From the latest news to the most comprehensive tutorials, learn how to get the most out of your iPad with our step-by-step guides and expert tips.
iOS 11 makes your iPhone and iPad more powerful, personal and intelligent than ever before. You might be wondering if you have the device requirements to install it. Fortunately, we're here to answer that question.
It was only a matter of time until Apple would release an in-house case for Apple Pencil. Lo and behold, just after this year's main WWDC keynote had come to a close, the item already offered by various third party companies was silently added to the Apple Store.
We'll put this addition down as rather overdue and predictable - all the while welcome - which also holds true for the colors currently on offer. With Saddle Brown, Taupe, Midnight Blue and Black, Apple draws on the four most classic tones also available for iPhone and iPad cases, playing it safe rather than betting on a new color palette. As it stands, the cases ship in 3-5 business days and can be grabbed for a hefty $29 per piece.
If this is what you were waiting for, hurry up, because shipping times might slip fast!
Apple Pencil is already loved by a large constituency, but new features added this fall will mean more and better use cases for the white stylus. Deeper integration for Apple Pencil has been developed for both the current and new iPad Pro range, the latter however does boast additional technological advancements such as ProMotion, developed to further boost the responsiveness and latency of the writing tool.
With the exception of ProMotion, all iPad Pros in the market are going to acquire a bunch of new skills. Naturally, the most prominent features were introduced under the buzzwords of Instant Markup, Instant Notes, Inline Drawing and Scan & Sign.
To flesh out Instant Markup, any device screenshot taken on iPad immediately creates a thumbnail in the newly-designed app dock, which in turn can be marked up or manipulated otherwise before being shared.
Besides this and a built-in scanner functionality for the enhanced Notes app, Inline Drawing (between typed paragraphs) for Pencil will be implemented, allowing for the user to easily clear as much space as needed between written words for drawings or sketches.
It is also now confirmed that touching the lock screen with Pencil will instantaneously open a clean piece of paper to work on. The instant note will be saved inside your Notes app in the event that the iPad is locked again.
What's more is that iOS 11 boasts smarter machine learning algorithms capable of recognizing Apple Pencil handwritings in Notes, which means you will be able to search notes by way of Spotlight search and consequently detect files containing words scrawled by hand.
Apple announced a new Files app at its Worldwide Developers Conference today that works especially well with the newly announced iOS 11 productivity features for iPad. A placeholder listing for the Files app appeared on App Store earlier today, meaning users will be able to hide and re-download the new app.
Featuring a user interface that looks like an enhanced iCloud Drive app, the Files app allows you to access files and folders in your iCloud Drive, on your device and in third-party cloud services like Box and Dropbox, as long as they include a Provider Extension for iOS.
And with new iPad productivity features on iOS 11 like an enhanced Split View mode, an interactive Dock (pictured above) and drag-and-drop, users will be able to easily, say, drag an attachment from Mail and drop it on a folder in the Files app to save it to a custom location.
It works the other way, too.
For instance, you could tap and hold the Files app icon in the Dock to bring up your recently accessed files, then simply drag a recently opened image and drop it in a precise place within the Keynote presentation you're working on.
Your files can be browsed in the grid view with larger thumbnails or you can access details about files in the more informative list view. Items can be sorted by size, date and more, you can create new folders, delete files and so forth.
The files app requires iOS 11 and supports only 64-bit devices.
Following the announcement of its new 10.5-inch iPad Pro, Apple showed off a slew of new iPad-specific features that are coming in iOS 11. It's a pretty impressive collection of improvements, clearly aimed at making the tablet more of a productivity tool.
Apple calls this the "biggest iOS release for iPad ever," and there is a lot of new stuff here. So for now, instead of going into each new feature in detail, we're just going to list out all of the features so you can get an idea of what to expect.
New dock - can be filled with a ton of apps now, and there's a new predictive area to the far right that guesses which app you'll want to use next. You can pull it up from anywhere and slide an app up from it to the Slide Over view. New app switcher - preserves spaces, along with app pairings, so you can open the same set of apps easily. Drag and drop - drag and drop anything including images, texts and URLS. Even if you're in a full screen app you can collect multiple images by swiping with opposite hand and drag and drop. New Files app - supports iCloud, Dropbox OneDrive, etc. Allows you to drag and drop files into apps by swiping up on dock and holding down on the Files icon. Spotlight search for handwritten notes in Notes app. Inline drawing with Apple Pencil in Notes app. Quickly input numbers by swiping on corresponding key on virtual keyboard. New screenshot-editing UI that lets you crop image, annotate with pencil, and share with Share Sheet. Notes now has document scanner built-in.Here's a shot of the new Files app:
And here is Files app with drag and drop:
Here's the official excerpt on iPad features in iOS 11 from Apple's website:
iOS 11 makes multitasking on iPad even more powerful with a new customizable Dock that provides quick access to frequently used apps and documents from any screen, and a redesigned app switcher makes it easier to move between pairs of active apps, used in Split View and now Slide Over. The new Files app keeps everything in one place, whether files are stored locally, in iCloud Drive or across other providers like Box, Dropbox and more, and with Drag and Drop available across the system, moving images and text is easier than ever. Apple Pencil is more deeply integrated into iPad with support for inline drawing and a new Instant Notes feature opens Notes from the Lock Screen by simply tapping Apple Pencil on the display.
