“After several years of quiet development, Apple is readying a major new iOS initiative codenamed ‘Proactive,’ which will leverage Siri, Contacts, Calendar, Passbook, and third-party apps to create a viable competitor to Google Now for Android devices,” Mark Gurman reports for 9to5Mac.
“Like Google Now, Proactive will automatically provide timely information based on the user’s data and device usage patterns, but will respect the user’s privacy preferences, according to sources familiar with Apple’s plans,” Gurman reports. “As an evolution of iOS’s Spotlight search feature, Proactive is the fruit of a long-term initiative that involved the acquisition of small app developers, and integration of core iOS apps.”
Gurman reports, “It will also work with Apple’s Maps application to display personally relevant points of interest using an augmented reality interface, and integrate with a third-party Siri API codenamed ‘Breadcrumbs.'”
Much more in the full article – highly recommended – here.
MacDailyNews Take: Integrated POI (Points of Interest) will be a boon for Apple Maps! The Siri API release merits the careful consideration over users’ privacy that Gurman reports is occurring at Apple. Moving Spotlight back to the left of the first Home screen (from the current hidden at the top of the screen) is also a good idea, but now we have to unlearn another seemingly random and short-lived UI change and relearn a prior behavior. Oh, joy! Hopefully, Apple keeps such UI changes to a minimum and maintains their renewed focus on quality over quantity. Roll out new features when they’re perfected, not on an artificial annual timeline, Apple!
I wish they would add active traffic to Maps while navigating and allowing you to zoom out while navigating. Both of these features today require a two taps to go to Overview and then you have to adjust the magnification level.
POI is good too especially if you could get real time data as you drive on highways for gas and food stops.
How about waypoints? If a person has multiple errands to run, plotting the fastest route between those locations is impossible. It’s practically impossible to set and edit waypoints on the fly with Apple Maps.
All the convenience of Google with the privacy protection of Apple= the beginning of the end for google…
Is it just me, or does it seem that Apple has spent the last 5 years trying to duplicate everything Google does, right down to the rumored self-driving cars? STOP THE INSANITY APPLE. You don’t need to copycat the Evil company.
that’s not the point…Apple provides a service to delight customers and add value to the hardware universe. Google provides a service to harvest personal data for resale to advertisers.
No! I HATED spotlight (a feature I NEVER use being somewhere I always see it (to the left). Garbage! It’s much more hidden where it is now. I wish I could disable it altogether. I maintain a single page of apps using folders. I don’t want it sliding side to side at all. That’s so iOS 3.
Pull-down Spotlight makes much more sense. Accessible from any home screen page.
I would be more thrilled about this if Apple would make Apple Maps work in more areas than the USA, UK, Europe and Australia.
Oh, well. I can always hope for incremental improvements and hope that one day, Apple will consider my little corner of the globe worthwhile enough to put in some effort to update (some of the satellite photos are several YEARS out of date).
Until then, it’s Waze for me. (I still can’t get the taste of Google out of my mouth though, since they bought Waze last year. Sigh…)