Friday
Oct052012
The must-have feature?
Friday, October 5, 2012 at 3:00AM A question from Dave C. today. What is the must-have feature on your phone which stops you from switching phones? After switching from a 4s to the Samsung Galaxy S3 then back to a iphone 5, I think the keyboard ultimately annoyed me the most, and the lack of the magnifying glass when editing text.
Reader Comments (22)
Widgets, widgets and widgets. I have 3 widgets active on my homescreen: calendar, to do's and corporate mail. I only need to fire up my phone to see what's coming up today.
iCloud integration with iTunes.
sgs3: wider screen, more flexible options, and yet I couldn't get on with the keyboard either :P
If you're using android , just use swiftkey keyboard. The best by miles and miles and miles and miles. Every phone should have it!
The must-have feature for my 4 is that I've already bought it, and a new phone would cost a lot of money. It's not so much that it has everything I want, but that it does not lack anything sufficiently important to me to want to change.
Neil. The 4 is a great phone and still can have iOS 6. Even my wife's 3GS on iOS 6 is superb.
My must have feature is the same as when I bought my original Palm: a calendar with a decent notification system. At the moment neither Android nor iOS on their own provide what I want so I use the notication system of the former and WeekCal for entering appointments on the latter. With auto sync to Google this works really well. My iPod touch is so thin that I barely notice it in my pocket. This way I don't have to make a choice between two great OSs.
For me it's very easy: it's nothing to do with the phone features but with the system and its openness.
Android gives me freedom to do just about anything I want: connect anywhere to anything, drag & drop, buy apps, download and install not "so free " apps, test what I want, and above all have total control over what I want to do.
I just drive insane about iOS and Macs and the ability to not knowing where things are on the system. They are available yes, but where exactly are they?
With Android I have access to all files, the whole system struture and that's what I cherish the most.
I want to create folders on the card and put every file I want there so all apps can access it, natively - that's control. I don't appreciate much connecting a device and then see a bar saying "synching step 1 of 6"... but what is going on? It's simple, ok for the majority, but not for me.
It's not really fair to blame not knowing where something is on the operating system — moving to something new means that there's a learning curve!
I'd actually suggest that Mac is easier than most Linux distributions in this sense, and indeed Windows when it had a registry (assuming it does not now!) — if you can find your way around a Linux system, you'll find Mac OS X pretty easy, particularly since rather than looking for hidden .preference or .config files, you can probably just look in ~/Library/Application Support.
It's waiting for the synchronisation to start — negotiating, I'd have thought. Step 2 will be backup, if enabled. When files are being transferred, you can see individual file names as they are being moved across.
Does Android show you more than that? (Would you want it every time, or is it the ability to look deeper if you wanted?)
I had a thought you would answer me Neil ;-)
I guess the other way around also applies. If I were on Mac I would find Windows system too confusing maybe. I say this because recently I've been using a MacPro and in Windows I know exactly where I put files but in Mac I can go "Finder" and then it shows me the files by categories... I don't want that. I'm now starting to get used to the menu thing... it's ok, but somehow aged. and then... what's with the thing of having to press 4 keys to get an action??
OK, MacOS is simple. That's it. You can never go wrong, that's for sure. But you are so damn limited. That gets on my nerves. It really does. On Windows my most powerful apps are the Windows explorer and the notepad! I can do wonders with them!
About iOS I understand what you're saying, but ie my boss has got 3 iPhones (2 4S and one iphone5) and I'm completely lost when connecting and synching the devices... what is going where?... I don't know. I just let it synch. He wants to keep the info on all 3 devices the same. How can I do that?
Android doesn't show me a thing! I control things and I do what and how I want. I synch with google and to make backups I just need to use an App or open as USB storage device and copy/paste to PC. Simple.
I certainly wouldn't disagree that iOS is simple, but I am surprised by your analysis of OS X, which is "just" Unix with a shiny GUI, to my mind.
