iOS 15: Top Five Features That Caught My Attention

As Apple's latest operating system update, iOS 15, was announced, I couldn't help but get excited about all the new features that were introduced. As someone who is deeply invested in their Android phone for customization purposes, I was eager to see how Apple would address this aspect with its latest release. In this article, I'll be highlighting my top five favorite features of iOS 15 that have left me impressed.

Focus Modes: The Ultimate Customization Tool

One of the standout features of iOS 15 is its Focus Modes, which offer an unprecedented level of control over notifications and app usage. This feature allows users to create separate profiles for different periods of their day, depending on their needs. I can enable Work Mode when I'm at the office or Personal Mode when I'm relaxing with friends and family. Each mode offers a range of customization options, including the ability to turn off notifications from specific apps, select which home screens are displayed, and even adjust the behavior of Siri's Spotlight feature. What I love most about Focus Modes is that they offer universal control across all devices, including iPhone, Apple Watch, iPad, and Mac.

Long-Press Quick Settings: A Simplified Interface

When it comes to customization, there's always room for improvement. That's why I appreciate the new Long-Press Quick Settings feature in iOS 15. By simply pressing and holding on a particular setting, users can access multiple Focus Modes without having to dig through menus or switch between apps. This simple yet elegant solution has streamlined my daily routine and made it easier to manage my notifications.

Performance Tweaks: A Quiet but Significant Upgrade

While the spotlight of attention was on new features like Focus Modes, Apple also addressed performance tweaks that are sure to please long-time users. With iOS 15, the company has optimized various processes to provide a smoother experience across all devices. While these changes may not be flashy, they demonstrate a commitment to delivering a more polished and refined user interface.

Improved Spotlight with Siri Suggestions

Spotlight, Apple's virtual assistant, has been revamped in iOS 15, offering improved suggestions for searching your iPhone, including search results from the web and additional information like weather forecasts. This enhanced feature will undoubtedly make it easier for users to find what they're looking for on their device.

Gym Mode: Customization for Every Occasion

To round out my top five features, I'd like to mention iOS 15's Gym Mode. This new feature allows users to customize their iPhone's home screen and notification behavior based on physical activity levels. When you enable Gym Mode, your phone will adjust its interface to prioritize essential apps and silence non-essential ones, making it easier to stay focused during your workout or exercise routine.

Making Skillshare Classes: The Art of Learning

As I delve deeper into the world of iOS 15, I'd like to take a step back and talk about my latest Skillshare class. As an Android user with a passion for customization, I've always struggled to find resources that help me improve my skills in creating high-quality videos. That's why I've developed a comprehensive course on the art of video creation, covering topics from filming techniques to editing software and more. Whether you're a seasoned creator or just starting out, this class is designed to help you take your content to the next level.

Skillshare: A Platform for Lifelong Learning

For those who don't know, Skillshare is an online learning community that offers thousands of courses on various creative topics. From photography and illustration to music production and video creation, there's something for everyone. As someone who has spent years honing my skills through hands-on experience, I've come to appreciate the value of learning from others. By watching classes and tutorials from experienced instructors, you can gain new perspectives and insights that will help you improve your craft.

Conclusion

iOS 15 is more than just a software update; it's a reflection of Apple's commitment to innovation and user experience. With its focus on customization and simplification, this latest release has left me excited for the future of mobile technology. Whether you're an iPhone enthusiast or just looking for ways to improve your productivity, there's something in iOS 15 that will suit your needs.

Link to Skillshare Class: If you're interested in learning more about video creation or would like to check out my latest Skillshare class, I've included a link below. As a bonus, early sign-ups will receive a free trial of a premium membership, which is sure to be a valuable resource for anyone looking to improve their skills.

