Gadgetory

multi-player a our group FaceTime shortcuts automatic workout detections in dark mode we're cutting through all the fat and getting to the good stuff from WWDC right here on the apple core now let's be honest this is not the most exciting Developers Conference at least in terms of announcements we had no new hardware and no major redesigns to their operating systems however Apple did deliver on some requests from both users and developers starting with iOS 12 now this was an important update because it focused on performance improvements something much needed after iOS 11 but it's obviously to be expected what's important here is that it doesn't discriminate against older devices according to Apple iOS 12 will come to all the devices that had iOS 11 updates and will make them faster and with less bugs now that's TBD but it's a step in the right direction in Apple acknowledging that it made a mistake by making our older devices slower another boring one important update is screen time controls now breaking news we're spending way too much time on screens and on our phones this from the phone manufacturers that made us addicted to phones in the first place but that's besides the point with iOS 12 you will be able to set app limits and be able to see a rundown of how you're spending your time which may be horrifying for a lot of us and though we may be too far gone now it's not all lost for our kids because parents will also get the same controls to monitor and set time limits for their kids wait wait wait a second first they give us the tools to make us less addicted to our phones and then they give us meme oh geez those are animal Gees of yourself now featuring tongue tracking that's a thing now this is kind of like what Samsung tried to do with their avatars but they made it look a lot less creepy than Samsung you can now use them in messages and FaceTime and I can't believe I'm reporting on this but the more exciting news about FaceTime is group video calling of up to 32 people now I don't need to talk to 32 people at a time and it looks kind of messy on the phone but for people that would be great and one of the more impressive iOS 12 updates was a our kit - with a rumored multiplayer support now this is great for getting your butt kicked by Scott Steiner at this slingshot game but it's also great at being able to render the same graphics on multiple devices at the same time it also includes 3d object detection which is able to meld real-life and virtual life like they did in this awesome lego demo and a new file format to share it all in making a are more accessible to the masses but what this all boils down to is Apple paving the road for the hardware to come the next big one was Mac OS will have a Apple captain in California for this year's theme but moved it to the desert and now the coolest feature at least according to developers was dark mode but the feature that may have the biggest impact if you're a Safari user has to do with privacy Apple has enhanced their intelligent tracking prevention now that means that they're blocking any kind of widget with a share like or comment button that may be tracking your information without your permission watch I was 5 also got some pretty major updates my personal favorites were all the new fitness features most importantly the automatic workout detection this means you won't have to bother logging anything on the Apple watch anymore because it will know when you start and stop a workout runners also got some cool features like a gentle nudge when you're going above or below your target pace and it now tracks hiking and yoga other important features include actionable notifications limited web browsing series shortcuts I swear we're getting to that a walkie talkie app which is pretty self-explanatory and the podcast app so that's great but the bigger news here is that it now supports audio for third-party apps like Pandora and even Spotify if their game but what about Siri Siri did not get any smarter but that doesn't mean Ceres not open to learning with the new app called shortcuts users will be able to program commands for Siri to work with third-party apps now that may not be enough to satisfy a lot of users like myself but it's really not about me here this conference was about the developers and we want to see we've gotten them excited I'm really excited about the the series shortcuts I think as a developer I see that it's really useful we want to make it for patients using our app we want to make it as easy as possible to be able to do things on our app and I think Siri is a great way to do that but also as a user I can see real ways that I would actually use that functionality myself me I actually am kind of excited about dark mode for for Mojave so I'll be excited when the production version of that comes out yeah I'm really excited about like multiplayer capabilities so you can have but two people seeing the same thing at the same time of same place so that kid you just saw he's 11 years old already has 8 apps on the App Store and is officially making us all look bad so that's it for today but in the meantime you can give us some love give us a like and subscribe or you can tweet me with some of your favorite features from this year's Developers Conference and we'll be back next week with more on the apple core