Category: iOS

stepping up to ios 16 with a side of watch os 9

whbeebe1 Comment
My Daytona Beach with life guard lock screen and the new ugly bold time font

Tuesday evening I updated my iPhone 11 Pro Max to iOS 16 and my Apple Watch 7 to Watch OS 9. I spent about an hour after the update looking around and enabling certain new functionalities that I was looking forward to. I also tried some new functionalities that didn’t work the way I expected; Apple once again violating the principle of least astonishment ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_astonishment ).

I’d read about Apple heavily revamping the lock screen, allowing among other features the ability to add widgets to it. That’s a feature that Android has had for years. I tried that, only to discover that

  1. The types of widgets you can add are very limited, and
  2. You can’t add widgets to your existing lock screen.

I was also unpleasantly surprised by the change of the time font on the lock screen. In earlier versions it was regular text. Starting with iOS 16 it’s now bold, which looks bad. And there’s no way to change it back. Furthermore, if I wanted to add new widgets to my lock screen, I can’t do that with my existing lock screen. I have to chose a new lock screen, then edit that one. I’ve decided to leave well enough alone. It’s a good thing I like what I currently have and feel no need to change it.

As for the new medical features, here’s a public service announcement. If you want to discover them and work with them, then open up the Apple Health app and touch the Browse button at the bottom right of the screen. The opened Browse screen lists everything you can enable and change, including Medications and Sleep.

I set up Medications with the three medications I currently take. You can either use the built-in camera to read your prescription on the bottle, or if it can’t read it, then you can type it in by hand. Medications was able to read two out of three of my prescriptions. I thought that Options | Dose Reminders would pop up an alarm, but it didn’t this morning. As far as logging if and when I take my meds, I have to open the app and press a button saying I’ve taken all of them. Unfortunately I’ve now got to actions to remember; to take my meds, and then to remember to open the app and log I took them.

I then set up Sleep. All I had to do was tell it how many hours I needed, then when I went to sleep and when I needed to wake up. For me that’s seven hours between 10pm and 6am. So far it seems to work. After a full nights sleep I can see how long I was in Deep, Core, and REM sleep. There are four spikes during the night when I woke up. I can believe that as my bed is also where my cats sleep next to me. If they get too close, or if Luke decides to sleep right on top of me, I’ll wake up briefly to shift around to a more comfortable position, then fall right back to sleep.

Finally, before I went to bed, I tried to find a way to share this information automatically with my local medical group, Orlando Medical. Apple’s software is far too limited to find a match for anything in this area.

So far all the prior iOS functionality I depend on is still in iOS 16, with the notable exception of how wallpapers are selected. All the critical functionality I depend on is still working, and that’s all I really care about.

I’m not all that thrilled with iOS 16. If I were grading this, I’d give it an overall B grade at best. New iOS 16 functionality, especially the lock screen changes and selecting new wallpapers, I’d give a grade of F.

i don’t like the washington post’s new news app on ios

whbeebe
Old version of app

I’m very picky about my news sources and the tools I use to consume that news. Those tools are apps on iOS. My two primary news sources are The Washington Post and The Guardian. I pay for both in order to get full access and to avoid any advertising. The both work for me.

But now The Washington Post wants to replace the app I currently use on my iPhone with a newer and more improved version.

New! and Improved! version of app

The critical difference for me is how the stories are presented. In the older version each story was in a panel, and the panels were stacked vertically. The stories are organized into sections, and the sections are selectable via the menu at the bottom. Simply scrolling up or down allows you to quickly browse the stories. A single tap opens up the story. If you swipe left you move to the next full story. Swipe right an you go back to the prior story. I personally like to hit the browse button and then swipe down (or up) the panels, jumping around a bit and reading the stories in each section that caught my interest. I found it clean, well organized, and easy to navigate.

The newer app is flat. There are no panels. The stories in each section are packed together with little differentiation. It unfortunately looks too much like a social media feed, such as Facebook. And that’s probably what annoys me the most. I’m sure somebody in management and marketing thought that borrowing the look of a social media feed was a Good Thing. It’s not. Another annoyance is having the sections listed across the top as a sliding menu, in small text. You can swipe that menu left or right and pick a section at random. I suppose that’s supposed to aid “discoverability.” I’ll give a half-point to the ability to swipe down in the main news sections. Swipe left in a section and it slides to the next section. Swipe right and it slides back to the prior section. It’s a nice touch, but not nice enough to counter what I consider its flaws. Those flaws being a jumbled mess more complicated to navigate and find anything.

There’s not much I can do about the change. The Washington Post is switching to the new app, and the old app is going away. I knew this before writing this post. But I don’t have to go quietly into The Washington Post’s idea of a better app. The new hotness isn’t better, it’s worse.