Shutting off Compass Calibration in Location Services can stop iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S on iOS5 from sucking battery life and running hot.
I have an iPhone 4 and fwiw, mine was losing 10% per 2 hours and running warm as soon as I upgraded to iOS 5. In my case the culprit was quite easy to track-down. The new OS Location Services has a new sub menu: System Services. These services by default do not show the familiar arrow icon at the top right of the status bar. However, a new setting allows System Services location usage to be displayed. Just as well as in my case (I hasten to add that your mileage might vary) the culprit was ‘Compass Calibration’ which was perpetually holding on to Location Services even through restarts. Switching the blighter off cured the problem. What’s odd is that I have tentatively switched it back on since and it no longer activates Location Services. Very odd, but there’s my tale.
via Troubleshooting a battery-sucking iPhone 4S | Macworld By flyperson 4:48:54 PM PDT Oct 24, 2011
Filed under: Apple
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In which I unwittingly befoul an otherwise fitting tribute to the late, great Mr Jobs
“SHARE YOUR MEMORIES of Steve Jobs” read the email from Faith Korpi, producer of the 5by5 network to which I contribute a podcast. I thought she meant memories of actually interacting with the guy. I had one such experience: Steve fired me from a freelance project. That being my only “memory” of Steve Jobs, I responded to the assignment by telling that story.
5by5 created a beautiful audio tribute to Steve Jobs. The other contributors, who understood the assignment correctly, carefully crafted personal tributes to Steve Jobs and his legacy. Listening to this series of heartfelt recollections, you get a sense of the contribution Steve Jobs made to all our lives. The testimonials of my colleagues make me feel awe, wonder, hope, and terrible sadness.
A little over twenty minutes into this love fest for a giant of our time, my little story comes along and quickly sinks like a stone. I didn’t write it out in advance (no time, I was chaperoning my daughter’s second grade field trip) and I didn’t record it in my pristine podcasting studio (same excuse). The gist of it is, Steve Jobs fired me and another guy from a project before we did a lick of work, paid us anyway, and afterwards, for nearly ten years, Apple hardware and software that worked perfectly well for everyone in the world misbehaved for me — as if the aborted project had left me cursed.
Pathetic.
I admire and marvel at Steve Jobs every bit as much as my better spoken, better prepared colleagues. Not only did he understand that computing is about people, not technology; he also had the will to unapologetically demand perfection from the human beings who worked for him. If I live to be one thousandth the creative director he was, I will tell myself, “Well done.”
Filed under: Apple, Design, glamorous, industry
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Essential iPhone Photo Apps
“EVER SINCE the iPhone 3GS, the iPhone has become my primary camera. Aside from its terrific image quality, it’s the abundance of photo apps that make it shine. I get asked a lot about what apps I use, which are good, etc. Here’s my list.”—Jim Barraud
Essential iPhone Photography Apps
Filed under: Apple, Applications, art direction, Community, iphone
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My Favorite Mac Software (on Bagcheck)
Filed under: Apple, Applications, Design Comments off.
FTC to investigate iTunes in-app purchases
I’m looking at you, Smurfs.
Parental complaints over iTunes App Store in-app purchases in children’s games such as “Smurfs’ Village” have prompted the Federal Trade Commission to look into the matter, according to a new report. — AppleInsider | FTC to investigate iTunes in-app purchases after receiving complaints.
Filed under: Apple, business, Design, family
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Hold off upgrading MobileMe iCal
UNLESS YOU ENJOY waking up to a blank calendar, hold off upgrading MobileMe iCal for now. Prior to the latest update, I enjoyed flawless, seamless calendar integration across my desktop and laptop computers, iPhone, and iPad. I could enter an appointment on any device and know that it would show up immediately on all the other devices. And I could share calendar data easily with others, whether or not they were MobileMe users. All that changed last week with Apple’s latest calendar update.
The first thing the update does is pointlessly duplicate all your existing calendars, so that you have double listings of all events.
To stop that nuisance, you have to choose which version of each calendar to stop displaying: the new one hosted at MobileMe, or the “old” one that is locally cached on all machines and is in the fact the same thing. With no information from Apple, I guessed that I should stop displaying the “old” sync’d calendar and instead display the new MobileMe copy.
This caused the “old” calendars to disappear from my sidebar entirely. Now when I create a new event, there is much spinning of the beach ball as the cloud and my local computer negotiate every character press.
