Hands on with iOS 4: Thoughts, one week on

Quick flicking between apps

Ghostly icons

Opinion on Apple’s implementation of Multi-tasking and the task switcher are sharply divided: many like it, but almost as many seem to hate it. While it’s hard to know exactly how multitasking will work until apps that support it start being pushed to our devices, the task switcher is working fully in the iOS 4 GM and I’m still undecided on it. For that reason, I’m putting it in both ‘The Good’ AND ‘The Bad’. On the upside, flicking between apps that you’ve recently used is very quick. If you’re browsing Safari and receive a text, Safari is just a double-tap of the home button and a tap of the Safari icon away. That may not sound like it would be any quicker than the OS 1 thru 3 method of quitting to home-screen and launching the other app, but it feels it. Even the transition animation where the two apps briefly share the same screen before switching place makes it feel quick.

Spell check

Spel it properlee

Spell check barely registered a raise of an eyebrow from me when it was announced as it hardly sounds exciting, but in reality it’s a god-send. You still get the auto-correction for obviously mis-spelled words, but if you still manage to spell it wrong you will see a dotted red line underlining your offending word. Tap it briefly and a pop-up that resembles the select/select all/copy pop-up will give you suggestions which you can tap on to choose. It is so much easier than having to go back and manually correct spelling and it works across the entire OS. Great stuff.

Wallpaper

Customise it! (Click to enlarge)

It’s great to finally be able to use wallpaper on your home screen. When I see screenshots of the OS 1 thru 3 black backdrop now it looks so… bare. Why this wasn’t part of the OS from the outset is beyond me, but it’s here now and it’s great. You’ll want to be a bit selective as to what you use as wallpaper however – so much of the screen is covered with icons that photos of loved ones etc really don’t work and you’ll want to stick to patterns. Drop shadows are added to the white text below your icons so pale wallpapers aren’t too much of a problem but you’ll soon figure out what works and what doesn’t. Being able to use a different wallpaper for the lock screen is a neat touch.

Camera Zoom

The implementation of folders is really great. Under 3.1.3, I had about seven screens of apps, which was messy. It was cumbersome flicking through all the screens and it actually held me back from installing more apps because I just couldn’t deal with the ‘mess’. Sometimes I would actually uninstall apps that I actually liked just because I wanted to shrink the number of screens I was using. That is gone now. On the main home screen I have all the stock apps as normal, plus iTunes and the App Store in a ‘Stores’ folder. On the next page I have every other app I need installed across 16 folders that fit onto just one screen. There is plenty of room to add more apps to these folders and it suddenly feels like my phone is so much more ready to load up with what ever I want.

Counter for texts

Text counter

This is mobile phone 101 stuff that, again, should have been here from the outset but I’m loving the new character counter in the Messaging app. The counter doesn’t appear until you’ve gone onto the second line, but it leaves you in no doubt as to whether you’re going to be charged for a SMS or a MMS.

.co.nz!!!

Spot the difference

As Dan reported a couple of weeks back, holding down ‘.com’ on the keyboard now gives you more options, including ‘.co.nz’. What a difference that makes! Typing ‘.co.nz’ used to be so annoying – just six little characters but so much swapping between letters and symbols — no more!

Much faster wifi

Wifi friendly?

This could just be to do with my own home setup, but data speeds under wifi are much faster for me under iOS 4. Under 3.x.x attachments in email would take forever to load and YouTube would buffer for so long before playing, but now everything is pretty much instant. I’ve done speed tests using the speedtest.net app and have found that the speeds being captured are pretty much the same as all other devices on my network, whereas before results would vary wildly. Like I said, it could be something particular to my network, but I have a pretty common router and setup so this could be a bonus for you, too.

Mail app automatically generates appointments in Calender app

Ta-da!!

