12.1 became the first browser to support dark mode on the web. A lot of people love using dark mode, but not every website has a dark version. Almost 40% of web page loads are from users in dark mode, and yet only 10% of page loads support it. If you love dark mode, you’ve probably hit a site that felt particularly bright. Adaptive Dark Mode is designed to close that gap, providing a consistent dark experience across the web.

If this sounds familiar, it’s because so many third-party Safari extensions for this very task already exist, including the very popular (and a MacStories favorite) Noir. The difference, of course, is that Adaptive Dark Mode is built deep into the WebKit engine itself now, ships for free in Safari, and offers greater speed and performance since it’s not limited by an extension. It sounds like Apple thought of a lot of details here:

At the core of Adaptive Dark Mode is the transformation of color. Sometimes colors are simply decorative, while other times they have semantic meaning. Adaptive Dark Mode determines when to invert colors so elements remain visible or when to leave colors unchanged.

While creating Adaptive Dark Mode, we developed a color matrix to invert the luminosity of colors while preserving hue. It’s used to make light backgrounds dark, and dark text light. When transforming text color, Adaptive Dark Mode aims for sufficient contrast as defined by the WCAG 4.5:1 contrast ratio. Light CSS gradients are also transformed to dark.

And:

It takes the same care with images. Most are left unchanged, preserving their integrity. But many icons and logos can lose contrast when the background color behind them is inverted. So Adaptive Dark Mode inspects SVG images and transforms colors when needed. For bitmap images, it analyzes the pixel histograms and inverts simple black-and-white logos.

Noir and similar extensions had a great run. Between this, the MCP server added earlier this year, and vertical tabs in 27.3, it’s time for me to go back to Safari everywhere.

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Siri AI’s Evolution Is Both Surprising and Obvious

Siri AI in iOS 27.3 beta.

Siri AI in iOS 27.3 beta.

As part of the release of the 27.3 developer betas yesterday, Apple announced a substantial expansion of the capabilities of Siri AI. As you recall from my iOS 27 review two months ago, Siri AI launched with support for a limited subset of app domains based on schemas that Apple specifically optimized for the first version of Siri AI. In a major reversal for a mid-cycle update to Siri AI, that limitation is entirely going away: the updated Siri AI will instead work with any kind of app that supports any custom App Intent – as long as the developers do the work of modernizing their App Intents and integrating with Siri. Effectively, though, any app can work with Siri AI now, and Apple calls this the Siri AI Developer Preview.

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