Apple Event Predictions
This week on Tuesday Apple is set to make an announcement and we pretty much already know its going to be the new iPhone. As I do pretty much every year I get the blogging craving and need to write what I think might be in the new iPhone. Lets get started!
iPhone X
Lets start with the name or names. Normally we could predict the name by going up one number or adding a S to the current name. This year is a different year compared to others. This year is the 10th anniversary of the iPhone. Most people seem to agree that they will show a phone called the iPhone X for the anniversary and this will most likely be the most expensive iPhone. But that will probably not be the only phone they show off, they will probably brake the trend of iPhone # then iPhone #S, and go from iPhone 7 to iPhone 8 and 8 plus.
These Phones will have most of the new features of the iPhone X except for maybe one or two minor features. These phones will probably start at a cheaper price then the iPhone X. So the line up will probably be iPhone 8, iPhone 8 Plus, and iPhone X.
Infinity Screen
Now lets talk about the thing we all use everyday the iPhone screen. Now I think most people seem to think this will be the same for all models, but I think it might be different. I think one of the key features of the iPhone X will be a top to bottom edge to edge screen. This is what most Android phones have been moving to and that look vary sleek. Most people have been making renders of a iPhone looking like that as well.
But most people seem to think that is what all the iPhones will look like, I think this style will only be the iPhone X and the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus will look and have the same screen as the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus. iPhone X will need something to make it different and I think that might be one of the things that makes it different from the 8.
Touch ID or Face ID
The iPhone X will also need something else to make it different from the iPhone 8. We have been hearing rumors about touch ID leaving because of the bigger screen. Also if the screen is bigger we will be seeing the end of a physical home button on the iPhone X. Unless they figure out how to make the Touch ID sensor to work under a sheet of glass the iPhone X will not have Touch ID. Instead they may use Facal recognition in replace of Touch ID.
The iPhone 8 and 8 Plus having smaller screens will still have a physical home button and will have the normal Touch ID. Im sure they will come up with some reason the iPhone 8 won't be able to use Face ID so it can be a iPhone X only feature.
Storage
This one shouldn't be too much of a shocker but the rumors have been saying that the new iPhones will start with a 64 GB configuration instead of a 32 GB configuration. We might even see the max storage go to 512 GBs that might be a iPhone X only storage size.
Conclusion
These are probably the mayor things that will be different from the current iPhones. These phones will also have new and faster processors, better cameras, and they will all run iOS 11. I think the prices for the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus will be similar to what the 7 and 7 Plus are now but the iPhone X will be the one that start higher at $999 or $1,000. So now we wait and see, lucky we only have to wait till Tuesday.
Apple September 2016 Keynote
Apple had there announcement today and unveiled the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus. They also announced a few other things to talk about other than the iPhone. We had a new Apple Watch and an update to iWork.
iWork Update
The first thing of significance was an update to iWork. This update will finally allow you to do live collaboration with other people across all platforms. They haven't said when this would be available but I would guess sometime around sierras launch.
Apple Watch series 1 and 2
The Apple Watch got a update today. The new Apple Watch is called the series 2. It looks pretty much like the old apple watch which is now being called the series 1. The upgrade is more on the inside with a better CPU (dual core) and better graphics. The other difference is this apple watch is water proof up to 50 meters, so this will be usable for swimmers. All the old accessories will work with this model. The series 2 will have a better screen and be brighter so it can be better seen in the sun.
Apple also decided to update the first apple watch with the series 2 new dual core processor. You can pre order booth series 1 and 2 on September 16th the series one will cost you around $269 and the series 2 will cost around $369. They also showed off a nike branded apple watch which they say will be good for runners. The Nike + watch will cost the same as the series 2.
iPhone 7 and 7 Plus
As you might imagine the whole reason for todays keynote was to show off the iPhone 7. The new iPhone will come in black and jet black. This just means one has a glossy finish and the other has a mat finish. It will come in same colors the iPhone 6s and 6SPlus come in as well. I guess ill rip the bandaid off about the headphone jack and say its gone. I’ll let that sink in for a second. Ok you have had enough time the headphone jack is gone but with booth the 7 and 7 Plus you will get a pair of lightning ear pods and a dongle that goes from lightening to a headphone jack so you can still use your old head phones with it. There reason was basically its time to get rid of it so we can add other things to the phone. They also introduced wireless ear pods that look pretty good and you can still use Siri with now a tap of the ear.
