New "iOS in the car" screenshots revealed by developer
Apple is slowly working on bringing the iPhone experience to the car dashboard – and some screenshots of what it might look like have surfaced on Twitter, thanks to developer Steven Stroughton-Smith.
“iOS in the car”, as it is being called has been in development for some time – though until now information has been somewhat limited. The idea is that when you get into your car, your iPhone will hook up to your in-car display – enabling you to access phone-powered GPS and other apps and services.
Above is what looks like a home screen – with only the Apple Maps app available on it. As you might expect, things are being kept simple so that drivers can keep their eyes on the road – so the only other stuff is the time, a wifi indicator to confirm there’s a connection and a virtual “home” button.
Here’s Apple Maps running in car mode – again, with slightly stripped back controls and operating in landscape mode. The buttons appear to be a bit chunkier than on normal iPhone apps, because when driving its easier to mash your fingers on to roughly the right place than be precise.
Be careful! Here’s a friendly reminder that what Apple Maps tells you to do maybe inaccurate. I think this is the closest we’re going to get to an official apology for Apple Maps being beyond terrible.
And finally, here’s another maps screenshot showing how you can access bookmarked locations.
So it is clearly early days for iOS in the Car – but here’s hoping Apple making it just as open as the main iOS platform – not least so we can get Google Maps, but also also because it will be interesting to see how developers take to building in-car functionality.
As you might expect, there’s no details on release dates yet.
