Apple iOS 9 Content blockers leaves iPhone 5 and 5 C out in the cold

The ability to add content blockers to your browser in iOS 9 was one of my most looked forward to features, but though Apple doesn’t mention it, all the apps for content blocking leave out the iPhone 5C as well as the iPad 3 which can both take iOS 9. It makes me wonder what else is left off of the earlier devices. I am betting that the ability to keep playing a video on the iPad doesn’t work on the iPad 3, but will have to test and 3 as soon as I can get my wife to upgrade my old iPad 3.

Photos for Mac is broken, no way to delete photos that you have imported! FIGURED IT OUT iCLOUD PHOTOS IS BROKEN

I was just importing my photos off of my iPhone into the new Photos for Mac, Photos being the replacement to iPhoto that Apple recently released, and I noticed a major issue.

In iPhoto when you imported your photos you had the option to delete them on import. Well in Photos that option is completely gone. There is only the option to import your photos. Well I just imported 2 gigs of photos, and want to clear up the space off my iPhone. Now I have to what, delete them off my iPhone myself? Well the only way to do that is individually, and this is 300+ photos and videos!

And I thought maybe I missed something and imported the photos again, and it happily imported the same photos and put them into my Photo library right next to the previously imported photos! What is going on here?

I get that the new iCloud features are to keep all your photos forever and safe, but the idea is to keep your full sized photos in the cloud, so you can access them from anywhere, not to never be able to delete your photos from your iPhone. If that is the case people are going to run out of space really fast!

And besides who can afford the iCloud feature? Apple is charging way too much for online space, especially when Amazon lets you store your photos for free!

And the removal of a trash can isn’t a good idea either? What if you accidentally delete a file? (I was wrong about this, there is a way to view Recently deleted photos, just now a menu item instead of a section on the sidebar)

Why has Apple changed to a company that doesn’t give you a choice on how you use your Apple devices, you have to use them how they tell you to and there is no other way (exactly why I don’t like Final Cut Pro X)?

••••

Well I think I figured this out, I had to turn off iCloud Photos on my iPhone, now when I import I get the option to Delete items after Import. So if I was to keep iCloud Photos on, my phone would fill with all my Photos.

So now I had to re-import all my photos again (making duplicates in Photos) with the checkbox checked and now I can have it remove the photos from my iPhone, though this doesn’t seem to work well as it only did about half the photos the first time, and I am having to do the process multiple times to get the photos off my phone, creating duplicates in Photos every time. And now it seems frozen about half way through!

Is this seriously a feature? Being unable to remove photos from my phone? Seriously? This is a joke, if I want to store all my photos in iCloud I don’t want to keep copies on my iPhone or it will completely fill up really fast! This is completely broken! FIX THIS APPLE!

Not only that, but Apple help doesn’t work for me with Photos. So how am I supposed to figure out how this works?

iOS and other Space, Apple really needs to fix this!

Apple iOS has had a serious problem for a very long time, and it seems to be getting worse, or is at least for me. There is a space on iOS devices that is listed as other, and is supposed to be data, be that document data, caches, saves or other things from applications, but it quickly becomes bloated with random crap and can actually completely fill up your device very quickly. In fact I have hit the point where iTunes is in fact reporting that I have more other space than anything else, and enough other to actually not allow my iPhone to sync! Now that is a lot of other data, especially when I last restored my iPhone only a week ago (and a complete restore in iTunes, when you wipe it, re-install the OS and then restore your data and apps from a backup seems to be the only solution to this issue.
Now here is the space on my iPhone.
And here is what iTunes is reporting when I connect my iPhone.
Over 20 GB’s over capacity!
Here is the other space specifically.
And by contrast the Apps and Music space.