Link: [Insert Link]

That's it for today's article on iOS 15. If you have any questions or comments about this latest software update, feel free to share them in the section below.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhey what's up mkbhd here this is an iphone 12 pro max and it's running the software that's going to be on the next iphone the 12 s or 13 or whatever it's called it was unveiled about a month ago at wwdc and it's ios 15. in this video i'm going to show you all of the stuff that i think makes the biggest difference the new stuff in this new software now i'm going to do a separate video on ipad os 15 because i've been using that for a while too and that's a whole separate set of features and hopes and thoughts and expectations but again that's coming in a later video so definitely make sure to subscribe if you haven't already to be among the first to see that but in this video let's focus on what's coming to the iphone and i'm going to go in order of least exciting to most exciting to me maybe your order is the same also how about that new wallpaper eh i kind of i kind of dig the new ios wallpapers i'll link some sort of collection of them below if someone's hosting it somewhere okay so number five the redesigned stock apps yeah i said it the weather app is kind of nice now now i still can't forgive apple for buying dark sky and then just stealing it from android like i literally hate that every day that was the best android weather app but they've been building all of that information into the apple weather app now and it's got a fresh coat of paint over everything there's these big full screen animations sometimes it's sunny here and you can see that if it's rainy you can see the rainy animation i imagine snow and hail would look pretty cool too so that is nice the iphone's new clock app also looks mostly the same but one subtle thing is it lets you type the time for your alarm instead of having to deal with the sliders all the time so it's small but i see that as a small win safari is a little more controversial but it's redesigned as well and it includes an address bar down here now at the bottom which yes means it is by definition more reachable but now it kind of moves around a bit more fluidly like it disappears when you scroll it's looking pretty full screen all the time but then you can swipe across it to switch between your open tabs and when you want to type in it it moves back up to the top so it's a little more fluid i think it's going to take some getting used to but then last but not least i want to highlight apple maps now it's been the butt of jokes for many years i still don't use it but they have been relentlessly improving it catching up to things like google maps and adding features that are pretty unique and interesting so this new version has much more detail and has a lot more 3d models of various buildings and landmarks now certain cities will get it much earlier than others if you look through san francisco for example way more details way more trees and buildings are modeled here if you look through new york city there's a couple skyscrapers mapped out but they don't show up at every zoom level so it's still being built and if you live in a smaller city well you may never see this stuff but it is cool that they're adding it so all right then number four facetime i'm separating this out from the other apps because it's pretty important and let's face it a lot of iphone users are about that face time life they've added a bunch of uh tweaks and improvements and new features here too so there's spatial audio and facetime now so in group face times people's voices come from the direction they're oriented on the screen there's a new grid view too so it's neat you can see everybody there's portrait mode added so you can blur your background and different microphone modes so you can choose standard isolating voices or wide spectrum microphone modes depending on if you have a lot of background noise you want to cancel or if you want to keep the vibe keep the coffee shop environmental noise but there's two really big new facetime features here share play and facetime events okay so share play this is maybe something we're doing more in pandemic times than ever but you know how if you're facetiming someone and you want to watch something at the same time as someone on facetime now that's built into facetime so as a feature you can listen to apple music together with someone or watch tv shows or movies on apple tv with synced playback controls so one person pauses it pauses at the same time for everyone one person fast forwards or scrubs around to show you something it'll fast forward for you too way better than trying to keep this in sync manually and shareplay has a new api as well so obviously apps will be able to build in and plug into this we currently have the disney app and hbo and espn i'm hoping for other stuff maybe like spotify maybe netflix youtube would be nice so these will these will be added hopefully in the future but then also facetime calls can now be events meaning you can add them to your calendar you can also share a link to them which might sound like a certain other couple apps we've been using a lot lately like zoom which means people on windows desktops and people on android phones can click the link and join a facetime call so you can technically say you have facetime on android now all right feature number three is called live text and this i think is really smart really cool so this is all done on device and basically now any image you have with text in it from your camera or just anything in your gallery you can long press the text in that image and it'll recognize it and let you do anything you can normally do with any other text you can select all copy it paste it somewhere you can translate it and i've been messing around with this in various images of all kinds text printed even written text and it's been pretty good at working really well plus you can use that lookup feature to get some serious suggestions that are sometimes useful especially if the name of the place or company is somewhere in the text then siri can find it siri's still not that smart yet so it's got to be something pretty obvious it does not work for videos i've tried but it's it's pretty great on a lot of photos and also works uh with photos of animals so i took