It’s hard to tell in advance whether or not a new iOS release will get me excited. With iOS 8 I was really excited about Continuity, and I always like the addition of Safari improvements. In iOS 9, we got proactive assistance so spotlight and Siri were more context sensitive. I think I was most excited by slide over, split view and picture-in-picture. Those features seemed to really solidify how Apple was going to be handling multitasking in iOS going forward.
So when I started hearing rumors about what would be included in the latest iOS 9.3 update, I was immediately pretty excited. Now that it was released earlier this week, I’ll go over the new features here and give my impressions.
Night Shift
Admittedly, this was the most interesting thing to me. I hear a lot of complaining (from my mom mostly) about how I shouldn’t be reading/watching movies/web browsing in bed on my iPad. Most modern displays, especially on mobile devices are notoriously “cool” meaning they tend to be towards the blue end of the color spectrum. This helps the displays to be brighter in direct sunlight, and also more vibrant, but if you’re in the dark, getting ready for bed, it’s not so great. The brightness and the “cool” tint sends signals to your brain that mimic sunlight. It’s basically telling your brain, “hey, the sun’s up, it’s time to get active.” Night Shift helps to correct that problem. It re-tunes the display to exaggerate “warmer” tones in the spectrum like red and orange. With iOS 9.3, you can turn it on manually, or on a schedule. You can also specify how much or how little “warmth” you want to use. It looks weird at first, but after as little as 15-30 seconds, you’ll adjust and won’t be able to tell the difference.
Notes
I’ll admit I’ve started using Notes a lot now that you can have checklists, formatting, drawing and more. In iOS 9.3 Apple added secure notes. You can secure notes using a password or Touch ID. This is great if you have some confidential information you want doubly protected both by your device’s PIN and Notes itself. I haven’t had a use case for this yet, but I expect I will very soon.
I think Night Shift and secure Notes are the most notable changes in iOS 9.3 for me, but other additions included improved personalization in the News app, more information about third party apps in the Health app, and additional 3D Touch context menus. I’m particularly fond of the menu on the Settings app which allows me to quickly jump to bluetooth, wifi, or battery settings in one quick motion.
One last thing to note is that the Night Shift feature isn’t available on every single device. While it is supported all the way back to the iPad 4th generation, the original iPad mini does not support it. The performance of the original iPad mini isn’t quite enough to allow for Night Shift without reducing performance and stability on the rest of the device.
Overall, I definitely give iOS 9.3 my seal of approval.