MacMost Now 617: iOS 5 First Look

Take a look at the new features in iOS 5. New apps like Reminders and Messages add new functionality. Notifications now have a wider set of options. Twitter is built in to many apps. You can move and split the on-screen keyboard. You can sync with iCloud and use an iOS device independent of any computer.
You can also watch this video at YouTube (but with ads).
Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost Now. On today's episode, let's take a look at some of the new features of iOS5.
So now that iOS5 is out, let's take a look at some of the new features. Now, one of the big ones is that you don't have to have a computer to use your iOS device. You don't have to sync it with anything. So, that's a big deal for people just getting their first iPhone or iPad and maybe don't actually want to have a computer, or maybe they have an older computer and they just don't want to bother syncing with it. 
Now, most of the new features of iOS5 will work both on iPhone and the iPad. So, let's use the iPad to take a closer look at some of them.
So, here's split keyboards, go into anything that uses the keyboard. And then you have it down here and you can see these little ridges on the bottom right. You can click and hold and you'll get an undock and split option there. So, let's split. You can see it splits the keyboard into two parts which can be useful for thumb-typing. You can also grab that button there at the lower right and drag up and down. If you drag it all the way to the bottom, the keyboard comes back together. If you just go to undock, then you can see that you can move the keyboard anywhere on the screen, so move it to the top of the screen or the middle if you want. And there are a lot of other ways to use this functionality as well. For instance, just grabbing and dragging will instantly split the keyboard like that.
So, a new app is Reminders. Go into that and this for iPhone and iPad. You can add these little reminders, they're like little alarms. Let's hit the + button there and add a new one. And you can select it and then, on the left, you can see the name, you can have it remind you on the day, you can have it have priorities, notes, anything you want here. And so, it's kinda like a to-do list manager.
Messages is an app that allows you to send text messages between different iOS devices. So, you and your friends that have iPhones and iPads can use this instead of using your carrier's text messaging which may include fees.
So, you'll notice that there's a Twitter app there. That's actually included. It's not something I had added. It's just included with iOS5 on both iPhone and iPad. And it's even integrated in Settings. You can see that there's a Twitter settings panel that's part of the main part of Wettings. It's not a third-party app, really. It's included as part of the OS. So you can add your Twitter account and then different applications actually use that Twitter account, say, you can send out messages to your friends directly from there without having to do it in a separate Twitter app.
So, in addition to the cool feature of the camera being able to use the up volume control to snap a photo, there's a bunch of new stuff in the Photos app. Big new thing is you can create a new album. So, you can do it right here on your iPhone or iPad. Before you had to do that on your computer and then sync it. Now you can create a new one, you can see, it'll appear there. In addition to that, you can edit photos now. So, you have this Edit button at the top. And you can actually do things like enhance the photo, red-eye reduction, cropping, all sorts of things.
So, now in Safari, and this is an iPad-only feature, you now have tabs instead of different pages. So, here I'm viewing a page, I've got a + button at the upper right, I can add another tab there and I can go to another page. And now I can switch between them just by clicking on the tabs and I can close a tab by clicking the X on the left side of the tab.
Now, the Calendar app has some new looks to it. And it also has, on the iPad, a yearly view. And on the iPhone, for the first time, it has a weekly view as well. It has a bunch of new enhancements in Calendar.
If you look in Settings, we have a whole new set of settings for iCloud. And yOu can see all the different things here that you can sync using iCloud. You have your account at the top and you can create a new account, including a new Me.com email address if you like right from here. And, of course, the big new feature is WiFi sync. And you can see that in the General Settings here I've turned that on so I can actually sync this iPad with my Mac without having connected with the dock cable. You can turn that on here or you can also turn that on in iTunes when you are syncing.
Now, cool new thing is you can swype directly between apps. I'm going to use four fingers and swype from right to left and you can see I've gone from one app to another. And I can go the opposite direction as well. So I can get between apps without having to go first to the Home screen.
Now, a big deal here in iOS5 is Notifications. And we have the settings here for it. You can have Notifications set for different apps in different ways. For instance, let's go to the Calendar app. And you can see here illustrations of how alerts are showing. You can have them set to none. Alert, which is on the right, which is the default from before, which little pop-ups appear and you have to dismiss them. Or you can also have banners that drop down from the top and then disappear a little after. You can also decide whether or not the app icon will do something when you get a notification and whether or not notifications are viewed in the lock screen when you've got it locked.
Another new iPad-only feature, it only actually works on the iPad2, is airplay mirroring. So, if you have a $99 AppleTV2, you could actually use your WiFi network to mirror the screen to your television. So this could be really interesting for gaming. Matter of fact, developers actually have access to be able to put something different up on the screen than is on the iPad. So, you can potentially play a game where you have the controls in your hands and the display up on the screen. Maybe even multiple players. And the new iPhone 4S should have airplay mirroring as well, although older iPhones and the original iPad won't have this because it requires the latest processor.
So, iOS5 is for the iPhone 3GS, 4 and, of course, the new 4S, as well as both versions of the iPad and the last two generations of the iPod Touch. To get it, just sync with iTunes and it should show that there's a new update available.
Now, I'll have a closer look at some of these features in later episodes. Until next time, this is Gary with MacMost Now.
MacMost Now 617: iOS 5 First Look

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