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iOS Today 806: What's New in iOS 27?
00:55:56
New Siri AI Learns Personal Context Understanding!
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- [00:00]
Micah Sargent
You have one new message translating. Disney and Pixar's Hoppers is now available on Disney.
- [00:09]
You could say that again.
- [00:11]
Critics are calling it Pixar's funniest movie ever and a wildly entertaining ride. Blizzard Potato. It's certified fresh and verified hot.
- [00:19]
Now we party.
- [00:21]
Rosemary Orchard
This is incredible.
- [00:23]
Micah Sargent
Wow. I am clearing the rest of the day.
- [00:25]
Disney and Pixar's Hoppers now available on Disney. Rated pg.
- [00:31]
Rosemary Orchard
Morning decisions. How about a creamy mocha Frappuccino drink? Or sweet vanilla smooth caramel maybe? Or white chocolate mocha? Whichever you choose, delicious coffee awaits. Find Starbucks Frappuccino drinks wherever you buy your groceries.
- [00:46]
Micah Sargent
Mornings have a rhythm. You can hear it, feel it. And at Quaker, we fuel it with 100% whole grain oats and a good source of fiber in every bowl, helping you turn that rhythm into your soundtrack for a great day to start Whatever's next Quaker. Official sponsor of FIFA World Cup 26
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Rosemary Orchard
I oh, let's go. I oh, let's go.
- [01:15]
Micah Sargent
Coming up on iOS today, WWDC. Well, it's happening and that means it's time to talk about what's new in the world of Apple's platform. Stay tuned for this episode of iOS today.
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Rosemary Orchard
Podcasts you love from people you Trust.
- [01:36]
Micah Sargent
This is TWIT. This is iOS Today, episode 806 with Rosemary Orchard and me, Micah Sargent. Recorded Tuesday, June 9, 2026 for Thursday, June 11, 2026. What's new in iOS 27? Hello and welcome to iOS Today. This is the show where we Talk all things iOS, iPadOS, WatchOS, HomePod, OS and you know, more. All of Apple's platforms. We love to talk about them here on the show. You make the most of your devices. I am one of your hosts. My name is Micah Sargent.
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Rosemary Orchard
And I am another host. My name is Rosemary Orchard and I'm here to help you maybe reframe Your view of iOS Ready for iOS 27?
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Micah Sargent
Yes, we are really excited to be talking about this as Apple has just sort of revealed its platform updates. One thing to be aware of with this year's set of updates is as Apple always I think is any keynote will do. You set out a roadmap of what you plan to talk about. And Apple's focus this year has been on performance, on safety and privacy, and then third on AI, Apple intelligence, artificial intelligence, generative AI, et cetera. So those are many of the things that we'll be talking about today as we make as we run through the coverage of everything that's been announced now. Apple, of course Last year made the change of numbering for its various platforms to instead reference the year in which they will be getting the most use. So despite the fact that it is 2026 right now, the plan of course is that 2027 is the year of now iOS 27, given that sort of September tends to be when these devices or these, these platforms are rolled out with the launch of a new iPhone. So in the meantime, Apple runs betas over the summer and has, you know, opportunities to collect feedback and how the platform will go. Okay. With that in mind, I think one of the things that is first on my mind also happens to be one of the things that seem to be first on Apple's mind when it came to the design of the platform. Very much a. Hey, hey, we hear you, we hear how you're feeling about Liquid Glass and we are offering some options when I, because of course I backed up my phone and then installed iOS27 in its developer version and when I did so one of the things that becomes part of the sign on process, the initial setup process, is a slider that lets you choose how transparent or opaque Liquid Glass is as a whole. And that was I think one of the things that we've seen up to this point Apple kind of try to address with a toggle of reducing transparency, increasing transparency. But now we are given more control right at the start to make adjustments to that.
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Rosemary Orchard
Yes. Yeah, we are. Micah. So I'm here in settings Appearance and then there is a section just called Liquid Glass and if the, the slider is in the center that is default. So you can go all the way down to more transparent which there's a full, full little preview here so that you can see when I drag for example the image down, then I can see more, more clearly how transparent that is. Whereas if I slide it all the way to the right, which is, you know, maximum or minimum glass, maximum frosting perhaps. Let's, let's translate this into cupcake terminology then especially it's slightly annoying they didn't put a bigger image here. I understand why they've done it like this so that you can see it when it's like half over an image, half over a plain background. But yeah, it's quite use. You'll see how clear that is. Now for me, I personally have got used to Liquid Glass and I am finding this the default settings to be absolutely fine. But I do appreciate the fact that they are reintroducing toolbars. Uh, so it's no longer just a series of little floating buttons. Across the top or the bottom of something. And they're actually grouping things back into proper toolbars so that you have like an easier to see collection of buttons which will improve visibility and just accessibility for anybody has any kind of vision impairment or just people who struggle with getting distracted because, like, being able to see through things can somehow not work very well with certain brain types. So it's really nice to see that there are more options here. And yeah, I will be talking to my parents about this in September and going, hey, so which one of these do you actually like the most? Which one of these is easiest for you to use? Because they're both in their 60s now and, you know, that tends to be the age where people's eyes tend to start testing them in new and interesting ways. So I'll make sure that their iPhones are set up to help them actually see what they're doing instead of causing any confusion.