Now that we have that out of the way with they have made changes to the home button. It is now a solid state object and will use 3D touch. This makes me think they might be inching there way to a besalist design maybe next year.
The one thing they harped on the most was the new camera on the iPhone 7 Plus which uses 2 12 MP cameras with 2 different lenses. It seems to work much better in low light than any iPhone before it. The flash has improved, it can do up to 2X physical zoom and up to 10X software zoom. You can shoot in RAW finally and can do deep depth photos with a new camera style called called portrait. Though I will say this feture will not ship with the phone it will come in a iOS 10 update later on maybe iOS 10.1?
The iPhone 7 and 7 Plus will have the same faster better stronger things going for it. a new A10 fusion chip, which will be 64 bit and a quod core processor. It will have better batterie life for most of us. Apple has also changed the storage for its phones now starting at 32 GB and going up to 256 GB So lets talk about pricing. The iPhone 7 will cost you $649 and the 7 Plus will start at $769.
Wrap up
They did talk about iOS 10 which will be available one September 13th for all supported devices. Apple pay will be coming to japan in October and speaking of japan Mario will be coming to the app store in a new Mario game just for mobile. A lot was talked about today but I still am wondering about iPads and Mac. This might mean they could have an October announcement coming up. For now we will have to wait and see and enjoy our new iPhones with no head phone jack.
Dos and Don'ts of iOS 10 Public Beta
Today is the day some of us have been waiting for, the iOS 10 public beta is here. As I type this I'm sacrificing my iPad Air 2 to the beta gods. This got me thinking, other people are doing this too and some of them might be first timers. Which is fine its a public beta anyone can sign up and get the bits. So I thought it might be helpful to make a quick list of dos and don'ts when using the public beta, and a lot of these things can be used for other betas as well.
Back-Up
Before you do anything at all, even before you sign up for the public beta program do your self a favor and do a local backup to your computer. Even if you do iCloud back up do a local backup. If you need to roll back to a stable build of iOS it will make things go quicker if you have a local backup.
Play with your Apps
After you have installed the public beta bits, open some of your most used apps and mess around with them to see if they still work. Just remember this is a beta and none of the apps from the app store are optimize to run on iOS 10 so just be thankful they even open up. Also make sure your apps are all up to date. Sometimes its not an OS thing that is making them crash it could just be a bug that the developer already fixed. But if they do not and you really need the apps to work just roll back to iOS 9, that is why the first tip was to backup.
Don't bug the Devs
Maybe some of your apps don't work and it might be, because of some changes under the hood in iOS 10. Please for the love of god don't go to the app store and write bad reviews about the app and give them a 1 star. Right now the 3rd party developers can not fix any iOS 10 related problems. If you have a problem with a app that could be a iOS 10 issue file a bug report in the feedback app.
Feedback App
The feedback app will help not just you but also apple and 3rd party devs too. This is a public beta test so the whole point is to get feedback from users to find bugs and to suggest things you might want to see in iOS 10 or future updates to iOS 10. This is also where you can tell develops about crashy apps so they can make fixes and can have them ready when they can put iOS 10 optimized apps on the app store.
I hope these tips help when you are trying out iOS 10. Just keep in mind that this is beta software and it will be buggy so don't get too mad when things break.
Speculations for March 2016 Apple Event
The invites have gone out for next weeks Apple event. Up until today this event was just a rumor but the invites went out for a March 21st event. But what will they be announcing? This is what I want to speculate about. iPhone SE:
First off we have to talk about iPhone. Rumor is that Apple might announce a smaller iPhone one about the size of the iPhone 5 but have the guts of the iPhone 6S. Some of us think even the iPhone 6S is too big of a screen. I still think the 4S screen was the better size but a iPhone 5 screen is pretty good too. I have big hands but I need 2 to use my iPhone a lot. While with my 5c I could pretty much use my iPhone with one hand. Well maybe my next iPhone I will be able to do that again.
iPad Mini Pro:
Back in October the iPad Pro was announced and some people liked it and some didn't. Mostly cause of the size. But most people agree that the best part of it is the Apple Pencil. Well what if you could have the power of a iPad Pro and the ability to use the Apple Pencil in a iPad mini? Well if that's what you wanted you might have won! The iPad mini pro might be a thing being announce in a few weeks.
