Amid the flurry of Apple Intelligence features pushed out to iPhones, iPads, and Macs in recent months, AI-powered art generation hasn't been forgotten. Apple has debuted a new AI art maker called Image Playground, ready and waiting to turn your text prompts into pictures. If you're running iOS 18.2, iPadOS 18.2, or macOS Sequoia 15.2, you'll find Image Playground on your device as a preinstalled app. You can use it for everything from backgrounds for digital invites to cartoon depictions of your friends and relatives. If you can describe it, Image Playground can make it--and here's how to get started.

With the rollout of iOS 18 this fall, Apple is introducing some big changes to its iPhones: more customization options for home screens, a redesigned Control Center, support for the RCS text messaging standard, and of course a bunch of generative AI features put under the umbrella of Apple Intelligence. Individual iOS apps are getting upgrades too, including Safari, and one of the new features you'll notice in the web browser once you've got iOS 18 installed is the option to remove "distracting" items from a page. It's called Distraction Control, and the idea is you can cut out pieces of a page you're not necessarily interested in, like images or menus. This isn't the Reader mode that reformats pages so only the main text and images are showing (and which itself is getting an update in iOS 18). It's not an ad blocker either, because you won't be able to persistently hide ads or any other frequently updated content. But it is a potentially useful tool to improve the web browsing experience.

Apple's AI-powered Journal app is finally here. The new diary entry writing tool was first teased for iOS 17 back in June, but it only became available on Monday with the new iPhone update -- nearly three months after iOS 17 itself came out. After Apple released iOS 17.2, iPhone users can now access to the Journal app, which allows users to jot down their thoughts in a digital diary. Journaling is a practice that can improve mental wellbeing and it can also be used to fuel creative projects. You can create traditional text entries, add voice recordings to your notes, or include recent videos or pictures.

Following the recent launch of the new M3-equipped MacBook Pros, Apple will soon be releasing an update for its Final Cut Pro to make further use of its own silicon. According to the company, its updated video editing suite will leverage a new machine learning model for improved results with object and face tracking. Additionally, H.264 and HEVC encoding will apparently be faster, thanks to enhanced simultaneous processing by Apple silicon's media engines. On the user experience side, the new Final Cut Pro comes with automatic timeline scrolling, as well as the option to simplify a selected group of overlapping connected clips into a single storyline, and the ability to combine connected clips with existing connected storylines. As for Final Cut Pro for iPad, users can take advantage of the new voiceover recording tool, added color-grading presets, new titles, general workflow improvements and stabilization tool in the pro camera mode.