How to use Proactive

Get suggestions based on the apps you use most

If you’re willing to allow it, Proactive will learn your habits throughout the day and offer relevant shortcuts to apps and functions based on your previous actions, as well as habits based on your current location. These shortcuts will be presented to you in the bottom left-hand corner of your iPhone/iPad’s lock screen, a space usually reserved for Apple’s ‘Handoff’ feature (which lets you use an

app on your Mac and continue where you left off on your iPhone).

Proactive also embeds itself in the Search menu, which has reverted to its position to the left of the home screen, as it was prior to the iOS 7 update. For those of you that have got used to the pull-down Search menu, don’t worry – this is still available too, but won’t show Proactive categories by default.

Contact suggestions

If you allow Proactive to monitor your habits, what kind of things can you expect it to do? For starters, it’ll suggest contacts based on a number of factors – call/text frequency, location and even past habits. Lets say you always call your other half when you leave work to let them know you’re on your way home. Instead of having to manually open the Phone app, select the contact and call them, you can instead swipe to the left of the home screen and access the Search menu.

You’ll be presented with icons of frequently contacted contacts, with a similar look to how frequent contacts are currently displayed in the multitasking menu in iOS 8. Tapping on an icon reveals shortcuts to message, call or FaceTime (if applicable) them, as well as an info button to open the contacts details in the Contacts folder.

Plus, if you create an event invitation or email, Proactive will suggest contacts you usually include with them. It bases this information on past events and emails with similar subject lines and event names, which both speeds up the overall process and makes sure that you haven’t forgotten anybody.

App suggestions

There are two ways in which Proactive can suggest apps for you in iOS 9. The first is via the Search menu – underneath your suggested contacts, you should see a line of suggested apps. These suggested apps are ones that are frequently used, and the list can be extended from four to eight suggestions by tapping the ‘More’ option to the right of the screen.

However, we’re far more impressed by its second method of suggesting an app. Let’s say, for example, you always listen to music when you walk to work in the morning. As your iPhone learns your habits, it’ll automatically start playing music when you plug your

headphones in – but only at times when you usually play music. As well as this, it’ll offer a shortcut to the Music app via a greyed out Music icon in the bottom left-hand corner of the lock screen.

It’s not just limited to music though, it can be for any app – Craig Federighi gave an example during the WWDC 2015 keynote. He habitually meditates as soon as he wakes up in the morning, and showed his iPhone prompting him with a meditation app at the relevant time.

News

As well as suggesting contacts and apps for you, Proactive also has another trick up its sleeve –

news. Using your current location, iOS 9 will find the trending news stories in your area. This is accessible by swiping to the left of the home screen to access the Search menu, and scrolling down to the News subheading.

Four articles will be displayed by default, but more can be displayed by tapping the ‘More’ icon on the right-hand side. Featured articles (around our location in London) come from publishers including The Independent and Sky News. You’ll be presented with its featured image, headline and the first three lines of the article.

Tapping on the article should open it in Safari, and you can quickly get back to the Search menu by tapping on the ‘Back to Search’ button that’s displayed in the top left-hand corner whenever you open an app via Search.

Instead of linking to an article in Safari, iOS will open the article in Apple’s newly announced News app. This Flipboard-esque app allows readers to create their own news stream based on topics and publications that interest them, and loads all articles in-app. However, until Apple launches iOS 9, we can’t be too sure of its integration with the Search menu.

Nearby locations

This feature will be a lifesaver for those of us that travel a lot. When you access the Search menu, you’ll be presented with vividly coloured icons of nearby points of interest. These icons allow you to one-tap search for points of interest around your location such as car parks, petrol stations, and restaurants. Tapping on an icon will take you to Apple Maps, where you’ll be presented with a list of nearby locations that apply to your search.

These results don’t only include the name of the business, but also a star-based rating system, Yelp! reviews and distance to the location. You can also visually see the results, with a litter of Pins being dropped around your current location on the map. Tapping a pin will highlight the result in the list and will present an option to get either walking, driving or public transport (if in a supported area) directions to the location.

Siri commands

Thanks to the new Proactive assistant, Siri has become a lot smarter and is able to do more than ever before. For example, if you went to New York City for a holiday, you could activate Siri and ask it to: “Show the photos I took when I was in New York City”. You should be presented with the photos you were looking for. How’s this done? Siri searches through your photos and bases its results on dates, locations and album titles.

That’s not all Siri can do either; it can also remind you about things you’re looking at in your apps at a later date. If you’ve found a new restaurant in Apple Maps that you want to check out later, you could say “Remind me to check out fuel when I get to my car” or if you’re half way through writing a document in Pages and need to stop, you could say “Remind me to carry on with this tomorrow”.

Intelligent Search

The combination of Proactive and Siri in iOS 9 doesn’t only result in suggestions and an improved Siri, but it also results in a muchimproved search utility. Prior to iOS 9, your search results would include Wikipedia entries, Bing search results and App Store search results in addition to the standard contact, message, email and note results.

With iOS 9 you’ll be able to search for much more. So, for example, you could hunt for sports scores and schedules, allowing you to look for the latest Arsenal score instead of asking Siri to find it. You’ll also be able to search for the weather in

any location around the world, see the latest Stock prices and carry out calculations and conversions. However there’s one other feature of the intelligent search that we can’t wait to use. If developers add support, you can search for keywords in third-party apps. This means that if you have a recipe app installed on your iPhone, you could search for “sticky toffee pudding” and the search results will display the recipe, directly from the app.

Smart caller ID

We can’t be the only ones that hate answering calls when we’re not sure who’s calling, right? Well Apple has decided to address this issue in iOS 9 with a smart caller ID. How does it work? Whenever you get a call from a number that isn’t stored in your contacts, iOS will search through your emails to find a possible match. If a match is found, the senders name will be displayed underneath the number.

But what if you don’t have the number in any emails? Not everyone emails first, so don’t expect to get a heads up about those annoying PPI calls. However if the caller is calling from a land line, the origin of the call will be displayed underneath the number, giving you a better idea of who the caller could be.