Showing posts with label what. Show all posts
Showing posts with label what. Show all posts
Wednesday, May 13, 2015
Its the little things What we like and dont like in iOS 7
Now that we’ve been living with iOS 7 for a while, we’ve had a chance to uncover some little things we might not have noticed at first.
Some of those little things are good, others not so much. Here’s our list. What about yours? Let us know in the comments below.
What we like
Wayfinding and leveling with Compass: In iOS 7, Compass received a thorough revamp, gaining a couple of cool new features. One my favorites: Say you’re trying to find your way in a specific direction. Just orient yourself in that direction, and then tap the compass. Now, when you start to stray from the direction you specified, a red bar on screen indicates just how far off course you are. My other favorite: If you swipe to the left on the compass, you bring up the new level, which works when you place the phone flat on a surface or set it on its side.—Dan Moren
Wayfinding and leveling with Compass: In iOS 7, Compass received a thorough revamp, gaining a couple of cool new features. One my favorites: Say you’re trying to find your way in a specific direction. Just orient yourself in that direction, and then tap the compass. Now, when you start to stray from the direction you specified, a red bar on screen indicates just how far off course you are. My other favorite: If you swipe to the left on the compass, you bring up the new level, which works when you place the phone flat on a surface or set it on its side.—Dan Moren
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| The iTunes Store wish list. |
Wish List in the iTunes Store: I’ve used the Wish List in iTunes on my Mac for years to keep track of music I want to buy someday. I was never able to access that list from my iPhone—until iOS 7 came along. Now, I can tap the list icon at the top right of the screen in the iTunes Store app to get access to my Wish List. (There’s also a list of tracks I’ve previewed or played in iTunes Radio.) Coincidentally, my Wish List is also more accessible now on my Mac, too, thanks to iTunes 11.1: For example, when I like a track in iTunes Radio, I can add it to the list with one click on a contextual menu.—Dan Miller
Specifying short names in Mail, Messages: The new Short Name feature, which you can find by going toSettings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars > Contacts, lets you customize how contact names display in Mail and Messages, when real estate is at a premium. If you activate it, you can opt to show first name and last initial, first initial and last name, or first or last name only. Moreover, you can ask iOS to show nicknames to shorten things even more, so you see ‘Dan’ instead of ‘Daniel’, for instance.—Dan Moren
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| Timestamps in Messages. |
Reminders geofence perimeter: The geofencing capabilities of Reminders are handy when you need a location-based reminder. But if you’ve ever wished for more fine-grained control over when your phone believes you’ve arrived at your Home or Work location, iOS 7 can help. When you select a location, you’ll now see a small map, with a blue circle around the location’s address. By tapping and dragging on the black handle of that circle, you can expand or contract the area in which your reminder will fire. So if you want to remember to call someone when you’re a couple of miles from home, Reminders is your new best friend.—Dan Moren
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| Shared links in Safari. |
Timer on the home screen: You probably know that you can set a timer using Siri—it’s even more efficient than using the timer shortcut in Control Center. But when you want to check on that timer, the easiest thing to do, by far, is simply to wake up your iPhone. You’ll see the current timer, counting down, on the lock screen, right beneath the clock. Even better, when the timer is done, you can silence it from the lock screen, with just a tap.—Dan Moren
More info in Weather: The Weather app now includes sunset and sunrise times, as well as the basic high and low temps. Just side-scroll on the hourly forecast section, and it’ll include the time the sun is coming up or going down—handy whether you’re trying to plan a morning run or you’re a vampire concerned about curfew.—Scholle Sawyer McFarland
Swipe right to go back: In most stock iOS apps, as well as many apps that have been updated to support iOS 7, the familiar Back arrow in the upper-left corner of the screen is gone. You now navigate to the previous view (whatever that was) by swiping to the right from the left edge of the screen. I initially disliked this approach, because it wasn’t obvious and I didn’t know exactly where that gesture would get me. (The arrow would always include the name of the previous screen or section.) But after using iOS 7 for a while, I have to say the swipe-back gesture has grown on me. In fact, I’ve gotten so used to it that when I encounter an app that hasn’t been updated to use the gesture, I find my self swiping right, over and over again, wondering why nothing is happening.—Dan Frakes
