81–90 of 160 posts
Google Now is the one feature that will determine whether I switch from iPhone to Android in the next 6 months. If Apple doesn't come up with something comparable in that time frame, they will lose a customer.
Yet the problem with your phone doing all of this location-aware intelligence is that you wind up with the dead-battery he started his article out with. Whenever I read articles like this one I'm left wondering whether my life is distinctly different from most. I generally have a pretty good idea about my calendar - where I'll be going that day, and what restaurant I'll grab a bite to eat in if that's part of my agen…
I was very skeptical of Google Now originally, and disabled it after a week on the Nexus S. It never gave any useful info, and indeed made it unlikely the battery would last the day. But with the Nexus 4 I left it on, and have been finding it useful regularly ever since. Zero-action directions and timetables for getting home after a night out. Directions to local places I've recently searched for on maps. The automat…
Tell me why I’m an idiot for having this opinion by tweeting @tomdale. Off topic, but this is genius. I never understood why everybody copied that "you should follow me" rudeness of a line. Not thinking too high about yourself is how you win people's goodwill.
I have one wish: that the iOS programmers at Apple learn how to write efficient concurrent code and that they stop leaning on the next, faster, generation processor so hard that any phone that is just one generation older than the leatest and greatest becomes slow as shit. My iPhone used to be fast. Most things used to be snappy. Now it is slow as shit. From the address book lookups (which I have timed to usually clo…
While I feel your frustration with iOS apps in general, concurrency is not a silver bullet. I can't say anything specifically about what's making certain iOS applications slow, but I actually think it's probably more related to Core Data and file IO. I can also say their new concurrency technology (Grand Central Dispatch) is one of the most brilliant pieces of technology I've seen in a while. The reasons why are pret…
You do NOT allow the UI thread to hang on blocking calls. That's UI programming 101. And Apple engineers are unique in how consistently they fail to follow even this most rudimentary of rules.
My #1 wishlist item, which would be easy to implement, is "guest mode" -- let me hit a button on the lock screen (or elsewhere) which lets me loan someone my phone briefly without any personalization or sensitive data. A standard web browser, phone app, etc. Maybe let me customize what apps are available in "limited mode". This matters even more on an iPad, which I'm generally willing to share, vs. my phone, which I…
Here's my feature wishlist for iOS7: - Nothing. I don't want anything new. I'm happy with the current feature set my phone currently has. What I desperately want from iOS 7 is a renewed focus on stability and Not Sucking. There's been a significant amount of additional functionality brought in over the last few releases, but it feels like in terms of stability it's not improved anywhere near as quickly.
I'll go even further and say: I want to be able to turn existing stuff off in Settings. I don't need a Spotlight home screen to the left, I don't want the ugly notification centre that I accidentally trigger and never use, and neither will I ever touch Newsstand or Stocks or Weather or Siri. How hard can it be to present a list of on/off switches - some of them exist already for parental controls.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Yet the problem with your phone doing all of this location-aware intelligence is that you wind up with the dead-battery he started his article out with. Unlikely. The main culprits in high battery usage are the screen, the gps, and the radio when there's not very much signal. Google Now does not ever show up in my top-five battery users list.
An app itself doesn't use much battery unless it's doing something CPU intensive. Android reports the actual thing that was using the battery. For example, if I watch YouTube until my battery's dead, it won't say YouTube used the battery, it will say the screen did.
My #1 wishlist item, which would be easy to implement, is "guest mode" -- let me hit a button on the lock screen (or elsewhere) which lets me loan someone my phone briefly without any personalization or sensitive data. A standard web browser, phone app, etc. Maybe let me customize what apps are available in "limited mode". This matters even more on an iPad, which I'm generally willing to share, vs. my phone, which I…
Apple doesn't want you to share your phone.
I have one wish: that the iOS programmers at Apple learn how to write efficient concurrent code and that they stop leaning on the next, faster, generation processor so hard that any phone that is just one generation older than the leatest and greatest becomes slow as shit. My iPhone used to be fast. Most things used to be snappy. Now it is slow as shit. From the address book lookups (which I have timed to usually clo…
I have one wish: that the iOS programmers at Apple learn how to write efficient concurrent code and that they stop leaning on the next, faster, generation processor so hard that any phone that is just one generation older than the leatest and greatest becomes slow as shit. My iPhone used to be fast. Most things used to be snappy. Now it is slow as shit. From the address book lookups (which I have timed to usually clo…
Optimising code costs money, may make the code base harder to maintain and does not help much with selling new devices. I really hope there will be a future shift in making money from software, not hardware. Right now the opposite seems to be happening. :(