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Micah Sargent
Absolutely. Yeah. I'm glad that that slider is there. I moved it around and ended up leaving it for me on default. But it's good that one of the things that I said about this announcement was sort of a tagline, seemed to be self awareness. And in some ways it was signaling, hey, you know, we are aware of the things that people are complaining about, upset about wanting to change, and we are working on that thing or those things. And I think that that was one of the highlights for me of the event was seeing how Apple was addressing some of these hopes that people had for the platform going forward, but also more importantly, the needs that people had for the platform going forward. When it came to actually, again, a lot of the announcements were across the board as opposed to being tied to one specific platform. But with Apple intelligence, that is something that we are going to have to kind of COVID from the perspective of having access to a lot of it, but also not having access to a lot of it just yet. Before we get to that, though, let's continue with some of the improvements and the privacy and security features. Given that that is kind of how Apple laid things out at the show. Aside from the liquid glass adjustments, we're also seeing Apple tout faster performance across the board. That meant that your photo library would load up to 70% faster. I heard that there are improvements to airdrop transfers, which I think is great. Sometimes you're in the middle of doing one and then you're both just standing there going, why is this taking so long?
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Rosemary Orchard
Oh, yes. Yeah. In particular, what's been very annoying for me is if I've just taken a bunch of photos and I want to send them to somebody then opening photos. If you've just taken like 10 or 20 photos, it can take a little bit for them all to actually end up in the photos app. Um, and that's something that's been sped up and I was testing that a little bit today. Um, and that's really good. And the other thing that they've said that they've sped up, which is really cool, is indexing so that searching for things is faster. So if I know that Micah has sent me something super cool about one of his dogs, then I can go and search for like Henri or Mitzi and search for their names and then that will just get pulled up and even if you sent it to me like five minutes ago, it'll already be there in the search, which would be really nice because the number of times I've been there going, I know my mum and I talked about like a particular wine, what wine was it? And I'm searching and I'm using the messages search because I know she would have sent it to me in messages and I can't find it. It drives me crazy. So I'm really pleased that they're doing better spotlight searching with better performance and security there because that's all on device as well.
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Micah Sargent
Another thing that I'm happy about is that they have improved upon the networking so that it can be smarter about changing networks or smarter about not changing networks. There are times where you are driving along and it just so happens that the process that's checking for networks ends up picking up on one that's pretty strong and ends up connecting to it. But then moments later you no longer are within range of that and then the disconnect happens and it's just very frustrating to have those things going in and out. So hearing that the, the iPhone will kind of seamlessly move between wifi, between cellular connections, but also again, more importantly, make the choice at times not to switch to a different network is a nice improvement there as well. I was very happy to hear about improved indexing, particularly for me on macOS where I have had a number of issues getting what I was actually after to be the first setting or the first result. And so that was something that made me go, okay, good, good, good. I'm glad that they're once again paying attention to that. I also was pretty impressed they showed in maps updates to how the maps are rendered. Up to this point there were relatively washed out images throughout. And what has happened is on top of using the data that they have from being on the ground, driving around, capturing visuals. They're also using satellite imagery and of course AI to combine all of that together to render even more detail and render even better color for the detail that is provided. So Apple says, architectural fixtures, shapes of individual trees, all in stunning, sharp detail. And yeah, from the looks of things, it does look a lot better. Before we move along to talk about the safety and privacy features, let's take a quick break here so I can tell you about our sponsor of today's episode. It is Shopify bringing you this episode of iOS today. If you've shopped online, well, chances are that you've bought from a business powered by Shopify. When you're scrolling your feeds and then all of a sudden you see it, that one product that you've been looking for, you click on the link, you add it to your cart, you hit checkout and as you're filling in your address you realize, oh no, I don't have my card nearby. Ugh. But that is when you see it. The purple pay button that saves all your information, making checkout as simple as a tap on your screen. That's Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world and 10% of all e commerce in the US from household names like Allbirds and Mattel to brands just getting started. With hundreds of ready to use templates, Shopify helps you build a beautiful