iOS 10 Notes
My initial impression is that I don’t have a strong reaction either way. A lot of things are a little nicer. Some are a little worse.
I initially ran into a lot of errors syncing with iTunes on my Mac, but that mysteriously fixed itself after a day or so. I continue to see a bug where there’s a delay before dictation works with my Bluetooth headset.
Probably the worst problem is that auto-correct is much less accurate. I went from typing pretty quickly and very accurately to frequently typing long strings of nonsense. They don’t even look like words, and it takes multiple tries to correct them. And, secondly, when I am typing slowly and not making mistakes, it is more aggressive about “correcting” to a completely different word. Hopefully, either iOS will adapt to the way I type or I will fix whatever I’m doing wrong.
The camera audio bug is finally fixed. HDR still doesn’t stay on. Importing photos via Image Capture now requires me to unlock the phone.
The Bedtime feature is interesting but a bit odd. It doesn’t consistently remind me to go to bed, and there seems to be no way to preview the wake-up sounds. [Update: The sounds do play, but very quietly. The preview seems to use the ringer volume (which I had set to the minimum) rather than the one in Bedtime (which I had set to maximum).]
For full reviews, see Andrew Cunningham, Nick Heer, David Pogue, Rene Ritchie, and Federico Viticci.
The biggest change in iOS 10, the thing that required the most retraining for me, happens right at the beginning of every interaction.
In iOS 9, I began using my iPhone by putting my thumb on the home button of my iPhone 6S and pushing. Touch ID would sense my fingerprint and unlock the phone. Yes, it blew past all my notifications, but it was fast.
With iOS 10, I’ve needed to train myself to do things in an entirely different way.
I’m confused by this new iOS 10 device unlock process. I have to do this 100s of times a day and now suddenly it’s possible to do it wrong.
Each major iOS release brings big headline features that Apple announces on stage. But there’s always a lot of great little improvements and polish, many bringing improvements worthy of their own headlines. I kept a running list of these big little iOS 10 features while testing the public betas. Now it’s time to share with the rest of the class.
I’d like to share ten of the most useful and relevant highlights to help you make the most of iOS 10.
OMG the new Messages interface is so much worse than before. Mystery meat unlabelled buttons for everything.
Ashley Feinberg (via John Gordon):
Apple seems to be using search (in this case powered by Bing) to pull GIFs from a number of different sources. Its only censorship method thus far seems to be blocking potentially problematic words like “boobs” and “penis” and—as of this morning—“butt.” And there’s no reason for Apple to think that the word “huge” would bring up anything more than, say, a particularly large pillow or strawberry, except for the fact that of course it fucking would.
After iOS 10 update, all shortcuts are gone and when re-added, don’t sync.
Lots of people have been asking where the Shuffle or Repeat buttons are in the iOS 10 Music app. And it’s true, they’re not easy to find.
The problem is, the screen where you swipe up to reveal them doesn’t offer any sort of visual indication that there’s a reason to swipe up.
Genius is one of my favorite features in iTunes and the iOS Music app. It’s full of surprises. But it seems that Apple doesn’t like it any more. They changed the way you make Genius playlists in iTunes 12.3, and now they’ve removed it from the iOS Music app.
It's been a few days now, and the reality of the iOS 10 music ecosystem is beginning to settle. The redesigned Apple music player has been polarizing, to say the least, and one of the most dismayed groups are users who rely heavily on star ratings.
In iOS 10, ratings in general are buried deeper in the UI. Apple has made it a little more tedious to access their proprietary Love/Dislike algorithm, but the older 5-star system has been removed entirely.
I’ve been tracking the performance of new iOS versions on the slowest supported hardware for four years now, and I don’t think my findings have been positive since I wrote about iOS 6 on the iPhone 3GS. iOS 7 was a bad fit for the iPhone 4, and iOS 7.1 was only an improvement in a relative sense. iOS 8 and iOS 9 were tolerable on the iPhone 4S, but they were still significant slowdowns compared to iOS 6 and 7.
But we have some reason to be optimistic about iOS 10 on the iPhone 5.
With iOS 10, you can use your iOS device as a magnifying glass.
I like the move back towards thicker fonts.
heyeased (via Isaac Halvorson):
The history of the 1px wallpaper effect, iOS 7.0-7.1: It could not set to wallpaper (App crashed), 8.0-8.2:Folders were pale blue tone (I vaguely remember Dock had a dark color also on 1px.), 8.3-9.3: these were gray tone and the background was never darkened on any color, and 10: the background is darkened on any color but Dock and folders are the original color. It has been changed three times since iOS 7.
This release (iOS 10.0.1) contains a total of 37 new emojis, or 632 emoji updates in total. This latter figure includes completely new characters as well as redesigned images for existing emojis.
Despite all of the things I thought Apple did right in iOS 10, I found their lack of support for the iPad as a unique platform to be disappointing. I know they can’t hit every item on their internal wish list with each release, but after the robust enhancements to the iPad experience in iOS 9, seeing many of this year’s improvements be scaled-up versions of the iPhone experience was not encouraging. In particular, the lack of significant improvements for the 12.9-inch iPad Pro seems worrying.
I had initial iTunes sync issues as well the first day — always got stuck on syncing calendars... seemed to go away the next day.
The most annoying thing for me so far is that you can't hide the QuickType keyboard anymore. The traditional autocorrect was much more effective for me, and when you combine QuickType with the thicker headings in Messages, iOS 10 on an iPhone SE feels a lot more cramped than iOS 9 was.