Drop me an email with some concrete examples, and I'll see if I can help out? I'm more used to hearing the other argument — that it's just too complicated, and that Windows is really easy, which I attribute mostly to needing to get used to a different operating system. I had a heck of a hard time moving from Windows to Linux but, over the years, it became easier, and then second nature.
What is it that you want? I use Windows at work, and Mac and Linux at home, and their folder management seems much the same to me — I put something into a folder, and it's still in that folder when I next go there?
Now, I spent time working with emacs, so I'm perhaps not the best person to deal with this, but, if you post what you were trying to do, I'm happy to help see if there's an easier way to do it? Under System Preferences / Keyboard, there's a tab for Keyboard Shortcuts — you could establish a shortcut for pretty much anything, through the selections on the left.
Alternatively, have you tried Alfred, as a faster way of doing things?
For me, one of the pleasures of Mac OS X has been the ability to move around without needing to use a mouse/trackpad; keyboard navigation takes a bit of getting used to, but I can move around most of what I need to do without clicking on stuff now, especially through using Spotlight as a way of launching things and accessing documents.
Just post, and I'll see what I can do — I spent a good couple of years helping out on the Asus EEE forum, teaching newcomers how to get the most (or, at least, get over the worst) with their first Linux machine, so more than happy to help here.
I'm not sure if that's a good or a bad thing! At least it means I read your posts, and they interest me sufficiently to reply, I guess :)
I sync both my iPhone and my iPad using the same domain account on my server, with everything getting pushed to the devices when an update is needed. Far easier than iTunes, to my mind :)
For keeping my computers in sync, I previously used Unison, but I'm now using owncloud, which has amazed me — in particular, it exposes a webdav interface, so I can synchronise marked-up documents on my iPad too, which then are pulled down onto my computers. A really great tool for keeping things in order without needing to trust a third party with my data.
"I'm not sure if that's a good or a bad thing! " - a good thing Neil. I know you are a bit more tech and use both systems, so you have a good expertise on the matter and it's always good to learn from someone like you.
I deal with Windows perfectly but I'm new to Macs and the OS, so I bump into some questions easily. I'm sure it's due to not having much experience...
One thing I need your help: my work is about using several programs at the same time, taking information (strings of text, images) like copy/paste from one to another. I can move around easily in Windows but in the OS X I have trouble doing that... how can I switch fast between some safari pages, and several office docs? Is there a shortcut to switch between open programs? Can I arrange the dock in a better way like the Windows?
Thanks Neil :)
I like the speed of the Note 2. Web browsing even in HSDPA+ is even better than my S3. The smoothness with which everything happens is compelling. Now I have experienced this level of performance I can't go back to my other Android devices. I think this is Jelly Bean and 2MB RAM effect. I'm not sure 4G would make the experience materially better. I hope Sammy add this power to their new Galaxy S IV.
I'm with Neil here. Been (and largely still am) perfectly happy with my iPhone 4 which does all I need it to. So it seem a little mad to be thinking of spending over £500 for an iPhone 5, or around £450 for an SIII (I tend to by unlocked off contract now) when the device I have is stil perfectly viable.
But, on the other hand, we're not like that here are we? We like shiny new toys. My iPhone 4 might be perfectly viable, but it's two iterations behind the 5, so the temptation starts to creep in.
It's an iPad next for me anyway. Have resisted/held off/been unable to justify (delete as applicable) any sort of tablet but now I can't hold back any longer. Will have an iPad by early November (birthday time!) although the temptation to hold on to see if the iPad mini appears is strong.
The iPad added to my Macbook Pro and existing iPhone 4 makes the case for an iPhone 5 over an SIII more compelling.
In the context of the original post, the must have feature for me is largely irrelevant. So long as the device can connect to the internet, what I want most is synchronicity. And I get that from iCloud not the device although clearly the Apple "ecosystem" of which we hear so much about now forms the base from which all that can happen.
@Gavin I still love Swype, although it and CoPilot seem incompatible.
Quick question for the iPhone guys: if you jalbreak can you change the keyboard? The default keyboard's the main thing the iPhone users I know have complained about, especially after seeing Swype. I know at least one of them has JB'd theirs (to change to a pink theme!)
