Month: July 2017

Sorry sorry!  I swear I have an opinion, I just was mulling over other things, and the fact that Apple is apparently switching up its opinion on iOS.  Yeah.

 

tvOS

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Well…Apple did literally one thing.  The literal only thing they literally said was that tvOS is getting an Amazon app.  That’s literally it.  I really don’t get it.  I don’t think they know what to do with tvOS.

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watchOS 4

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It gets a Siri watch face and a few little Toy Story watch faces.  Not like the Mickey and Minnie faces (where they stand in the middle and point to the numbers), but little GIF-like ones where they do a little animation against a black screen with a digital clock in the corner.  You can also now view apps in a list view.  Yes, with giant buttons compared to the small circular bubbles.  I wanna say they did that just to show that the customer isn’t always right.  That probably isn’t the reason, but giant list buttons on a 32mm screen doesn’t seem that sound.

This leads me straight into:

iOS 11

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This is the reeeeaaallly interesting one.  They seem to have made this a productivity update, at least for the iPad, and what better thing to give the iPad then an actual dock…as in you can put 13 apps in it, yes, THIRTEEN, in addition to a space of three icons for your recent apps:  That’s 16 icons in one row in both portrait and landscape mode.  That’s Apple Watch home screen levels of tiny icons.

…sorry, I don’t know why I started off with a bash at iOS.  There’s a whole lot of good in this update:  Drag and drop, an actual file system app that includes iCloud drive, Google Drive, Dropbox, and I think some others, a document scanner tool for Notes, and you can now run at least three apps at once, and you can save spaces of two apps at once, and you have a lot more controls you can access in Control Center, and can add and remove them at will–

–what?  You say this doesn’t sound simple?  …oh you’re right.  Hmm…

I have a theory.  As stated in this article, I think Apple is upping the bar on how much complexity it wants in iOS.  Yes, Apple is increasing complexity…in the name of not forcing you to abandon it at the slightest indication of having to do something awkward.  It is exactly how I put it in this post.  To quote: “Our lives require more complex features.  We cannot live as simply as we have before.  As things grow more complicated, we need more features to deal with them.  Apple is attempting to encompass ALL of our lives, while leaving us CONTROL over our lives.  That needs more than just two buttons for five things.”

 

I also said that the more features Apple creates, the worse the software will get, because maintaining more and more features means there’s more and more ways the software can clash with itself, and more and more things Apple has to maintain.

That’s a necessary evil, unless Apple can pull off something cool, which it has always tried to do in the past.  We’ll see.

 

I’ve been playing with the public beta on my iPad, and while some things are of course wonky and spastic, it still feels like iOS.  At the moment.  Although I’ve heard that the beta for iPhone is actually worse than the beta for iPad…which doesn’t make too much sense to me.

Also, the artificial intelligence updates in iOS are awesome!

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macOS High Sierra

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This is mostly just smarts updates, and a new file storage method.  This one is a good update too.

The name is a little odd…like macOS is on drugs now.  Or something.

[Sorry I’m kinda skipping this one, macOS is about as un-Apple as you can get, and you can run Windows on it even.  So it’s really not worth talking about in terms of Apple’s simplicity or even in terms of a computer so much…though I do recommend this update.  People who like to browse sites will no longer have to deal with auto-playing videos…although I believe HTML5 ads can still take over your screen to promote AWESOME TANK GAME #5033!!!!!]

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HomePod

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Hey, it’s the rumored Siri speaker!

Hah, I don’t think Apple wanted it to be thought of as only a Siri speaker though.  It’s also a really smart regular speaker:  It detects where the walls are in the room and directs the sound to open parts of the room to create the best sound it can.

It sounds like a really rocking device. I bet it’s a bass blow to the more treble companies…why did I just devolve into puns that got worse the more I did them…

Also it looks like the head of a giant news-anchor microphone.  I think that was intentional.

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iMac Pro

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I like this.  It’s black, shiny, and powerful.  It has 18 cores(!) in its CPU.  And they demoed a virtual reality thing along with it that looked really cool too.  It’s a nice little computer.  Too bad nobody but people with a lot of money can get it.

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ARkit

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This is an API in iOS you can use to create nice-looking augmented reality apps.  That’s it, not even a demo AR app is packaged with iOS.  They showed a few examples of it in the keynote, and it does look really good, but I kinda wish they’d at least put some sort of AR thing in Maps so we could see it out of the box.  I need to find an app that uses it so I have more of an opinion.

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Overall, a really interesting keynote.  iOS stole the show for me, I think it’s very interesting Apple is changing how it’s designing that software.

 

I’m really interested to see what Apple will do next.  And it’s legitimate interest this time, not just fanboy interest 😉