After a Hiatus, I'm back

I haven’t blogged as often as I should. I’ll try to get back on my pace now.

The big news is iOS 7 and the new iPhones. As I blog about the Mac, I can give only a superficial review of iOS 7. As for the new iPhones, look elsewhere or even better, post your opinion and unboxing shots in the comments.

iOS 7 does push the immediate visual aspect to a new level. On my iPad 3, iOS 7 running the MacLife app looks like a slick paper magazine. I speak from experience, as I have subscribed to their paper edition as well as their iOS one, and both look as good as the other.

As for buying Microsoft’s hyper-promoted (it’s everywhere that the old Romney ’12 ads were) Surface RT tablet, they both look pretty. It’s a draw with respect to layout and typography. Just consider what applications you want to run on your tablet. The iPad and its even cuter sibling, the iPad mini, run many more apps than the Surface RT does at present.

One big change for me came with the disappearance of the Application Switcher tray. In iOS 6, you double-tapped on the Home button to raise up the screen and reveal a row of buttons for applications:

 

iOS 6 Home Screen	iOS Application Switcher revealed by double-tapping Home Button	Prepare Application for Quitting by Tapping and Holding iCon	Tap and Hold Application iCon to shut off App

(No, I don’t have an iPhone. I borrowed these shots from someone else’s iPhone 4. Thank you very much)

 

Well, here it is in iOS 7. I double-tapped on the Home Button and this is what I got:

 

No, the Home Screen doesn’t slide up. Instead, I got my running apps displayed in a line when I double tapped the Home Button.

To shut off an app, Just Flick Up on an app in the the row and it shuts off. No messing with red dots this time, just a simple upward finger flick. I flicked the Music app and the Steve Miller Band packed up to go home.

Where the Heck is the Sharing icon?

In iOS 6 and OS X Mountain Lion, the sharing icon for sharing content looked like this: You clicked on it to share content via Twitter, Flickr, and Facebook, e-Mail, and sometimes Print.

Well, it doesn’t look like that in iOS 7. It looks like this:

I didn’t find it at the top right-hand corner of the screen. I found it at the bottom left-hand corner of the screen.

 

I have played with iTunes Radio. My first comment is that I’m glad that Apple didn’t wipe out the list of Internet Radio Stations (formerly known as Radio, now known as Internet) on iTunes. I like Abacus Radio’s Vintage Jazz, which is under the Classical section. Go figure.

Being a 58 year old man, I don’t appreciate Miley Cyrus. I’m more of a Renee Fleming & Susan Graham enthusiast. I’ll have to see about setting a Susan Graham station in iTunes radio.

 

Tom Briant

Editor, MacValley Blog