Now this is nuts. This is a fresh install of IOS with a restore of my Apps, and I heavily pruned them to make space for more music (as my iPod Classic bit it recently, the horror!).
Now my iPhone won’t even sync because iTunes reports it as over capacity, and yet I have 2 GB free on my iPhone. Now as I said the only real solution is to once again do a backup and restore in iTunes, but this is an imperfect process at best. First off it doesn’t even work from iCloud (I lost 4 months of data when I tried that and had to go back to my last non-cloud backup) and my first restore of my iPhone managed to forget all of my folders and randomly install my Apps until it filled all the pages and stopped installing (though I had more apps on my iPhone before). Another restore fixed this, but it still leaves issues.
You have to re-enter all passwords. And even worse much app data is lost. Google Authenticator will be empty (even with a safe local backup to my computer) so restoring both iOS devices at once is not a good idea, as getting into the things with 2 step authentication without your second password is a huge pain! And apps like SIZER to keep your friends and family clothing sizes just loses all of it data and you have to get it again! And don’t forget to re-log into to your settings for Messages or you will be getting different parts of conversations on different devices!
So just to do a restore, not only does it take at least overnight on your computer, but then you have to spend a good deal of time getting everything working again! Honestly when I backup my iPhone I expect a full backup onto my computer (I can understand a cloud backup being only partial), not a partial backup! Why not make a disc image of the whole install, so a restore literally restores it?

Apple, you need to fix the restore, and especially fix why this Other space bloats to begin with! It has done this since iOS 1, and the problem is only worse now as Apps get bigger and people take more photos and expect to carry more music!

FitBit will not be integrating with Apple HealthKit and it’s Health App

Well it seems that FitBit will not be integrating it’s Fitness data with the newly released Apple Health App via HealthKit.

You can see this very commented post at Fitbit’s Forums, where FitBit gives the following statment:

 Status: Reviewed By Moderator

We do not currently have plans to integrate with HealthKit.

It is an interesting new platform and we will watch as it matures, looking for opportunities to improve the Fitbit experience. At the moment, we’re working on other exciting projects that we think will be valuable to users. The question we want you to keep in mind when providing feedback is: What do you imagine a HealthKit integration would entail and what do you expect to get out of it?
Your voices are being heard. We’re actively reviewing your responses and providing feedback to our product development team.

Now they say they are listening and want to your feedback, but there are already 32 pages of feedback of people wanting this integration, and they do say they have no plans to integrate with HealthKit.

FitBit does have a $49.99 a year premium service called Benchmark to get better info on your fitness data, so they want to make money off of your data, but they already offer free integration with Microsoft’s Health Vault, which negates any argument about having to pay to access your data how you want to.

Health and HealthKit are one of the most exciting new features of the recently released iOS 8. It is a new central repository for your health data, that eventually will even be able to pass information to your doctor if something changes with your health. It is meant to not only work with the new Apple Watch, but with other fitness trackers and devices. And Apple even showed the FitBit app in their presentation, hoping that Fitbit would integrate.

Now I have been a FitBit user from the beginning, with an original, a One and a Force (which I returned because it was giving me a rash) and an Aria for weight, and got a FitBit for my mom as well. So I have been a very good customer. And I have even been saving my refund check for my Force to see what FitBit would be replacing it with, but this makes me think I would be better off putting that money into an Apple Watch.

I have been quite excited by the Apple Watch as it is a Fitness tracker and also a replacement for my Pebble Watch, but the one day battery life and lack of waterproofing has me quite nervous, but the Fitibt Force was not WaterProof and neither is the One.

So maybe it is time to start thinking about moving away from Fitbit. I could sell my One and my Aria and get an Apple Watch and either an iHealth Lite or iHealth Body Analysis Scale (iHealth already has HealthKit intergation from their 4 apps and 9 devices!).

FitBit really needs to get on the ball here or they are going to lose a lot of customers who don’t want to be stuck only within their ecosystem.

The Apple Watch has been Announced along with the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus

Apple has announced the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus, the bigger and biggest versions and with more storage coming out September 19th (with iOS 8 on September 18th), moving the iPhone 5S to the low end, and the iPhone 5C 8 GB for Free! Love the 1080 diplay on the big one, but think it is going to be way too big. Apple Pay sounds great, but I won’t have a new iPhone for a while, so I am excited it works with the Apple Watch.

And even more exciting is the Apple Watch. As a Pebble and FitBit user I am very excited. It has a digital crown to help navigate without covering the display. As well as the inductive charging to leave this waterproof (my biggest FitBit complaint). And I love the changeable watch bands! And 2 Watch sizes and 3 types, the Watch in Stainless, The Sport in stronger aluminum or the Watch Edition in gold for the high end. And having siri on watch is pretty cool.

I am most excited for fitness and workout apps. Actually the workout seems more exciting, as it does your specific workouts, vs just overall daily activity. The integration with healthkit will be great though, especially if it also works with fitbit or other health trackers, so you can see your friends on other devices (as I love seeing how my mom does on fitbit, which is usually much better than me). And having the heartbeat monitor is also very exciting.

