As developers continue to familiarize themselves with beta releases of Apple's forthcoming iPhone OS 3.0 software, a series of new and updated features is beginning to emerge, reports AppleInsider. Chief among the iPhone OS tweaks: Users may now close out of Safari and clear all open browser windows without first creating a new blank page to eliminate the contents of the last active window. Previously, users with multiple open Safari windows could employ the red "x" icon in the upper left-hand corner of each screen to close all pages except the final page, which did not include the "x" icon, effectively forcing iPhone owners to open a new page in order to close out the remaining page.
Another improvement: iPhone 3.0 will offer a numerical percentage to illustrate how much battery life remains on the iPhone or iPod touch. Credit goes to resource files contained within the new version of the device's Springboard application, which includes 22 new PNG files--half are numerical characters (and a "%" sign) in black typeface to represent healthy battery level percentages, while the other half change to red typeface when battery life falls bellow a certain threshold. Users may select whether their battery status indicator appears as an icon-only view (per current versions of the software), an icon/numerical view, or a numerical-only view.
The iPhone 3.0 OS also boasts a new Push Notifications preference pane for users to enable or disable any of the three types of notifications (Sounds, Alerts and Badges) that third-party applications can push to handsets. In addition, users may disable all notification formats should they wish to maintain tighter control over their battery usage. Apple will also introduce Data Detectors in a variety of new applications to automatically detect text fragments like email addresses, phone numbers and street addresses, allowing users to execute actions on those fragments via touch selections--e.g., automatically dialing a phone number or adding it to the device's address book.
For more on the new iPhone 3.0 OS features:
- read this AppleInsider article