Linked List: September 18, 2013

Wednesday, 18 September 2013

A Few Points on iOS 7 

Short list from David Sparks. I agree with him on every single point.

12 New Settings and Features in iOS 7 

Good list from Dave Hamilton at The Mac Observer.

Rene Ritchie Reviews iOS 7 

Rene Ritchie goes deep on iOS 7:

iOS has always stressed direct manipulation and 1:1 touch tracking, because it created the illusion of genuine interaction. Combine that with the new engines, and now the illusion is even better. You’re not just tapping buttons, you’re moving objects through their own virtual space. You’re not just flipping through a stack of tabs tediously drawn to look and move like cards, hiccuping and losing proper perspective as you go. You’re flipping real card-shaped objects that fly past, always in perfect perspective because they’re rendered to be. It’s so real, it begins to feel like a game. and that’s exactly the point. Real gamification is about enabling discovery though play. It’s about rewarding intuition with delight. It’s about making computing fun.

No idea how anyone is getting any work done today — so much great stuff to read, so many updated apps to try.

Jim Dalrymple on the New iPhones and iOS 7 

Jim Dalrymple:

A fingerprint sensor could be one of those cool features that everyone talks about, but nobody ends up using in their day-to-day lives because it’s too much of a hassle. I’ll be honest, heading into the event, I was wondering if Apple’s implementation of the sensor would be good enough to actually make it useful. Not just for a demo to make people gasp and clap, but could I use it every day.

The answer is unequivocally yes.

The whole front page of The Loop is chockablock with great iOS 7 links. I won’t bother duplicating them, just go to The Loop and load them into tabs from there.

Pogue on iOS 7 

David Pogue:

The look of iOS 7 may grab you or not. But once the fuss about the visuals dies down, something even more important comes into focus: the work that’s been done on making iOS better. The longer you spend with the new OS, the more you’re grateful for the fixing and de-annoyifying on display.

For example, you no longer have to burrow into infinitely nested Settings screens to adjust your control panels. Now you can just speak what you want, using Siri: “Open Wi-Fi settings,” for example, or “Open brightness settings.”

Anand Lal Shimpi Reviews the iPhone 5S 

Copiously detailed and researched. A genuine pleasure to read. So glad Apple provided AnandTech with iPhone review units. As I concluded, the 5S is a performance and graphics powerhouse:

There’s more graphics horsepower under the hood of the iPhone 5s than there is in the iPad 4. While I don’t doubt the iPad 5 will once again widen that gap, keep in mind that the iPhone 5s has less than 1/4 the number of pixels as the iPad 4. If I were a betting man, I’d say that the A7 was designed not only to drive the 5s’ 1136 × 640 display, but also a higher res panel in another device. Perhaps an iPad mini with Retina Display? There’s no solving the memory bandwidth requirements, but the A7 surely has enough compute power to get there. Not to mention that Apple hasn’t had issues in the past with delivering a SoC that wasn’t perfect for the display.

Set Your Jackass Dials to Nine 

Barry Randall, writing for the WSJ’s MarketWatch:

And if you think that the built-in fingerprint reader on the new iPhone 5S means something, well, it doesn’t. For years I followed Authentec, the company Apple bought to acquire this fingerprint technology. Using a biometric solution like fingerprint recognition was going to go mainstream any day now. Any day now. Until it wasn’t. It turns out, passwords work just fine. And they never have a smear of peanut butter on them to stymie the fingerprint reader.

OK, sure.

Like the PC business before it, I think the handset hardware business is moving toward a zero-margin, loss-leader existence, where the customer experience is defined by software and systems often controlled by others. Tim Cook should ask Michael Dell how that transition has turned out.

A writer for a Wall Street Journal publication just suggested that Tim Cook, CEO of the most-profitable personal computer maker in the world, call Michael Dell to find out how the PC business is going. OK, sure.