online store that matches your brand's style and helps you get the word out. Like you have a marketing team behind you. You can easily create email and social media campaigns wherever your customers are scrolling or strolling. Best yet, Shopify is your commerce expert with world class expertise in everything from managing inventory to international shipping to processing returns and beyond. If you get stuck, Shopify has award winning 247 customer support. I really am excited whenever I see that Shopify button because for me I love being able to track a product all along the way. That's something that Shopify can do. Not only do I get multiple payment options, but the ability to know that a pack that my product's about to ship, that it has shipped, that it will get here. I just the other day bought a pair of pants and was very excited that it was Shopify because a couple days later, boop. Your pants are moving through the process and that was great. These are trousers to be clear for our outside of the U.S. audience. And I was very excited that Shopify was part of that. So good stuff. See less carts go abandoned and more sales Go with Shopify and their Shop pay button. Sign up for your $1 per month trial today at shopify.comios go to shopify.comios that's shopify.comios all right, let's head back to the show. We are covering iOS 27 and the new updates therein as I promised. We'll talk about Apple. Apple's one of its main points here which was privacy, security, safety and, and the focus on children's no children and teens in these updates Apple has and I have to thank them because I'm sure Rosemary, you were thinking, ooh, this has just rolled into dozens of episodes of iOS today. Apple has made some updates to how its child accounts can interact and making it it easier for parents or guardians to better set up their device set up devices for their kids in safe, safety, aware ways. So one thing that has been added is a setup assistant that will let you kind of quickly figure out how to, to make the platform better for a child. And what I mean by that is you can kind of choose what apps are available. So in this you can choose to either have the essentials only so that the settings app, the messages app, the phone app, FaceTime and maps are available. But you can also set it up so that there are not just the basic apps but other apps like weather and notes and reminders. You can decide what apps specifically are pre installed and then go from there. Now we know of course that Ask to Buy is a feature that allows for you to get a prompt when your child wants to make a purchase. Right. But what I want very excited about is that there's a new feature called Ask to Browse and this lets you set up approvals for visiting websites. This I think is important, Rosemary, because we have seen up to this point kids figuring out how they can use the browser to get around these privacy
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Rosemary Orchard
or these good old instagram.com working when the Instagram app is not installed and things like that. Yeah, this is an interesting one for me because I love the idea in theory, especially if you've got younger kids, you know, there's a five year old who is in my life an awful lot now and it's one of these things where it's like as he's figuring out spelling and a little bit of typing, it's like cool. He's gonna start stumbling across things and browsing the Internet. You know his, his primary thing is how do I spell YouTube? So you know, we're still working on a number of skills there. Qwerty seems to baffle him slightly, but that's okay. You know, at some point he'll get there. But you know, there, there, there are a lot of things out there and you know, nobody knows whether or not everything is safe. So especially what I, what I genuinely really think is great about these parental features is it is not just 100 based on age ratings because we all know that there are some things which for some kids are appropriate at an earlier age. And other kids, kids may actually find that there are certain things which they're not ready for yet, even though the age rating says it's fine. And in those cases having the parents be able to go actually no, you know what, I know this game says it's appropriate, but this kid's not ready for that yet is great. The one thing that does slightly concern me is kids with parents who aren't particularly supportive of them and you know, they're the way that they are. And those kids not being able to find, support it through the Internet, which has been a great resource for many a person out there. I know, you know, but there's, it's one of these things where there's, there's wins and losses on all sides here. And I know for a fact that there are a number of websites out there which are one typo away from a legitimate website and making sure that your kid doesn't end up on something. Like, you know, if they were trying to browse a website that was all about great kitchenware called only Pans and then they missed type the P for an F, that would be a very different experience. Right. So you know, it's one of these things where yeah, it, it depends on the kid. But also I think it's, these are the sort of controls that we should be providing for parents to be able to make those choices, you know, and, and the guardians involved in these kids lives because that way people can make better choices. Instead of governments attempting to govern things and then ending up outsourcing things like identity verification and age verification to third party companies around the world who don't have any certification for that. Not that I'm bitter about that particular law.