What bugs us
Control Center’s tricky target: Although I like the new Control Center, I wish it were easier to summon. Yes, it sounds simple: Just swipe upward from the bottom of the screen. But in my experience, it takes a few swipes before Control Center actually appears. Perhaps I’ll acquire the touch over time, but for now I find it really frustrating (especially, for some reason, on the iPad mini).—Christopher Breen
Wasted space in home-screen folders: In iOS 6, folders on the home screen could display up to 20 apps at a time on the iPad, and 16 at a time on the iPhone 5 and the most recent iPod touch. In iOS 7, you see only nine apps at a time. Granted, you can now put many more items in a folder and then swipe to navigate among multiple folder screens. But the nine-apps-at-a-time limit—which appears to have been implemented solely for aesthetic reasons, so folders can zoom out and in gracefully—feels like it’s wasting a lot of useful space. Worse, it forces you to perform more taps and swipes to access a given app.—Dan Frakes, Armando Rodriguez
Email groups in Mail: While iOS Mail has improved steadily with each major update to iOS, it still doesn’t support sending to email groups. And the iOS Contacts app still doesn’t let you create such groups. You can, of course, create contact groups in OS X’s Contacts app. But those groups don’t function the same way in iOS as they do in OS X. I can’t, for example, send an email to the ‘Macworld Editors’ group on my iPhone—the group doesn’t even show up. And, while I’m at it: When filing email, Mail no longer remembers your last-used position in the mailbox list; you have to scroll from the top each time. And although it’s great that you can now search all mailboxes from within Mail, iOS 7 has eliminated the option to search only, say, message subjects or senders.—Dan Frakes
Less accessible media controls: In iOS 6, you could always bring up the media-control buttons from the lock screen—even if you weren’t currently playing media—by double-pressing the Home button. That made it easy to resume listening to your most recently listened-to track. In iOS 7, if you disable Control Center on the lock screen (which is better for security), you can’t initiate media playback without unlocking your phone and opening whatever music-playing app you usually use; the media controls appear on the lock screen only if you’re already listening to something.—Dan Frakes
That tiny blue new-app indicator: The little blue badge that iOS 7 puts next to new or newly updated apps is really hard to make out, especially if you’re using a lighter-colored background. It isn’t as prominent as the old ‘New’ banner we had in iOS 6, so figuring out if you’ve used an app since you downloaded it is harder.—Armando Rodriguez
Folders versus bookmarks in Safari: In the past, telling the difference between folders and bookmarks in iOS Safari’s bookmarks list was really easy. But now, owing to the “simplification” of iOS 7’s visual language, each of them has a similar blue outline; you have to squinch up your eyes to tell the difference. The problem is particularly annoying on an iPad mini.—Christopher Breen
A less powerful Spotlight: iOS 7 makes Spotlight easier to access, but it also makes the feature less useful. You can now search for files only locally, whereas before you could also use Spotlight to quickly search Google or Wikipedia. I can understand Apple’s wanting us to rely on Siri for quick Web searches, but the virtual assistant is less reliable, and sometimes I don’t feel like dictating everything I’m searching for.—Armando Rodriguez
Data source: via Macworld (By Macworld Staff)
Control Center’s tricky target: Although I like the new Control Center, I wish it were easier to summon. Yes, it sounds simple: Just swipe upward from the bottom of the screen. But in my experience, it takes a few swipes before Control Center actually appears. Perhaps I’ll acquire the touch over time, but for now I find it really frustrating (especially, for some reason, on the iPad mini).—Christopher Breen
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| Folders in the iOS 7 home screen. |
Email groups in Mail: While iOS Mail has improved steadily with each major update to iOS, it still doesn’t support sending to email groups. And the iOS Contacts app still doesn’t let you create such groups. You can, of course, create contact groups in OS X’s Contacts app. But those groups don’t function the same way in iOS as they do in OS X. I can’t, for example, send an email to the ‘Macworld Editors’ group on my iPhone—the group doesn’t even show up. And, while I’m at it: When filing email, Mail no longer remembers your last-used position in the mailbox list; you have to scroll from the top each time. And although it’s great that you can now search all mailboxes from within Mail, iOS 7 has eliminated the option to search only, say, message subjects or senders.—Dan Frakes
