New Features in iOS 6.1 Get Leaked

Developers are starting to signal the apparition of some visible changes across several services in iOS 6.1, a new beta seeded by Apple yesterday alongside iOS 6.0.1 which made its way onto end-user devices with its own fixes and tweaks.

While we know much of what iOS 6.0.1 has to offer, iOS 6.1 has remained a bit of a mystery for most members of the Apple fan base – as not everyone is a registered developer with the Cupertino giant.

But, as always, patience has its rewards. In less than a day of being released in developer circles, some of the new features included by Apple in iOS 6.1 are getting leaked out.

For example, as the screenshot above shows, the Maps application in iOS 6.1 now puts a big “Report a Problem” button right smack in the middle of its interface. Presumably, that button will get tapped a lot, and Apple wanted to make the process as easy as possible.

As the company struggles to fix the flawed mapping service, there are more aesthetic changes to be observed throughout iOS 6.1.

Another such example is the second image, which shows a redesign of the lock-screen music player controls. The on-screen buttons are spaced well across the entire width of the display.

From the release notes, one developer tells us that a new “Reset Advertising Identifier” button has been added to Advertising Settings.

According to Apple’s own literature, “This button resets the Advertising Identifier so that future requests will return a different value,” this person said.

For Passbook, the relevance behavior has changed for boarding passes that include both a relevant date and a relevant location.

According to our source, the date must now match so that these passes become relevant. Developers are told that if both the date and the location match, they will be relevant for a longer time frame.

Coders are actually instructed to provide both these pieces of information when they believe it makes sense for their passes.

Last, but certainly not least, the Map Kit framework in iOS 6.1 Beta introduces new classes that allow external apps to perform map-based searches for addresses and points of interest.