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Apple Releases iOS 10.1 With New Portrait Mode For iPhone 7 Plus (macrumors.com)
Apple has released iOS 10.1 to the public today for all iOS 10 users, and with it comes several new features, a long list of bug fixes, and various other under-the-hood improvements. One of the biggest new features introduced is a new "Portrait" mode, which uses the dual cameras in the iPhone 7 Plus to create shallow depth of field portrait photos with plenty of background bokeh. MacRumors reports: To achieve the blurred look, the image signal processor in the device uses the wide-angle camera to create a depth map while the telephoto captures an image, dissecting the different layers of the photo to decide what to blur with an artful "bokeh" effect. It works on people, pets, and objects, but it does require good lighting to achieve the proper results. The update also [...] brings Transit directions to Japan for the first time. There have been some tweets to the Messages app. It's now possible to play Bubble and Screen effects in Messages with Reduce Motion enabled, something that wasn't previously possible. There's also a new option to replay Bubble and Screen effects. It's important to the note that the "Portrait" mode is still in beta, and will not work flawlessly. Mac Rumors has a full list of the changes made to iOS 10.1 embedded in their report, which you can view here.
No one else could have thought of that before Apple "innovated" it - especially if the corners are rounded.
First I read "awful" instead of artful
Company Releases Software Update. In other news, excellent cod harvest this year.
What's up with tagging Wikileaks/Assange stories as "SPAM" lately? It's big news and some very well written posts have been removed from the Firehose despite receiving plenty of upvotes.
Slashdot's new editorial..? Remember, was supposed to be a friggin hacker/nerd newa site.
At first I was thinking portrait mode for the apps, it was always in portrait mode. It was never landscape mode. Whoosh. Should have said fake-bokeh mode.
'Bokeh' is used when referring to the quality of the out-of-focus background (or foreground) of the image, not the fact that it is out of focus. Shallow depth of field images have blurry elements. By definition. But different lenses render that OoF area differently. Some lenses have a jittery, doubled-up, or ring-like pattern, or render OoF highlights as oblong smears or as hard circles. It just depends on the lens design. So when we talk about this, it's about the quality, not the quantity or existence of blurred areas.
Think of it like this: every lens of a given format, focal length and aperture will produce essentially the same mount of OoF areas. It's just physics. The focal plane is where it is, and the meaningfully in-focus area (say, on the subject's face) is going to be a given depth (for a given display size and resolution). Period.
But that's like saying all pianos can play a middle C note. They can. But some sound twangy or harsh, while others sound more pleasing to the ear. Likewise with the OoF rendering by some lenses. With the piano we can say "it plays middle C, but the tone is harsh" - and with the camera, we can say that the lens when wide open can render shallow DoF and thus blur the background, but the bokeh is harsh (or, creamy, or busy, or smooth - whatever... it's the "tone," the visual quality of the blur rendering, generally considered to be more appealing the more creamy it is - though sometimes harsh, nervous bokeh is desireable for certain cinematic moods, etc).
Sorry, pet peeve. "Shallow depth of field" doesn't mean "has bokeh." That's like saying the car's suspension has ride. All cars do! But what's the quality of the ride? More like a sports car, or a limo? Better bokeh usually comes from much higher quality glass, and more of it in the design of the lens. Big, fat, fast prime portrait lenses are built - among other things - to play that visual note more elegantly than cheaper lenses do, even though they both hit the note when told do if they can achieve the same aperture at a given focal length.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
"There have been some tweets to the Messages app. "
iOS portrait mode means portrait vs landscape mode for desktop/apps, PERIOD. ;)
Hmm, do you put a period after you've said period? Anyway, I digress...
If you wanted to use the word "portrait" instead of having a more accurate title like "fake bokeh" or "portrait photo background blurring" etc you could at least use "new portrait mode for camera app". This is supposed to be a site for nerds, know your crowd. Yeah, I know, I talk like I'm new here...
