A note to my long time followers: Sorry, this one isn’t directly about travel. Hold tight, barring any new travel bans I will be back on the road in mid October.
Sam Pirtle
Ever since June, when Apple first announced iOS 14, I have waited in eager anticipation of all the changes. Obviously I really wasn’t paying enough attention at the announcement. Some of the features I wanted are only on iPhone. I really don’t have much to say about the iPad experience, so I will mostly just cover iPhone in this post. I have only been tinkering with the new system for a few hours, so this is truly a first look post.
I was surprised that swiping to the right on the home screen still brought up the Today view. I had thought that with widgets on the home screen the today view would no longer be needed. I later realized that very few widgets of the new style are avalible, so the today view is needed for the old ones.
You can see in the above screenshot that the today view has been tweaked a little. One thing I don’t like is that the new style widgets are at the top and you can’t move them to below the old style widgets. Hopefully my favorite apps’ devs will soon update the widgets.
On the home screen I placed some of the new style widgets. I also added a few of the apps that don’t have widgets, which I use the most. I was able to stack widgets on the home screen, but really didn’t need to since there are so few of the new widgets to choose from. I would like to have Apple News, Google News, and the Guardian stacked together.
Hands down, the thing I like best about this update is the App Library. I liked this so much that I removed all the app folders from all my home screen pages, getting the home screen down to two pages. I also removed almost all the stand alone apps,which were on my home pages, leaving only the camera app in the tray and four apps on the second page along with the widgets.
Just by accident I swiped down on the App Library page to find an alphabetical list of all apps on the phone. This is something I have always thought the phone should have. You can tape on the letters at the right to jump down in the list. This is very handy for me. I was always losing my apps in my carefully curated folders. “If I put it here, I will remember!” Yeah, right.
I have kept Page One of my home screen as clear as possible so I am greeted by the cute wombat, clear of all overlaying icons, when I unlock my phone. Now it is just him and the camera app.
With this update, my Air Pods Pro have been switching seamlessly between my iPad and my phone. That really nice feautre doesn’t seem to carry over to my MacBook. It would be nice if it did. As I was writing this, I wondered; would this work for my non-Apple headset as well? A quick test showed that, yes, my SoundCore headphones are now going back and forth between my phone and pad, without my doing anything past the original pairing.
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