We both know that everyone is entitled to an opinion.
After all, listening to or reading someone else’s opinion can inspire a person to greater works, thoughtful introspection, or, tell us that this person with the crazy opinion has an ulterior motive and contact should be avoided after dark.
On a related topic, what are you willing to do to find 15 features Apple should include in iOS 7?
Thoughtful? Insightful? Deceptive?
The ZDNet headline was a grabber. ’15 features Apple should include in iOS 7.’ Alright, I’ll bite. Apple is working on iOS 7 already, so it’ll be nice to see what another tech writer for a major tech media publication has to say about iOS’s needs.
What I was looking for was something thoughtful, perhaps insightful, but instead I was, to my way of thinking, utterly deceived.
How so? Well, first, the 15 items that iOS 7 should have could not have taken 15 minutes to dream up. Some are worthy, some are not.
What really caught my hair on fire about this list was how the 15 items were delivered by ZDNet. Bullet points? Nope. That would be thoughtful and considerate.
Paragraph by paragraph? Uh uh. That would be logical. Instead, good old ZDNet reverted to 1999 technology and the non-journalistic practice of bait and switch. These items are for iPhone enterprise customers.
Instead of a nice bullet point list, the 15 items that Apple should put into iOS 7 take up 16 pages (and each page has a few advertisements to catch your eyeball before it rolls back into your head).
Spoiler alert invoked here.
- Divvy up ‘Personal’ and ‘Work’ – Because it’s just very hard to do in iOS 6 now.
- Improve Email Management – Everyone hates email. I say drop Mail altogether. Enterprise users would get more done.
- Quick Access To Wi-Fi and VPN – Because three taps is just too much and I’m getting paid by the, uh, month?
- Automatic App Updates – Sounds great, but am I the only one who sees a problem with ‘automatic?’
- Unread Item Count In Lockscreen – Yes. Finally, a good one. The lock screen needs to be a notification center. Wanna bet we see one in iOS 7?
- Spotlight Custom Domain Search – Because the boss pays for the bandwidth.
- Location-aware Sounds – Great idea. Now, the lockscreen needs a legend so I can be prompted to remember what each sound means at each location.
- Location-aware Wi-Fi networking – Isn’t this a waste of a bullet point?
- Guest Mode for BYOD – OK, I’ll bite. Again. Is this really important?
- AirDrop File Sharing – Because sharing files is so difficult on the iPhone. Bump? Dropbox?
- Longer PIN number – Fair enough. But guessing a four-digit PIN isn’t child’s play. How about alphabetizing it?
- Set Default Apps – To assign documents to specific apps, of course. Lots of problems with that.
- iPad Multitasking – Because, you know, Samsung can do it and there’s almost two dozen apps where it works. And knowledge workers are so into multitasking.
- Uninstall Native Apps – Fair enough. But you never know when you might want one back again. I just hide them in a folder. Case closed.
- Offline Maps – Yes. Finally. A good one. Now, how much space will that take up on my 16GB iPhone?
To be fair, the list is interesting, and it wouldn’t take much effort to double it or triple it, and even more if you ignore the enterprise-centric nature of the ZDNet list and add some for the rest of us.
I managed to summarize all 15 items that should or could be included into iOS 7, and get them down with bullet points and on one page. Compare that to the 16 pages ZDnet wants you to view.
Say, ‘Thank you, Kate.’
About Kate MacKenzie
Longer PIN –There already is long alphabetic pass codes! Simple turn “simple pass code” of an you can make a nice long alphabetic mixed pass code.
Also, caching of the new vector maps works great. If you want the gigabytes of offline maps, get the tomtom or other like app..
It’s absurd that you have to click through 15 pages to get to the list. Some of the items are OK, others are crap and worthless, but, seriously– 15 pages?
Shame.
Alphabetizing the PIN would go a long way toward increasing security.
Here’s a question, though. The ZDNet article seems critical of iOS for the enterprise. Which smart phone is used the most in the enterprise? If I’m not mistaken, BlackBerry lost that crown already. Android is being shunned by the enterprise because it’s not a secure OS, and malware abounds. Meanwhile, the ‘consumer’ company, Apple, has plenty of enterprise tools for business, and that’s why iPhone is probably tops in the enterprise.
If not Apple, which company?
Number 5 just hit me. The guy, Zack whatever, just does not know what “enterprise IT” is, how its managed and how it works. No idea whatsoever. Otherwise he never ever pulled up something so stupid in article regarding “business or enterprise use” of computing device. The guy plays around with words meanings of he doesn’t know and his only hope is, that nobody else doesn’t also and that makes him look smart. As non-native english speaker, is “amateurism” a word or does simple “dumbass” do the job?