Let's take a look at the new features of iOS 12.
I think the most powerful new feature by far is the ability to customize Siri.
These are called Siri Shortcuts.
There are two ways to add them.
One is to go into Settings, then go into Siri & Search.
Here you can add shortcuts.
Now there's suggestions that appear right there for things that you've done, websites
that you've gone to, phone numbers you've called.
Things like that.
So you can go ahead and select one of those.
Just hit the plus button there.
Say if I wanted to go to this website here I could customize it by pressing the red button
here.
Make me laugh.
Now I can say Done and now that's added there so that I could just say, you know ask Siri,
to make me laugh and it's going to go to the website.
Now much more powerful than that is the ability to use the Shortcuts app and build your own
shortcuts.
So this is similar to the workflow app that existed before as a stand alone third party
app.
You can go ahead and add a new shortcut and you can drag actions.
There are tons of different actions you can drag and you can put them together.
It's like Automator on the Mac.
As a matter of fact not only can you have different commands that control different
apps but you can do scripting things like asking for input, getting Clipboard, you know
doing loops, doing variables, doing all sorts of things.
You can construct your own scripts in Shortcuts and then assign a Siri commands to those.
Now if you use Animoji, you need to have one of the new iPhones or last year's iPhone X,
you can get four new Animoji now to the list.
But more important than that you can get your own.
So you can create a Memoji.
There a whole little builder here for creating your own character and customizing the character.
So you can have a lot of fun with that and then use these characters in your messages.
But you can also use them in FaceTime.
So here I am talking to myself in FaceTime and I can tap this button here and I can select
Animoji or Memoji and actually use that instead of myself.
You can see it still includes the background.
You can see my hand there.
It just replaces my head with it.
But you can also do more than just that.
You can use all these different effects here.
Like there's filters that you can use.
There are all sorts of other little things that you can do.
You can draw for instance.
Put shapes.
So you have lots of effects that you can use in FaceTime now.
There are also improvements to Notifications.
So there's a bunch of new improvements and settings you can change.
One of the main ones is grouping.
You can see I've got a group of twenty notifications all from the same source there.
So instead of just filling up the screen with notification I've got that.
Also, wherever you see Notifications you can go in now and you can manage the notifications.
So you can set it on to Deliver Quietly or Turn Off Notifications or go to Settings.
So you don't have to go and find that Notification source in Settings to change it.
You can just do it right there when you see a notification.
There's a small but significant improvement to how Do Not Disturb works.
When you turn it on from Control Center, you can of course just turn it on, but you can
also tap and hold and now you can actually turn it on for an hour or until this evening.
Not until tomorrow morning, or Until I leave this location.
So now when you have a meeting, you want to turn on Do Not Disturb, you can say Until
I Leave this Location and now you don't have to remember to turn it on.
Another big new feature is ScreenTime.
You can find this in the Settings app.
You can go into it and it gives you a complete rundown on how you're using your phone or
iPad.
You can go in and see all the different categories.
You can dig down by category or by app.
You can set a passcode so somebody can't make these changes.
You can actually do limits on different apps and different categories of apps.
You can even impose that on yourself or you can kind of set it up as parental restrictions
for maybe an iPad that you're going to give to a child.
There are a lot of other changes as well.
There's some major redesigns to apps.
For instance the Stocks app has a big new redesign.
It has news in it.
The News app, itself, has some new things.
There's a redesigned Voice Memos app.
The iBooks app is now Books and it's got a slight redesign to it as well.
There's security stuff.
Safari is better at preventing websites from tracking you.
There's also security code autofill which is a neat feature.
When you get one of those texts, you know, for a security code to fill-in for an app
or website that text will automatically become part of Autofill on the keyboard so it makes
it easier.
Instead of having to copy and paste or remember that code.
If you use CarPlay, now Goggle Maps and Waze are both now going to be available as apps
in CarPlay.
It's nice of Apple to make third party maps available there as well as their own.
There's some new AR stuff.
There's a new measurement app that you can measure things in a room.
There's also the ability for developers to create AR apps where you're actually like
playing a game or experiencing something with another person.
So you're both seeing a shared augmented reality.
Like a pool table in the middle of a room and you can both see it through your device.
There's a whole bunch of other things too.
There's an English thesaurus that you can access in addition to the dictionary that's
already built in . The battery info, in Settings, now has some more detail to it which is really
nice as well.
So there's a lot of cool new things in iOS 12.
One notable missing thing that was hyped was the group FaceTime.
The ability to FaceTime with lots of other people.
But that's not going to be in the initial release.
Apple has promised that it will come out as part of iOS 12 at some point in the future.
So look for that in coming months.