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
I can't stand the new chat features and really enjoyed my 5s as a semi-secure phone that gets all the basics done with access to a great app store. That's all I wanted apple... stop trying to cram courage and change down my throat because at this point my next phone will be an android.
Apple: Please -- PLEASE -- stop telling me to upgrade my aging iPhone 5 to iOS10 every. damn. day.
It's as bad or worse than the stupid Windows 10 upgrade warnings/updates in Windows 7 -- and there's no way to stop the prompts. (Yes, you can manually block their update server hosts in your wireless router, but you'd never better walk away from that WAP or ever use cell data - all of which kind of defeats the point of mobile computing.)
Yes, I get that supporting multiple versions of iOS is expensive and resource intensive; But just push out a warning to inform me when you're going to stop supporting iOS9 at a set day/time. I'll have a decision to make - at THAT point. Leave me alone until then!
It's the only thing holding me back.
Yeah, for a smartphone, on a 4-6" screen pretty good. But, print them out 8x10 to hang in your home and you'll quickly understand why an f 1.8-2.8 lens is SO EXPENSIVE. The bokeh you get from a tiny pinhole sensor is no match for even a consumer grade APS-C sensor on a dSLR camera.
No actually, I just tried it out a bit. It's a neat trick but it's pretty hit-and-miss, it really struggles to maintain the hard edges of the foreground subject so you get the background blur bleeding and your foreground edges end up blurry. I know it's explicitly "beta" but it's a fair way off being a convincing fake of the real thing.
They sold it as being a lot better in their presentation, in reality it's not really like that at all.
I am just as disinterested in this as I was when all the other phone manufacturers did it years ago.
However, the fact that Apple is shipping a camera with a significantly wider aperture, dual cameras, 2x optical zoom, and RAW support is a marvel! How about focusing (no pun intended) on that? If dual-cameras truly become standard, there's lots of interesting uses for that. Part of the reason it hasn't take-off has been that no manufacturer has offered dual-cameras consistently, so app makers had to make one-off apps that only worked on specific phones. Apple doing it could make it a standard thing. Think: 3D pictures, 3D scanner apps, better augmented reality games, ...
I really hope this comes back in iOS 10. I honestly feel like I am going to break my home button - it has felt flimsy lately.
Nevermindthe [sic], when you write, "it's important to (the) note", you make yourself to be an idiot Anandtech work-for-free-still-in-school so-called writer. Just thought I write that, since it's oh so important to note! Do you know what I mean? Know? Know what I mean?
The problem isn't the 'bokeh' of the tiny lens and sensor. That's a discussion about the quality of the out-of-focus area rendering. No, the problem with the tiny sensors and tiny lenses with their very small apertures is that they cannot produce shallow enough depth of field in the first place to even produce an out of focus background in the first place. Basic physics. So there's no point trying to compare the OoF rendering quality (is the bokeh harsh? smooth?) of that tiny platform to a larger format sensor with a quality fast prime lens, because simple physics makes that comparison pointless. That's why they're faking this in software: because there's no physical way to do it with the tiny camera. Light doesn't work that way.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Typical Apple - add a much needed and awaited feature in iOS 9 in the Mail App, where you can go into a mail folder and hit Edit, and in the lower corner, have the option to Trash All messages.
In iOS 10, Apple removed this feature, but the Trash folder still retains a "Delete All" button in the same spot, but every other mail folder has now reverted to ios 8 behavior. That is, to delete all messages in a folder, it now requires Edit, then tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap swipe tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap swipe tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap Delete. But I can Mark All as Read, or Flag All, but nope, why would you want to Trash/Delete All?
And to this day, one still cannot collapse/expand hierarchical IMAP folders. I gave up on this feature and renamed some of my more frequently used mail folders to start with A or B so that they show up near the top of the alphabetically sorted list (such as rename "Spam" to "Blocked").
Any recommendations for a Mail App replacement? I want to leave my messages stored on my IMAP server, some of the ones I have tried were nice, but involved synchronizing all messages in all folders to the iphone, which I do not want, or did not support S/MIME through the Contacts properly for encryption/signing.