Dos and Don'ts of iOS 10 Public Beta

Today is the day some of us have been waiting for, the iOS 10 public beta is here. As I type this I'm sacrificing my iPad Air 2 to the beta gods. This got me thinking, other people are doing this too and some of them might be first timers. Which is fine its a public beta anyone can sign up and get the bits. So I thought it might be helpful to make a quick list of dos and don'ts when using the public beta, and a lot of these things can be used for other betas as well.

Back-Up

Before you do anything at all, even before you sign up for the public beta program do your self a favor and do a local backup to your computer. Even if you do iCloud back up do a local backup. If you need to roll back to a stable build of iOS it will make things go quicker if you have a local backup.

Screenshot (27)

Play with your Apps

After you have installed the public beta bits, open some of your most used apps and mess around with them to see if they still work. Just remember this is a beta and none of the apps from the app store are optimize to run on iOS 10 so just be thankful they even open up. Also make sure your apps are all up to date. Sometimes its not an OS thing that is making them crash it could just be a bug that the developer already fixed. But if they do not and you really need the apps to work just roll back to iOS 9, that is why the first tip was to backup.

IMG_0238

Don't bug the Devs

Maybe some of your apps don't work and it might be, because of some changes under the hood in iOS 10. Please for the love of god don't go to the app store and write bad reviews about the app and give them a 1 star. Right now the 3rd party developers can not fix any iOS 10 related problems. If you have a problem with a app that could be a iOS 10 issue file a bug report in the feedback app.

App-Store

Feedback App

The feedback app will help not just you but also apple and 3rd party devs too. This is a public beta test so the whole point is to get feedback from users to find bugs and to suggest things you might want to see in iOS 10 or future updates to iOS 10. This is also where you can tell develops about crashy apps so they can make fixes and can have them ready when they can put iOS 10 optimized apps on the app store.

apple_feedback_assistant_icon_thumb800

I hope these tips help when you are trying out iOS 10. Just keep in mind that this is beta software and it will be buggy so don't get too mad when things break.

Speculations for March 2016 Apple Event

The invites have gone out for next weeks Apple event. Up until today this event was just a rumor but the invites went out for a March 21st event. But what will they be announcing? This is what I want to speculate about. iPhone SE:

First off we have to talk about iPhone. Rumor is that Apple might announce a smaller iPhone one about the size of the iPhone 5 but have the guts of the iPhone 6S. Some of us think even the iPhone 6S is too big of a screen. I still think the 4S screen was the better size but a iPhone 5 screen is pretty good too. I have big hands but I need 2 to use my iPhone a lot. While with my 5c I could pretty much use my iPhone with one hand. Well maybe my next iPhone I will be able to do that again.

iPad Mini Pro:

Back in October the iPad Pro was announced and some people liked it and some didn't. Mostly cause of the size. But most people agree that the best part of it is the Apple Pencil. Well what if you could have the power of a iPad Pro and the ability to use the Apple Pencil in a iPad mini? Well if that's what you wanted you might have won! The iPad mini pro might be a thing being announce in a few weeks.

Apple Watch 2 (1.5):

Almost a year ago the Apple Watch came out and it seems to be a success. Well we might just see the Apple Watch 2. I doubt it will be much different from the original, it will probably be faster and have longer battery life. They might have some surprises in software with watch OS 2 which is in beta right now and will be out at some point.

Watch OS 2, iOS 9.3, OSX 10.11.4, and TV OS 9.2:

This one I would put money on. I'm almost sure they will release them shortly after the event is over or later on in the week. All of these have in beta or public beta for while now and as far as the public builds for iOS they are in 6th build of it. So even if you can't afford anything that might be announced in the event you will still have something to play with that day. That's about all I can come up with. We will see in a few weeks on March 21st what they will really announce. You will be able to watch a stream of The event by Apple and many blogs will be live blogging it as well.

  

One a Day

I've been radioing my head all day to figure out what to write about today. Mostly cause I haven't seen any tech news that has jumped out at me that I feel like commenting on. But after using a app twice in a day I thought maybe that is what I should write about. So today I'm going to tell you all about one a day. 

I'm pretty sure I haven't talked about it before on this blog but if I have well I'm going to again cause it's an app I really love and I don't know if I could live with out it. For those of you who do not know, one a day is a journal app. In the past I have kept booth digital and physical journals. But I always ran into the problem of either losing them or just not having it around when I need it. My first digital journal was a floppy disk and I used Microsoft Works to write my entry's and saved them with a password and then locked the floppy so it couldn't be read if it was inserted accidentally. 