Apple Watch 2 (1.5):
Almost a year ago the Apple Watch came out and it seems to be a success. Well we might just see the Apple Watch 2. I doubt it will be much different from the original, it will probably be faster and have longer battery life. They might have some surprises in software with watch OS 2 which is in beta right now and will be out at some point.
Watch OS 2, iOS 9.3, OSX 10.11.4, and TV OS 9.2:
This one I would put money on. I'm almost sure they will release them shortly after the event is over or later on in the week. All of these have in beta or public beta for while now and as far as the public builds for iOS they are in 6th build of it. So even if you can't afford anything that might be announced in the event you will still have something to play with that day. That's about all I can come up with. We will see in a few weeks on March 21st what they will really announce. You will be able to watch a stream of The event by Apple and many blogs will be live blogging it as well.
Hearthstone for the iPhone
Like a lot of these things I hear about them on Facebook when I'm on the bus and Hearthstone for the iPhone is no different. I was itching to play it all day and finally I got to play it on my iPhone.
So let's talk about the game. Hearthstone is a Warcraft based card game for just about all mobile and desktop platforms. If you have played it on the iPad or your desktop nothing has changed game play wise. But the UI had to be tweaked for the smaller interface. It might take people who have played it on the bigger screens to adjust to were your hand is but that should really just take a minute.
Over all to me the game is solid you need about 1 GB of free space also about 10 mins minks to play. Though I know I can easily play it for 3 hours and now that I can play it on my phone I'm sure there isn't going to be a time I'm not playing it now. Also with the new Blackrock adventure mode there is plenty to keep you busy if you need something to do.
Facebook Paper 1.2
Facebook pushed out a new update to its Paper app today version 1.2. I won't lie I haven't used this app in awhile. I liked it when it came out cause it looked and worked a lot better than the normal Facebook app. But over time I just slowly started going back to the normal Facebook app cause I could do more in it. My biggest problem when it came out was you couldn't use your lists as sections in Paper. You still can't do that in this version but I'm still taking a look at what you can do now.
One of the first things I noticed was a new section called trending which shows you all the things that are trending on Facebook. It's nice to see that they are at least adding new sections to the app, but I would really like them to let you create your own sections or pull in your lists from Facebook. If you can't tell I'm a very heavy user of lists.
I always like to look at the settings of apps after a major update, and I noticed a switch that lets you make Paper your default Facebook app for notifications. So when you get a notification that someone has liked your status on Facebook it will open in Paper. This is a nice thing to turn on if you want to use Paper as your Facebook app but would like to keep the normal one for back up.
I also noticed that when I pulled down the section I was in to show the main menu there was a hamburger icon so touched it to see a list of my Liked pages and groups I have joined. I didn't see anyway to pin them to make it a section but it gives the pages a nice look to browse your liked pages and groups. It lets you easily move threw the years of the Page right to its founding.
I'm going to try and use Paper as my Facebook app on my phone. They seem to have made enough changes to make it more useable. If you want to give Paper a try for yourself you can download it to your iPhone here: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/paper-stories-from-facebook/id794163692?mt=8 . It is a iPhone only app but it will work on iPad.
One a Day
I've been radioing my head all day to figure out what to write about today. Mostly cause I haven't seen any tech news that has jumped out at me that I feel like commenting on. But after using a app twice in a day I thought maybe that is what I should write about. So today I'm going to tell you all about one a day.
I'm pretty sure I haven't talked about it before on this blog but if I have well I'm going to again cause it's an app I really love and I don't know if I could live with out it. For those of you who do not know, one a day is a journal app. In the past I have kept booth digital and physical journals. But I always ran into the problem of either losing them or just not having it around when I need it. My first digital journal was a floppy disk and I used Microsoft Works to write my entry's and saved them with a password and then locked the floppy so it couldn't be read if it was inserted accidentally.
