Meeting Report

It's Glowtime

At our 13th of September meeting, we talked about Apple’s announcements from their recent “It’s Glowtime” event including the iPhone 16/Pro, Apple Watch 10 and Air Pods 4.

Apple News

We discussed Apple’s annual iPhone announcement event, held on 9th September and titled “It’s Glowtime”. This included:

You can watch the event on the Apple website. Mac Rumors have a roundup of all the announcements.

Member Topics

  • Ben mentioned that the magnifier app provides an easy way to take close-up photos on iPhone even on models which don’t have a macro mode in the camera app.
  • Ben talked about the Apple Music Memos app which was withdrawn and replaced by Voice Memos. In iOS 18, Voice Memos will allow musicians to layer recordings, for example to add vocals to a backing track.
  • DavidB asked about the support for RCS messaging coming in iOS 18 that should improve messaging with Android users. Mac Rumors have a useful article explaining this.
  • DaveK asked about identifying the precise location where a photo was taken. We found that in Photos the location is only shown as a pin on a map. Opening the same photo in Preview we could see the precise latitude and longitude of the location in the GPS tab of the inspector. Those coordinates could then be used to find the location on a mapping service.
  • DaveK had occasionally been seeing a narrow bar appear on his iPad when he tried to use the keyboard. We identified this as the interface that appears when an external keyboard is connected to the iPad. Dave found he could switch to the on-screen keyboard by tapping the left most icon in the bar (this is the language indicator if you have multiple keyboard languages enabled as Dave did) and then choosing “Show Keyboard”.
  • Ben mentioned the iOS game Flappy Bird returning, unfortunately it seems that this new version is not related to the original author.