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Micah Sargent
You really caught me off guard with that one in the best way. And yeah, I remember being a kid and in the US of course we have our federal building where the president works and lives and that's White House document. But I remember as a kid not knowing that it was.gov@ the end and there was a website that was available at a different, more common top level domain that was not what you wanted to see, or maybe it was, but not for me at the time, that's for sure. And so, yes, there are sometimes those just slightly slight letter changes or whatever it happens to be that can make a difference with this. I'm very happy to see kind of these subtle updates, but more importantly, the focus on giving reasons behind this and really covering the talking to different experts and making sure that parents feel comfortable with the choices that they're making and that they feel not just comfortable, but secure in the choices that they're making. Because I think that sometimes we give people these different options, but without guidance, it can be kind of confusing and a little uncertain about what is good, what is not. So I think that that's good as well. Another change is that over time, if a child wants to add new contacts, well, you can set it up so that, so that they also have to be approved whether those contacts can be added and that the people can be communicated with on the other end as well. It's really, I think, about more than anything just trying to make sure that there's more control and awareness about what's going on across the board. I also like that these different apps can be divided up into categories and you can decide how much time can be devoted to these different categories. So you can say you can spend up to 60 minutes using entertainment apps, you can spend up to 60 minutes using social media apps. All other apps you can use whenever you want. Again, all along the way you're getting guidance, which I think is great. So you can see what is, what is suggested, what is recommended based on developmental studies, and do a better job of making those choices therein. Lots of different stuff that has become part of the process of setting up access to apps and to video and to the phone. And I think that Apple has done a pretty good job of updating those things. All right, that is a look at the privacy and security, specifically child safety, as those updates have taken place. But that is not all. In fact, the biggest update across the board is the updates to Apple Intelligence. Apple is, you know, putting itself into the same space that we've seen now from Google, that we've seen from Microsoft in some ways making sure that its consumer devices feature the feature, the features, frankly, that we expect to see at this point. So that means that the new Siri is here called Siri AI. And Siri AI is redesigned for one thing. Its dynamic island presentation is a little bit different, but more importantly, you are able to communicate with Siri and it does a better job of the Follow up situation. Yay. Now, whenever you talk to Siri on your device, you can say, you know, do this thing and then you could ask a question about the thing that you just had it do and it's not requiring you to continue to start new prompts. That said, I do not yet have access to it. I'm on the wait list for Nusiri and so I have not had an opportunity to play around with Nusiri yet. But I wanted to ask, have you yet or are you also on the waitlist?
- [25:56]
Rosemary Orchard
I'm not on the wait list, Micah, because I thought I would wait until today just so that I can show folks for when the public betas come out how they can sign up for it. So under settings and then Siri there is a try new Siri button and then you can join the waiting list, which is very exciting. And yes, I will just continue with that. And now I am on the waiting list. So we will wait. See this? This may be really speedy. It may not be. I have a feeling it's going to be a slow onboarding to let them check the demand that this is going to place on their servers and things like that. Because obviously this is going to be a certain amount of computer usage. You know, all of these things are how much it's going to be. They probably have a pretty good estimate. But there is always an outlier in every group. You know, like if you've got a group of friends, there's always one person who's way taller than everybody else. There's one person who's really, really intelligent, one person who's really great at baking, things like that. Everybody is different in their way. And there's gonna be one person in every group who uses a significant amount more of this than they expect. It still surprises me to this day every time I'm visiting my parents and my dad's like, oh, I don't know that. I'm just gonna ask Siri. And he'll talk to Siri and she'll go, here are some results I found on the web. And he's happ happy with that, which to me is mind boggling. Absolutely insane. Like I can't. Like this is one of the reasons why I don't use Siri for a lot of things. Unless it's something that I know she will have the answer to, like calling my mum or something like that. She can do that. So I tend not to use it all that much. But I was very impressed by the obviously very polished pre recorded demo that they had yesterday. In fact, they have multiple demos. But it is very, very interesting the way that it seems to be able to pull lots of data together. And also this goes back to that indexing and performance improvements that we talked about earlier, where there are, you know, it's able to pull this information out of things like messages and emails and things like that much faster because the performance is better. And Spotlight has done all that indexing to make things better. And this should work across all devices as well. So it should be available on iPad and WatchOS and HomePod OS and TVs and macOS. I don't know why I put macOS at the end because I think macOS is going to be insanely powerful for this because it's already got a massive processor for on device computing. But we'll see what happens there.
- [28:31]
Micah Sargent
Yeah, with the new Siri AI we are along with being able to kind of talk to it in a better, more natural way and not have to think a lot about how you are delivering it. Siri has entered the camera as well. And so as part of that sort of visual intelligence experience, you can take a photo and start this visual search. So if you see something, what is this that I'm looking at? In the example given by Apple, someone had taken a photo of some cricket balls and and Siri is explaining what cricket balls are and how they work. And so I think that is also an exciting update when it comes to visual intelligence. But I am more interested in, I want to talk about personal context and broad world knowledge and then I would love to hear you talk about taking action in apps by way of app intents and some of that stuff. So when it comes to personal context, this is something that we've seen now Google do a really good job of figuring out for the consumer at Google I O. And even before that event, Android received updates that allowed for more awareness of what's happening on someone's device and using that to say, you know, I know that you have have a calendar event that is about this and I know that there was an email that was sent that also regards this and you're talking to this person. So let me surface some suggestions for what you might say back. Or even better, if someone asks me a question in a message and it's like, oh, do you have those photos from the other day when we went to the, I don't know, to the lake? And then being able to then open the photos app and not have to scroll back, but just have those photos presented to you is really nice. So being able to just have that happen automatically, but also being able to do something like show me photos from when I went to Spain, show me an email that had Todd in it and then it can pull that stuff up. It just is better at getting to what you're after. The other aspect of this that I think kind of counteracts some of what you were talking about Rosemary, with your dad, because I'm also mind boggled that he's happy with here's what I found on the web for you. A broader understanding of world knowledge, meaning that we don't have to have that here's what I found on the web for you thing, but that it could actually use its knowledge plus any searches in the moment to condense down and actually answer my question. So the example that they give here on the website is Siri, why do the stars twinkle in the sky? And not having it just go here's funny Fanny, wait for you is very nice. Referencing information online, giving you detailed up to date insights and pulling those important facts and having them available to you is really something that I'm looking forward to for sure. The last thing that I'll mention because I did forget that this was part of it as well. Siri's voice options are much more customizable. You can change the pitch, the speed, the tone and the sort of enthusiasm altogether and make your specific version of Siri sound exactly as you want it to. I am being attacked by a fungus gnat at the moment. It's driving me up a wall. They're everywhere. Anyway, so, so that is my part of it. Tell us about how Siri can like Surface app functionality and what's going on there.
