My iOS7 Annoyances
Last week I upgraded my iPhone 4s to iOS7 and am mostly satisfied with the new version of Apple’s mobile operating system. But I wouldn’t be me if I weren’t annoyed by some of what I’ve seen.
Here are a few of my issues:
- Notification Center has been upgraded to be 3 screens rather than 1. The first screen is called Today and features Calender, Weather and Stocks. The second page is called All and it displays all of your app notifications. The third tab is called Missed and it shows you all of the notifications you have not yet acted on in reverse chronological order.
The Today page is actually quite useful but has a major flaw. When it shows your schedule it displays only the next 6 hours from your calendar in Calendar view. This actually only gives you part of your day and shows your appointments interspersed with open time. This takes up too much space on the screen and limits it’s usability. More helpful would be a List view similar to the iOS6 Notification Center that shows the time and description of all your appointments for today. If it’s late in the day or you only have a couple of items in your schedule for the day then maybe it could show tomorrow’s appointments too.
But my annoyance here is actually something tangential to this. Not only does it not display in List view but List view isn’t even an option. I can understand a default view but at least give me the option to change it.
- While on the subject of calendars, the Calendar app has an annoyance as well. It too defaults to Calendar view but gone is the toggle to switch from Calendar to List view. On first glance it seems like List view was removed altogether. But it’s not. If you tap the search icon you are suddenly in List view with a search field at the top of the screen. A better user experience would be to have the toggle and have the search field visible at all times. Or, if the search field would clutter the screen too much, have the toggle with the search button and when the user taps to search push the screen down.
- iOS7 introduces a new feature called Control Center. With a simple swipe up from the bottom of the screen you can pull up a subset of settings such as turning on and off WiFi & Bluetooth and setting the screen brightness. Control Center also displays a mini player, so you can see what audio is playing and control progress, as well as icons for four apps (Flashlight, Timer, Calculator and Camera).
Control Center is actually a really great feature and I use it regularly for turning on and off Airplane Mode, WiFi and Bluetooth, as needed, and controlling the music that’s playing. But I hardly ever use the Flashlight, Timer and Calculator features. Unfortunately I can’t customize this area of Control Center. In fact, I can’t customize Control Center at all.
- Unlike previous versions of iOS on the iPhone, iOS7 has a separate app for Facetime. (Previously it was a accessed through Contacts.) This is a nice touch that makes it easier to use Facetime. However, when you launch the Facetime app you see an odd background. Examining it closely reveals that it’s an out of focus picture from your front facing camera (the one you use when in an active Facetime call). Why would they design this app, part of an operating system that is known to be a battery drain, to use a camera, which uses quite a bit of battery power, for a background? Especially since a static background would work better because it wouldn’t distract you from the foreground.
- App updates have changed in a couple of ways. The first is the ability to set apps to update automatically. I don’t like this feature but am not annoyed by it because I can see how it can be useful to many people. It’s the second way app updates have changed that annoys me.
In iOS6 and earlier when you would tap “Update All” to update several apps the system would limit the updates such that no more than 2 apps were updating at a any time. But updating all the apps at the same time causes the phone to freeze as several apps battle for the resources needed to update themselves.
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