My first fun Apple device was my 2009 iPod Touch*, which I think means I've been dealing with iOS since version 3. By now, I know the routine. The new version of iOS comes out. I wait for a couple of weeks, so that the early adopters can find all the bugs for me. After installation comes the fun part: trying to figure out what it can do (and sometimes what it can no longer do—hey, I liked some of those old iOS 3 wallpapers that vanished in later versions). So this evening, armed with iPad and iPhone, I settled in to see what iOS 7 was capable of.
I started with the tips on maximizing battery life. Other tips may be useful, amusing, or irrelevant: battery life is nonnegotiable. No, won't be using Air Drop: shut it off. No, not using Bluetooth: off. I already knew to turn on Reduce Motion to turn off the annoying parallax motion for the wallpaper, but reading about it reminded me how annoying the whole idea was: why yes, I want nothing more than to spend some of my precious battery charge so that the wallpaper can twitch slightly. And hey, by turning off some of the more deeply buried features in Settings, not only do you increase your battery life, you increase your privacy as well. Win-win!
After the thrill of wringing out more battery life, the other tips paled in comparison. I will probably go back and study the camera tips later. I'm way too used to the camera in my old smartphone, which was barely adequate for even the most rudimentary photography; I basically got conditioned to not think of the phone camera as an option. I have a digital camera which I prefer to use, but I don't carry it with me routinely, and now that I have a better phone camera at hand, I may actually start using it. I use the Gmail app, so tips on using the native Mail app don't do me much good. Just before getting to this Thing, I'd found the iPhone's flashlight. I like the idea, and it wasn't a bad amount of light for such a little device. But will I remember that the phone is a flashlight when I desperately need to see something? (The phone is a flashlight. The phone is a camera. The phone is a computer. The phone is trying to be a personal assistant. The phone almost never gets to be a phone, poor thing.)
Let's see, what else do I know in the way of tips? Well, you can split the iPad's keyboard in two to make it easier to type with your thumbs, if you're used to that from your phone. I'm not, and my hands are small enough that I can use the horizontal keyboard normally. Plus, an iPad weighs noticeably more than a phone, and holding it like a phone is problematic. But you can split the keyboard by putting two fingers on it and pulling it "apart;" reverse that to reassemble it. More generally useful: tap the very top of the screen when you're in an app to scroll to the top of a feed (like Twitter, Facebook, or a blog) rather than manually scrolling and scrolling and scrolling. And my aging eyes like the fact that you can adjust the font size (Settings > General > Text Size or Accessibility), but the feature isn't implemented by all apps yet, so it's more of a wish than a reality.
Learning the tips and tricks for each iteration of iOS is productive and sometimes fun. But after four rounds of this, I find myself wishing the whole process was more intutive…which is supposed to be one of Apple's strong points, right?
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*Which I still use. It's more or less permanently installed in my audio system, since the battery no longer holds a charge, but it works just fine for my music and Pandora.
Monday, January 27, 2014
Wednesday, January 22, 2014
23 Mobile Things #1: Blogging & Registering
Write a blog post for Thing 1 telling us what you hope to get out of the program, says the first prompt for this latest version of 23 Things on a Stick. Expanded horizons, I answer.
When I participated in the original version of this program, I was comfortable using computers, but I wasn't all that adventurous. I spent most of my time online doing basic web-surfing and email, and I still spent a lot of my computer time offline, working with Microsoft Word. I participated in a number of mailing lists and I had a wee bit of experience dealing with Usenet. I knew there were things like MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter in the world, but I wasn't sure what they were, and no one I knew used them, so there was nobody to ask. Oh, and the whole blogging thing: why would you write whatever came to mind and make it public—and why on earth would anyone be interested? What I got out of 23 Things on a Stick was encouragement to try all these things. It was difficult for me to play with something if I couldn't see a practical reason to do so, and the program itself was such a reason: play with this and tell everyone what you thought of it and what your experience was like. And although I almost never used it as such, I thought of it as a support group: if I had a problem with one of the Things, I could read other people's experiences of it and see if that helped.
In the end, what I got was a much bigger online world. I had been introduced to Facebook and Twitter, and I still participate actively on both today. Okay, it took a while to decide I liked Twitter, but no one said I had to adopt everything instantly, and I only managed to stay on the MySpace site for about two minutes before fleeing it forever. My mailing lists have been replaced with Facebook groups and friendships. I miss the in-depth discussions, but on the other hand, I feel as if I have a much better sense of the other members as people. And it turned out I liked blogging and ended up starting several different personal blogs—and as you can see, I never took this one down.
So what do I want from 23 Mobile Things? The same thing: a bigger world. I'm still not the most adventurous soul in the world, although I love my mobile toys (iPad and iPhone). I tend to look for variations on the apps I already have, and despite all of Apple's exhortations of There's an app for that! I rarely think to look for anything completely new to me. I'm hoping to be introduced to totally new apps, to apps that help me do what I still have to do on my desktop computer, and to apps that maybe I don't need but that my friends will find useful. And above all, I hope to learn really interesting things. (Or Things. Whatever.)
When I participated in the original version of this program, I was comfortable using computers, but I wasn't all that adventurous. I spent most of my time online doing basic web-surfing and email, and I still spent a lot of my computer time offline, working with Microsoft Word. I participated in a number of mailing lists and I had a wee bit of experience dealing with Usenet. I knew there were things like MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter in the world, but I wasn't sure what they were, and no one I knew used them, so there was nobody to ask. Oh, and the whole blogging thing: why would you write whatever came to mind and make it public—and why on earth would anyone be interested? What I got out of 23 Things on a Stick was encouragement to try all these things. It was difficult for me to play with something if I couldn't see a practical reason to do so, and the program itself was such a reason: play with this and tell everyone what you thought of it and what your experience was like. And although I almost never used it as such, I thought of it as a support group: if I had a problem with one of the Things, I could read other people's experiences of it and see if that helped.
In the end, what I got was a much bigger online world. I had been introduced to Facebook and Twitter, and I still participate actively on both today. Okay, it took a while to decide I liked Twitter, but no one said I had to adopt everything instantly, and I only managed to stay on the MySpace site for about two minutes before fleeing it forever. My mailing lists have been replaced with Facebook groups and friendships. I miss the in-depth discussions, but on the other hand, I feel as if I have a much better sense of the other members as people. And it turned out I liked blogging and ended up starting several different personal blogs—and as you can see, I never took this one down.
So what do I want from 23 Mobile Things? The same thing: a bigger world. I'm still not the most adventurous soul in the world, although I love my mobile toys (iPad and iPhone). I tend to look for variations on the apps I already have, and despite all of Apple's exhortations of There's an app for that! I rarely think to look for anything completely new to me. I'm hoping to be introduced to totally new apps, to apps that help me do what I still have to do on my desktop computer, and to apps that maybe I don't need but that my friends will find useful. And above all, I hope to learn really interesting things. (Or Things. Whatever.)
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