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Rosemary Orchard
Well, there's a whole bunch of things Maika and there's a section, there's a whole bunch of things we can talk about in Shortcuts Corner as well. But what Apple has done this year is they've added more APIs for developers. So that's basically a programming interface where, where developers can go, cool. Apple's made this amazing new thing like permission kit and I want to use that in my app so that the people who are using my app can ask for permission from a parent or guardian to then access say for example a chat feature that you know is there in the app. So the app is then available to more people. But maybe certain features are limited, you know, based on parental controls and things like that. And Apple has added a whole bunch of these. Now app intentions tents specifically are going to be what we end up talking about. In Shortcuts Corner, though, I'm very pleased to report, and I will do this as a little sneak preview, Apple has added a testing system for this so that anything that like directly talks to Siri or Spotlight can much more easily be tested by app developers. Because this is something that I personally have worked with multiple developers on because they're going, huh, well, how do I test this? And the answer is you, you, you release it through TestFlight and then you get lots of people to test it and tell you if it works or not, unfortunately. Because the, the testing system for that wasn't always great. But yeah, there's, there's a whole lot of things that are sort of snuck into various places. Apple hasn't explicitly unfortunately given a list of all of the things. And as much as I was trying to make notes during the, the keynote yesterday, there, there's a lot of things which are like, interesting. Cool. I didn't notice that there is accessory access now so that developers can specifically go, oh, okay, cool. So you've plugged in like a USB keyboard. I would like to do a thing with that or just any USB device. And yeah, there's, there's so many things here. Like I've been scrolling through the developer website for a couple of hours today and there's, there's. Yeah, I mean I could talk about a bunch of these things, but I don't think you want me to go into the particular individual functions that are available and everything. And it's. Yeah, like the, the whole like website is loading a little slowly at the moment, possibly because I'm doing things. But app developers are going to be able to use Siri AI and its features and hook into that and use the computing, which means that they don't have to farm things out to ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini or Copilot or whatever system it is they'll be able to hook into Apple's system, including the advanced system, which maybe, you know, there are going to be some limits on the more advanced systems, but you know that if you've got iCloud plus, then you should have bigger limits. Essentially, from our understanding, or at least my understanding of the reading that I've done, but, but Apple has not published those limits anywhere. It's one of these things where it may take us a while to find out. It's like when Apple came up with the, the new iPhones with satellite connectivity. It was free for the first year and then also free next year and then also it's free in year three and I think possibly I can't remember if we're in year four now. It's been free the entire time I've had satellite connectivity, satellite possibilities on my iPhone and that's not changed yet. So I guess we're going to have to wait and see what those limits are as more extensive testing is done by the lovely users out there.
- [36:19]
Micah Sargent
Yes, there's lots more, of course, that are kind of hidden within. The updates to Apple Intelligence outside of Siri include photo editing changes that allow for. For cleaning up a photo, removing things from it, extending a frame. I'm really excited about that one because I feel like that's one of the most arguably harmless forms of generative AI. There are times when I need to take a photo. Well, when I want a photo to have especially, I might want a wallpaper. And the photo that I've taken, there's not a lot of headroom on it. But with a wallpaper, you've got the clock up there at the top. So being able to just say, hey, extend this up, and it just adds more to some. I feel very comfy, cozy about that as a concept and am very happy to see that added. There is a new feature, Rosemary, that you were looking to talk about, called reframe, not to be confused with refrain, which uses a lot of spatial awareness and understanding to make adjustments to the almost the angle of the photo. But do you want to talk more about that so we can show a little bit of what it looks like right now?
