Favorite features from iOS 18, iPad 18 and MacOS Sequoia

Wow! It's been a while since I posted here. We recently moved to a new place, so between house hunting, moving, and home renovation, the blog kind of fell to the wayside. I'm planning to get back on track and write about the home projects I've done in the past few months.

Back to the focus of this post. I've been using Apple's new updates since beta, and while initially, this year's changes seemed minimal, I've come to enjoy many of the "quality of life changes" they made across the board.

It might be obvious, but I'm not including any of the Apple Intelligence-related features.

iPhone & iPad OS 18

Calendar 2 day view—I live in week view. I do time blocking daily, so being able to view 2 days at a time in portrait on the iPhone is very useful.

Reminders in Calendar — Even though I've been a Things user for years, I'm trying to use reminders for more chore-like tasks. I often manually duplicate tasks from Things and add them to my calendar so I can allocate time to each task. This new feature is now way easier. It's making me consider trying out Reminders going forward. I'm using it to schedule my meals so they are at least 2 hours apart. I wish they had allowed us to adjust the size of the reminders for tasks that took more than 15 min.

New Control Center — I still have not settled on my perfect setup, but adding shortcuts is my favorite part. I had some shortcuts on my view that I used frequently today, and I have now moved to the control center. Now, I can keep the Today view as more informational, and anything that requires action lives in the Control Center. One thing I miss is that on the old one, I was able to access all the home accessories from the Control Center if I tapped on the home icon. I now had to recreate a page with my favorite one manually.

Widget Resizing—Ever since this was introduced in MacOS, I've wanted it to be available for iPhone and iPad. Delete and re-add a widget was very time-consuming, and you lost all the settings. It's been very handy for widgets like the Parcel one I use to track packages. I can have the large size when I'm expecting a lot of packages but change it to a small size when I only have one.

Smarter Trips in Photos — Memories did a really poor job with vacations; they just showed up a random street as the memory name and often confused photos.

Lock Screen Actions per focus mode — This has been useful for my gym focus, where I know I won't need a flashlight, so I replaced it with the Tabata timer.

Tab Bar — As an avid iPad mini user, it was a pain not having any navigation while in portrait mode. Regular iPad users keep complaining about this feature, but for me, it is perfect.

Math Notes — This is so cool! I love the seamless variable support. So far, I've used it to calculate the costs of my patio renovation project and calculate my RMs easily at the gym.

Custom emojis on tapback — Finally...

Passwords App — I can finally delete all my open password section shortcuts.

Mac Os Sequoia

iPhone Mirroring — This is by far my most used new feature. As a UX designer who works on mobile web, I can now easily test live projects on a real device without switching back and forth from desktop to phone. It's also helpful to use some apps that do not have a Mac counterpart, like iRobot and pocket casts (the Mac app sucks).

I know there are more features, but I have not had the chance to test them. I am looking forward to window tiling, but I just have existing tools for that between Better Snap Tool and Moom, so I'll have to see if the native approach is better.

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It's definitely quieter than other years, but this season is always very fun! What are your favorite features?