- One of the first videos we made in this processor series
was about how notifications on the iPhone are
bad.
And like I said last week,
oh my God.
I think they might have fixed notifications in iOS.
But here's a question.
Did they?
Now, all the caveats at the top.
One, I'm feeling kind of sick so give me a little bit
of space to have a terrible raspy voice.
Two, this is the developer preview.
It's not a public beta, it's very very early,
so we might see bugs, and this is definitely
the furthest thing from a review.
Also, last but not least, since this is such
an early preview of iOS 12, it's possible that
some things might change between now and when
it comes out in the fall.
Got all that, cool.
(coughs)
Cool, cool, cool.
So this is the big one for me.
With group notifications your notifications are,
you know, grouped.
And they're grouped together by default, app by app.
So when you have a ton of notifications,
it's much faster to sort of scroll through
and parse through what is and isn't important.
Before, on iOS 11, your notifications were just
one giant big unsorted list, and honestly
it felt like scrolling through Twitter,
and if your operating system feels like Twitter,
you're definitely doing something wrong.
Anyway, the reason that group notifications
are interesting is they don't just group app by app
but they can be grouped within an app.
So for example, with Messages, all of your
different conversation threads can be
different groups on the lock screen.
Now this could be a potential for abuse
if like say a news app wanted to send you lots
of different groups and you really only want
like the top stories or something.
We'll have to see what developers do with it.
So this is all incredibly helpful,
but I don't know yet if it goes far enough for me.
So for example, in a group you can only see
the most recent notification at the top,
you have to tap in to see the rest of them.
And I'd like to see kind of a summary of everything
that's inside there, but whatever.
You can swipe a group away all at once,
and that is so much better than we had before,
I'm just pleased to see that Apple did something.
Even more important to me is that now,
finally, when you get a notification,
you can jump to edit that notification's settings
directly from the notification itself.
And this is huge.
When you get a notification, you can swipe over
and tap the Manage button, which brings up a new
panel that Apple calls the quick tuning UI.
And there are a few options here.
Deliver quietly, turn off, and settings.
Basically, what these buttons do is set up
a preset group of notification settings.
So when you tap deliver quietly, it sets up
the following things.
It sets notification to go to your notification center,
and not the lock screen.
It turns off sound and vibration.
And it also turns off banners.
If you tap turn off, it turns off notifications.
But look at that turn off button.
You notice that there's a dot dot dot on it?
That's because if you tap it brings up another panel.
And on that panel there's a button to turn off
all notifications, which is probably what you wanna do.
But, some apps will give you another button
that will take you that app's in app notification
settings, and the reason that's there is like,
an app developer is annoying you, Apple wants to give
them the option to have you go into the app
and tweak the settings, instead of turning notifications
off altogether.
Here's why this is a huge upgrade over iOS 11.
Because before, if you go an annoying notification,
you had two choices.
Just swipe it away to get rid of it,
but then the next time they send you one
you'd be annoyed again.
Or, stop whatever it is you're doing,
go into the settings app, find that app,
tap into it to change notification settings,
or open the app and see if the app has its own
in app notification settings.
It was just a whole mess that you just never bothered with.
And now you finally will.
We've been talking about settings a bunch,
so let's actually just look at the settings.
'Cause they've been completely redesigned.
In the last video we talked about
(in deep voice) the mystery of the check boxes.
And the mystery is still here but it's
slightly less mysterious because they've got
the nice little graphics now that show you
what all these different buttons mean,
so it's a little bit easier to figure out.
Now, I'm not gonna go through it and count them,
partially because in the last video I got
the math wrong, I don't want you to yell at me
in the comments, I deserved it and I'm sorry.
But, suffice to say there's still a ton of options here,
they're just easier to understand now.
One of the more interesting UI choices in iOS 12
is that the notification center and the lock screen
are now very different things.
Notifications can go to one or the other,
or even both.
Developers in iOS 12 can now send a notification
silently to the notification center,
without asking for your permission,
which seems scary, but it's actually maybe
an interesting idea, because you'll see it in the
notifications center, there'll be a button that says
I don't want these, so that's pretty easy
to get rid of, but it's a better solution,
Apple thinks, for developers than when you know,
the first time you open the app they're like
(ding)
do you want notifications?
(ding)
Do you like notifications, we have notifications for ya.
(ding)
That's annoying, this seems better.
But we're gonna have to see.
It's gonna take some time for me to see
what I think of this new paradigm of notification
center and lock screen being completely different,
because I'm a little bit worried that notification
center is just gonna become a dumping ground
of crap I've ignored, and stuff that people
wanna send me that I don't wanna bother looking at.
But it's still early and we don't know yet.
Alright, so the last big set of features I wanna
talk about are all the upgrades to do not disturb.
And I really love them,
and the best one is that you can now set
a time limit for how long do not disturb lasts.
'Cause I always forget to turn the dang thing off.
You can have it go off by a time,
you can have it go off by a location,
you can even do really clever things like
have it go off by what's in your Apple calendar.
Here's a neat thing that happened to me over the weekend.
Siri did something good.
It saw that I had a movie ticket in my Apple Wallet,
and then popped up a thing saying, hey,
do you wanna turn on do not disturb during
the length of this movie?
That's really smart.
Another thing that's really neat is the new
do not disturb at bedtime.
Basically, you turn it on and it hides
notifications on your lock screen,
which seems like a small thing, but then when
you wake up in the morning the first thing
you see isn't everything you missed,
it's like the weather, and that's nice,
I like to wake up and just see the weather, it's nice.
Thanks Apple, you're so nice.
That really seems insincere, but I mean it.
Last but not least there is this new screen time feature
which shows you how much you use your phone,
but there's a lot going on in there and so
I think we're gonna wait until the full iOS 12
preview to really get into it.
I am super happy that Apple's finally giving us tools
to deal with notifications.
But I just don't know if they're the right tools yet.
Or maybe they're instruments?
Whatever, anyway, the point is, this is an early
developer preview, and so it's too early to review,
and honestly, that's why I'm not comparing it
to Android yet, if you've been waiting for that.
I wanna wait till these things are
a little bit more developed.
What I do wanna do is talk about what I think
has happened, because I think Apple's philosophy
around notifications has very clearly changed.
It's no longer enough to just try and keep it simple.
Think about all of the abstract concepts
which you have to understand now to deal with notifications.
Notification center versus lock screen,
and temporary banners versus persistent banners,
versus app badges.
You need to understand the difference between
the main notification settings
and the in-app notification settings,
and I could just keep going here.
But what's funny is iOS is supposed to be simple,
this doesn't seem very simple.
That's the point.
Notifications are just plain hard and complicated,
and that's the way that they're going to be from now on.
And Apple finally had to admit that.
Back at WWDC one of the Apple executives told me
a story about Steve Jobs.
He said that Steve used to liken user interface
to a Pixar movie.
Now, Pixar movies appeal equally to both children
and adults, and a good user interface
should be simple enough for novices,
but complex enough for pro users.
And what's new in iOS 12 is we finally have
the notification controls for pro users.
But notifications are so crazy right now,
they're so prevalent and they're just all encompassing.
That you know who the pro users are?
Honestly, I think it's all of us.
Hey, thanks for watching, and let me know in the comments,
do you think that Apple did enough to fix
notifications in iOS 12?
We'll have a chat there, maybe hit the subscribe button.
When you've done all that, head on over to this other
video where we talk about all the rest of
the features in iOS 12, because really,
there's just a ton of them.