Camera
Like the rest of iOS 7, the Camera has
received a signifi cant overhaul. It will
offer four different modes: standard
camera, video camera, a square camera,
and panorama; you can swipe back and
forth between them.
If you think that square camera
might be Apple’s way of taking a shot
at Instagram, congratulations: you’re
spot on. The app also now includes
different live photo fi lters that you
can apply to your still or square shots.
They’re even non-destructive, in case
you want to remove them later.
Moments and Collections
For those of us that end up with
thousands of pictures in our Camera
Rolls, Moments and Collections
offer a better way to organise those
photos. Just as iPhoto on the Mac can
automatically break pictures into events,
Photos on iOS can use metadata like
time and location to create different
“Moments” – all the pictures you took
on Thursday at dinner, for example, or all
the photographs you snapped while on
that weekend trip to the country.
Collections are larger groupings of
Moments – often all the photos you took
in a general area (around your house)
during a time period of often several
months. Beyond that, you can zoom
out even further to a Years view, which
breaks down all the pictures you took
in various years.
AirDrop
AirDrop in iOS 7 lets you exchange
fi les like pictures, Passbook passes
and contacts between two iOS users
over Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, without any
confi guration and (as Apple’s Craig
Federighi pointed out) without the need
to walk around and “bump” phones
with people. It will appear in the Share
sheet, along with more conventional
items like Mail and Messages; you can even use it to share multiple items
to multiple people at once. Files end
up right in the appropriate app and
are encrypted during transmission.
You can also change permissions to
determine whether everybody can
share with you, or only certain people
nearby (or people in your contacts).
What we don’t know is whether or
not iOS devices will be able to AirDrop
fi les back and forth with Macs.
Safari
Apple’s web browser – which the
company likes to point out is the most
used browser for mobile devices – has
some new tricks up its sleeve in iOS
7. There’s an entirely new minimalist
interface: the search and URL fi elds
have been merged into one, which will
now suggest URLs, bookmarks and
search results as you type. In addition,
your favourites are quickly and easily
available from that screen, allowing you
one-touch access to your bookmarked
sites. And the interface will disappear
into the background as you scroll, giving
you even more space with which to
view your content.
A new tab interface lets you scroll
more quickly through open pages (and
continue scrolling down to iCloud Tabs);
there are also the same continuousscrolling
Reading List and Shared
Links features that will appear in OS
X Mavericks. And iCloud Keychain, a
new feature that syncs your passwords
between your devices and even helps
you generate new passwords, should
work seamlessly with Safari.
iTunes Radio
Some have argued that iTunes Radio is
basically Pandora (the popular US radio
service), but that doesn’t mean it won’t
be popular. As with Pandora, you can
create stations based on a song, artist
or genre, then rate the songs as you go
along – in case you want to hear more
like that track or nothing like it ever
again. You can also control the balance
of your stations, determining whether
they’re hit-heavy, favour new music
discovery, or a mixture of the two. A
history tab will give you a full list of all
the songs you’ve listened to, just in case
you can’t remember the name of that
track that had you tapping your toes.
But Apple’s new streaming service
has the additional benefi t of being closely tied in with the rest of the iTunes
ecosystem, meaning that you can easily
buy songs from the iTunes Store, directly
from within iTunes Radio. Apple hasn’t
yet confi rmed when it will launch the
iTunes Radio service in the UK.
Music
Most of the changes to the Music app
are cosmetic, it seems, refl ecting the
new design aesthetic of iOS 7. Despite
the extensive overhaul of iTunes on the
Mac that Apple did last year, there didn’t
seem to be much crossover to iOS – or,
if there is, Apple hasn’t revealed it yet.
In particular, there’s no indication that
iTunes 11’s Up Next feature has jumped
to Apple’s mobile platform.
