Awesome, glad you found the pod casts helpful. Yes, I have written to
Apple with these suggestions. I think what it comes down to though is
that Apple wants complete control over the operating system and the
user experience. If they were to open up the platform in the ways I
have mentioned, they would lose some of that. While Android is
certainly not perfect, that is the main reason I use it for my mobile
platform, I want complete access and total control over my device, and
you just cannot have that with IOS unless you jail break. I'm probably
a rare breed, I prefer android for my mobile platform, but for the
desktop platform, it's the mac all the way.
Original message:
Mike,
Well thought out comments. Have you considered broaching these ideas
with Apple? They might not listen, but nothing ventured…nothing
gained. They stop listening to the customers & they'll find themselves
just another tech company, like Microsoft.
BTB, still using your podcasts for an occasional refresher on OSX.
Great job on those. In fact, you helped me make the switch & not one regret.
Cheers,
CJ
On Jun 10, 2013, at 9:57 PM, Mike Arrigo <[email protected]> wrote:
After looking at the new features of IOS 7, a few things are missing
that I was hoping Apple might have considered. Perhaps some of these
are there and were just not mentioned, or these could be things Apple
will never include because of the experience they want to provide. I
will list what I think is missing and state why I think they are good
features to include. Of course, this is just my opinion, these may not
matter to some people and that's fine.
No built in file management. Just about every other operating system,
whether mobile or desktop provides a way to browse the files and
folders on your device and change them. IOS 7 still has no built in
file manager, and no support for USB mass storage or media transfer
protocol. I think there is an app you can get that helps with some of
this, and the air drop may make this a bit easier, but still
transferring content from a computer to an IOS device is more difficult
than it needs to be. With Android for example, many devices support
mass storage, and those that do not have a memory card slot support
media transfer protocol, or you can install an app that lets the device
show up on your network like any other drive.
No option to change default apps. As far as I know, there is no way to
change what app will be the default when doing things like clicking
links or opening files in other applications. For example, you can
install other browsers, but you cannot set them as the default. On
operating systems such as android and the mac, this can easily be changed.
Apple does not allow you to change the default keyboard used for
typing. While you can install other keyboards such as fleksy, you must
go in to the application and type what you want, then choose to send a
text message, send email, or copy the text to paste in another program.
In Android for example, you can install and set other keyboards as the
default. I'm currently beta testing fleksy for android, and if I set it
as the default, I can use it to type in any application. You can also
dictate within fleksy for android if you wish since any keyboard has
access to android's voice recognition service.
I was also hoping Apple would have opened up the way text to speech is
handled, but this does not appear to be the case. It's good that they
added a male voice, probably Tom. However, the same restrictions still
apply as far as I know. First, developers are not permitted to use the
voices that IOS already has. This means that if an application wants to
provide text to speech, aside from voiceover, the application must
license and include its own TTS engine. So, for example, let's say you
have the read to go app, the motion x GPS app and the blindsquare app
installed. You would most likely have 3 copies of the same Acapela TTS
on your device, taking at least an extra 100 MB on your device. If
Apple allowed developers to use the built in voices, this would not be
necessary. Similarly, Apple does not allow you to install new system
wide voices. Speech is very subjective, but if you wanted to use
Acapela for example with voiceover, this is not possible because of
Apple's restrictions. With operating systems like the mac and Android,
any application is free to use the voices provided, and you can install
third party TTS engines such as Acapela and Ivona, and they are
available for screen readers, or any other application that wants to
use them. To be required to have more than one copy of a voice on a
device is a waste of space, especially when it offers no benefit to the user.
IOS is certainly very accessible, but I am a bit disappointed that
Apple has not opened things up a bit for developers and provided access
to file management. I'm not saying Android is perfect, it isn't, but it
does include some major things that I think the newest version of IOS
is still lacking.
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