Auto-lock settings

Maybe it was a blessing that the iPhone came with auto lock set to 30 seconds by default.  It was so horrible I was forced to immediately change it.  Though it may have also been better to follow the rule: make the defaults nice.  With 30 second auto lock the screen was often dimming before I could figure out which button to press next.  I think one minute would be a nice minimum for this, even for battery fascists.

But the options are less useful than it might at first appear.  There are many options, but only from 30 seconds to 5 minutes and then Never.  I actually went straight from the 30 second default to Never.  But after a day or two that wasn't working out either.  I thought 30 minutes would be just about right.  But I could only chose the longest non-Never option, 5 minutes.  That has actually worked out fine, but it still seems stupid to offer choices 1,2,3,4,5 minutes.  They should be more like 1,2,5,10,20, as 3 and 4 minutes are not that much different, nor 4 and 5.

This should be pretty obvious.  Was the 1,2,3,4,5 choice a last minute decision by the battery fascists?

And though it's less "simple" what about just letting people select the time continuously by typing or rolling odometer numbers?

iPhone text notifications

This is wonderful.  My phone is sitting to the side, auto-locked.  Text comes in, and it's shown right on the screen just long enough for me to read.  Afterwards, no blinking lights for embarrassment or distraction.

I can even turn on the phone without opening the screen and see the message.  That's great!

My Android phone would never show anything useful about texts or phone calls without opening the text or phone app, which takes some time (and in fact it always took time just to open the phone, even without security, I had to swipe multiple times just to get it right).

Not so intuitive: Album sorting in the Music app

OK, I want to see if I added Amused to Death to my iPhone.  I hadn't realized that I only yet have a 24/96 version.  I wonder if it would play that.  Probably, though to get the best quality might one have to have a audio-mixer-bypassed like Amarra on Mac?  Otherwise, you aren't really getting 24/96.  I doubt that the iPhone is a bit-transparent hirez music playing device like Pono, but I don't know at all.

Perhaps that is what is clogging up all the memory on my phone for only 30 59 albums.  I have determined that 59 albums seem to be taking about 40 Mb.  I believe now that's not unreasonable for 59 CD's to have that much uncompressed data.  But I was still wondering if a likely degraded-in-playback hirez file is lurking on the phone.  So I thought I'd take a look at the phone (I know now….would have been easier on the computer…but isn't the phone supposed to be ultra-intuitive and all that)?

So I open Music on the phone, and it shows my Albums (by Album) with Hope by Klaatu on top.  Well I'm sure that can't be the very first album alphabetically, and sure enough it isn't.  What may be the first alphabetically is Aja…which appears about in the middle of the list.  What kind of order is this?  There is a pulldown giving me different things

Now I can hold down on the Albums pulldown, and what I get is a list of things I can select from.  I can select Artists instead of Albums.  But nothing I select comes up in alphabetical order, even if I select it several times.  I can't see the logic to the order things do come up in.  Actually it seems to put the same Album on top regardless of whether sorted by Artist or Album.

Must keep an Android handy anyway

Apparently there is nothing like "Wifi Analyzer" for Android on iOS.  Apple doesn't allow use of any "frameworks" that can access that information, and hasn't since iOS 5 or thereabouts.  Speculation is that Apple is worried things like this drain the battery faster.

As everyone who has used it notes: everyone using wifi must have Android Wifi Analyzer.  It's the most useful wifi analyzer.  Once you've used it, you can't imagine getting along without it.  iPhone has a number of "wifi analyzers" that give you detailed information but only about the wifi network you are attached to, nothing about the RF strength and relative RF strengths of other wifi networks, which Android Wifi Analyzer shows dynamically on a graph calibrated in dB.

There is something called Wifi Explorer for Mac OS X that looks even better, just not in your pocket.

This is a significant disappointment, and I blew about $15 on iPhone wifi analyzers that give comprehensive information I'm rarely interested in, and spent a couple hours searching for what I actually wanted.

Why the iPhone virtual keyboard is better

I was making tons of typos texting with the Samsung Galaxy S4 keyboard.  Many of these typos were strange including numbers and letters, and the spell checker let those right through (even suggesting other combinations of numbers and letters).

I hardly make any typos texting with the iPhone 6S Plus keyboard.  Not only are the keys substantially larger (and they look larger still, thanks to flat top appearance and grey back with black letters on white: which would be more readable even at the same size).  There's no row of numbers on the top, and somehow just having three rows of all letters makes it easier to type right.  Of course it's a bother when you do actually have to use numbers, but not so much.