Wednesday, June 10, 2020

iOS 13.6 Beta Saves Your Reading Position in Apple News Articles

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The iOS 13.6 beta, which is currently in testing, introduces an Apple News feature that's designed to save your place in an article when you start reading something and then exit out of the article or the app.


In iOS 13.5.1 and earlier, if you exit out of an article while reading it and then attempt to return to that same article later, the ‌Apple News‌ app automatically starts back at the beginning of the article. In iOS 13.6, it opens back up to the place that you left off so you don't need to scroll down to find the portion of the article you were last reading.

As noted on the MacRumors forums, it takes about thirty seconds for the ‌Apple News‌ app to register and save your position in an article before it's safe to exit out. This isn't a feature that's needed for short articles that you read right away, but for longer content, such as ‌Apple News‌+ magazine articles, it's a welcome change.

The iOS 13.6 update also appears to be laying the groundwork for an ‌Apple News‌+ audio feature that will see Apple offering audio versions of some ‌Apple News‌ stories. Audio is not enabled at this time, but it looks like it's a feature Apple plans to launch in the near future.

Along with these ‌Apple News‌ changes, iOS 13.6 includes a toggle that offers more granular control over the downloading and installing of iOS updates and it adds a new Symptoms section to the Health app.

iOS 13.6 is in beta testing and is limited to developers and public beta testers at this time, but the new features will be available to everyone when it sees a public release.
Related Roundups: iOS 13, iPadOS

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Apple Discontinuing iTunes U at the End of 2021

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Apple will be discontinuing iTunes U at the end of 2021, according to a new support document shared by the company today.

Apple says that iTunes U tools have been replaced with next-generation apps for teachers and students, which include Classroom and Schoolwork, plus the Apple School Manager tool.
Apple has been hard at work building the next generation of apps for both teachers and students:

- Classroom turns your iPad into a powerful teaching assistant, helping teachers guide students through a lesson, see their progress, and keep them on track.

- Schoolwork helps teachers save time and maximize each student's potential by making it easy for teachers to share class materials, get students to a specific activity in an app, collaborate with students, and view student progress.

In addition to Classroom and Schoolwork, Apple also introduced Apple School Manager to enable IT Administrators to easily manage iPads, Macs, Apple TV, Apple IDs, books, and apps, while ensuring data is kept secure and private. Apps such as Pages, Numbers, Keynote, GarageBand, iMovie, Clips, and Swift Playgrounds have education-specific features that are used regularly by teachers and students.

With this in mind, Apple will discontinue iTunes U at the end of 2021. iTunes U will continue to be available to all existing customers through the 2020-2021 educational year.
According to Apple, iTunes U will be available for the 2020 to 2021 educational year, with support ending in late 2021. For public content publishers, until iTunes U is discontinued, new and existing content will be available publicly, but Apple suggests creators start exploring other options. Current iTunes U users can continue publishing content through Apple Podcasts or Apple Books.

Apple suggests private publishers transition over to the Schoolwork app, and Apple plans to add ClassKit support to iTunes U to make transitioning easy. Materials in iTunes U courses can be transitioned into Schoolwork Handouts, and iTunes U will also get an export feature so those who want to move to third-party apps or Learning Management Systems can do so.

iTunes U has been around since 2007, and was built in to the iTunes app to provide university lectures and learning content from U.S. colleges. iTunes U allowed educators to create courses with audio, media, handouts, ebooks, and more, with the iTunes U app available for users to access their collections on iPhone and ‌iPad‌.

When Apple started to transition away from iTunes in 2017, iTunes U content was discontinued as a standalone feature and was transitioned into the Podcasts app and the Podcasts section of iTunes. Support for iTunes U has since been dwindling, with Apple instead focusing on new educational tools.
This article, "Apple Discontinuing iTunes U at the End of 2021" first appeared on MacRumors.com

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