And Apple TV control is very cool, since it will be on your wrist already.

Expensive though at $349 to start in early 2015.

•••

Too bad apple screwed up the stream so much! Couldn’t watch it on my Apple TV, and it started with Chinese translation overlayed, and it keeps stopping and starting! Bad job Apple.

LastPass for iOS 8 Announced

iOS8_Reveal

LastPass has announced LastPass as a Safari Plug In for iOS 8. So you can access your vault and fill in passwords right from within Safari in iOS 8! AWESOME!

So about my Password Managers question. The $12 a year LastPass will now work within iOS browsers!

Still want to see what SplashiD does, though I am still considering moving everything over to 1Password as I can keep all my passwords away from the cloud that way. Just don’t trust internet security at all anymore, though at least I do use 2 step authentication where I can.

Pebble Watch and iPhone 4 and Battery Life

Yes, I was a backer of the Pebble Smartwatch Kickstarter Campaign and got a black Pebble when it came out. And they can now be ordered for $150, though through Kickstarter I got it for less. It is a pretty impressive watch, with the ability to display notifications from your iPhone or Android, though it is still a little buggy, with me having to reset Notifications on my iPhone a few times a day.

Overall I enjoy it, and like that the SDK is now out so third parties will be able to write there own watch faces and applications.

Still it needs to get better. The RunKeeper application has not been included yet, even in Beta for iOS (though Android users have been able to try a BETA), and my biggest complaint is battery life.

Not only does having it on, and bluetooth in use drain my iPhone 4 very quickly (we are talking down to 20% by the end of the day), but the old school bluetooth in my iPhone 4 really drains the Pebble quickly. In fact while it has gotten better (it used to not last 24 hours), but now with the latest firmware 1.10 I would say it lasts more like 36 hours without a charge. Still not so good. And even worse is what happened last night. I connected my Pebble to it’s charger and left it. It was still connected to my phone, so vibrating, and somehow managed to unconnected the power. So today my watch is on it’s last legs, and not likely to even make it through half the day because it disconnected itself last night! Certainly not so good.

I am sure the battery life would be much better if I connected to my iPad 3, but since I don’t currently have cellular hooked up to it, that would only work when near a wifi connection, so not all that often. I am sure it would be better if I ever got an iPhone 5, or 5s when that comes out, but I find that unlikely right now!

Overall I really like the Pebble. I like being able to see my e-mails and preview them, so I know when I really need to check e-mail, as I am usually editing on other people’s computers, so I don’t have a dedicated e-mail program open and must stop and check to see if I got e-mail. Of course it can also get annoying, as some times my watch is buzzing allot, and it sucks that you can only see your latest message, especially when you get a bunch of messages at once!

I am looking forward to RunKeeper and other 3rd party applications, and better battery life would be great!

Google has released Google Maps for iOS

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OK all, time to all take a collective breath, Google has released Google Maps for the iPhone and iPad. Download it and stop complaining about Apple Maps!

Yes I don’t like Maps too well either. Sure the 3D thing on new devices is cool, though useless. And I don’t see why older devices can’t do turn by turn. And I do hate the colors, and the traffic has been totally useless, but I just moved to alternatives. And have been really enjoying VUZE for traffic, but now Google Maps is back, so…

EDIT: ArsTechnica has a great article on it, including it’s shortcomings. The biggest that it doesn’t access your contacts from anywhere, not iOS or from Google itself, so you can’t just type someone’s name to get their address (THIS SERIOUSLY NEEDS TO BE FIXED).

And they tell you how to activate privacy, though it looks like it will then also turn off your helping with traffic.

iPhone 5 first impressions

Still have my iPhone 4, but went to the Apple store to check out the iPhone 5. It sounded great, but not too great, but I was wrong.

The first thing you notice is how light it is. It makes the iPhone 4 seem heavy, but it still feels well built and solid. And the mostly metal back is much better than the glass iPhone 4 and 4S. The phone is thinner, and lighter, and taller.

The taller screen looks better even at the same resolution. And the bigger screen is just better. Wide screen shows look great and having an extra row of apps on every screen is fantastic.

And the lightning connector is impressively small. Still if it is not faster, it sucks to make every previous accessory either incompatible or have to work with an adapter.

if all of the speed tests are true, this is a really impressive phone. I so want one! Ha!