- [37:42]
Rosemary Orchard
Yes. So essentially, like, the best way to get a great photo is to put yourself in the right position. Right. So in the ideal world, you would take that one step off of a cliff or you would sit inside of a wall. But you and I both know stepping off a cliff or sitting inside of a wall to take a picture, not necessarily, necessarily the best option. You know, you could do it, but I wouldn't recommend it. And sometimes, especially with kids and animals, you don't have time to get yourself into the perfect position to take the greatest photo in the world. Like the dog was posing very, very cutely earlier today. I didn't have enough time to fully crouch down on the floor because I can guarantee if I'd done that, he would have moved. So there's some new tools here in the photos app. When you go to edit, it says cleanup, which can do more cleanup things better. Essentially extend, which Micah mentioned. So, you know, extending the trees at the top and then there's reframe. So it will need to prepare the image. However, I Did prepare this one earlier and mess around with it a little bit. And now I can just go down a little bit so that I am actually eye level with the dog and I might try to zoom in just a touch there and then I can tap on reframe at the bottom and. And it's going to use AI to adjust this and fill in the blanks essentially because everywhere where it's blurry, it's not yet calculated what it thinks that should be. Now, I did attempt this with a couple of other pictures earlier also, same dog and at one point his nose and muzzle got very, very squooshed and were like very flat, almost like a duck Bill in one of the pictures that I'd taken because he was resting his nose on the car, on the dashboard, inside the car, which was very cute. But his, his nose ended up being squash, squashed because it, the AI didn't do a great job there. But now it's, it's reframed my picture so I can tap and see the original versus the reframed version. It just takes me down a little bit. And yeah, I thought that this was a really nice option. And I did see an amount of discussion from people when this feature was announced saying just take the right photo in the first place, which is great if you can, but sometimes you just miss that much the moment. This is why I also personally love to have Live Photos enabled because then you've actually got the shot where everyone has their eyes open instead of the half second later where great Aunt Lizzie looks like a drunken sailor because she's doing like this for some reason. You know, there's a fly or something. So, yeah, I, I think that all of these are tools and you can use them well. Now it does beg the question of, is this photography, is this still photography, is this AI art? And so on and so forth. I'd argue that it's somewhere between the two. But for a lot of people, especially people perhaps with limited mobility who don't have the ability to get down and belly crawl on the floor to get themselves into the perfect position to take a photo, or when you're just taking a photo of a very animated subject who is not necessarily doing the best posing the best, then yeah, I think the reframe tool is really nice and I will probably be using that more and more.
- [40:56]
Micah Sargent
Yeah, I agree. I think it's a really cool, it's a really cool feature. I used it. I'm a tall person and there are times where a photo is taken from a distance. And from a person who's not as tall. And so it's sort of a looking up kind of photo. And so I had one of those and I adjusted it so that I was a little bit more so that it looked like the person was taking the photo directly across, which was kind of cool to be able to do. I wasn't expecting to have that functionality. So it was, it's a nice addition. And yes, I think that one of the things that they showed on stage, it was a photo of two children. And what I liked about the feature is that it focused on reframing the scene around the subject as opposed to interacting too much with the subject. And for me, that's where the line is and that's why I am more comfortable with things like expand. But then there's also the fact that a lot of the times, even when we're making adjustments to exposure and saturation and stuff like that, that's not how my skin is perceived by the naked eye. And so how much of this is not a show where we're going to sort of come to an answer on generative photography versus not. But I think it's more of a personal choice there. And I like Apple's take on some of this for sure. There are are other updates like what I talked about with Google, being able to have suggestions in messages and mail so that if someone says, for example, oops, we're also out of garlic, could you please grab some when you're at the store, a little suggestion pops up underneath that message saying add to reminders or add to notes. Very nice. One of my favorite things that actually made me kind of cheer during the show was the introduction of getting relative information when you're on a call. So I know that I used to, if I needed to call my doctor's office, one of the first things they do is ask you for your medical record number. And I didn't. If I didn't have my card nearby, I'd have to go find it and figure out what my number was again. And I ended up, you know, coming up with a bunch of different solutions for that. But now just having that information surfaced is really cool. So. So when you're on the phone, the example they give is you're on the phone with plane, with a plane company and you are able to see the boarding pass with the confirmation number and all of that right there on the screen. Organization in Safari, being able to group things by topics and so much more. More has made its way as well into the system. We will of course be digging into all of this over the coming weeks and months and getting as much coverage of this as possible, as much knowledge and understanding of what's changed as possible. Before we move on to the Shortcuts segment, is there anything else that you wanted to wanted to mention that, you know, people have have discovered that that is exciting?
