Everything We Know About Apple’s New iPhone Software

Get ready for split-screen views, transit routes and lowkey shade delivered via iMessage

The next version of Apple’s mobile operating system is almost here.

The company is expected to unveil iOS 9 at its annual Worldwide Developers Conference in June. A new iOS update isn’t quite a big deal as a new iPhone, but the announcements can often be substantial–iOS 7 brought us a completely revamped mobile interface, while iOS 8 featured a health activity tracker and improved predictive keyboard.

Here’s what’s rumored to be in the works for Apple’s iOS 9:

A New Font

Apple is reportedly planning to dump the Helvetica font it’s been using since iOS 8 in favor of a San Francisco font that’s currently in use on the Apple Watch. The font was chosen for Apple Watch specifically because it’s readable on small screens.

A “Home” app for connected devices

In iOS 8 Apple added HomeKit, a framework that helps users control connected devices in their home. Now the company is working on a user-friendly app called “Home” that will let users more easily control disparate devices from a single interface. Among the features rumored to be part of the Home app are virtual rooms that let users easily detect which parts of their house have which connected devices. However, 9to5Mac warns that the featureset so far is fairly limited so the app may not be ready for a public debut in June.

Improved Apple Maps

Apple is finally planning to add subway and bus routes to its Maps app, a feature that’s been available in Google Maps for years. The initial rollout may be limited to just a handful of cities globally, including New York and San Francisco. The company is also using Roomba-sized robots to develop indoor maps of buildings and landmarks, though that feature won’t necessarily be ready for iOS 9.

Dual-app viewing for iPad

Apple wants to give iPads the ability to run two apps side-by-side. The split-screen functionality is already available in tablets by Samsung and Microsoft, so it would be a welcome addition to Apple’s device. The new mode could allow users to resize an app to take up one-third, one-half or two-thirds of the screen.

The iPhone 4S may still be supported

The iPhone 4S is close to four years old, which is an eternity in the world of mobile tech. However, Apple is expected to continue supporting the still-popular device with iOS 9. In fact, according to9to5Mac, Apple is changing its software development process to ensure that iOS 9 runs better on old iPhones and iPads than iOS 8 did.

Contact-specific read receipts

Passive-aggressive texters, rejoice! Apple is apparently tweaking iMessage to let you choose which of your contacts you share read receipts with. Drake is probably really excited.

A Google Now Competitor

Apple may be planning to expand its digital assistant capabilities beyond Siri with a new personalized interface code-named Proactive. The menu, which would likely be located left of the main home screen, would integrate information from a user’s calendar, Passbook and other apps to provide daily itineraries. Proactive could remind you to call your mother each week for instance, or automatically pull up directions to your office each morning. The similarity is similar to Google Now, which is available for Android phones

Unified Search in Google Calendar and Google Drive

Back in 2012, Gmail enhanced the search feature by showing relevant emails, Google Calendar events, Google Drive files as you type your query. A similar feature is now available in Google Calendar and Google Drive.

For example, you can type a query in Google Calendar and find emails and Google Drive files, in addition to Google Calendar events. Click one of the results and it opens in a new tab.

Google Drive shows Google Calendar events and results from Gmail. If there are no Google Drive results, you'll see this message: "there are no recent records that match your search".

Google introduce Google Pholes

Today during their I/O 2015 Keynote Google announced Google Photos, a new service that will allow users to easily upload, edit, and share photographs from all of their devices. Google Photos seems like a reboot of Google's previous efforts for making a photo sharing service through Google+, and is instead a standalone product with its own dedicated apps and website.

Google's goal is that Google Photos will become a place where users can permanently store a continually growing collection of photos from their cameras and mobile devices. They also hope to improve upon the organization and sharing of photos, which has become a difficult problem to tackle with people taking and sharing more photos than ever.

The big promise of Google Photos is that the storage for your photos will be unlimited. This is a huge step above the measly 5GB of iCloud storage you can use with Apple's Photos offerings, and still an improvement over services like Flickr which offer users 1TB of storage. However, there is a caveat to the unlimited storage. While you aren't limited by the amount of photos or videos you can store, you are somewhat limited by their quality. Users who opt for unlimited storage can only store images at up to 16MP, and videos at 1080p. This shouldn't really affect any users who intend to use the service for storing photos from their smartphone, as most smartphone cameras have lower resolutions than 16MP.

There is another option for users who want to use Google Photos for their high resolution pictures from their DSLR or mirrorless camera, or who just have a very high resolution smartphone. Users can opt to have Google Photos use their Google Account's 15GB of storage, and with this option there are no limits to file size or resolution. Since many devices give away 1TB of free Google Drive storage, I suspect that this option will be popular among users who want to keep their photos in the highest possible resolution while staying within Google's ecosystem instead of going with another photo offering like Flickr.

The second half of Google Photos is how it will intelligently organize your photos. Google can analyze the content of photos and group them into categories based on their subject. While I haven't seen this in action, if it does actually work as well as Google claims then it would remove much of the hassle involved with organizing your photo collection.

Google Photos also allows for groups of photos to be shared. You can share a link to one of Google's automatically created groups, or you can make a collection of photos and get a single link to share them all at once. There's no need for the person you're sharing them with to have a Google+ account or to have the app installed.

In addition to grouping and sharing, Google Photos has all the other features that one would expect from a photos app such as simple color adjustments, cropping, and other editing controls. Google Photos will be available today across essentially all major platforms, with apps available for iOS, Windows, OS X, and an update to the existing Photos app coming on Android.

Source: Official Google Blog

Office Lens Android now available at Google Play Store

Thanks to the participation of more than 130,000 Google+ community previewers, we’re pleased to release Office Lens Android today. Called a “great app” by one tester, Office Lens turns your Android, iPhone or Windows Phone into a pocket scanner that works “flawlessly,” delivers “crystal clear images” and does an “excellent job of transcribing a printed page, despite edge distortion (page from a hardcover book),” according to other users.

