Yesterday I made a huge mistake! I upgraded not 1, not 2, but 3 things, each of which made me want to pull out my hair.
1) Safari. Two things: Top Sites and no separate search window.
I don’t know what the drive is currently to clutter displays and waste real estate. Google Plus continually makes “improvements” that make things look more and more cluttered (if you choose a single panel on the web version, you can have all that wasted space!) and everyone else seems to be on the same bandwagon. Maybe there are times when having your web browser open to show you all your recent “top” sites there on one page is useful, but there should be more of a choice to choose “let me live clutter free!” One would think that it would make sense that if you set your homepage that that would be the page that opens up. But the new and improved Safari? Nope, apparently this is too logical. Set your current page to your heart’s content, you still will open to no less than 6 of your most often clicked-to sites, your current home page being thrown into the cluttered Top Sites page. You want to only see your assigned Homepage? There is a workaround. You need to set “New windows open with Homepage,” even though it would be very handy to have new windows open to Same Page. Top Sites is just a more cluttered version of something that already existed, was tidy, didn’t waste real estate: bookmarks. Places I want to repeat visit often are found in my Bookmarks Bar. Maybe have a Top Sites tab if you need a visual reference to click on.
All-in-one-URL/Search field? Annoying as hell and one reason why I stuck with Safari was that I still had a separate search field. There are times when it’s advantageous to see what search terms I had in the field as I am browsing search results. Now, I either have to open a new tab, to keep the original search, or I have to backtrack or go up to History. These options, to me, are kludgy. They are extra steps that didn’t exist in the older version. Choice would be nice.
2) iTunes. I finally updated yesterday. To find my minimized view was now a big black square. Yup. So I could drag the corner to make it less big…but it was still a too-big black square. I went through all the menu items. Ooh, here’s an iTunes “classic visualizer.” Classic sounds hopeful. Nope. Black square still there. If there is a menu item that fixes this, please let me know. Somewhere under the View menu seems like a logical place, though apparently I am trying to too closely emulate Spock. None of the web searches I looked at were helpful. Maybe it was my search terms – if only Safari had kept them up there, easily viewed so I could ponder different search terms…
Turns out that there is a fix. Click on the music icon in the corner. Now isn’t that intuitive? At least now when I am in iTunes, my blood pressure doesn’t go up by merely seeing the interface.
3) iPad. I finally updated from iOS version 6 to the latest version of 7. Thought it was about time. I’ve been working on a project that required working with iOS, so it seemed a good time to finally get around to it. Where do I start?
First, I get motion sick. When I log onto Netflix I click into menus as quickly as I can to avoid time with those moving images that I just want to swat out of the way. Literally, I want to swat them to be still and if I thought throwing a book would help, I would. I don’t watch tv channels that have scrolling text. I click off websites that blink as soon as I can or if I feel the need to read something, cover the blinks, because I cannot read with things moving and blinking. Along with the trendy predilection of building in clutter and wasting space, is also that of making things move, blink, dance around. So the “cool” motion thing that happens every time one loads or quits an app with iOS 7? Nasty. Made me want to throw my beloved, overpriced device away. For this problem, though, a web search did help. Seems that I am not the only one with an adverse reaction to the motion, so it’s a good thing that I didn’t update to v7 right away. One of their bug fixes was to add a button to allow one to reduce the motion. Easy to find and intuitive? Hell, no. You navigate to Settings/Accessibility/Reduce Motion. Accessibility? Who named this category? But, yeah me, someone on the internet pointed the way to happiness and now I can open and close apps without worrying how recently I ate or when it would be safe to eat next.
The new way to access the Control Panel? Instead of clicking the home button, just swipe from the bottom. Not immediately apparent, but ok. Once one knows about it, kind of easy, yeah, even more convenient. But orientation lock? Lock Rotation shares the same position as Mute in the Control Panel, so one can have either/or, not both. Ok, if we really can’t fit both on that screen, well, whatever. What’s not ok is that this seems like putting the hot water tap on the right. If I go Settings/General/Use Side Switch To and have Lock Rotation checked, then the Mute button appears in the Control Panel. Likewise, if Mute is checked, Lock Rotation is visible. Maybe I am unclear as to correct definition of what exactly the side switch is…or maybe checkmarks mean something different in Cupertino. You know, like in some countries, nodding your head actually means no.
There is too much wasted space between the icons. I’d prefer to see everything in a folder at once without having to scroll through said folder, thank you.
The Safari icon. Yuck. The fact that I had to figure out how to remove Apple, Disney and Yahoo from the top menu and every search page annoys me. The way the URL field displays URL information? Very inconvenient.
The worst of it? iOS 7.0.4 broke my project. My beautiful project that worked magnificently until I updated from whatever version of 6 I was using. Heartbreaking. Spent into the wee hours of the morning trying to troubleshoot. Something with HTML5. I seem to have found a workaround using a much earlier version of the software, so will be plodding away rebuilding things with that for the rest of the day, just to finish this current project, and hopefully the software will update to make things work again.
The take away? Never upgrade more than one thing on a given day. Why cause oneself too many headaches in one day. Upgrades may or may not bring useful features, but they usually do bring some measure of grief. Some of this may fall away as a user finds things that were hidden or moved, or discovers cool things that we had been wishing for or didn’t know we wanted; other things may be messed up either temporarily or permanently. Case in point: Quicktime.
As for the image above? It doesn’t matter how quickly you change a lens outdoors (I am very fast, moving one lens on as I am taking the other off), it is still long enough for a critter to move in.