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| Media controls in Control Center (from the regular home screen). |
That tiny blue new-app indicator: The little blue badge that iOS 7 puts next to new or newly updated apps is really hard to make out, especially if you’re using a lighter-colored background. It isn’t as prominent as the old ‘New’ banner we had in iOS 6, so figuring out if you’ve used an app since you downloaded it is harder.—Armando Rodriguez
Folders versus bookmarks in Safari: In the past, telling the difference between folders and bookmarks in iOS Safari’s bookmarks list was really easy. But now, owing to the “simplification” of iOS 7’s visual language, each of them has a similar blue outline; you have to squinch up your eyes to tell the difference. The problem is particularly annoying on an iPad mini.—Christopher Breen
A less powerful Spotlight: iOS 7 makes Spotlight easier to access, but it also makes the feature less useful. You can now search for files only locally, whereas before you could also use Spotlight to quickly search Google or Wikipedia. I can understand Apple’s wanting us to rely on Siri for quick Web searches, but the virtual assistant is less reliable, and sometimes I don’t feel like dictating everything I’m searching for.—Armando Rodriguez
Data source: via Macworld (By Macworld Staff)
Tuesday, March 31, 2015
What on Earth Is Minecraft 10 Things to Know About Microsofts Billion Dollar Acquisition
With over 54 million copies sold, Minecraft represents the biggest niche audience since gaming itself. News that Microsoft has acquired Minecraft maker Mojang for $2.5 billion should have gotten your attention, so lets take a look at what Minecraft is. The game itself was released nearly five years ago, so this isnt an in-depth explanation - just a quick guide to get non-gamers up to date with what the hype is about.
1. Minecraft is a video game
This should be obvious, but Minecraft is a video game that was first released in an "alpha" state in 2009. You might be familiar with the concept of a beta, where software is released but continues to be developed to remove bugs. An alpha is what comes before the beta - where youre not just testing for bugs but still developing the key features, and creating art, sound and other assets in case of video games.
Minecraft was originally released as a PC game, but over the years as its popularity grew, it was ported to more platforms. Today, you can get Minecraft for Windows, OS X, Linux, Android, iOS, Xbox 360, Xbox One, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, and PlayStation Vita.
2. Minecraft isnt really a video game
While Minecraft has many game-like elements, its really much more like digital Lego. The game itself doesnt really have a goal - you can explore the world, and build what you want. In Survival mode - which is the closest Minecraft gets to a game, you have a health bar which can be depleted by attacks from monsters, starvation, suffocation and more events.
You can make armour and weapons, and build defences, breed animals and more. Then theres Creative mode, where you have access to most of the resources through a menu, and you can fly around the world. Youre free to build large projects, and just have fun.
3. Minecraft has sold over 54 million copies
Whether you think that Minecraft is a game or not, theres no denying that it is a success. Taking into account all platforms, Minecraft has sold over 54 million copies. You can play Minecraft by yourself and create things on your own, and if you want, you can connect to this huge community in multiplayer worlds, where you can work together to build things.
4. It looks like first-person Lego
Minecraft has a unique visual style that has inspired quite a few imitators by now. Everything is made up of blocks - including your character, and even the water looks blocky. This is a deliberate stylistic choice, although some players use mods to change the way Minecraft looks. Funnily enough, while Minecraft has been described as digital Lego at least partly for this reason, there are now official Lego Minecraft sets you can buy.
5. There is mining, and crafting
In survival mode, you start the game empty-handed and need to hit blocks to collect them. So you can hit a tree, and get some wood, for example. Thats the most basic thing you can do though. The next step is to use the crafting grid to turn those blocks of wood into planks. From there, you can turn the planks into a crafting table, where you can make more complex items - such as a wooden axe, with which you can get wood faster. Keep crafting and your mining becomes better.
