iOS 8 reviewed
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
A Swype-like keyboard (I actually use Google Keyboard's Swype mode, even though I own Swype) is a "must have" on my phone and has been for over three and a half years (since Swype beta was available on the original Galaxy Note).
While there are definitely thumb typists who can type quite fast, for me personally Swyping is significantly faster than tapping. I refuse to go back to that, it is bad enough things like passwords require tapping (although thanks to LastPass working with Chrome on Android, that too might be a thing of the past).
Now all we need is Microsoft to get with the program. Windows 8/8.1 still lacks a Swype-like keyboard and third party keyboards don't really exist. Kind of sucks on the Surface (you don't ALWAYS have the keyboard cover on).
It's a good development for iOS and WP to have more flexibility without comprising the essence of what they are.
When I got the Lumia 635, I didn't know about the swype-like functionality. I used it from time to time, without thinking, but never noticed it until someone else pointed it out.
It works well, and would be nice on the Windows tablets.
Switching between multiple keyboards in Android is totally pain. This was over a year ago, but back then I have drag down the notification area, choose Change Keyboard, select keyboard I want to use and go back to typing (maybe optionally switch the layout to the correct one before that) instead of a single button press. Some keyboard do provide a way to switch to other keyboard, but they're mostly non-obvious (e.g. in Google Japanese IME, you have to long press the layout switch [A/あ] button for few seconds, then choose "Change keyboard"). Even though most non-English keyboards also provide English layout, but most of time they're simply half-baked or just downright bad.
I don't know how Apple designed their third party keyboard API, but I truly hope they have some kind of guideline regarding the keyboard switcher, and that third party keyboards in iOS are per-language so all non-English keyboards out there don't ended up implementing a half-baked English keyboard. Either way, I'm really happy to see SwiftKey coming to iOS, even more so when my favorite Japanese IME (ATOK) announced they're going to release a keyboard for iOS.
i believe aosp keyboard put a button left to space which you can long-press in order to get the switch keyboard popup. but his biggest gripe was probably the settings which default for some keyboards after changing the standard...
(If anyone is interested, I'm working on a clone of the existing Apple keyboard for use as a base for developing 3rd party keyboards: https://github.com/archagon/tasty-imitation-keyboard)
Under Tim Cook I'm not sure that maxim will apply to design any more, it certainly didn't apply to software/hardware in the 90's pre-jobs. Perhaps Cook will still apply it to services like apple pay where it helps them lock in profits and customers, just like most other corporations.
The big surprise is not that iOS8 is getting Swype, but that they are opening the APIs up for arbitrary third-party keyboards (albeit heavily curated, I'm sure).
I think they just want to first make sure that the default user interface is totally solid and easy to use, and that the geeky stuff will not harm that. That way geeks can opt into power user stuff, but regular users don't even have to know it's there.
iOS has seen a steady progression of power-user functionality: SDK, cut/copy/paste, app switching, detailed notifications settings, cloud storage and syncing, etc. But if you go back to the original iPhone UI, the basics will still work that way in iOS 8.
Seems like every time someone compliments the OS X Terminal, someone else pipes up with a list of commands and utilities it's missing or several versions back on, compared to a Linux distro.
I'm not super hardcore about shells or whatever though so I probably don't get exposed to many of those issues.
I do get the feeling that Apple is trying to take the approach of the Ubuntu LTS series and be fairly conservative on what they're including in the OS.
Ditto SwiftKey (although they announced a hard release date: tomorrow).
EDIT: I spoke too soon: Swype for iOS 8 is out now:
I also find that bugs that would have gotten Apple mocked in the press and caused a massive outrage are ignored in the Android world. Namely the year or so Google Play Services would randomly lose its mind and drain your battery and the never ending Chrome bug where clicking a link just leads to an immediate page not loading condition (blank page appears and the spinning loading icon stops immediately). Heck, even the new version of Chrome does this. Thankfully not as often.
If either of these happened in the iOS world, there would be a lot of yelling a demands for fixing, as opposed to the current state where serious bugs persist for months at a time.
I'm willing to give Android L a chance before I leave. Hoepfully, we'll be seeing a higher quality of product here.
Unlike some other iOS users' and ex-Android users' claims, I never experienced any significant lags or bugs in the new Android OSes on Nexus 4. I had some issues with WIFI on beta Jelly Bean, but that was a beta release for a reason. The so called scrolling problem on Android never happened to me at all.
I find that gripes people have with Android are the one that's overblown out of proportion. They probably used Android years ago back in 2.X days, and still have a bad taste from it.
