iPhone

Creative Selection by Ken Kocienda (Books 2018, 31)

Martin McCallion, , 2 Comments

Hey, I made it to 31, by reading the last chapter of this on the last day of the year.

This book, subtitled “Inside Apple’s Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs,” is written by the software engineer who worked on the original version of the iPhone’s software keyboard. It’s an interesting view into how things were for someone working at Apple at the time.

That’s not something we often get, with the company’s noted dedication to secrecy, so it’s good for that. But while I did get a sense of what it was like, I feel that there’s an awful lot more he could tell, especially about the people. We do get a sense of some of them, but not much insight. And especially not about he author himself. We learn next to nothing about him outside of his work.

Maybe that’s the way you have to be when you work at somewhere as high-pressure as Apple. Worth a read if you’re interested in Apple and their products.

Creative Selection by Ken Kocienda (Books 2018, 31)

Great New Phone; All the Wrong Reasons

Martin McCallion, , 2 Comments

My iPhone 6 was getting slow, and its battery was poor. I have been thinking of replacing it. But September is approaching, and Apple will announcing new iPhones (three new ones, according to rumours). So I had more or less set my mind on waiting till then.

That would also be consistent with my iPhone buying history: 3G, 4S, 6… the next in the sequence is 7S.

Friday changed my plans. I was standing at a bus stop on Old Street, just replying to a WhatsApp message. Something touched my hand, and for half a second I thought someone was bumping into me. Then there was a firm grip on my phone and it was gone. Pulled right out of my hand and off down the road on a moped — which must have come across the pavement from behind me.

I should have been more aware. I knew this kind of theft was a thing. Weā€™ve been hearing about them for a few months. But you donā€™t always think about it, and you never think itā€™s going to happen to you. And, yes, OK, drink had been taken. But not that much.

The bus arrived a few seconds later, so there was nothing I could do but get on and head home. There was another guy at the stop who witnessed it, and he very kindly set up a hotspot on his phone and let me use it from my iPad. The Find My iPhone app didnā€™t find it, so the thief had probably turned it off right away. But I was able to request a remote wipe in case itā€™s ever turned back on, and I got an email from Apple saying all the card details had been removed from Apple Pay.

All of which meant I had to make a trip to the Apple Store on Saturday. And to the Three store, where it was alarmingly easy to get a replacement SIM. I just had to tell them my phone number and give them a payment card. No questions asked. Not even my name and address.

So I now have jet black 256 GB iPhone 7. Which is lovely. Iā€™m late to all the new features, obviously, but hereā€™s a quick rundown:

  • TouchID: itā€™s now insanely fast to unlock my phone. Seems like itā€™s almost before I touch the home button sometimes.
  • 3D Touch: people on podcasts seem to be saying theyā€™ve stopped using this, but Iā€™m loving it. Especially the edge-press for activating the app switcher (a feature which seems to be going away in iOS 11, I hear, so I probably shouldnā€™t get too used to it).
  • The haptic feedback generally. Little clicks that tell you when youā€™ve activated something. Just makes the whole experience much nicer.
  • The ā€œtapticā€ home button. When Iā€™ve tried this in the shop before now I wasnā€™t too sure about it. But a couple of days using it for real and I think maybe I prefer it to the feel of the old real button.

Plus, itā€™s black. Really, really black.

Even the box was black.

The cables are still white, of course. Which reminds me, Iā€™ve always disliked Appleā€™s ear buds, and passed all my past ones on to my kids. But I thought Iā€™d give these a try, not least because I wouldnā€™t mind trying the AirPods if theyā€™re ever in stock anywhere,1 and they have the same form factor.

And I donā€™t hate them. I thought I always had trouble getting them to stay in, but that doesnā€™t seem to be the case now. The main problem is they donā€™t give enough sound isolation, so you can hear the traffic and people talking even with music or a podcast playing. Iā€™ve always preferred the kind with rubbery tips, which form a seal. But aside from that, these are better than I expected. Which bodes well for AirPods.

Downside: the battery life doesn’t seem dramatically better than my old one, weirdly. For the first couple of days it was busy downloading updates and restoring things (and getting hot), but that should be over now. I’m assuming that I just have to give it a few full cycles till it beds in and the measurement gets more accurate.

And all the things you have to set up again. That’s not the fault of the phone, though, so much as the way it came to me. If had planned this I would have done an encrypted iTunes backup, which would have meant more things were restored to the new phone.

Anyway, that was a lot of words and no links about not very much.

  1. I asked in the shop if they had them in, and of course they didnā€™t. [↩]
Great New Phone; All the Wrong Reasons

I phone, you phone

Martin McCallion, , Leave a comment

So, I’ve got an iPhone. I walked into the O2 shop near work the other day, and came out half an hour later with an 8 GB phone and a Ā£30-a-month contract.

The device itself is a thing of beauty, in both hardware and software terms.

iTunes, however, is an ugly piece of dingbat’s kidneys.

Don’t get me wrong: it does its thing well, from playing music, through purchases, to synchronisation. But my god, it looks ugly.

And nor do I like the way it presents the music it knows about; but then, I’ve never seen an application that does that very well.

As to typing with the on-screen keyboard, well, it’s actually not that bad; it’s never going to. Be fast, bit there are some smart optimisations, like automatically switching back from the symbol keyboard to the letter one when you hit space after a comma, or immediately after you type an apostrophe.

And I almost cry with happiness every time I see the transition from one app to another.

ETA: As you can see from the typoes above, I wrote that on the shiny device. I’ll leave them in for posterity.

I phone, you phone