The more you mine, the more materials and combinations become possible, and after that, you can start to build highly complex structures. People have made reproductions of Hogwarts and real world locations like the Eiffel Tower, giant Marios bestriding the blocky tiles, and even simple towers to protect themselves. Using special "redstone" blocks that can have more than one state, people have built calculators and even computers, investing a huge amount of time and effort to work it all out and then put them together.
6. You can play Minecraft inside Minecraft
You know how we mentioned that using redstone blocks you can create binary switches and make computers? Setting up several thousand of these blocks, some people have even made a very basic 2D Minecraft that you can play - inside Minecraft. The scale of the work required to do this honestly boggles the mind, and thats just putting it all together.
First, someone had to figure out how to make this whole system of tens of thousands of bricks to work together.
7. The world of Minecraft is 9 million times the size of Earth
The world of Minecraft is theoretically infinite - the areas are made up of chunks that are loaded as required. There are some technical limitations to the total space possible, and therefore, the total surface area is 4.7 quadrillion kilometres squared. The Earth is "just" 510 million kilometres squared, making Minecraft effectively over 9 times bigger.
8. Minecraft helped popularise the "early access" model
Today, paying for a game that is still a work in progress isnt a big deal. Theres Kickstarter of course, where you might pay for something thats barely an idea. And then theres something like Steam Early Access, where you can pay for games that are still being made.
Minecraft is probably the most famous example of the trend - players could buy the game in the initial development stages, the alpha and later the beta, all the way up to the final release. At each stage, the cost of the game went up, but if you bought an older version of the game, you were assured a copy of the final game at no additional cost, along with other benefits. Games like DayZ would come along later and cement the model, but Minecraft is certainly one of the games that set the early trend.
9. Minecraft has a huge fanbase, with merchandise and meetups
There are Minecraft conventions, including the official one - MineCon, which has taken place in locations like Washington, Las Vegas, Disneyland Paris and Orlando, Florida. These events were heavily attended and show how involved the community is. On the Minecraft website, you can buy a lot of merchandise as well, ranging from soft toys to vinyl figures, foam swords, blocky torches, mugs, posters and clothes.
Minecraft might have started as a digital distraction, but it is very much present in the real world today.
10. Minecraft has applications well beyond Minecraft
Minecraft has been discussed as a teaching tool for Computer Aided Design, and for other educational tasks. It can be used to build virtual designs for 3D printers, for example. This year, the Danish Geodata Agency recreated all of Denmark at a 1:1 scale in Minecraft, a virtual world anyone can visit. Minecraft has also been introduced in several schools to teach subjects such as history and science. For example, teachers have taken advantage of the popularity of the game to build multiplayer servers where they can recreate the pyramids, and other monuments, together in Minecraft.
Windows 9 Preview What the Next Microsoft OS Will and Should Bring
Microsoft did something very...er... interesting in October 2012. It launched Windows 8, the operating system that would "unify" Microsofts platforms across PCs, phones and tablets. Except, there was a fairly large flaw in the plan.
Microsofts vision of unification wasnt just from an engineering perspective. The company also wanted a unified user interface across all its devices.
Now lets think about that for a second. Traditional PC users (both desktop and laptop) were used to mice and keyboards. They had been using these two devices pretty much since the advent of the PC. Various companies had also managed to add support for other input devices over the years, but no one was really using a touchscreen on the desktop.
Microsofts presence in the tablet market was non-existent, for all intents and purposes. Very few "tablet PCs" existed, running full versions of Windows 7 with the lowest power Intel Core processors available at the time. They were heavy, didnt have great battery life, and only seemed to be useful for designers and artistic folk, whod use a stylus to draw.
Most people were either using iOS or Android tablets, and few people were clamouring for a Windows equivalent of these two.
Finally, lets consider the phone market, where Microsoft had slight success with Windows Phone 7 and has since had a little more with Windows Phone 8 and 8.1. Its market share was fairly insignificant, and the company would have really needed something special to make things work out.