This is one of my favourite new features. If somebody sends you an email and suggests an appointment at a particular time in plain English, mail will turn the time within the body of an email into a link. Tapping the link will generate a calendar appointment at the correct date and time, with the location suggested in the location field. For example, in the above screenshot Dan has suggested we meet for coffee at Starbucks at 3pm ‘next wednesday’, and without any correction or messing around Mail has added the appointment to Calendar at the correct date and time. Pure awesome!

Quitting apps takes you back to folder

Quiting an app takes you back to the folder

This one really frustrated me at first, and it still does a little. When you quit an app that was launched from within a folder, pressing the home button will take you back to that folder. You then need to either press the home button again or tap somewhere outside of the folder for it to close, and then navigate back to the main home-screen if that’s where you’re wanting to go. That’s a lot more button presses than before and I still find it really jarring — you hit the home button and for a second or so you’re thinking ‘Oh! Where am I?’. I’d like to see some control over this behaviour because I preferred it before – I want it to dump me back to the main home-screen as the way I see it, odds are that the next app I want to launch is not going to be in the same folder as the last.

App Switcher is un-intuitive

Two iPod app icons... really??

Oh, App switcher. What did you do to my beautiful iPhone? Yes, I mentioned some things I like about it in the ‘good’ section, but it’s a real double-edged sword. If you haven’t seen the app switcher in action, it’s activated via a double-tap of the home button. The screen shifts up and exposes a row of four icons. The four icons you see are the four most recently-used apps, and tapping them will quickly switch to that app. Swiping to the left will reveal the iPod contols, screen orientation lock and a permanent link to the iPod app itself, whilst swiping to the right will reveal the next four most recently used apps.

Sounds okay so far, right? Well, the problem is that every time you open a new app it adds it to the app switcher, so after a few days pretty much all of your apps are there and if you want to get to one you haven’t used in a while you have to keep swiping through a million screens to get to it. Yes, you can shut apps down completely and remove them from the task bar (even though Steve Jobs said having this function meant you had ‘failed’), but it is a one-by-one process and makes things even more confusing — why have Apple given me the ability to quit apps from the Task switcher?  Is it because once apps start using the multi-tasking APIs they are going to be resource hogs? I hope not because I really don’t want to have to get into the habit of quitting apps from the app switcher.

I think that apps should have a time-limit for the app switcher. If you haven’t used a certain app within, say, an hour or two, it should disappear from the app switcher. That way the app switcher is kept clean and becomes genuinely useful as it’s a way of switching between the apps that you really do frequently switch between. Some of the apps, like the phone app and the iPod app, need never appear in the app switcher in my opinion.

Menus remember their place

This is going to be another one that you either love or hate. Dan and I are at odds about it, so I’d love to know what you guys think. When you go into Settings, for example, and go through various sub-menus to make a change and then quit back out, when you go back into Settings it will open at the same place that you last left it. Again, I find it jarring – I open settings and I expect to see the top-level menu, but I could be looking at the Ringtones menu or the Network settings or anything at all when I go into it now.

YouTube remembers place

I really don’t like this. Just like the settings menu, YouTube remembers where you get to and opens at the same point next time. What this means is that if you open the app, search for a video, and get three minutes into it before quitting out, when you next fire up the app it will start playing that video at three minutes. Sometimes this might be useful but generally speaking if you quit out of watching a YouTube app part way through it’s because you have decided you don’t want to see the rest. Again it’s jarring, and what’s worse in this scenario is that it is going to start consuming your mobile data allocation on a video you probably don’t want to see.

Very buggy until restore + new profile

iOS 4 does not like your OS3 profile

When I first updated to the iOS 4 GM I found it very buggy and I couldn’t believe this could be a final release. Things like calendars not syncing, apps crashing, photos not deleting properly, you name it. In the end I tried restoring my phone and starting a new profile. This seemed to fix the issues I was having but as soon as I restored from my backup the issues were back. I found the only solution was to start a brand new profile. This meant backing up all my photos etc and then starting from scratch including re-installing all my apps and music. It took about three hours but I now have a pretty much bug-free device. I recommend doing this, but it is a pain.