iOS5 – Top 10 Features

Apple has closed the gap between android and iOS with hell a lot of features being added to iOS5.

1. Non-obstructive Notifications Finally. A new Notification Center aggregates all your notifications into one and is accessible by pulling down a menu from the top of the screen. Yes, its just like Android. Notifications are also making their way onto the lockscreen, where swiping across a text message takes you right into it. A lot like Samsung’s touchwiz UI.



2. Newsstand: A new place to house all your magazine and newspaper subscriptions.




3. Deep Twitter Integration: Now you can use Twitter account to signin to all your apps just like you use google account on android. This includes the Camera and Photos app.


4. Safari Improvements iOS safari on iPad gets tabbed browsing, like honeycomb. Safari also gets a “reader” extension that strips the nuisance from page. Also added to the iOS browser is a Reading List, which does what the name suggests by accumulating a list of pages you want to read later. Accessible on multiple devices.


5. Reminders is just like iCal on Mac os x, which popsup alerts. Its fully location aware and can trigger location based alerts. It’ll sync across devices and with your calendar.



6. More Camera features: A new camera button right on your lockscreen for quick photos. Also you can use the volume-up button to shoot a photo.  Pinch-to-zoom, while holding your finger down on a particular area will lock down exposure to optimize the shot for its particular lighting. Couple of other effects and in-app editing for photos like cropping, rotation, red-eye reduction, and a one-click enhance option.


 7. New Keyboard: A new split keyboard has also been shown off in iOS 5, blows away Windows 8.

8.  PC-less: Finally apple realises it’s a pain to use smartphone, Tablet with a PC. You no longer need a PC/Mac to use iPHone, iPod or iPad.
 Goodbye to cable syncing, all Wifi based syncing with iTunes, cloud. Over-the-air
software updates —  
Wireless syncing & OTA software updates
 



9. iMessage: It’s a messaging service exclusively for iOS users, which comes with delivery and read receipts, an indicator for when the other party is typing, and the ability to push messages to all your devices. Just like BBM. You’ll be able to send messages, photos, videos, and contacts. Group messaging will also be available. It works over either WiFi or 3G and looks to be making good use of Apple’s new push notifications.

10. iCloud: All the Cloud features of Android world are now in iOS: Cloud music, contacts, calendar, email, all of them are automatically synced among the devices using same account, even the apps.

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Availability: iOS 5 will ship in the fall to the following devices: iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4, iPad 1 and 2, and iPod touch 3rd and 4th generation.

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Time to look at a few features of yum in RHEL-6.1 now that it's released

• 
  

  Search is more userfriendly

  As we maintain yum we are always looking for the "minor" changes that can make a big difference to the user, and this is probably one of the biggest minor changes. As of late RHEL-5 and RHEL-6.0 "yum search" was great for finding obscure things that you knew something about but with 6.1 we've hopefully made it useful for finding the "everyday" packages you can't remember the exact name of. We did this by excluding a lot of the "extra" hits, when you get a large search result. For instance "yum search kvm manager" is pretty useless in RHEL-6.0, but in RHEL-6.1 you should find what you want very quickly. Example commands:

  yum search kvm manager
  yum search python url





• 
  

  The updateinfo command

  The "yum-security" or "yum-plugin-security" package has been around since early RHEL-5, but the RHEL-6.1 update has introduced the "updateinfo" command to make things a little easier to use, and you can now easily view installed security errata (to more easily make sure you are secure). We've also added a few new pieces of data to the RHEL updateinfo data. Probably the most significant is that as well as errata being marked "security" or not they are now tagged with their "severity". So you can automatically apply only "critical" security updates, for example. Example commands:

  yum updateinfo list security all
  yum update-minimal --sec-severity=critical





• 
  

  The versionlock command

  As with the previous point we've had "yum-plugin-version" for a long time, but now we've made it easier to use and put all it's functions under a single "versionlock" sub-command. You can now also "exclude" specific versions you don't want, instead of locking to known good specific ones you had tested. Example commands:

  # Lock to the version of yum currently installed.
  yum versionlock add yum
  
  # Opposite, disallow versions of yum currently available:
  yum versionlock exclude yum
  yum versionlock list
  yum versionlock delete yum\*
  yum versionlock clear
  
  # This will show how many "excluded" packages are in each repo.
  yum repolist -x .





• 
  

  Manage your own .repo variables

  This is actually available in RHEL-6.0, but given that almost nobody knows about it I thought I'd share it here. You can put files in "/etc/yum/vars" and then use the names of those files are variables in any yum configuration, just like $basearch or $releasever. There is also a special $uuid variable, so you can track individual machines if you want to.






