Post-Macworld Wrap-up Part 2: iPhone 1.1.3 and its More Hidden Features
It’s the little things about the 1.1.3 update that I am enjoying, things I haven’t seen documented anywhere else yet:
- I don’t know if it’s because I have more icons at the bottom of my Home screen, but when they fly in from offscreen now, the icons fly under and through the Dock. This adds depth. Depth is deep.
- The SHIFT key can now be used simultaneously with letter keys, just like a real keyboard. The simultaneous pressing of one finger in one area of the screen and another finger in another area of the screen does not render each useless, but rather augments both. This tip via iPhone Atlas.
- Diacritics, I found by accident. I had no easy way of writing the word ‘naïveté’ before the 1.1.3 update. Now all I have to do to use the many diacritics available for each vowel and many consonants on the keyboard is hold the key until the menu of options pops up above it. UPDATE: Reader Ben informs me that diacritics were around before 1.1.3. Well, they’re new to me, but thanks for the correction, Ben. I guess Daring Fireball readers tend to know what’s up. How naïve of me. Sent from my iPhone.
- MobileSafari now features a magnifying glass icon next to the URL field, which does the same as tapping in the URL field: it drops down a Search field. Apple added the new icon perhaps because it wasn’t intuitive to tap the URL for search. The new icon displaces the + icon, which has been moved to the bottom of the screen and is used for for adding bookmarks, mailing links or adding Webclips.
- When you’re anywhere outside the SMS app and you receive an SMS, the options used to be ‘Ignore’ or ‘Reply’. If you chose ‘Ignore’, the notice would go away and the SMS icon would continue to show new message status. ‘Ignore’ has been replaced by ‘Close’, which does the same as ‘Ignore’ but now you will see no new message alert because it assumes you have read it already. For my money, this is a bad move because I’m now more likely to forget that I have a very important SMS to respond to. No, sir. I don’t like it.
Of course the jiggles make me happy. And the multiple Home screens will come in handy. And the Webclips will make it so I don’t have to keep tabs open for my most often-visited sites in Safari. That makes things cleaner, which is next to godlier. And the SMS capacity increase by a factor of 75 is nice (but still no clean way of archiving them is not nice - I’ve already had to go through many cycles of backing up encrypted data from the Mobile Sync directory to preserve all the many impressive SMS conversations I’ve had since June 29, 2007 - please, Apple, make a desktop-based SMS conversation browser). There are a few other little things that would be nice to have. They’ll come in time, I’m sure.
Post-Macworld Wrap-up Part 1: MacBook Air
Post-Macworld Wrap-up Part 3: iTunes Movie Rentals and AppleTV