But the problem with that was it wasn't that covenant and probably not all that secure. About 2 years ago I herd about one a day. I'm not sure how I herd about it, it was either iPad Today or from appadvice.com. But either way it was an app I fell in love with cause it was simple and straight to the point. When you open the app it will ask you if you want to use iCloud or Dropbox to sync your entries. This so you can either write an entry from either your iOS devices or a Mac. I for one use it on all my devices I normally use it on my iPad or Mac when I want to write a long entry that could go on forever. I use my phone however when I'm out and about and I need to write a short entry either cause something or someone has pissed me off and I just need to write down quick how I'm feeling and what is going on in my head. Instead of say writing a tweet or a passive aggressive Facebook post.

 I also like that one a day lets you add photos and embed YouTube videos when making entry's. They also give you good way of keeping track of your entry's by being able to tag your entry's and even geo tag them. They can even kind of give you a snap shot of when you were writing the entry but showing what music might be playing and what the weather is at the time you wrote the entry. They also give a lot of ways for you to look at past entry's with a calendar so you can a photo entry mode so you can see only entry's that have photos attached to them or you can look at entries you favorited.

One a day is really a app I don't think I could live with out and is certainly an app worth it's price of $4.99. You can get it from the apple App Store here: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/day-one-journal-diary/id421706526?mt=8.   

iPad Problems

UPDATE 7/31/13: For some reason I can see the updates now. I don't know what changed but its working and I was able to update all the apps that needed updating.

For the last week I have not been able to update my apps on my iPad 2 cause the App Store update page just shows a blank page. I can download apps and buy apps and even browse the app store but I cant update apps. It will even show the badge on the icon showing how many apps need to be updated but I cant see them. I just wanted to go threw what I have done to try and fix this issue.

To start off I have had this issue before. I open up the app store to update apps and get this:

Normally if I force quit the app store and restart the iPad things go back to normal. When I did this when it showed up a week ago this fix did not work. The second thing that I tried the other was to backup my iPad and then do restore threw the iPad then I restored all my apps and settings threw iTunes. I went to the App Store after everything was done and it still wasn't working.

Today I did basically the same thing but I did the restore threw iTunes so that it would be forced to download a fresh install of iOS 6.1.3. Once again after it was done restoring my backup I went to the App Store still nothing. Then I thought when if I update the apps threw iTunes so I updated all the apps that showed up in iTunes then synced my iPad. Well now it shows I have no updates on the icon badge. But if I go to the update tab it will not tell me there are no new updates like it normally should do if their are no updates.

At this point I have done everything I can think of to get to start working again I can think of except restoring it and setting it up as a new iPad. I don't want to do that since I have 100 apps on my iPad and I don't want to go back in to each one and resign in to every app and my e-mail all that stuff. I will if I have to I might call Apple before I do that they might be able to help or at the vary least put me in the right direction.

Bigger iPad

I was watching Tech News Today on the TWiT network which is how most of the ideas for blog post come form. They talked about a rumor of bigger iPhone and iPad screens. They seemed to not like the idea of a bigger iPad but to me it made me exited.  

Most companies seem to like this idea of big phones and small tablets. I have never agreed with this to me my iPhone 4S has just the right size of screen for everything I like to do with it which includes watching videos. I've never cared for the iPhone 5 bigger screen and I wish they had made a iPhone 5 that had the old screen size. I don't look at my iPhone and wish it was bigger cause I have a iPad 2 which runs iOS and is a bigger screen. I do look at my iPad and wish it was a bigger screen. I run into this thought normally when I'm doing some photo editing on my iPad or light video editing with the iOS iMovie.

I think the obvious thing would be for watching videos a bigger screen would be way better. When I'm in school I use my iPad a lot to show friends YouTube videos. I've always seen my iPad like a cheap MacBook  Air that runs iOS instead of full OSX. For me I it's all I need and if I need a real computer I remote my Mac threw my iPad. The only real times I need to be in front of my Mac is when I want to play a game like World of Warcraft or something like that or when I have to do major video editing for a project for school. That is only cause no one has made a grate video editing app for iOS and I only have 16 GB of storage of which I have only 1.1 GB free.

So what would I like to see the next generation of iPads to be like? Well I would like a bigger screen, not too big but between 11 and 12in would be perfect. I also would like them to up the storage on the devices. So instead of the cheapest iPad or iPhone coming with 16GB they start at 32GB and maybe go to 320GB. This is all wishful thinking I'm sure we will not see anything like this when they do come out with the new iOS devices. We will more likely see thinner, lighter, faster iPhones and iPads but next year maybe we will see some of these hopes happen.

A happy surprise in mobile iTunes

I went to go update my a app on my iPod just a few mins ago and found the purchases button and saw all my apps that I have gotten and so I went to iTunes and all the music I have boughten were there as well. I didn't know they had added that today I thought it was a iOS 5 thing but I'm glade they added it today. I hope to see the whole WWDC keynote latter.