So what do you think, did Apple achieve its goal of making the iPad more productive?
Augmented Reality is set to make its mark on Apple's iOS 11, as the impressive technology has been showed off on stage moments ago. ARKit brings the API to all developers, allowing developers to tap into the latest computer vision technology to build compelling virtual content on top of real-life scenes. It brings along all new possibilities for existing apps like the by now infamous Pokemon Go, as well as for new creations such as camera apps allowing for virtual object manipulation.
The technology is going to be rolled out across all the latest iPhones and iPads, virtually rendering Apple's devices the largest player in the Augmented Reality field over night.
The live demo given certainly looked awe-inspiring and showed multiple objects being rendered on top of an on-stage table and subsequently affecting each other when shuffled around. That is to say, the shadows cast by all objects and light emanating from the virtual lamp adapted to corresponding movements and displayed correctly on surface of the real world table.
In a second, equally impressive, demonstration, a Lego Batmobile was projected onto the table and disassembled in real time by touching the iPad's screen, camera angle and individual bricks could be smoothly manipulated. It remains to be seen what else developers and Apple themselves have up their sleeves later this year, this short excursion alone certainly did whet our appetite for more.
As rumored, Apple today announced a new 10.5-inch version of its iPad Pro. It features a larger display, in a body that's essentially the same size of the 9.7-inch iPad. You can see in the above image that this is possible thanks to slimmer bezels—Apple says they've been reduced by 40% in size.
The tablet weighs 1 pound and is extremely powerful. It features a new ProMotion Retina display that can refresh at a rate of 120Hz. That's double the refresh rate of previous iPads, making things smoother, crisper and more responsive. This is powered by an A10X Fusion chip processor, which has a 6-core CPU and 12-core GPU.
Other features include a 12MP iSight camera with optical image stabilization (same as iPhone 7) and a 7MP FaceTime camera. It has the same 10-hour battery life, supports USB3 fast-charging, and entry-level storage now starts at 64GB. The new iPad Pro starts shipping next week, with prices starting at $649.
Here's a note from Apple's press release on the new tablets:
“These are by far the most powerful iPads we’ve ever created with the world’s most advanced displays featuring ProMotion, the powerful new A10X Fusion chip and the advanced camera system of iPhone 7,” said Greg Joswiak, Apple’s vice president of Product Marketing. “Together with iOS 11 these new iPad Pro models will radically change what users can do with iPad.”
One last thing: a new full-sized Smart Keyboard has been custom designed for the 10.5-inch iPad Pro, offering a thin yet durable keyboard that never needs to be charged or paired over Bluetooth and is easily foldable into a protective Smart Cover.
What do you think of the new iPad Pro? Will you be picking one up?
With the live-streamed WWDC keynote almost upon us, Apple has now created a bespoke Snapchat geofilter to help promote this year's developers conference. The sponsored WWDC 2017-themed geofilter automatically appears for Snapchat users who find themselves near the McEnery Convention Center in San Jose.
As first noted by 9to5Mac, the filter is available when sharing photos or videos with other Snapchat users. Simply choose it from the list of Snapchat filters to have Apple's official WWDC 2017 banner design applied to your item. Again, this is a filter that uses geofencing so only people attending this year's developer conference will see it in Snapchat.
The same stickers can be found in iMessage via Apple's official WWDC app, as shown above.
Snapchat is available at no charge from App Store.
A placeholder listing for a new Apple Files app has briefly appeared on App Store ahead of today's live-streamed WWDC keynote, as spotted by iOS developer Steven Troughton-Smith late Sunday. It's surfaced in the Utilities section of App Store and has since been removed.
No screenshots or the official description were provided.
The app requires iOS 11 and 64-bit support and is designed for both iPhone and iPad. It sports a blue file folder icon resembling the design for folder icons in macOS. It's entirely possible that the new Files app is really just a rebranded version of the existing iCloud Drive app.
It's unclear if the forthcoming app will be a new stock item in iOS 11 or an optional download. If I had to guess, I'd say it will likely come pre-installed with iOS 11. Since iOS 10, Apple has allowed users to hide most of the stock apps from their Home screen.
To help users easily re-install any removed stock apps, Apple has provided all of its first-party iOS apps that are removable as downloadable App Store items. iOS 11 will be previewed at WWDC later today along with tvOS 11, watchOS 4 and macOS 10.13.
Recovering from a somewhat slow week just before Memorial Day, the Cydia Store appears to be back up and kicking with some interesting new jailbreak tweaks for modding out your device to make it cooler than everyone else's.
In this roundup, we'll talk about all the jailbreak tweaks that were released in Cydia this week, starting with our favorites and then moving on to the rest afterwards.
The Touch Bar is perhaps one of the most innovative new features of the latest model of MacBook Pro, but a new jailbreak tweak dubbed TouchBar by iOS developer LaughingQuoll aspires to bring a similar feature to jailbroken iOS devices.
After installation, the tweak essentially hides out at the bottom of your device’s display in all interfaces. This makes it easy to get to, enabling you to access its shortcuts with ease, no matter what you might be doing.
The Lock screen is the first thing you see every time you wake your device up, whether it’s coming out of your pocket or you’re grabbing at it for the first time of the day from your nightstand.
That said, why not use your jailbreak to customize your Lock screen? A new free jailbreak tweak called LSHiddenTools10 by CydiaGeek will allow you to do just that.