There were, at the time, around 1 billion Windows PCs in the world, 99 percent not using a touchscreen monitor. Less than 5 percent of smartphones ran any version of Windows Phone, and there were barely any tablet PCs. In that backdrop, Microsofts decision to release an OS that was optimised for touch-screen devices, rather than traditional input methods, seems premature to say the least.
Whats worse is that the UI was aesthetically, and in many cases functionally, seen as a regression from Windows 7, which is still the most popular PC operating system. Bringing back the Start Menu is an example that Microsoft is backing down from its aggressive way of teaching users new behaviour.
After two years of bug fixes, patches, question marks over the future of Windows RT, and an awkward operating system that was arguably a bigger flop than Vista in terms of adoption and user satisfaction (despite being technically more sound), Microsoft has slowly come around to accepting the reality.
September 30 is the speculated date for the "preview" version of Windows "Threshold", also informally called Windows 9 by most of the tech press. Sites have generously leaked videos and screenshots of a legit-looking preview build of Threshold.
Looking at the videos, youll be able to see that the interface is still mostly flat and boring like Windows 8. Im curious as to why they made an OS as pretty as Windows 7 and then went back to the flatness of the Windows 3.1 days, though thats down to personal taste.
Moving on, we see the return of the start menu , just with tiles thrown in. If you compare this start menu to the present one of Windows 7, it strikes me as less useful, as it simply links to fewer things. The entire right column is filled with tiles. What used to be in the right column (Control Panel, Documents, etc.) end up as pinned items, quite obviously taking up space used for pinned programs in Windows 7.
Of course, when compared to Windows 8, this is much better than making obscure "charm" gestures, or receiving a face full of that jarring start screen.
Metro (or Modern) UI apps can now be (mercifully) run in windowed mode, and can be minimised. While some may question the utility of these in the PC version of the OS, the main complaint with Windows 8.x was not having a choice, so I guess this is step in the right direction. The same goes for the existence of "PC Settings" when the Control Panel exists, and two different calculators, one for touch screens and the other being the old one were used to on Windows 7. Of course these are still early days, and all this may yet be fixed before Windows 9 reaches the consumers.
Well also most likely see virtual desktops, like on Linux systems and OS X. You can switch between different desktops, and have different windows on each. This would, in theory, allow you to switch between multiple workflows. The actual implementation looks a bit sketchy, however. Im specifically talking about window management; the creation, removal and navigation of virtual desktops looks good enough.
Long story short, from whatever weve seen so far, Threshold seems like a mixed bag. Its sort of Microsoft saying, "Hey, we made really bad decision with that Modern UI stuff but heres a compromise." But its clear that the company still hasnt quite let go of those tiles, which suggests the company is continuing to walk the tightrope between listening to user feedback and going ahead with what it believes is the future of Windows.
Microsoft must keep in mind that the function of a good operating system is to provide a stable and secure environment for applications and users to interact in, not sell itself as one giant overblown "app".
Unifying the interfaces of PCs, tablets and phones wasnt a good plan either, as Windows 8 proved. Three different type of devices and two different input models cant be fitted into one box. Even Apple and Google keep PC and mobile separate, so one wonders if Microsoft is on the right track with its one size fits all policy. Kernel code sharing doesnt mean having a common UI. And blindly sharing features is known as taking a shortcut.
Tablets, convertibles and 2-in-1s are devices that can benefit from both: ecosystem support and a touchscreen interface. Microsoft should focus on smoothening out the experience for these users while at the same time leaving the traditional PC market alone, as far as the interface is concerned.
After all, Sun Tzu did say, "Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win".
Windows 8 was an example of Microsoft going to war and then seeking to win. It was also an attempt at besieging a walled city, while bafflingly leaving the gates to its own fort wide open. Windows 9 must change that.
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed within this article are the personal opinions of the author. NDTV Gadgets is not responsible for the accuracy, completeness, suitability, or validity of any information on this article. All information is provided on an as-is basis. The information, facts or opinions appearing in the article do not reflect the views of NDTV Gadgets and NDTV Gadgets does not assume any responsibility or liability for the same.
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