a picture of this cat and long pressed it and it tries to tell me the breed i have no idea if that is the actual breed of this cat but that's pretty cool that it tried and it's kind of approaching what google lens has been doing for a while now but even more intuitive since you can just literally long press straight on a photo without a separate app it just kind of works this specific feature works with devices with a12 bionic or later so not every older iphone will get this but it's pretty good i just like it's catching up to google lens now google lens will identify more things like it'll just try to id anything the shoes you're wearing the type of car that drives by and this is a bit more limited now but maybe someday in the future this will do all that stuff too okay so number two notifications now i'm still saying this with a caveat which is that they still have a long way to go android's notifications have forever been way better than ios's notifications but they've made some key improvements here and some stuff that i'm happy to see first of all again a fresh new coat of paint you can see this new design with bigger photo icons you know app icons to the left i love that that right away makes a pretty big visual difference and then there's a new feature called notification summary so if you don't use your phone for a while basically if you've gone to sleep and wake up or you haven't used it for a bit it'll round up all your low priority notifications and put them in one place so that seems nicer than having to go through the whole list and deal with them all i just don't know what what exactly qualifies as the the low priority stuff that shows up here is it just messaging apps that get through is it everything gets rounded up into this i'm not exactly sure yet but then you have extra control over what notifications show up because you can turn on focus mode and the person you're messaging will actually see that you have notifications silenced and actually brings me to my number one feature by far focus modes so and this actually works universally across all your stuff so if you have an iphone also your apple watch and your ipad and your mac and as someone who likes customization who uses an android phone most of the time for customization this is the best like version of that i've seen on the iphone in a while it kind of feels almost like separate profiles even though it's not quite that check it out you can go into your quick settings and long press here and you've got a couple focus modes there's do not disturb there's sleep mode but also a personal and a work by default and each of these settings at a basic level let's different notifications in from different apps and different people so do not disturb mode silence is pretty much everything work mode doesn't let your fun apps notify you personal mode doesn't let your work apps notify you and so you can customize what those apps are and who can talk to you in each mode but then you can choose a bunch of other settings about each focus mode too so you can have them automatically turn on or off depending on location or time of day and you can literally choose only certain home screens to show up when you have a focus mode activated so you can have a home screen set up for when you're at work that doesn't show your distracting social media apps and then when you switch focus modes or you get home for the day you can have a separate home screen that shows up with all that stuff or whatever other focus mode you want to create seems like you can just make as many as you want a gym one a driving one a reading a gaming one whatever it's pretty sick and on top of all that customization like i said they sync across all your devices so if you enable work focus mode on your phone all of your stuff is in work focus mode and then you get home and home mode gets triggered automatically for location everything starts getting your personal notifications again so that's pretty sweet i made a video about why some of apple's features take longer to build and implement i'll link it below like button if you haven't already seen it but it's a great video i recommend it but that's it now of course there's way more than just five new things with ios 15. they had a whole two-hour keynote so of course there's lots of small stuff that didn't make the cut for me um things like improved spotlight with way more siri suggestions things like uh the improved offline speech-to-text recognition which is sweet and just various performance tweaks and improvements but generally i'm liking ios 15. it's looking and feeling a lot better and you can let me know if you agree with the order of my top five or not but it looks nice almost as nice as my skillshare class oh yeah that's right some of you may already know that i have made a skillshare class all about like the way that i create videos some of the review videos you've seen some of the latest videos on the channel and how i go about that whole process from end to end so skillshare for those who don't already know is an online learning community for creatives where you can find thousands of inspiring classes to learn something you don't already know so photography illustration music making mkbhd videos it's funny because i identify as self-taught mostly like i didn't go to school for most of the things that i do here now making these tech videos but i always wish there was there could have been something that i could have followed along that could help lay this sort of steps and fundamentals out so that's kind of what i've made is what i wish i had back at that time and i've also gone through other skillshare courses to learn other people's perspective on doing things like there's one specifically on iphone photography and filmmaking with caleb and niles for a moment and you can see the way they do things and the way they think about things and so just to get a variety of perspectives you can just have one skillshare account and then just watch a bunch of different stuff there's no ads on skillshare and they're always constantly just launching new premium online courses so you kind of just sign up and then just hang out and just watch a bunch of stuff and collect as much as you can so if you want to check this stuff out if you're interested at all i'll have a link below with my link early sign ups will get a free trial of a premium