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.
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