Be Excellent To Each Other

Is this being released next week?

Just been on the Apple site and it says 'coming soon' still.

Looking forward to the turn based navigation, and if it's any good I can see it replacing the TomTom.

Being able to use Siri to properly integrate with app opening is good as well.

Out on the 19th.

Sweet. Looking forward to anything in particular?

Or is there anything still missing?

(can't wait until they implement copy-paste!)

19th Sept, I think.

It's alright. Nothing massively revolutionary or anything, but definitely some well-needed touches. The App Store changes are lovely, though it's still a stupid webview that doesn't remember your scroll/page position if it needs to refresh. Annoying.

not exiting to install an app looks good though.

The turn-by-turn navigation is pretty good, but it's no replacement for a dedicated app in my opinion. I've been on the iOS6 beta since it came out and I still always fall back to CoPilot Live.

Opening apps with Siri is bloody good though, and Siri's accuracy itself seems improved somehow (perhaps this is just placebo though, I can't see how it would make any difference assuming it processes everything server-side)

It's been a pretty smooth beta this time. Are we still on beta 3 or so? Aside from the usual cockups in the Music app, I've barely ran into any bugs, and no crashes at all.

Oh Why does it not live up to a dedicated app?

I would have thought the answer to that would be obvious.

No passwords for free apps!

Or updating apps. And they all install/update in the background instead of quitting out of the App Store. Finally.

And yet here I am wanting to know if it is because maps don't update as quick, or traffic info has a delay, or it's just not as pretty.

A keyboard that isn't dogshit would be good.

It has to stream the data. So lose your connection, or have no connection, and you're buggered.

oh. That seems silly that it wouldn't pre load a whole route.

See Mr Dave for further details.

You've been spoilt, as the iOS keyboard is lights ahead of the one on WP7.5.

Will there be random battles too?

The thing is that now I've been using SwiftKey for a while I can type most stuff almost as fast on my fairly crappy HTC Wildfire S, with its postage stamp-sized screen, as I can on my iPad. They need to get something sorted.

I disagree... but then, I would.

It might do something… I haven't looked into it. And all the mapping data is vector-based, as far as I'm aware, so it should be quicker by default, and not need to download (so much) additional data when you zoom in.

I'm struggling to see how you can think it's anywhere near as good. It's a constant battle to press the space bar sometimes.as.it.gives.me.fullstops.instead.

Also, you press an S and it highlights the D half the time. It's shit. When you hold down the .com button it doesn't have a .net extension, but a .edu? Sloppy. The only good thing is how easy it is to add words into the dictionary.

The iOS keyboard is far superior imo.

Co-Pilot and TomTom will win out as the maps are locally stored. If you have GPS but no 3G/EDGE/GPRS you will still at least be able to see where you're going and not just a blue dot in the middle of nowhere.

I can't see to find an android keyboard I like, but the apple one is fine.

As before, SwiftKey is fine if you (a) Download a dictionary for it, (b) tell it if you're an accurate typer and (c)Not the default keyboard anyway. Given that this is all dealt with in the setup process unless you skip it...
Besides if you can't get on with it, there's not exactly a lack of alternate keyboards.

Unsurprisingly a Japanese keyboard is not particularly good for typing English, because that's not what it's designed for, and I'm too lazy to switch between two keyboards even though it's hardly a hassle.

For what it's worth, I found the Win7 keyboard to be pretty much unusable (I think it took me most of Crasters cigarette break to post a message here proclaiming that he liked cock) and the apple one to be on a par with the default android one.

Why have you got a Japanese keyboard on your phone?

INB4: "So I can type in Japanese"

Well, that's the answer, really, isn't it? It is after all, quite hard to type Japanese without a keyboard which can do it.

Why have you got an English keyboard on your phone?

I believe it does, I think it pre-loads your route in advance. Not sure though, haven't tested it.

The problems I have with it are that it's a bit light on information and the next direction "roadsign" at the top takes up quite a lot of screen real estate, which I don't like. I'd much rather just have a little thing in the corner telling me what to do next and when, so I can see more of the map.

It also lacks a lot of the features that dedicated apps have, like the offline maps, text-to-speech (reading road names out to you) and even just basic things like a readout of your speed, ETA etc. (although admittedly, that last one may have just eluded me)

Well, yes, that's the literal answer of course, but I was more interested in why you specifically have one. Are you Japanese? Do you work in Japan sometimes? Did you buy a Japanese phone for some interesting reason? If you'd rather not say for some reason that's cool as well of course, I'm just making conversation here.

Dave-san is not Japanese, as his Somalian brogue makes obvious to those who meet him.

But enough about his shoes...

I learned some at school, forgot it, learned some more after and have a rather close Japanese friend who I speak to regularly.

I'd be too embarrassed at how bad my ability is to go and speak it in Japan for now - I'd end up insulting everyone and indicating that I was a girl within the first hour. (well, on that basis, I'd be very reluctant to talk to anyone other than her, really)

It's an English phone, but you can chuck whatever keyboard you want on it. I believe you can use iPhones for the purpose as well, although from what I've heard (and this is all third hand, old information, so not reliable) you need to activate both a japanese and chinese keyboard to be able to write everything you'd wish to, which just seems a bit icky if true.

Is Safari going to do file upload like they said?

PLEASE GOD TELL ME YES.

Yep! Only from your photo library, though.

It is (and does) but the problem I've found with it (which will obviously change given time) is that many websites detect that you're on an iPhone, but don't check for OS version so they just say "Sorry, you can't upload stuff with Mobile Safari! Sucks to be you!"

imgur, I'm looking at you:



(hosted on imgur, for the irony)

Videos?

Those too. They all sit in your photo library.

Like iTunes, that should probably be renamed to Media Library or something.

Yep.

Also, though I'm not sure if this was fixed in iOS5: when you're browsing through your library, flicking through the photos, and a video comes up… it doesn't pause your music any more. That always infuriated me, considering the video didn't auto-play… it just stopped your music for no reason whatsoever. But not any more!

It's little shit like this that really pisses me off about Apple. In particular, the podcasts app which is the worst piece of shit that they have put out. I persisted with it after they released a bugfix version, and this month I went over my 500Mb data cap, because it decided to download all my podcasts when I was out of the house, despite having deliberately accessed it when I was at home on wifi (the day before) to trigger the downloads. iTunes has a setting to prevent music downloads and match working using 3G, but Podcasts has no such setting to prevent network download (and no global setting function at all, ridiculously). It was even (I realised today) streaming podcasts that it had already downloaded.

I believe there's a proper native Podcasts app released in iOS6.

That's what APoD is talking about. And he's right, it's shit. And it has an insufferably twee UI.

We'll see how that goes. Or whether they have just bundled the FUCKING SHIT CUNTING FUCKING CRAPARSE Appstore version in with it.

Oh right, I thought he'd just downloaded it from the App Store. Unless it's the same app.

Is it more twee than Mr Russ? He's such a twee bastard.

It's the same thing.

Ah yes, I forgot about the Reel to Reel. Way to go, backreferencing to tech that only existed and ceased to be used in circulation before the concept of a podcast was considered.

Steve Jobs will be Reel to Reeling in his grave.

He likes to move it move it.

You Mad, Stuntman?

Can I set my own default browser yet?

Yes. You like Safari, right?