membership which is pretty sweet and i'll see you over there thanks for watching catch you in the next one peace youhey what's up mkbhd here this is an iphone 12 pro max and it's running the software that's going to be on the next iphone the 12 s or 13 or whatever it's called it was unveiled about a month ago at wwdc and it's ios 15. in this video i'm going to show you all of the stuff that i think makes the biggest difference the new stuff in this new software now i'm going to do a separate video on ipad os 15 because i've been using that for a while too and that's a whole separate set of features and hopes and thoughts and expectations but again that's coming in a later video so definitely make sure to subscribe if you haven't already to be among the first to see that but in this video let's focus on what's coming to the iphone and i'm going to go in order of least exciting to most exciting to me maybe your order is the same also how about that new wallpaper eh i kind of i kind of dig the new ios wallpapers i'll link some sort of collection of them below if someone's hosting it somewhere okay so number five the redesigned stock apps yeah i said it the weather app is kind of nice now now i still can't forgive apple for buying dark sky and then just stealing it from android like i literally hate that every day that was the best android weather app but they've been building all of that information into the apple weather app now and it's got a fresh coat of paint over everything there's these big full screen animations sometimes it's sunny here and you can see that if it's rainy you can see the rainy animation i imagine snow and hail would look pretty cool too so that is nice the iphone's new clock app also looks mostly the same but one subtle thing is it lets you type the time for your alarm instead of having to deal with the sliders all the time so it's small but i see that as a small win safari is a little more controversial but it's redesigned as well and it includes an address bar down here now at the bottom which yes means it is by definition more reachable but now it kind of moves around a bit more fluidly like it disappears when you scroll it's looking pretty full screen all the time but then you can swipe across it to switch between your open tabs and when you want to type in it it moves back up to the top so it's a little more fluid i think it's going to take some getting used to but then last but not least i want to highlight apple maps now it's been the butt of jokes for many years i still don't use it but they have been relentlessly improving it catching up to things like google maps and adding features that are pretty unique and interesting so this new version has much more detail and has a lot more 3d models of various buildings and landmarks now certain cities will get it much earlier than others if you look through san francisco for example way more details way more trees and buildings are modeled here if you look through new york city there's a couple skyscrapers mapped out but they don't show up at every zoom level so it's still being built and if you live in a smaller city well you may never see this stuff but it is cool that they're adding it so all right then number four facetime i'm separating this out from the other apps because it's pretty important and let's face it a lot of iphone users are about that face time life they've added a bunch of uh tweaks and improvements and new features here too so there's spatial audio and facetime now so in group face times people's voices come from the direction they're oriented on the screen there's a new grid view too so it's neat you can see everybody there's portrait mode added so you can blur your background and different microphone modes so you can choose standard isolating voices or wide spectrum microphone modes depending on if you have a lot of background noise you want to cancel or if you want to keep the vibe keep the coffee shop environmental noise but there's two really big new facetime features here share play and facetime events okay so share play this is maybe something we're doing more in pandemic times than ever but you know how if you're facetiming someone and you want to watch something at the same time as someone on facetime now that's built into facetime so as a feature you can listen to apple music together with someone or watch tv shows or movies on apple tv with synced playback controls so one person pauses it pauses at the same time for everyone one person fast forwards or scrubs around to show you something it'll fast forward for you too way better than trying to keep this in sync manually and shareplay has a new api as well so obviously apps will be able to build in and plug into this we currently have the disney app and hbo and espn i'm hoping for other stuff maybe like spotify maybe netflix youtube would be nice so these will these will be added hopefully in the future but then also facetime calls can now be events meaning you can add them to your calendar you can also share a link to them which might sound like a certain other couple apps we've been using a lot lately like zoom which means people on windows desktops and people on android phones can click the link and join a facetime call so you can technically say you have facetime on android now all right feature number three is called live text and this i think is really smart really cool so this is all done on device and basically now any image you have with text in it from your camera or just anything in your gallery you can long press the text in that image and it'll recognize it and let you do anything you can normally do with any other text you can select all copy it paste it somewhere you can translate it and i've been messing around with this in various images of all kinds text printed even written text and it's been pretty good at working really well plus you can use that lookup feature to get some serious suggestions that are sometimes useful especially if the name of the place or company is somewhere in the text then siri can find it siri's still not that smart yet so it's got to be something pretty obvious it does not work for videos i've tried but it's it's pretty great on a lot of photos and also works uh with photos of animals so i took a picture of this cat and long pressed it and it tries to tell me the breed i have no idea if that is the actual breed