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My iOS 7 Wishlist

tomdale.net

131–140 of 160 posts

Re: My iOS 7 Wishlist

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Three days of battery life on the Nexus 4? That sounds like a dream. Do you put it on airplane mode when you're not using it or something?

I would agree with that. I get great battery life from my Nexus 4, around 3 to 4 days.

iPhone5 requires charging at home, work and in the car. I maintain on average about 80% battery.

With my usage patterns the battery would probably last an entire work day on a single charge, but I have heard this is not the best way to run the battery.

Re: My iOS 7 Wishlist

#132
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is only one email app, not seperate apps for exchange / imap and gmail. If you enable IMAP access to your Gmail account, you can use the "email" app to access gmail accounts along with everything else. The Gmail app has a dedicated button for "archive" and it handles labels better, but you don't really need it.

The IMAP experience of Gmail is possible, but by and large ime it sucks. Gmail treats a email has having 0+ tags, IMAP implementations rely on an email being in 1 folder. This is a fundamental difference.

I think Gmail's IMAP implementation is a rather usable and clever hack, actually.

By the way, everything is under one folder, both on IMAP and in the web interface. It's called "All Mail" (Archive)

Re: My iOS 7 Wishlist

#133
post #51

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…

The Address Book was built before 3rd party apps were even considered (remember all apps were web apps at launch) and was optimized for fast syncing. At the lowest level it stores an address record, and any required diffs in SQLite.

Every time the AB is accessed, all the diffs get reapplied. Normally this wouldn't be a problem, as people don't edit their address books often enough to generate a ton of entries.

Unfortunately the old Facebook iOS app and a few others that allowed you to "keep your contacts up to date" would hit every single contact in your Address Book every time the app was activated with a hidden ABPersonViewController. The allowsEditing property was set to YES every time, which generates a new diff with no (or a minor) change.

Diffs were sycned back to the computer, but AFAIK "merges" only happend on OS upgrades, since it was unlikely a user would be making millions of edits.

(this is all roughly from memory based on a painful debugging session with our iOS guy and a few back and forth tickets with Apple looking into extremely slow AB access for some users.)

Re: My iOS 7 Wishlist

#134
post #51

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…

OT, but you nailed it on the Podcast App - in fact, it is the first time that I've unequivocally been able to say that Apple released an absolute crap application that really had no future it was so bad. I spent two-three hours with that app trying to understand it's "model" and deal with all the bugs before I finally gave up. It was fundamentally bad.

On the Pro-Side - it opened me up to the really nice alternatives, like DownCast and iCatcher! that are absolutely fantastic.

Re: My iOS 7 Wishlist

#135
post #45
post #30

Google Now isn't awesome because Google exposed various APIs into their omniscient database. And they're not letting random apps grab 'Now' information for their own purposes either. They haven't played the "Open" card on "Now", at all, that I've seen. So thinking Apple would match it by just opening some APIs is double-unlikely. Particularly not with their reluctance to allow any hooks that third party developers mi…

Ironically, Apple's services like Maps and Siri are the ones that are not very "integrated" but are quite "fragmented" instead, since they need hooks into different databases from 3rd party vendors of which they have no control on, while Google only uses their own Google search engine for Google Now, and their own Maps database for Maps. Also, Google has already brought Voice Search to the iPhone. I think Google Now…

Apple pays for Yelp's data, Google scrapes it. Your guess is as good as mine as to which lasts longer.

Re: My iOS 7 Wishlist

#136
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes, very early on in my use of my Nexus 7, Google Now pointed out that there was a concert coming up for a band that I love in my city. Bought a ticket right then. Would have been disappointed to miss the show. That's not a very location-aware use case (at least not GPS-granular-location-aware), but I dig Google Now for that kind of thing. Also when it shows me when my wife's flight is delayed or something, all beca…

Right. The magic is, when you search for example, some place, Later you will be surprised your phone pushes some notifications about the weather of that place, how and how long time to get there...

You don't need to tell google where you want to go or what info you need, Google Now provide all necessary or maybe-useful info to you automatically. But yes you can trigger it off.

And it is not so smart as we except, kinda like AI. I hope it will be the REAL personal assistant, not just like Siri, you have to send order before it acts as smart.

Re: My iOS 7 Wishlist

#137
post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it always has a WiFi or HSPA data connection, and I haven't disabled any of the usual suspects (e.g. syncing or location services). Of course the display is off most of the time, and that's the big battery hog. The screen is on maybe an average of half an hour a day.

That’s a nice trick, making the battery last longer by not using the phone. I’ll try it myself.

He could be running long term processes in the background. You don't know :3

Re: My iOS 7 Wishlist

#138
post #32

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…

> In my life, I don't ever anticipate winding up in a new city without knowing where I was going to sleep that night beforehand.

You're only one missed flight away from that happening. My wife and I were in that exact situation a year ago in Europe. AirBnB saved our butts on that occasion, but an app with preloaded data that was just checking availability on the (extortionate roaming) internet would have been invaluable.

Re: My iOS 7 Wishlist

#139
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple makes it very easy to create location aware reminders. So I don't think this is the problem you think it is.

I'd argue that Apple makes it possible to create location-aware reminders, but not necessarily "very easy." Say I want to set up a reminder to pick up some dish soap next time I'm near my neighborhood grocery store. I could open the "Reminders" app and try to do it, but that only works if the store is in my address book for some reason or I know the address. Otherwise I have to search for the grocery store in Safari…

You really use geofenced reminders every day? I've found them useful once in a while but every day seems excessive. Maybe you were being sarcastic, it's hard to tell.

Re: My iOS 7 Wishlist

#140

I think we all need to revert back to the days of 3 sometimes 4 days battery life on old school Nokia's like the Nokia 3315. It's amazing how battery life on phones seems to get progressively worse even though battery technology is better, we're still cramming in battery draining features when all someone needs in an emergency is the ability to make a phone call or send a text, not a web browser, email client and a F…

I have a spare Android phone I keep on with a SIM card in so work can call me for server emergencies even when my regular phone is on silent. With 3G, Wifi and data access disabled, it lasts for over a week on standby, even with not-so-great reception.

If you're fine with returning to the feature set of that era, modern phones have huge batteries and highly optimized chipsets that exceed the performance of the old phones.

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