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iOS 11 reviewed

arstechnica.com

71–80 of 296 posts

Re: iOS 11 reviewed

#71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Backwards compatibility.

The bane of everyone's existence. No thanks. I'm glad one company at least isn't willing to do that. I've had it up to here with "Windows XP is good enough for me, make your software run on it" types.

On the one hand I agree with you: on the other I quite like the fact that relatively large bodies of code I wrote 12 years ago still run unmodified (albeit in Windows desktop apps that have received updates and enhancements since then).

Due to these updates I don't know that they would still run on Windows XP but it's nice that the code hasn't needed to change.

Re: iOS 11 reviewed

#72
post #4

> Practically speaking, do I need to be able to play phone games from 2009 on my 2017 iPhone? Not really. The problem is not that you can't play phone games from 2009 on your 2017 iPhone, tying 32b deprecation to a hardware revision would actually have been nice (regardless of the hardware still being able to run in 32b mode). But that's not what's happening, the problem is that you can't play phone games from 2009 o…

>"Free space" which they could already have gained back by removing the applications in the first place. Were apps previously installed as fat binaries with 64 and 32-bit architectures included, and the 32-bit chunk has now been removed? Or was that already taken care of with the "app thinning" stuff a couple of years ago?

> Or was that already taken care of with the "app thinning" stuff a couple of years ago?

It should have been. And the update only removes 32b applications, not 32/64, if they were not doing so before I doubt they're going to thin fat binaries now.

Re: iOS 11 reviewed

#73
post #13

There is one thing I hope they that they fix in iOS, and that is to guide app-makers to understand bilingual users, I type a lot on both danish and english, and having to switch language in the keyboard for every conversation can get pretty tiresome. Luckily both iMessage and WhatsApp seems to support it now, so I hope they somehow can get other apps in on it. Telegram does not support this :/

Bilingual user here. I think predictive typing is a keyboard issue, not an app issue, and the iOS keyboard has been smart enough to use dictionaries in both languages without switching since iOS 9 or 10.

Re: iOS 11 reviewed

#74
post #13

There is one thing I hope they that they fix in iOS, and that is to guide app-makers to understand bilingual users, I type a lot on both danish and english, and having to switch language in the keyboard for every conversation can get pretty tiresome. Luckily both iMessage and WhatsApp seems to support it now, so I hope they somehow can get other apps in on it. Telegram does not support this :/

Can you explain what you mean? I type in both English and German. On latest iOS 10, regardless of which keyboard I have selected, I can start typing in either language and word prediction/autocomplete/spellcheck pretty quickly picks up which language I'm using.

Re: iOS 11 reviewed

#75

Review is not thorough. One huge change in the control center is that the wifi “toggle” doesn’t toggle wifi off anymore (wait what?). It just disconnects from the current network and doesn’t reconnect for a minute or so. If you don’t want to be tracked by wifi APs it seems you have to force touch settings into wifi and disable the adapter from there. Huge step backwards IMHO.

I remember reading that iOS 11 also come with MAC address randoming so that you can't be tracked by wifi.

Looks like it's been broken across nearly everything. Here's where I read about it. Anyone know if this is addressed? https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/researchers-b...

Re: iOS 11 reviewed

#76
post #60

The new default image/video codec that no other browser supports seems like it's going to be ... interesting. Of course they couldn't use VP9, just like USB-C - this is marginally better, and completely fucks over everyone developing outside the tiny Apple ecosystem.

I think Apple's response to that is, 'come, enter our walled garden!' Apple's ecosystem is a lot like the Hotel California: you can check in any time you like, but you can never leave.

Their walled garden of industrial standards? You can criticise both HEVC and HEIF as being patent-encumbered and pushed by big companies, but there's no "walled garden" about these two. Hell, fabrice bellard pioneered using HEVC for images with BPG.

Re: iOS 11 reviewed

#77
post #51
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, but that will only last some days or weeks.

The iPhone 5C won't update past iOS 10 so Apple will keep the signed version of that around and you can find 5C's for cheap. I mean if you really want to keep using 2009 apps. (I am not claiming that this is at all a reasonable work-around, just that there is a work-around.)

That's a good point. They can be stupid and inconvenient about it, but it's not making this stuff completely inaccessible.

Re: iOS 11 reviewed

#78
post #46

The new default image/video codec that no other browser supports seems like it's going to be ... interesting. Of course they couldn't use VP9, just like USB-C - this is marginally better, and completely fucks over everyone developing outside the tiny Apple ecosystem.

To be fair; HEIC and HEVC are industry standards. If browsers don't support them, that's on the browser.

An industry standard nobody wants to use in the industry is not a standard, it's a 'tentative' one at best.

Simply put, the patent groups behind HEVC got so greedy, far more than they had been with h264, that this thing is pretty much dead on arrival. The only consumer facing company that's still pushing for it is Apple. Everyone else has joined an alliance to come up with a replacement open codec, AV-1, which includes companies such as : Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, NVIDIA, AMD, Intel, Cisco, Amazon, Netflix, ARM, Adobe, the BBC, Broadcom, Realtek.

There is no backing your term of HEVC being an 'industry standard' other than it being supported by the MPEG group. But MPEG group standards were industry standards because people adopted them, not because the MPEG group in itself has some divine providence given power to call everything they make a 'standard'.

When the fight for which video codec should be 'the standard' was about WebM vs h264, h264 won and became a true standard not just in name but in practice because it was welcomed by every major company, while WebM was mostly pushed and cared for by one (Google), so Apple could get away with not supporting WebM in Safari and showing hostility to more open formats. This time it's not going to happen. HEVC on the web is not going to happen, at all. AV-1 is the only thing that could succeed H264.

Re: iOS 11 reviewed

#79

Review is not thorough. One huge change in the control center is that the wifi “toggle” doesn’t toggle wifi off anymore (wait what?). It just disconnects from the current network and doesn’t reconnect for a minute or so. If you don’t want to be tracked by wifi APs it seems you have to force touch settings into wifi and disable the adapter from there. Huge step backwards IMHO.

Misleading ui is terrible and making me consider other phone OS. I have wanted a toggle for location services in the control center for so long. Now they are going even further to remove useful functionality like toggling wifi and bluetooth. just horrible.

Why is apple moving further away from intuitive ease of use?

Re: iOS 11 reviewed

#80
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh it sounds to me that this is a great quick fix for the "I'm slightly too far from the AP to have bandwidth but I'm still maintaining a connection" problem I have almost daily. Will make an obscure security concern you've identified slightly more difficult to deal with. If you don't prefer trade offs like this, Apple likely isn't the best digital provider for you.

Who's a better digital device provider than Apple for security & privacy?

Nobody. I think a better statement would of been maybe this "feature" isn't for you. Head to settings and turn it off.
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