As for the must-have feature, it's the abililty to do whatever I want with it unlimited by restrictions imposed upon me by those who think they know better than I do what I should want. That rules out iOS and WP, although WP seems to be improving gradually.
Rather that switching between open programs (Cmd + Tab, like Alt + Tab in Windows), it sounds like you want to switch between windows of the same application?
If so, you want Cmd + ~ (on my keyboard, it's to the left of the "Z" key — it's the tilde key): this switches between windows in one application, such as between Word / Pages documents.
You could also use Expose, giving you a view of every window on the system. If you are using Lion / Mountain Lion, you might want to adjust the settings, so that it does not nest windows belonging the same application:
System Preferences / Mission Control and uncheck "Group windows by application"
If you had Safari open one page per window, this would probably work too. However, I use Firefox rather than Safari, and have everything open in a new tab. Because all tabs exist within the same window, this shortcut does not have the desired effect. Instead, I swipe between tabs using the trackpad. I can't remember what I did to enable this; something in Firefox's "about:config" to do with gestures, I think, and perhaps adjusting trackpad settings for three finger swipe so that it is not picked up by the OS as something else.
If you like keyboard navigation, which I do to move around using just the keyboard as much as possible, change:
System Preferences / Keyboard / Full Keyboard Access to "All controls"
With this changed, you can move around any on-screen menu using just the keyboard, and generally the space bar to fire the action.
Perhaps, but I'm not sure what you mean as, for me, Windows is just a Start button and some icons next it it, which is much like having the icons in the dock, and the Application, Documents and Downloads folder to the right of that.
What do you want it to do?
Cool, thanks Neil, I'll try those suggestions - look good.
About the status bar, it's the ability to have the main applications icons and if you have, 3, 4 docs/webpages open you can use Aero feature to quickly have a live thumbnail of the contents (without opening the doc)... OSX seems to put open docs on the right side tray, but the apps are taking too much space - BTW, I reckon there's a very small sign beneath some apps... is it to tell what's running? - I guess I need to re-arrange this my way.
On thing: about the scroll that was so talked about... I kind find it natural, not inverted. Maybe this feeling is related to having no experience in OSX.
The dock will show which applications you have running, rather than the documents / pages themselves. However, if you click on the dock icon whilst holding down the Ctrl key, it will show you, in text form, the documents you have open.
More suited to the task would be Expose; you may have a keyboard shortcut for this (a rectangle containing three rectangles, perhaps F3), or else you could set a trackpad gesture for it — in my case, push from bottom to top with three fingers, and it will show me everything I have open.
You can remove items from the dock by dragging and dropping them to near the top of the screen — the icon will change to a cloud / puff of smoke, and then you can release the mouse. You can add to the dock my dragging and dropping from any directory (including the desktop) to the bar.
If you look in System Preferences / Dock, you can change the size of the dock, to make it smaller, if you like.
Yes, like a small LED under the application.
I have not tried it myself, but you might like DockView — live preview of documents / windows in the dock.
Oh — and if you have not found it already — I would go with hiding the dock, and only activating it when your pointers reaches near the bottom of the screen; it makes more of the screen available for applications.
Thank very much Neil for your time explaining things to me. I can now try a few features and speed up the work. I guess I'm so used to Windows environment that I bump into a new system and need some learning (gestures, shortcuts, where things are and how to get them). Ultimately OSX can do the same as Windows but first I need to know how.
I'm just a bit frustated because I can work around so much faster in Windows, that's just it.
Keep with it, Rui - like anything new and complex, it takes time to get up to speed; you're probably comparing years of experience with Windows with a few days/weeks on the Mac?
I started by Googling "Mac keyboard shortcut $action" every few minutes, and, gradually, it started to stick. It didn't take me long to get up to speed, but it was not effortless.
First time I used a Mac, to try to fix a friend's networking problem, I hated it - but for the terminal and common *nix commands, I would have been stuck!