of this cat but that's pretty cool that it tried and it's kind of approaching what google lens has been doing for a while now but even more intuitive since you can just literally long press straight on a photo without a separate app it just kind of works this specific feature works with devices with a12 bionic or later so not every older iphone will get this but it's pretty good i just like it's catching up to google lens now google lens will identify more things like it'll just try to id anything the shoes you're wearing the type of car that drives by and this is a bit more limited now but maybe someday in the future this will do all that stuff too okay so number two notifications now i'm still saying this with a caveat which is that they still have a long way to go android's notifications have forever been way better than ios's notifications but they've made some key improvements here and some stuff that i'm happy to see first of all again a fresh new coat of paint you can see this new design with bigger photo icons you know app icons to the left i love that that right away makes a pretty big visual difference and then there's a new feature called notification summary so if you don't use your phone for a while basically if you've gone to sleep and wake up or you haven't used it for a bit it'll round up all your low priority notifications and put them in one place so that seems nicer than having to go through the whole list and deal with them all i just don't know what what exactly qualifies as the the low priority stuff that shows up here is it just messaging apps that get through is it everything gets rounded up into this i'm not exactly sure yet but then you have extra control over what notifications show up because you can turn on focus mode and the person you're messaging will actually see that you have notifications silenced and actually brings me to my number one feature by far focus modes so and this actually works universally across all your stuff so if you have an iphone also your apple watch and your ipad and your mac and as someone who likes customization who uses an android phone most of the time for customization this is the best like version of that i've seen on the iphone in a while it kind of feels almost like separate profiles even though it's not quite that check it out you can go into your quick settings and long press here and you've got a couple focus modes there's do not disturb there's sleep mode but also a personal and a work by default and each of these settings at a basic level let's different notifications in from different apps and different people so do not disturb mode silence is pretty much everything work mode doesn't let your fun apps notify you personal mode doesn't let your work apps notify you and so you can customize what those apps are and who can talk to you in each mode but then you can choose a bunch of other settings about each focus mode too so you can have them automatically turn on or off depending on location or time of day and you can literally choose only certain home screens to show up when you have a focus mode activated so you can have a home screen set up for when you're at work that doesn't show your distracting social media apps and then when you switch focus modes or you get home for the day you can have a separate home screen that shows up with all that stuff or whatever other focus mode you want to create seems like you can just make as many as you want a gym one a driving one a reading a gaming one whatever it's pretty sick and on top of all that customization like i said they sync across all your devices so if you enable work focus mode on your phone all of your stuff is in work focus mode and then you get home and home mode gets triggered automatically for location everything starts getting your personal notifications again so that's pretty sweet i made a video about why some of apple's features take longer to build and implement i'll link it below like button if you haven't already seen it but it's a great video i recommend it but that's it now of course there's way more than just five new things with ios 15. they had a whole two-hour keynote so of course there's lots of small stuff that didn't make the cut for me um things like improved spotlight with way more siri suggestions things like uh the improved offline speech-to-text recognition which is sweet and just various performance tweaks and improvements but generally i'm liking ios 15. it's looking and feeling a lot better and you can let me know if you agree with the order of my top five or not but it looks nice almost as nice as my skillshare class oh yeah that's right some of you may already know that i have made a skillshare class all about like the way that i create videos some of the review videos you've seen some of the latest videos on the channel and how i go about that whole process from end to end so skillshare for those who don't already know is an online learning community for creatives where you can find thousands of inspiring classes to learn something you don't already know so photography illustration music making mkbhd videos it's funny because i identify as self-taught mostly like i didn't go to school for most of the things that i do here now making these tech videos but i always wish there was there could have been something that i could have followed along that could help lay this sort of steps and fundamentals out so that's kind of what i've made is what i wish i had back at that time and i've also gone through other skillshare courses to learn other people's perspective on doing things like there's one specifically on iphone photography and filmmaking with caleb and niles for a moment and you can see the way they do things and the way they think about things and so just to get a variety of perspectives you can just have one skillshare account and then just watch a bunch of different stuff there's no ads on skillshare and they're always constantly just launching new premium online courses so you kind of just sign up and then just hang out and just watch a bunch of stuff and collect as much as you can so if you want to check this stuff out if you're interested at all i'll have a link below with my link early sign ups will get a free trial of a premium membership which is pretty sweet and i'll see you over there thanks for watching catch you in the next one peace you\n"