I’ve been playing with Siri on my new iPhone (Once I figured out how to turn it on. And no, that wasn’t as simple as it appears. I had to power cycle my iPhone before the option even showed up in the Settings menu. I’m assuming that is because I restored from an older iPhone backup. Or for some unknown reason.)

I won’t list any of the humorous results of using Siri. There are a bunch of examples all over the tech blogs. But it is amazing how accurate it is in transcribing (textually) what I say, even if it has no clue (contextually) what I was asking.

Definitely not perfect but a huge leap forward.

The only real problem I saw was network related. Siri complained about network connectivity problems occasionally. So… Got a bad network connection? Siri isn’t going to be happy. And there was a definite lag between speaking and text regurgitation when I used Siri in Pages.

Notifications

Okay, I know the geek squad has been complaining about the way IOS does app notifications but I think Apple went too far in the wrong direction. They went from simple to too complex in my opinion. I had to go in and change the notification settings for over 30 apps this morning. Some to turn off (Who would want THAT app to blast you every time something happened?) and some to turn back on ( Why was OmniFocus suddenly silent?)

And I never want any app – except the actual phone and music app ( and games when I’m playing them; and maybe TomTom when I’m driving) to have sound alerts turned on!

App Syncing

I’m not using iCloud yet. I still use MobileMe for calendar and contacts ( mixed in with the Exchange server at work) and will until you can merge a nonMobileMe Apple ID with it. I want only one. But I want everything in both as they currently exist.. What I really want is automatic syncing between my iWork apps in iOS and OS X and that isn’t there yet. There’s still a disconnect.

App Failure

( Updated as I run into things… )

• Stanza, my favorite ePub reader broke in iOS 5 and since Amazon bought the company that made it I don’t ever expect an update from ePub “hating” Amazon. And iBooks isn’t really an adequate substitute for how I used Stanza (grabbing ePubs of web pages off the Internet for offline reading using dotEpub.). So I went looking for a replacement. MegaReader, which isn’t free, seems to be a reasonable substitute though I don’t quite have it set up to my satisfaction yet.
• Safari -
  • Tabs: okay, I’m not a huge fan of tabs in web browsers. But that’s just me being curmudgeonly ( and stay off of my lawn, Damn it!). I much preferred mobile Safari’s multi window method ( which the iPhone still uses.) but I can live with it. What I don’t like is losing the ability to scroll back to the top in Safari by touching the window border just below the search and location entry boxes. That’s now tab space. And that top of page gesture? Now it’s working only ABOVE the search box and 99% of the time I miss it and hit search. Whose idea was that? ( Oddly enough, it’s easier to do this on the iPhone.). It works best if you “aim” slightly into the window margin.
  • Bookmarks bar – the first entry is directly above the close icon for the first tab. It’s too easy to accidentally hit that instead of the link above it, grumble!
• Reminders – ( new ) ugh. Needs some integration with OmniFocus
• NewsStand – ( new ) Why can’t I put his in a folder to hide it away? I don’t want it!
• Cards – ( new ) Why is this only an iPhone app? Shouldn’t it be iPad’ed?
• iBooks – For some reason, a large number of my books in iBooks lost their illustrated covers during the transition. Ugh! Had to remove the books in question from my iPad, sync, and add them back (and the less said about the crappy iTunes interface for selecting individual books to add/remove from an iDevice the better!)

And sometime yesterday Apple released updates to iOS and OS X 10.7 (aka Lion)

Thanks to the other bazillion Apple fanatics, it took me all evening to down load the 2GB+ of updates for my iPad, iPhone, Lion and a few other things. Then came the actual update process, which I won’t detail here but it took more than an hour for the iDevices and 30 minutes for my MacBook. I did my iPad last. Plugged it in and went to bed ( yes, it was that late!). Finished tinkering with its settings when I got up 6 hours later.

What’s Apple up to! Inquiring techno-nerds (and pundits in desperate search of hits) want to know!

Now, my iPhone 3Gs is getting a bit long in the tooth tech-wise, and my cell phone contract ran out several months ago, so there is definitely a new iPhone in my future this Fall/Spring. The only question is what will it look like and how much will it cost (Do I go for another 2 year contract? Or spend the extra cash on a carrier unlocked model?)

And what will Apple call it? iPhone 5? 4S? Wilbur?

We’ll see how things go tomorrow ( 1PM Eastern. Live blogged at your favorite tech blog, of course.)

Oh yeah… iCloud = 5GB of free storage. iDisk = 20GB of online storage for approx. $9/ month.

For most of the things I use MobileMe for… Document syncing, calendar syncing, etc… iCoud does it. It even will provide iWork document syncing.

What it doesn’t do as far as anyone has said that might affect me:

iDisk ( which I use occasionally for media that iCloud won’t sync )
MobileMe galleries.
OmniFocus syncing ( though hopefully the OmniGroup will add iCloud syncing )

If iCloud doesn’t provide a reasonable substitute for iDisk and MobileMe galleries… I’ll move that here, since I’m already paying for the space/ service from Yahoo.

I guess I’m more concerned that OS X 10.7 ( Lion ) is supposed to go Mac App store only for distribution and there are several Macs ( family ) that I need media to update. Downloading a 4GB image isn’t going to cut it. We’ll see what happens.