That’s bad enough; losing all calendar data is worse.
When I rouse my home machine in the morning, it fails to sync with itself due to some asinine unknown problem in Apple’s cloud, sends me the pointless error message shown here, and gives me a calendar like the one at the top, which is completely empty except for locally cached birthdays. Restoring the calendar requires me to stop work, quit any open apps, and restart my machine several times.
Additionally, “old” calendars long shared with others don’t update. You have to tell the user to stop linking to the “old” calendar and send info about the new one. And the new one won’t work if the user isn’t on MobileMe.
I’d happily go back to the “old” calendars that were always locally cached, never got hiccups when I typed data into them, and never disappeared like this, but Apple has helpfully removed them from my sidebar, so I can’t. I’m stuck with poor performance and disappearing calendars.
Things work better some places than others—for instance, on my iPhone, where I use Calvetica, I haven’t suffered the same frustrations I’ve experienced on my home iMac—and of course your mileage may vary. No doubt Apple tested the update on at least a few user setups, and I’m sure there are people for whom the .0 update is working, but I’m not one of them, and you might not be either. Eventually Apple will fix these bugs. I suggest waiting until they do. There is no benefit to the new calendar for existing MobileMe users, and there are plenty of drawbacks for now. I love Apple but their usability testing sucks.
Filed under: Apple
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Episode 38: Macworld’s Jason Snell live on The Big Web Show
Macworld editorial director Jason Snell is our guest on The Big Web Show (“Everything Web That Matters”) Episode #38, recording live Thursday, February 10, at 12:00 PM Eastern. Jason, co-host Dan Benjamin and I will discuss the future of publishing, Macworld’s evolving digital strategy, and of course our favorite computers, phones, apps, and tablets.
Jason Snell is editorial director of Macworld. He’s been covering Apple since 1994. He’s also the host of The Incomparable Podcast, at theincomparable.com.
The Big Web Show (“Everything Web That Matters”) records live every Thursday at 12:00 PM Eastern. Edited episodes can be watched afterwards, often within hours of recording, via iTunes (audio feed | video feed) and the web. Subscribe and enjoy!
The Big Web Show #38: Jason Snell – 5by5.
Filed under: .Mac, Apple, Applications, apps, books, business, Design, podcasts, Publications, Publishing
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What’s on my iPad
2010: The Year in Web Standards
WHAT A YEAR 2010 has been. It was the year HTML5 and CSS3 broke wide; the year the iPad, iPhone, and Android led designers down the contradictory paths of proprietary application design and standards-based mobile web application design—in both cases focused on user needs, simplicity, and new ways of interacting thanks to small screens and touch-sensitive surfaces.
It was the third year in a row that everyone was talking about content strategy and designers refused to “just comp something up” without first conducting research and developing a user experience strategy.
CSS3 media queries plus fluid grids and flexible images gave birth to responsive web design (thanks, Beep!). Internet Explorer 9 (that’s right, the browser by Microsoft we’ve spent years grousing about) kicked ass on web standards, inspiring a 10K Apart contest that celebrated what designers and developers could achieve with just 10K of standards-compliant HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. IE9 also kicked ass on type rendering, stimulating debates as to which platform offers the best reading experience for the first time since Macintosh System 7.
Even outside the newest, best browsers, things were better than ever. Modernizr and eCSStender brought advanced selectors and @font-face to archaic browsers (not to mention HTML5 and SVG, in the case of Modernizr). Tim Murtaugh and Mike Pick’s HTML5 Reset and Paul Irish’s HTML5 Boilerplate gave us clean starting points for HTML5- and CSS3-powered sites.
Web fonts were everywhere—from the W3C to small personal and large commercial websites—thanks to pioneering syntax constructions by Paul Irish and Richard Fink, fine open-source products like the Font Squirrel @Font-Face Generator, open-source liberal font licensing like FontSpring’s, and terrific service platforms led by Typekit and including Fontdeck, Webtype, Typotheque, and Kernest.
Print continued its move to networked screens. iPhone found a worthy adversary in Android. Webkit was ubiquitous.
