Thursday, September 19, 2013

IOS7

Okay, so it's a little buggy. And it slows your device down. (It's intended for the next generation of chips, which are in the new iPhone and will obviously be in the next iPad). But it's pretty. Very, very pretty. That goes a long way with me.

I love the font. It's so clear it's almost frightening. If you've just installed it on your iPad, I'd like to give you a few tips. These are for iPad users only. I don't have an iPhone, so you're on your own with that version of the software. Here goes:
- To see your active applications, swipe upward with four fingers. This makes the active apps get smallish and you can swipe your way through them. To close an app, swipe upward on it with one finger. Or if you want to leave some open, just swipe down with four fingers to return to the home screen.

- Newsstand is buggy. It will not close. Mind you, Newsstand sucks so there's no reason to open it. The new OS lets you put it in a folder, which is nice. So now you can drop it on the icon of another app you'd like to forget and they'll create a folder, into which they'll both disappear forever! Good riddance. And if you get stuck in Newsstand and can't get out, do what I did: push the side button to shut the iPad off. Reopen it and you'll be at the lock screen, which will return you to the home screen. And Newsstand will disappear from your active apps. Phew. Pain in the butt.

-BTW, the iBooks app looks every bit as awful as it always did. I thought they were going to get rid of the faux ornamentation. Oh well, no one reads iBooks on an iPad. They download the Kindle Reader app and buy their books at Amazon. Sorry, Apple. So iBooks is another one you can toss into a folder and forget forever.

- Don't forget to enable automatic downloads. This way when Apple comes up with a fix for the bugs (which you'll notice, I'm afraid), you won't even be aware that your software was updated. Stuff will just work better.

- Finally, if the brightness of the white background drives you crazy, go into Settings/General/Accessibility and turn on "Invert Colors". Then when you tap the home button three times, your colors will reverse and you'll see white text on a black background. Much nicer at night. 
So far, that's all I've got. But I do like the OS despite my complaints. It's just too pretty to dislike.

Good luck!