Apple Maps
Do you mostly use Apple Maps? Maps is introducing 3D maps to help you navigate your local shopping centres, starting in American major cities first, with others to follow, similar to the train info rollout. The same goes for airports, with indoor maps now available in iOS 11 for major hubs around the world, and more to follow later on.
If you use Apple Maps while driving, iOS 11 will finally introduce speed limits and lane guidance warnings for easier navigation while on the road.
Redesigned Control Center and Notification Center
iOS 11 will streamline Control Center, putting all of the options in a single screen, including playback and Airpley controls. It will also include an improved vertical slider design for the brightness and volume controls.
Siri Upgrades
In addition to visual improvements and more expressive male and female voice options, in iOS 11 Siri is getting improved translation skills, including English to Chinese, Italian, German, French and Spanish, with more languages due to come.
Messages and Peer-to-Peer Apple Pay Payments
iMessage remains one of the best mobile messaging platforms out there (assuming your friends and family all have iPhones). Apple Pay via a new iMessage app, with TouchID fingerprint authentication, will quickly send payments (encrypted end-to-end) to someone you’re chatting with.
Using iCloud, iOS will now ensure your iMessages remain perfectly synced across all of your devices.
Apple Music
Apple set its sights on Spotify with Apple Music. Apple Music will have a Shared “Up Next” playlist so your friends can see what’s queued up at a party and make their own contributions to the mix.
Augmented Reality
While not immediately available to users when they upgrade to iOS 11, Apple is introducing a new backend tool for developers called ARKit, allowing them to take advantage of an iPhone or iPad’s camera, sensors, gyroscopes and other hardware to create and improve augmented reality experiences made popular by Pokemon GO.
Camera and Photos
iPhone and iPad’s camera apps will be getting new photography filters under iOS 11, including a long-exposure effect for Live Photos for capturing mages of things in motion, which should be perfect for action photography enthusiasts. Live Photos can also be trimmed, and users can specify which frame of the short video can be used as for the still image.
To help maximise the storage space on your iPhone or iPad which can’t be expanded, in iOS 11 is also introducing a new HEIF compression scheme, shrinking images better than JPEG can, with less compression. The same goes for video, with a new HEVC video codec.
Home Kit and Airplay 2
In addition to adding wireless speaker support to Apple’s Home app, HomeKit will introduce AirPlay 2 to control your audio hardware that supports multi-room playback, including the Apple TV.
Apple CarPlay Do Not Disturb
Taking advantage of clever Bluetooth and Wi-Fi doppler effects to detect when you’re in a moving vehicle, CarPlay will automatically lock down your phone, giving you nothing but a blank screen. An auto-reply option for Messages will also be available under iOS 11, letting others know you’re not ignoring them, but are busy driving.
Improved iPad Apple Pencil Support
Apple is now expanding what the Pencil can be used for on the iPad, in standard apps such as Mail, Safari, screenshots and Notes with markup that allows users to easily make hand-drawn annotations
In Notes, iOS 11 uses machine learning to translate and index hand-written notes so they can be searched, or copied and pasted as editable text.
Files App
Apple is finally giving iOS a dedicated File Manager app called Files — at least on the iPad. Filesis a central place to find or delete files for when your device runs out of storage space.
But Files also has access to stuff you’ve stored on iCloud, and other online storage options including Dropbox, Box and Google Drive, so you don’t need to hop from app to app to find a document you need, which is potentially the most useful feature of the new Files app.