Insights into the new spirit of web design, from a wide variety of extremely smart people, can be seen and heard on The Big Web Show, which Dan Benjamin and I started this year (and which won Video Podcast of the Year in the 2010 .net Awards), on Dan’s other shows on the 5by5 network, on the Workers of the Web podcast by Alan Houser and Eric Anderson, and of course in A List Apart for people who make websites.
Zeldman.com: The Year in Review
A few things I wrote here at zeldman.com this year (some related to web standards and design, some not) may be worth reviewing:
- iPad as the New Flash 17 October 2010
- Masturbatory novelty is not a business strategy.
- Flash, iPad, and Standards 1 February 2010
- Lack of Flash in the iPad (and before that, in the iPhone) is a win for accessible, standards-based design. Not because Flash is bad, but because the increasing popularity of devices that don’t support Flash is going to force recalcitrant web developers to build the semantic HTML layer first.
- An InDesign for HTML and CSS? 5 July 2010
- while our current tools can certainly stand improvement, no company will ever create “the modern day equivalent of Illustrator and PageMaker for CSS, HTML5 and JavaScript.” The assumption that a such thing is possible suggests a lack of understanding.
- Stop Chasing Followers 21 April 2010
- The web is not a game of “eyeballs.” Never has been, never will be. Influence matters, numbers don’t.
- Crowdsourcing Dickens 23 March 2010
- Like it says.
- My Love/Hate Affair with Typekit 22 March 2010
- Like it says.
- You Cannot Copyright A Tweet 25 February 2010
- Like it says.
- Free Advice: Show Up Early 5 February 2010
- Love means never having to say you’re sorry, but client services means apologizing every five minutes. Give yourself one less thing to be sorry for. Take some free advice. Show up often, and show up early.
Outside Reading
A few things I wrote elsewhere might repay your interest as well:
- The Future of Web Standards 26 September, for .net Magazine
- Cheap, complex devices such as the iPhone and the Droid have come along at precisely the moment when HTML5, CSS3 and web fonts are ready for action; when standards-based web development is no longer relegated to the fringe; and when web designers, no longer content to merely decorate screens, are crafting provocative, multi-platform experiences. Is this the dawn of a new web?
- Style vs. Design written in 1999 and slightly revised in 2005, for Adobe
- When Style is a fetish, sites confuse visitors, hurting users and the companies that paid for the sites. When designers don’t start by asking who will use the site, and what they will use it for, we get meaningless eye candy that gives beauty a bad name.
Happy New Year, all!
Filed under: A Book Apart, A List Apart, Adobe, An Event Apart, Apple, architecture, art direction, Authoring, Best practices, Big Web Show, client services, Code, content, content strategy, creativity, CSS, CSS3, Dan Benjamin, Design, DWWS, E-Books, editorial, Education, eric meyer, Fonts, Formats, Free Advice, Happy Cog™, Haters, industry, Information architecture, interface, ipad, iphone, IXD, javascript, links, maturity, New Riders, peachpit, Publications, Publishing, Real type on the web, Respect, Responsibility, Responsive Web Design, Standards, State of the Web, tbws, The Big Web Show, The Essentials, The Profession, This never happens to Gruber, Typekit, Typography, Usability, User Experience, UX, W3C, Web Design, Web Design History, Web Standards, webfonts, webkit, Websites, webtype, work, Working, writing, Zeldman, zeldman.com
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Flipboard Update Preview
FLIPBOARD, AS YOU DOUBTLESS know, is a social media magazine for iPad. Part RSS reader, part iPad publication uniquely curated by each reader, the app brings serendipity, discovery, and typographic excellence to the experience of keeping up with one’s friends on Twitter, Facebook, and so on. This morning (last night in Japan), a new, improved version of Flipboard was launched, offering designers like us even more visual pleasure and rewarding the hours we put into our content’s semantic underpinnings.
Designer Craig Mod, in a letter, told me his “goal was to try and produce one of the best RSS experiences out there.” It’s accomplished via features like those listed below and more, as seen in these screenshots Craig sent me from his pre-launch tests:
- auto-small caps
- portrait and landscape optimized typography
- full bleed images
- flowing of text based on image size and location in the document
- auto-generation of [figure] and [figcaption] objects based on alt
text on images
Adds Craig, “What’s great is that the more semantic and clean your feed, the better it will look in the app.”
Download Flipboard or update your copy in the iTunes Store and see.
Filed under: "Digital Curation", Apple, Applications, apps, architecture, art direction, ipad
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