Category: iPhone

ios 14 — adding speed dialing back to the widget screen

whbeebe

I’m not an iOS 14 booster, and probably never will be. The time I spend dealing with iOS 14 is turning me into a very loud critic of both the OS and Apple itself. I’ve already written about my run-ins with the App Store widget’s brokeness after the update. After that brokeness “magically” fixed itself, I started to focus on other aggravating changes between iOS 14 and every other iOS release before it. One of those changes was the elimination of the speed dialing/Phone Favorites view that used to be available on the widget screen. This post shows how to get that functionality back, albeit by different means.

You know the widget screen. It’s the “before” screen you get to by swiping the home screen to the right. Compared to Android, it was Apple’s limited implementation of widgets which Android, I have to admit, had nicely solved on day one of its release (or close to day one it that it didn’t matter). Apple could have had the same feature from the beginning with iPhone OS, but Steve Jobs, notorious micro-manager that he was, micro-managed what and how you could add to the screen(s) of your iPhone. I put up with Steve in my iPhone because in spite of the prettier views that Android could afford, it was the lousy Android hardware and software underneath the pretty skin that kept driving me back to iOS. The choice of mobile devices has always been a choice between the lesser of two evils. But I digress…

A feature I came to rely on with Android had no real equivalent on iOS, and that was the speed dial button. On Android, at least Android on the Samsung Galaxy S4, I could create a button on the home screen that would be linked to any given phone number. Touch that, and it would dial that number. The convoluted equivalent on iOS was the Phone app’s Favorites view. Add your favorite phone numbers, in whatever order you needed, and on the Widget screen you could install a widget view of Favorites, and it would show up to eight favorites in up to two horizontal lines, four/line. And it would display in the order your Favorites were listed. This worked just fine until iOS 14, when it just disappeared. What follows are my directions for getting that functionality back using the Shortcuts app.

Shortcuts is an Apple app and is free with iOS. It started life independently in 2014 as Workflow. After winning accolades for its cleverness and capabilities, it was purchased by Apple and renamed in 2017 to Shortcuts. I’m used Shortcuts to create eight dial shortcuts for eight different numbers. I’m not going to cover that here. What I am going to show is how, after creating all those shortcuts (a duplication of what is already in the Phone app), I inserted it into the widget screen.

Now before you say “what the heck,” this is the view with the Shortcuts’ dial pads. To get to the point where you can add Shortcuts to your widget screen, tap the ‘Edit’ button at the bottom of the screen.

Once in edit mode then tap the ‘+’ button at the top left. Lovely interface, isn’t it?

Now start scrolling down (or search, your call) for Shortcuts, and tap that to open it.

You now have three choices; one row of two shortcuts, two rows of four shortcuts, or four rows of eight. I chose door number three because I defined eight shortcuts for eight numbers. Tap the big blue ‘Add Widget’ button and it will be added to the widget screen, as shown in the first illustration.

The biggest problem I have with this solution, outside of all the convoluted steps I have to step through, is the amount of wasted screen real estate. This precludes this from being added to my home screen. So it will stay on the widget screen, and I’ll use my muscle memory to swipe-and-tap my most used numbers.

All of this to get back functionality I’ve come to depend upon since my first iPhone 6. This is, once again, another irritant of many that Apple has dropped along the way because somebody thought it would be better to do it this way. And like iOS 14’s release, it came (to me) without warning. I’m glad I had enough sense to figure this out on my own. I went looking for solutions as usual on the Internet, and as usual, I came across so much crap, especially people who wanted me to install their app to restore that functionality. And as usual, Apple’s own official help was silent on this issue with iOS 14.

what time is it in london? daringfireball gets its knickers in a knot over the answer

whbeebe2 Comments

Just about everybody and their sibling(s) knows who John Gruber is, and his blog, “DaringFireball” ( https://daringfireball.net/ ). In the past, before today, I’d regularly stroll by to read everything he posted. 99% of the time I’d nod my head in agreement with his opinions and observations and then move on to something else. Except for today.

Today, Gruber wrote ‘What Time Is It in London?’ ( https://daringfireball.net/2020/05/what_time_is_it_in_london ) in which he took Apple to task because Siri, when asked the question, supposedly took too long and then answered with the time in London, Canada.

Nilay Patel asked this of Siri on his Apple Watch. After too long of a wait, he got the correct answer — for London Canada. I tried on my iPhone and got the same result. Stupid and slow is heck of a combination.

So one of Gruber’s Twitter buddies tweets his experience asking the question, and Gruber gives it a try and finds the same issue. That’s fine as it goes. Except it gets much worse. In the next paragraph Gruber writes:

You can argue that giving the time in London Ontario isn’t wrong per se, but that’s nonsense. The right answer is the common sense answer. If you had a human assistant and asked them “What’s the time in London?” and they honestly thought the best way to answer that question was to give you the time for the nearest London, which happened to be in Ontario or Kentucky, you’d fire that assistant. You wouldn’t fire them for getting that one answer wrong, you’d fire them because that one wrong answer is emblematic of a serious cognitive deficiency that permeates everything they try to do. You’d never have hired them in the first place, really, because there’s no way a person this lacking in common sense would get through a job interview. You don’t have to be particularly smart or knowledgeable to assume that “London” means “London England”, you just have to not be stupid. (emphasis mine)

The stench of arrogance and entitlement that runs through this paragraph is so strong as to be unbelievable. It’s a good thing I never worked for John Gruber, because if I had and I’d done something, anything, that he deemed to be stupid and “emblematic of a serious cognitive deficiency” I’d have turned around and left far faster than he could have fire me. I would have, in effect, fired him as a boss. Who really wants to work for such a toxic individual?

If I’d run across this type of “problem”, I would have stopped and asked why that kind of result to the question. For software systems, that means letting someone know this is an issue and helping to resolve it. If it’s a person I stop and understand why they delivered that kind of answer. Who knows why? Taking something like this completely out of context and then rage-blogging about it only shows how immature the author (in this case one John Gruber) is. When it especially comes to people, I don’t believe in disposable people. I’m retired now, but I really have tried to be a mentor to those who’ve worked for me, not some bastard boss from hell.

I read that article early this morning while in my doctor’s office (many of us old retirees have Medical Issues that need looking into from time to time). I couldn’t try this in the waiting room, since a doctor’s waiting room, even during COVID-19, should be quiet. But when I got home around noon I tried it, and I got the “correct” answer. Later in the day I tried it again, and then this evening, before I wrote this post, I tried again and grabbed screen shots off my Apple Watch and iPhone. My hardware, in case you’re interested, is a Series 3 Apple Watch and an iPhone 11 Pro Max, both running the latest software that dropped yesterday.

Thanks, John, for helping me to cut my screen time down further. I now have more time to devote to what’s really important, helping others.

Series 3 Apple Watch, watchOS 6.2.5
iPhone 11 Pro Max, iOS 13.5