The best of the rest

While Apple Intelligence stole the show Monday, Apple had several other announcements that you need to know about.

Apple just wrapped up its weeklong annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) where thousands of developers from all over the world have participated in live networking events on Apple’s Cupertino, California campus, or have viewed sessions hosted remotely via Apple’s website and Developer app.

After Monday’s keynote, I wrote a long piece detailing the biggest features of Apple Intelligence, Apple’s approach to the generative AI revolution sweeping Big Tech, as well as walking my readers through the privacy features Apple is using to keep your data from being used by people you don’t know for purposes you wouldn’t authorize.

Here are some of the biggest non-AI features Apple announced in the keynote:

Home Screen Customization

Coming to both iPhone and iPad this Fall, you’ll have more freedom to customize your Home Screen icons. If you’re like me, you’ve got at least one friend who not only uses Android, but feels really smug about his choice of Android. (It’s always the people who mock Apple fans as being elitists who wind up looking down their noses at you for choosing to use an iPhone. But I digress.) One of your Android friend’s go-to defenses of his choice of Android over the years has been Android’s much greater flexibility with icon placement and Home Screen customization. And it’s a fair point. For whatever reason, Apple has never cared about (or at least prioritized) giving users the freedom to place icons wherever they want to on their screens. Apple’s been slowly adding more and more Home Screen customization over the years, but this year if you want to leave a gap in between rows of icons on your Home Screen, or have a vertical line of them on one side of your screen, now you can. Apple also will now let users tint their icons. So if you want your app icons to all be a specific shade of blue, or pink, or green, now you can do that.

Android Guy’s Home Screen bragging never meant much to me, because I’ve never been very fussy about the placement of my icons (at least not in that way), but this will be a welcome feature for thousands of iPhone users. And while I find tinted icons quite garish, many people are going to have a ball with this feature.

One feature I will be using is Dark Mode icons. We’ve had Dark Mode in iOS for a few years now, and in Apple's Fall 2024 OS updates, that gets extended to icons as well. Developers will need to update their apps to support this feature, so you probably won't have consistent Dark Mode icons right away, but I find them to be a nice complement to Dark Mode. (I personally have my devices set to automatic mode: Light Mode during the day, switching to Dark Mode at night.)

iMessage Improvements

“Tapbacks” is Apple’s term for when you tap on a message and apply one of the small handful of pictographic responses like thumbs up, heart, question mark, etc. These are more colorful in iOS 18, and you can now use any emoji as a tapback reaction. Many other messaging apps like Slack and Teams do this already, so it’s a welcome addition to Messages. There are also now more text effects you can apply to your message, and you can now apply them to just part of your message, not the whole thing as before.

This Fall you’ll also be able to create scheduled messages. My wife, who rarely tells me about a new iOS feature she’s excited about, is really looking forward to this one. Now when she wakes up in the middle of the night and thinks of something she needs to message someone about, she’ll be able to compose her message and schedule it to go out at the appropriate time.

If you have an iPhone from the iPhone 14 or iPhone 15 family of products, you’ve already had access to satellite-based SOS. I’m happy to say I’ve never had to try this feature, but there have been multiple accounts of people’s lives being saved by this technology. In iOS 18, if you have one of those models or newer, you’ll also be able to send iMessages and SMS via satellite. Neat. I’m not sure how much use I’ll actually put this to, but it’ll be huge for those who spend a lot of time outdoors away from wifi and cell towers.

Passwords App

For the last few versions of iOS, Apple has had a robust password manager built into iOS, iPadOS, and macOS that lets you store and generate secure passwords. Over time they added in the ability to set up code-based two-factor authentication, and store Passkeys as well. I've long been a big proponent of using Apple's password tool and firmly believe everyone should be using it to manage their passwords. But up until now it's always been a great feature hidden inconveniently in the Settings app. No more. This Fall, Passwords will be its very own app. It's still going to work the same way it has before, but now it'll be much more discoverable by less tech-savvy users. Making people more secure online is a tremendous benefit to Apple's customers.

Math Notes

While Apple Intelligence got the biggest press out of Monday’s event, Math Notes was probably the most mind-blowing demo. This will be on the Notes app in iOS, iPadOS, and macOS, but the killer demo Apple showed involved using Apple Pencil in the all-new Calculator app for iPad. You can write out math problems by hand, from the simple to the complex, and Math Notes solves them for you automatically. And as you do things like change numerals and variables, it automatically updates the result. You can even have it generate a graph based on the equation you’ve written out by hand. If my description doesn’t impress you, I implore you to go watch this part of the event and see it in action.

Smart Script

Another iPad/Apple Pencil feature, Smart Script takes your handwriting and improves the legibility of it as you’re writing. But if that weren’t enough, it actually learns your own handwriting style and keeps its corrections in your own style. Genuinely another mind-blowing demo. You may already have excellent penmanship, but I do not. My disgust at seeing my own handwriting keeps me on Team Keyboard. But Smart Script could actually get me writing with an Apple Pencil again.

Safari

I’m a huge fan of Apple’s longstanding Reader mode feature, and I enable it automatically for most websites I visit. This strips out all of the ads and gross formatting and gives you a clean page to read the content you came to the website for. In Apple’s Fall releases, Reader will also generate a table of contents if applicable. This will be a big help in navigating long form content on the Web. Safari’s also getting smart summaries that surface the most important details on the page.

There’s so much more, but this feels like a good highlight reel of what was announced this week. As is always the case, there were things I wanted to see Apple announce that they didn’t announce. This was particularly true of iPadOS given that my iPad Pro has become my primary computer. It’s very clear that Apple Intelligence was the all-hands-on-deck priority for Apple this year. Still, I’ll have more to say about iPadOS 18 in the coming days.

Thanks for reading! If you enjoy my work, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. It really is a huge encouragement to me, and helps me to be able to keep bringing you Apple coverage each week. Have a great weekend!