iOS and iPadOS 16 Tidbits ⇥ macstories.net

Federico Viticci of MacStories has written up some first impressions of iOS 16 details. Here is his description of the Home Screen wallpaper settings:

That’s not all though. From the same Settings page, you can click your Home Screen preview and tweak the look of your Home Screen as well. New options for the Home Screen wallpaper include a selection of built-in colors, plus a color picker to choose a different gradient as well as invoke the system-wide color picker. Additionally, for wallpapers that include a texture that may conflict with icon labels on the Home Screen, you can tap a ‘Legibility: Blur’ button to blur the wallpaper and make it easier to read text labels.

I think this is really well done. If you prefer your Home Screen background to be a solid colour or gradients, Apple’s implementation is a nice way of saving you the trouble of keeping that sort of thing in your photo library.

Also:

[…] As I mentioned yesterday, Apple has already implemented Live Activities for Now Playing controls on the Lock Screen, but there’s another one too. Timers on the Lock Screen for iOS 16 are now a Live Activity as well, and they’re displayed as an interactive notification at the bottom of the Lock Screen with buttons to pause and cancel an ongoing timer.

This new timer update looks nice, aside from a hard bounding box around the blur.¹ But truly nothing is funnier to me about WWDC every year than not seeing support for multiple timers on iOS. You can set more than one timer on WatchOS and a HomePod — I can set multiple timers on the completely basic oven in my apartment — but the wildly more powerful iPhone? Nope.