- [44:31]
Rosemary Orchard
Yes, Micah, there's two things and I've heard people complain about these. One of them more than the other. Volume and ringer and music things like so listening to music is a different volume to the volume of your ringtone, but that's also a different volume to the volume of your alarm and people have had issues. I have heard it from a number of people. I've never personally experienced it where your alarm just doesn't go off like and people just don't hear it. And there is actually a setting for this now inside of the clock. Sorry, I just needed to look back in because it changed it so you can change an alarm. I'm using the sleep alarm here as an example, but you can then adjust the sound and the haptics. And as a pro tip, when you get to this, if you play with it, it does just vibrate the phone until you click save or cancel. There is also bonus this one's been there for a while, but I'll take this as an opportunity to remind folks that you can have your wake up always play on iPhone even if you have an Apple watch. So that's quite a nice one. Another thing that I have heard people complain about. I just need to open the music app to retrigger. This is the fact that now playing sits on your screen until it decides it doesn't want to be there anymore. Which is fine most of the time time. But you know, if you're living listening to something that potentially has an explicit title or just you don't want to show people the podcast that you were last listening to when you're. When your phone is displaying things, you can now swipe it away and get rid of what's on your now playing screen. So there we go. Now people don't have to know that I was listening to Funky Town by Lip Sync when I drove my car. I was playing the Shrek soundtrack because. Because certain people love it, including myself. And yeah, why not?
- [46:25]
Micah Sargent
All right, I think then it's time for Wait, I do hear the music. It's time for Shortcuts Corner.
- [46:47]
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- [47:16]
shortcut score of the part of the show where you write in with your shortcuts requests and Rosemary Orchard, our shortcuts expert, provides a response. This time we're going to be talking about the new updates to shortcuts in iOS27. Rosemary, take it away.
- [47:34]
Rosemary Orchard
Well, Micah, nothing's changed in shortcuts. We're to going good segment over. No, I'm kidding. Obviously there, there is a number of things which are different in shortcuts and the first thing that you might notice if you're looking at my screen is, wait, where did that bottom toolbar go? And didn't Rosemary say something earlier about toolbars being a thing in iOS 27 again? Yeah, they have kind of disappeared. Not completely. So, you know, we've still got our main section here with all of the apps. Yep, so many apps. And then there is a new section in our main area. So if you back up from your shortcuts to find your automations, because way that we interact with shortcuts has changed a little bit. So I do have all my automations here and it's doing various things, which is pretty cool. I have, yeah, over 1,700 shortcuts. I really need to have a clear out. But now when I create a new shortcut, this looks a bit different. What do I want my shortcut to do? That is a good question. And now you can just talk to shortcuts and tell it what you want it to do. Now if you want to just build your shortcut, there's a little button in the top, right, to change that so you can just tap on it. It looks like a couple of, you know, rectangles sort of stacked on top of each other as though you were going to build some Lego. But. But we can actually go here and do this. Now. One of the things that I did for preparing, whilst preparing for the show today was to collect a number of links from my RSS reader. At one point I had. And I. I wish I was kidding, but I'm no one you're kidding. I had 48 links for the episodes of iOS today that we're recording today. That's a number of links and I only had the URLs. I didn't have the titles and the way that we put everything into the show. Notes, notes. It would be really great to have the title and even better if I had the title and then a tab and then the URL. Because then when I paste it into Google Sheets, it'll automatically go, oh, there's a tab space. Cool. I'm going to put this thing in the next cell new line, that's the next row and do this. And it makes it so much easier. So I asked it to get URLs from my clipboard, get the title for each one, and then prefix it spaced with a tab. And so this may actually come back with a different result, which would be good because then I can talk about the differences. But there we go. It's. It said it's gonna do this. So what does it do? It starts by doing get clipboard and then get URLs from clipboard and then it does a repeat with each. It gets the name of my repeat item. Very cool. It gets the first item from the name name. I'm not entirely certain why it needs to do that, but okay. And then it puts it together with a tab. Now this is particular really great here because on iOS I don't know if you've noticed, folks trying to find a tab on that keyboard does not exist. What I've always ended up doing is I have a shortcut saved which is just here as a tab so that I can get that. That ends the repeat. And this time it has not used AI, which is really, really good because what it did before, and I will show folks, because I have it right here, what it did before is it used a cloud model to join the text with new lines. Now I don't know about you, Micah, but to me using an AI to stick a bunch of text together feels like overkill when there's a built in action to do that straight on my iPhone. So previously it did something very similar. I don't why it's obsessed with getting the clipboard and then getting the URLs out of that because you can just do get URLs from and then actually use your clipboard instead of the result of the get clipboard action. But that's fine. I'm not entirely certain why it feels the need to get the first item from the name that's returned. But again, that's not the worst part of it. The part that did slightly frustrate me yesterday was the fact that it's. It was using a cloud model where a cloud model did not need to be involved at all, which was concerning, to say the least. But, you know, it looks like there are different ways for it to do that. So I'm. So I'm pleased to say that that did work.
