Category Archives: Serial

iOS 6

iOS 6 is more refined and looks great, but there are a few areas where it’s not so good or needs improvement.

I am not a fan of that new menu bar color. The dark blue is not appealing to me.

When scrolling past the page edges in Safari, the dark linen background appears. I’m not sure what it was before, but I was not happy to see linen here.

The new phone dialer is ugly.

The settings is getting a little cluttered. It would have been nice if Apple had included little text links between pages instead of including every option that you might be looking for in every place you might look for it. The Disclaimers in the new Maps app is a great example of the kind of link I think would be nice.

I’m not on Facebook, so I want all the Facebook sharing options to be hidden.

I wish that notifications overlay had a nicer, more intuitive animation. It’s different than iOS 5, but still weird.

Since iCloud tabs were added, it seems like the next step would be history. I would love it if my entire history would be listed in iCloud so I can browse to recent sites from my iPhone on my Mac. Also, Once I’ve opened a tab on my Mac, I’d like to be able to tell my iPhone to close it (sometimes).

iPhone 5

You’d be hard pressed to find “Macintosh” anywhere but a Tim Cook keynote. Tim seemed to be a little unsure of his speech this time.

It’s a little awkward to hear him come out on stage and say “thank you” over and over.

The humor Steve brought is missing. Only Phil injects some, but he doesn’t have the same sharp wit.

The promotional shots of Newsstand show it filled up with content. I wonder if brand new devices will come with some periodicals preloaded.

From the keynote, it looked like Ping might be gone. But it’s still in this one screenshot on the New iTunes page.

Apple Events Winter 2012

As I was reading John Gruber’s Mountain Lion, I began to wonder, Why is Apple doing 3 different events this quarter (Education, OS X, iPad) instead of consolidating them into one? They have covered multiple topics at events in the past. Is the company becoming more divided? Phil Schiller made the two presentations that have occurred this far, so that seems unlikely. Are these events each so important that they can’t share the stage? Well, the OS X announcement wasn’t even important enough to have a public event, so I discount that explanation too. Are they time-sensitive announcements? Perhaps, but enough to to warrant separate events? Not in my opinion. Is it a lack of focus or patience? Only time will tell.

I think they should have trimmed down the announcements, been more concise and highlighted the main points and waiting to make one grand announcement instead of three smaller ones.

There has never been a mass market for good journalism in this country. What there used to be was a mass market for print ads, coupled with a mass market for a physical bundle of entertainment, opinion, and information; these were tied to an institutional agreement to subsidize a modicum of real journalism.

Newspapers, Paywalls, and Core Users