Newer Androids are so much better than 2.X days, I would urge iOS users to try them out.
I installed as many keyboards as I found and tried every single one for about a day. I hated all of them. They were all different and some added interesting features, but I found that I could type fastest on my iphone's stock keyboard.
It just worked.
On my android device, I ended up restoring the stock keyboard and never looked back until I sold it and bought another iphone.
This was about 3 years ago, so maybe things changed since then.
I'd actually be interested to see an HN poll on this. I do not run an ad blocker and frankly I find most complaints about ads online to be totally overblown. Years ago there was a hellish amount of pop-ups, pop-overs and pop-unders, but these days I really don't have many problems, and I'm happy to support the sites I use.
So whilst I see where you're coming from, you can't just rule out annoying ads all together.
click ew
Adblock ftw.
The main difference I see now is that people with ad blockers talk about frequenting sites which have tons of ads, which doesn't send a message to the owner and probably actually exacerbates the problem since they'll toss bigger, more intrusive ads in ads the clicks-per-visitor rate drops. If I hit a site like that, I'll just leave and go somewhere else which respects its visitors more, particularly if they're savvy enough to follow the lead of sites like ArsTechnica which allow subscribers to disable ads.
If you are used to them and can block them out you're probably mentally doing the same job as an ad blocker.
Well, I can, but it requires a noticeably higher level of focus not to be distracted by movement in my peripheral vision - noticeable enough to be unpleasant.
I just tried disabled my adblocker temporarily; Ars Technica itself has exactly the kind of animated ads that I can't stand.
It's not just ads, though. It's all animations. I use image.animation_mode=once in Firefox to disable looping gif animations, use Flashblock, and generally disable anything that auto-starts whenever possible. The only thing I want animated on my screen is the cursor.
Also, to be fair to internet marketers, ads are much better than they used to be. The old 'punch the monkey style' ads are long gone outside of.. how do you say, questionable sites. Auto-playing videos are rare. Once in a blue moon I actually click on ads that are targeted to me. The system sometimes works.
Railing against ads just seems like a poseur-ish thing nowadays. I also feel especially bad blocking ads from sites I visit regularly. Its a dick-ish thing to do. It just seems better to keep open a dialogue on what we consider acceptable ads and what we consider unacceptable ads. Or help the site owner understand that they're better off with targeted ads or selling their ad space themselves, than joining some shady affiliate group with generic "This school teacher is making $900 a day" crap or, heaven forbid, video auto-play ads (which are pretty rare nowadays outside of news sites/youtube where the content is video but you're forced to sit through 35 seconds of ad before you can see it.)
A lot of annoying content isn't ads at all, its dhtml/css 'pop ups' asking you for your email address or facebook login or survey or whatever. ABP doesn't usually stop those either.
Loudly proclaiming you must use ABP is almost like saying, "Well, I visit tons of shady porn and torrent sites, where its more or less required." The non-shady web just seems like a better place than during the early 2000s when Flash ads ruled. YMMV of course.
If only we all focused on solving this direct payment problem[2] instead of actually actively working to further embed the advertising industry[3].
Sadly my comments along these lines always get downvoted because, as Upton Sinclair said, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7485773
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8008337
[3] "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks." – Jeff Hammerbacher, fmr. Manager of Facebook Data Team, founder of Cloudera
[1] https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/mercury-web-browser/id331012...
Takes some elbow grease, but the benefits of not loading ads should more than make up for the slowdown from going through a proxy.
If you find a site has annoying advertising then stop browsing it and find an alternative. Vote with your browsing habits.
The only logical explanation I can come to is... more RAM won't make a meaningful impact on the experience. More ram is the cure-all on a desktop but that's not apples-to-apples.
Well, not this time =p
Except when it would, as in, the case we are discussing right now.
I was under the impression that RAM had only negligible differences in consumption per-module, and capacity per-module has increased dramatically.
Besides, the main source of power usage is the screen.
Does a DRAM refresh for a denser chip draw substantially more power, or something?
(Legitimate question, I am obviously not an expert and I'd just love to learn more about this)
The reason is to give you better battery life and fewer issues caused by limited available memory.
People who are curious about system internals. Probably some of the people who read a site like HN. Even my dad likes to understand where these limitations originate and he's not a 'computer person' (though he is an engineer in another field).
Of course it matters. If you understand why, you can take steps to mitigate it or work around it. In this particular case, one workaround is to close unused programs and browser tabs every now and then to clear up memory so that the active tabs don't go through a forced-refresh. This is what I do on my 4S, and I haven't had to deal with the problem the OP describes in a long time despite being a "heavy" user.
