Gadgetory

one of the first videos we made in this processor series was about how notifications than 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 feeling kind of sick so give me a little bit of space to have a terrible raspy voice - 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 it's that some things might change between now and when it comes out in the fall got all that cool 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 are 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 the 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 your different conversation threads can be different groups on the lockscreen now this could be a potential for abuse if I 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 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 a new panel that Apple calls the quick tuning UI and there are a few options here deliver quietly turnoff 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 the notification to go to your Notification Center and not the lockscreen 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 on it that's because if you tap it it brings up another panel and on that panel there's a button to turn off all notifications which is probably what you want to do but some apps will give you another button that will take you to that apps 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 got an annoying notification you had two choices just swipe it away to get rid of it but then the next time you send you one you'll 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 because they've been completely redesigned in the last video we talked about 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 means so it's a little bit easier to figure out now I'm not going to go through and count them partially because in the last video I got my math wrong I don't want you to yell at me in the comments because 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 and iOS 12 is at the notification center and the lock screen are now very different things notifications could 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 notification 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 then when you know you first time you open the app so they're like do you wanna know vacations you like notifications we got notifications for you that's annoying this seems better but we're gonna to see it's gonna take some time for me to see what I think of this new paradigm of Notification Center 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 want to send me that I don't want to bother looking at but it's still early and we don't know yet alright so the last big set of features I want to 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 last because I always forget to turn the dang thing off you could have a golf 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 want to 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 lockscreen which seems like a small thing but then when you wake up in the morning the first thing you see is it everything you missed it's like the weather and that's nice I like to wake up and just see the weather that'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 is 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 want to wait until these things are a little bit more developed what I do want to 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 it's simple think about all of the abstract concepts that you have to understand how to deal with notifications Notification Center versus a 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 WWC one of the Apple executives told me a story about Steve Jobs he said that Steve used to liken the 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 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