First introduced for Windows Phone in March 2014, followed by the iPhone app early last month, Office Lens Android was the only version to have a public preview, which ran from April 2 to today’s formal release. Both iOS and Google+ communities quickly embraced the Microsoft capture app, with first-month downloads totaling more than 1.3 million for iPhone and 70,000 for the Android preview. To date, Windows Phone users have totaled 3.5 million Office Lens downloads.

A before-and-after look at how Office Lens Android does an, “excellent job of transcribing a printed page,” according to one previewer.

The handy scanner app recognizes the corners of a document, whiteboard, electronic screen or any rectangular media and automatically crops, straightens, enhances and cleans up the image, then enables saving to OneNote or OneDrive for easy retrieval from any device.

With Android beta testers representing 270 makes of phones and just under 2,600 models, the Office Lens team worked hard to ensure a seamless user experience across all Android phones. As a result of a user experience refinements, Android phone owners share a feature with Windows Phone users: saving Office Lens images to multiple sources at the same time—for example, OneDrive and Word—which involves separate steps on the iPhone.

From receipts to whiteboards, books to legal documents, the Office Lens Android pocket scanner recognizes the corners of any rectangular media and automatically crops, straightens and enhances the image, which can be saved to multiple sources at the same time.

Now available free in the Google Play Store, Office Lens was praised by an Android user for its “clean design.” It offers the following capabilities and features across all three phone platforms:

• Converts images of paper documents, electronic screens and whiteboard notes into Word documents, PowerPoint presentations and searchable PDF files for easy storage, editing and reformatting.
• Enables images to be sent via email, making it easy to share whiteboard notes with work colleagues, submit scanned business expense receipts or ensure family and friends have copies of important paper documents.
• Captures business cards and generates contacts, which can be sent to OneNote and added to your phone.
• Recognizes the corners of a document and automatically crops, enhances and cleans up the image.
• Identifies printed text with optical character recognition (OCR) so that you can search by keyword for the image in OneNote or OneDrive.
• Inserts images to OneNote or as DOCX, PPTX or PDF files in OneDrive, providing options to save, export and share the image.

Office Lens Android users will see the new OneNote location picker in the general release version, making it easy to decide where to save images and keep them organized.

We’re excited to introduce the final version of Office Lens, ensuring that Android users in 123 countries or areas, communicating in 30 languages have access to what’s quickly becoming the preferred scanner app. Please download your version of Office Lens today—Android, iPhone orWindows Phone—and keep sending comments our way, either below, at the respective app store or our UserVoice site. Your feedback helps us understand what users like best and determine which features to deploy to other platforms.

Microsoft's age detection shows up in your Bing image searches

Microsoft's face-based age detection is still a little wonky (I'm thankfully younger than what you see above), but the company is clearly enamored with it -- you'll now find it inBing image searches. All you have to do is look for a person and, in most cases, roll over the picture to find a #HowOldRobot that will guess how many birthdays the subject has seen. The feature is available in at least North America, so give it a shot... if for no other reason than to giggle at its occasionally harsh appraisals of your looks.

Microsoft's new iPhone app could make Siri jealous

Cortana is coming to iPhone and Android

Microsoft’s “personal digital assistant” for Windows devices, Cortana, will soon take spoken commands on Apple and Android devices as well.

Microsoft announced Tuesday that a version of its Cortana app is coming to iOS and Android. Cortana will enter a crowded field of personal digital assistants on those platforms, dominated by Apple’s Siri and Google Now.

Microsoft has attempted to distinguish Cortana as a careful listener, responding not only to spoken commands but seizing on context to answer follow-up questions. Chattiness aside, Cortana will first have to break users of the habit of using convenient shortcuts to Apple and Google’s personal digital assistants, which have been tightly integrated into their respective operating systems.

Here’s more on Cortana for iOS and Android, via Microsoft:


The Cortana app can do most of the things Cortana does on your PC or on a Windows phone. You can have Cortana remind you to pick up milk the next time you’re at the grocery store, and then your phone will wake up and buzz with the reminder. You’ll be able to track a flight using Cortana on both your phone and your PC, and get the updates on the device that you’re on so you don’t miss anything. Everything in Cortana’s Notebook will show up across all your devices and any changes you make on one device will be reflected when you use Cortana on any of your other devices.

The new app comes as Microsoft unleashes a suite of mobile services across rival operating systems, beginning with Microsoft’s surprise roll out of free Microsoft Office apps last November.

Microsoft Office Lens, An App For Scanning Documents With Your Camera, Is Now Available As A Stable Release

Office Lens, which was released in a semi-private beta in April, is now widely available through the Play Store. The app had been on Windows Phone for quite a while and, continuing their pattern, Microsoft decided they wanted it on Android as well. Office Lens uses your phone or tablet's built-in camera to scan documents or whiteboards and convert them to PDF or office document formats. Here's an example of how it's supposed to work from the app info:

 

Of course, lots of things will affect how well it works in your experience. The lighting, the quality of the camera, steadiness of your hands, and untold other factors may result in far less success than Microsoft's example images.

The app enjoys tight integration with OneNote, which if you weren't aware is pretty great on its own. Office Lens says it will OCR your scanned documents, though it is unclear if this requires sharing it to OneNote or OneDrive. If you like to jot down notes on real paper but also like to store things digitally, an app like this can be critical to your workflow.

Unlike most of their recent releases, Microsoft says in their beta group that Office Lens works on devices running software as old as Jelly Bean 4.1. If you're interested, head to the Play Store and give it a spin.