Android, on the other hand, doesn't force this. All apps assume they can do whatever they want in the background, without being shut down. This means, on my low-memory Android, that opening an intense browsing session followed by Google Maps kills all of my background chat apps, making me unavailable. This is far more unacceptable in my opinion then having to wait for an app to reload.
(I would agree that iOS is too aggressive when it comes to memory management, though)
Edit: Formatting
I think you're underestimating one's capacity to accept a tradeoff. Once a person learns that RAM is constantly consuming power as it's being refreshed – and that a device with more RAM is going to have less standby time – they might appreciate the decision to try to do more with less.
I don't doubt that there is probably an explanation that makes sense, but based on what we know, the least malicious explanation is that they forgot to test WKWebView with local files, which doesn't make sense.
Honestly, with Apple sometimes I wonder. Safari had so, so many bugs when iOS7 launched that I no longer believe they spend a meaningful amount of time testing Safari before launch.
And then they complain that Android users don't buy their apps...
This works with AOSP Email and Gmail (maybe others as well).
When implemented. It's a weakness of Android that few developers take advantage of all the features - I suspect a lot of apps are made iOS-first, so if a feature isn't available in iOS, it isn't implemented on Android. I hope that iOS gaining this feature will mean it is used a lot more on Android, too.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.everything...
So it isn't quite the same, but nor does it require switching apps.
That already exists in the form of "read notifications".
That's why I really like them. If I go away for 5 minutes in the middle of conversation, I don't have to tell the person about it, they'll see their messages were no longer read.
But now Apple has totally ditched the 4" hardware factor - the main reason I liked the hardware so much. To me, Apple has lost an edge by doing that.
So I could go through the process of switching from Android to iOS for... one phone generation. Doesn't seem quite so worth it then.
EDIT: by updates I mean hardware updates. The 4" form factor is still alive in terms of devices you can buy, but it's dead in terms of development.
If you're about to switch ecosystem and hate anything but 4", I'd get the 5S, it's still a fantastic phone with a top-class processor, top-class camera, awesome screen, good battery, and whatnot. It'll still be updated for 2-3 years software-wise, so it's more than enough for an ecosystem jump; after all, in 3 years, you might want to jump again somewhere else for different reasons.
For example: The iPhone 4S was released in October 2011. In October 2013, Apple released iOS 7. While iOS 7 supports the 4S, it increases RAM overhead to the point that switching from app A to app B kills app A the vast majority of the time. (This is terribly annoying when you're writing, you switch to a web browser to look something up, and when you switch back the thing you were writing disappears.)
The user adoption rate of new OSes is ridiculously high. This means you will have maybe 3-6 months after the new OS comes out before apps no longer support the old one.
The 8GB really bogs down and the 16GB has noticeable lag.
I know folks using iOS7 on a 16GB iPhone4 with no issues either (it's slower, but quite usable).
So, for all us people with small hands, what do you think we should do? Buy a 5.5" phone and use it like a tablet? That's not really practical :/
I will be very interested to see if Apple continues having 4", 4.7", and 5.5" phones in its line-up over the next few years. It seems like a natural spread that covers a good number of different use cases.
https://twitter.com/stuartparmenter/status/51207180752061644...
I have noticed that the Gmail app load time, on the iPhone, is unusably slow but it is one of the apps I need to use daily.
I love how gmail works/syncs across all platforms (my iPad on iOS, two Android devices, PC laptop and Mac desktop) and doesn't limit me to the Mac/iOS platform.
Also there's search... Mail.app does not handle search well for Gmail.
Did iOS7 also have similar requirement? I dont record that happened last time.
However to have that kind of update rate their iPhone must have been able to update, I am not so sure everyone had 5GB free space
For me, that's the feature of iOS 8 I'm most excited about.
I'm really looking forward to do some hobby graphics/game development using Go and have that run on my iOS device.
It looks like there are still some limitations that Apple could fix: http://codeflow.org/entries/2014/jun/08/some-issues-with-app...
about 75% of all user already have a browser with WebGL support: http://webglstats.com/
Edit: would appreciate an explanation for the downvote. Does iOS already allow this and I missed it?
Of course, the iPhone has it's strengths too, but I just want to get work done.
That's over _half_ of the maximum available capacity on my 16 GB model. No wonder they're releasing 128 GB iPhones now.
That's still huge.
The biggest annoyance is the password screen animation doesn't really work at all, and I'm sure other animations aren't as fast as they could be but the login is the only place I notice it. The iPad 2 has more GPU/pixel so I wouldn't expect it to be worse.
Apps work fine, Safari is better than ever.