- [52:02]
Micah Sargent
Yeah. Honestly, when I saw Apple mention that shortcuts were going to be sort of beckoned just through some, you know, typing in words or asking Siri to make one, the first person I thought of was you, Rosemary, because I was curious to hear how you thought it would do and what it would end up being able to create versus the stuff that you've been able to make. But more importantly, I think that it makes it possible for people to play around. And then my argument is, once you've had it, create a few for you, you start to see how shortcuts are made and then you can make your own. So just. I think it's a really neat, almost democratizing feature that they've added. Added.
- [52:44]
Rosemary Orchard
You know, in my initial testing, I'm quite pleased with the describe something to shortcuts and then, you know, it will return a shortcut. However, it may not be the most efficient option and it may not work exactly as you're expecting it. It's one of these things. As a programmer and somebody who's been using shortcuts since it was workflow, I tend to ask leading questions. I tend to just tell it kind of what I want to do. Like you saw, I said get the URLs from my clipboard because I know that the URLs are going to be on my clipboard and I know what that's fault. So, yeah, it's. It's one of these things where I'm. I. I wonder if we're gonna get a few requests and shortcuts, Connor. But if you are trying this, what I would love you to do is I'd love you to send me your request and send me a shortcut that was created from that same request. And I will not check your shortcut until I've created it manually. And then we can do a compare and contrast, because I think that could be really fun.
- [53:40]
Micah Sargent
I like that.
- [53:41]
Rosemary Orchard
And then I can analyze it and then go, okay, cool. So I did this. I didn't need to do that. There was a faster way to do it. Or actually it did this. And the way I did it was better because it's on device processing instead of sending it off to a cloud model or something like that. So, yeah, it'll be fun. And I don't think shortcuts Connor is going anywhere, folks, so feel free to send in your request, especially if you're not somebody who would like to use AI to solve your problems for you.
- [54:05]
Micah Sargent
Exactly. Yes. Oh, I'm looking forward to seeing that compare and contrast for sure. And and then on the other hand also continuing to be able to help people who are looking for things the more manual way folks that is going to bring us to the end of this episode of iOS today. Of course, if you have questions you can email us iostodaywit TV is how you get in touch. Our show is available at TWiT TV iOS or you can search for Iostoday wherever you get your podcasts if people would like to follow you and keep up with the great work that you're doing. Rosemary where are the places they should go to do so?
- [54:44]
Rosemary Orchard
Well, the best place to go, Micah, is rosemaryusha.com, which has got links to apps, books, podcasts and of course social media sites where you can find me. You can't find a link to my Discord handle because I'll be hanging out in the club Twitter Discord, where there's a bunch of people suggesting more songs for my playlist, but also having great chats about all the wonderful things that are coming with iOS27 and iPadOS20.
- [55:09]
Micah Sargent
Lovely. If you want to follow me online, I'm ikasargent on many a social media network. Or you can head to Chihuahua Coffee that's C H I H U A H u a Coffee where I've got links to the places I'm most active online. Please be sure to join Club Twit at Twitt TV Club Twit. When you head there you can join the club. $10 a month, $120 a year and doing so will get you some pretty awesome benefits. Every single one of our shows ad free. Just the content. You also get access to our special feeds that include a feed for behind the scene scenes before the show, after the show. We also have a feed that has our live coverage of tech news events like wwdc and a feed that has our special club shows, My Crafting Corner, the upcoming Media Club. We've also got Stacy's Book Club. We've got the AI User Group Coffee. I mean there's so many, so many great shows that are in the club, so be sure to check those out as well. And access to our members only Discord Server. A fun place to go to chat with your fellow Club Twit members and those of us here at TWiT. And there's one thing that you cannot forget like I did, which is that we've just added a new feature for Club Twit members. If you're a member of Club Twit, your special feeds that you get. Yeah, they've got chapters, chapter markers. Chapter markers. I know people have been asking for that for a very, very long time. I know we've been talking about it internally at Twit for a very, very long time. So I'm very excited to say that that is part of your experience. Big shout out to Patrick, who has made all of that possible. And so if you want chapter markers to make your way through an episode, that is another benefit of your Club Twit subscription.
- [56:54]
Rosemary Orchard
Also great when you want to come back and re listen to a section of a show like, gotta recommend it for that. You're like, oh, I'm must send this bit to Micah. You can be like, hey, Micah, check out your Club Twit subscription for iOS today. Shortcuts corner. There's something in it for you if
- [57:09]
Micah Sargent
that sounds good to you. Twit tv, Club Twit is where you go. Or use that QR code in the top corner there. Thank you so much for considering joining the club and I look forward to seeing you there. Alrighty. It is time truly now to say goodbye, everyone, and thank you for being here for this episode of iOS today. We'll be back again next week.