But the problem with that was it wasn't that covenant and probably not all that secure. About 2 years ago I herd about one a day. I'm not sure how I herd about it, it was either iPad Today or from appadvice.com. But either way it was an app I fell in love with cause it was simple and straight to the point. When you open the app it will ask you if you want to use iCloud or Dropbox to sync your entries. This so you can either write an entry from either your iOS devices or a Mac. I for one use it on all my devices I normally use it on my iPad or Mac when I want to write a long entry that could go on forever. I use my phone however when I'm out and about and I need to write a short entry either cause something or someone has pissed me off and I just need to write down quick how I'm feeling and what is going on in my head. Instead of say writing a tweet or a passive aggressive Facebook post.
I also like that one a day lets you add photos and embed YouTube videos when making entry's. They also give you good way of keeping track of your entry's by being able to tag your entry's and even geo tag them. They can even kind of give you a snap shot of when you were writing the entry but showing what music might be playing and what the weather is at the time you wrote the entry. They also give a lot of ways for you to look at past entry's with a calendar so you can a photo entry mode so you can see only entry's that have photos attached to them or you can look at entries you favorited.
One a day is really a app I don't think I could live with out and is certainly an app worth it's price of $4.99. You can get it from the apple App Store here: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/day-one-journal-diary/id421706526?mt=8.
Skyping Pets
Today I had to leave the house to go help my grandfather get groceries. I've been tasked to watch after the family dog this week. She docent like to be alone so I came up with this idea to leave my laptop on and call it to check on her and make sure she wasn't barking too much. In this post I'll list what I did to make this work cause its easy and you want to keep an eye on your pets while you are not home.
- Fist off you need Skype installed on booth devices you are going to use and the one you will be calling should be a Mac or a PC. For me I used my laptop and my iPhone 4S.
- You will also need 2 Skype accounts one for your one for each device.
- Next on the device you will be calling go to Tools>Calls then click show advanced options and check mark accept incoming calls automatically and start my video automatically when I'm in a call.
- Then you can change any settings you want to change like the cam settings and audio settings. I had to do this cause I used an external web cam and mic, not the one that came with my laptop.
- Once you have done all this you can sign in on your calling device and add your receiving account to your friends list and call it to test it out. When you call the receiving computer it should pick right up and start video.
This is a good way to just check up on your pets quick when you are out of the house. I'm sure for some ambitious people out there you could get something like a Raspberry Pie and make a dedicated Skype computer to use to check up on your pets. For me I'm using an old laptop to do this kind of thing in the future. I hope someone out there will find this useful.
Bigger iPad
I was watching Tech News Today on the TWiT network which is how most of the ideas for blog post come form. They talked about a rumor of bigger iPhone and iPad screens. They seemed to not like the idea of a bigger iPad but to me it made me exited.
Most companies seem to like this idea of big phones and small tablets. I have never agreed with this to me my iPhone 4S has just the right size of screen for everything I like to do with it which includes watching videos. I've never cared for the iPhone 5 bigger screen and I wish they had made a iPhone 5 that had the old screen size. I don't look at my iPhone and wish it was bigger cause I have a iPad 2 which runs iOS and is a bigger screen. I do look at my iPad and wish it was a bigger screen. I run into this thought normally when I'm doing some photo editing on my iPad or light video editing with the iOS iMovie.
I think the obvious thing would be for watching videos a bigger screen would be way better. When I'm in school I use my iPad a lot to show friends YouTube videos. I've always seen my iPad like a cheap MacBook Air that runs iOS instead of full OSX. For me I it's all I need and if I need a real computer I remote my Mac threw my iPad. The only real times I need to be in front of my Mac is when I want to play a game like World of Warcraft or something like that or when I have to do major video editing for a project for school. That is only cause no one has made a grate video editing app for iOS and I only have 16 GB of storage of which I have only 1.1 GB free.
So what would I like to see the next generation of iPads to be like? Well I would like a bigger screen, not too big but between 11 and 12in would be perfect. I also would like them to up the storage on the devices. So instead of the cheapest iPad or iPhone coming with 16GB they start at 32GB and maybe go to 320GB. This is all wishful thinking I'm sure we will not see anything like this when they do come out with the new iOS devices. We will more likely see thinner, lighter, faster iPhones and iPads but next year maybe we will see some of these hopes happen.