• yum has it's own DB

  Again, this something that was there in RHEL-6.0 but has improved (and is likely to improve more over time). The most noticeable addition is that we now store the "installed_by" and "changed_by" attributes, this could be worked out from "yum history" before, but now it's easily available directly from the installed package.
  Example commands:

  yumdb
  yumdb info yum
  yumdb set installonly keep kernel-2.6.32-71.7.1.el6
  yumdb sync





• 
  

  Additional data in "yum history"

  Again, this something that was there in RHEL-6.0 but has improved (and is likely to improve more over time). The most noticeable additions are that we now store the command line and we store a "transaction file" that you can use on other machines. Example commands:

  yum history
  yum history pkgs yum
  yum history summary
  yum history undo last
  yum history addon-info 1    config-main
  yum history addon-info last saved_tx




• 
  

   

  "yum install" is now fully kickstart compatible

  As of RHEL-6.0 there was one thing you could do in a kickstart package list that you couldn't do in "yum install" and that was to "remove" packages with "-package". As of the RHEL-6.1 yum you can do that, and we also added that functionality to upgrade/downgrade/remove. Apart from anything else, this should make it very easy to turn the kickstart package list into "yum shell" files (which can even be run in kickstart's %post). Example commands:

  yum install 'config(postfix) >= 2.7.0'
   yum install MTA
   yum install '/usr/kerberos/sbin/*'
   yum -- install @books -javanotes




• 
  

   

   

  Easier to change yum configuration

  We tended to get a lot of feature requests for a plugin to add a command line option so the user could change a single yum.conf variable, and we had to evaluate those requests for general distribution based on how much we thought all users would want/need them. With the RHEL-6.1 yum we created the --setopt so that any option can be changed easily, without having to create a specific bit of code. There were also some updates to the yum-config-manager command.
  Example commands:

  yum --setopt=alwaysprompt=false upgrade yum
  yum-config-manager
  yum-config-manager --enable myrepo
  yum-config-manager --add-repo https://example.com/myrepo.repo




• 
  

   

  Working towards managing 10 machines easily

  yum is the best way to manage a single machine, but it isn't quite as good at managing 10 identical machines. While the RHEL-6.1 yum still isn't great at this, we've made a few improvements that should help significantly. The biggest is probably the "load-ts" command, and the infrastructure around it, which allows you to easily create a transaction on one machine, test it, and then "deploy" it to a number of other machines. This is done with checking on the yum side that the machines started from the same place (via. rpmdb versions), so that you know you are doing the same operation.

  Also worth noting is that we have added a plugin hook to the "package verify" operation, allowing things like "puppet" to hook into the verification process. A prototype of what that should allow those kinds of tools to do was written by Seth Vidal here.

  Example commands:

  # Find the current rpmdb version for this machine (available in RHEL-6.0)
  yum version nogroups
  
  # Completely re-image a machine, or dump it's "package image"
  yum-debug-dump
  yum-debug-restore 
      --install-latest
      --ignore-arch
      --filter-types=install,remove,update,downgrade
  
  # This is the easiest way to get a transaction file without modifying the rpmdb
  echo | yum update blah
  ls ${TMPDIR:-/tmp}/yum_save_tx-* | sort | tail -1
  
  # You can now load a transaction and/or see the previous transaction from the history
  yum load-ts /tmp/yum_save_tx-2011-01-17-01-00ToIFXK.yumtx
  yum -q history addon-info last saved_tx > my-yum-saved-tx.yumtx
  

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