Tag Archives: iPhone

iPhone 11

Posted on by

The battery on my iPhone XS wasn’t holding a charge (I’ve had it a couple of years) so I popped for an iPhone 11 and it arrived yesterday. It feels strange to all them phones given all the other things we do with them. Mine is a camera first and somewhere near the bottom of the list is PHONE.

Barb has had one for a while and the photos she has taken are beautiful so I was eager to play with this feature. My friend George spoke glowingly of the photos he had gotten with the latest iPhone’s Night Mode. If I understand correctly, the phone takes three photos and magically combines them to come up with the best image. The photos below were just “point and shoot” on my part. I’ll probably never get around to researching and fulling understanding (or using) the many features of my new camera/phone.


First photo above using this new feature, the second photo not.
I was in San Francisco attending MacWorld (first and last time) when Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone. I didn’t understand or appreciate what a big deal it would be. I didn’t get one that first year but broke down a year later. And have had one ever since.
Here are a couple of more photos from yesterday.


I keep telling myself the iPhone I have is good enough. More than good enough, and I don’t need the latest and greatest. But look at those photos!

The smartphone is our era’s cigarette

Posted on by
Reply

Ross Barkan writing in The Guardian:

“(The 2010s were) dominated, from start to finish, by a single piece of technology that has obliterated the promise of the internet and corrupted human interaction. The smartphone is to the 2010s what cigarettes were to much of the twentieth century, a ubiquitous and ruinous marker of the zeitgeist.”

“In the late 2000s, we allowed a few corporations to persuade us that this advanced, alien technology – assembled via de facto slave labor in Asia – was essential to human existence. We readily bought in, condensing our lives behind the sleek glass. The scroll hooked us like a drug, triggering the exact right loci in our brains; suddenly, we could never be bored again, doped by endless Facebook and Instagram feeds, retreating from unnecessary conversation or thought into an infinity of trivia. The internet never left us.”

True Detective (Season One) on iPhone with AirPods

Posted on by
Reply

My Apple AirPods continue to open up new worlds of sound. I watched (and liked) the first season of the HBO series True Detective (Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson) on a TV. Last night I started watching the series again but this time on my iPhone with AirPods. As with Deadwood, it was a completely different experience. The music was far more powerful and evocative. The texture of the actors voices was richer. (You could almost hear the smoke when McConaughey exhaled) Not sure I can go back to listening to sound coming from across the room.

Small screens, large screens

Posted on by
Reply

I grew up with television, a child of the 50s and 60s. TV screens started off small and got progressively larger. The bigger the screen the better with quality secondary (don’t recall ever hearing the word “resolution” in those days. The family TV was a massive piece of furniture that we watched from across the room. Today, even a struggling family is likely to have a big-ass flatscreen TV. I’m watching less “TV” these days but that might be about to change.

I recently started watching The Wire (again) and got about halfway through the series before Riley showed up. Once she started settling in I went back to the series but on my iPhone this time. I’ve never watched a lot of video (hard for me to call it “TV”) on my phone just because… well, the bigger the screen the better, right? Turns out, not right.

When my phone is in my lap (or on a table), it’s about 18 inches from my eyes. In the photo above the phone is about a foot-and-a-half in front of my face and — as you can see — about the same relative size as the TV across the room. But with much higher resolution and — with AirPods — much better sound.

We have Apple TV and HBO and Netflix but my default streaming source is Amazon Prime which has an excellent app. I’m now finding I watch part of a movie or series… pause… and come back to it. Something I never did before. And my viewing now happens away from the TV room.

This is old news for most of you but something of a revelation for me. I’m find the viewing experience far superior — in many ways — on the phone. Tiny screen for the win.

All my health data on iPhone app

Posted on by
Reply

I’ve never paid much attention (or used) the Health app on my iPhone. Apple says it “consolidates health data from iPhone, Apple Watch, and third-party apps” to do all kinds of stuff. It has a “Health Records” section that I never did anything with until a couple of days ago when I learned I could sync my records (University of Missouri Health Care) to the Apple Health app.

I have about ten years of records stored in the MU Health system and can get to them via browser or iPhone app. But it took a little digging and I rarely had the need.

Within minutes all of my data was pulled into the phone app and I mean everything. More than 600 records (I’ve been pretty healthy). Immunizations, lab results, medications… the works. And much easier to navigate than the website and app I’d been using. So now I have all of my health records right there on my phone. Additional info.

TextGrabber

Posted on by
Reply

I’ve been using this app for years and thought I had posted on it previously but didn’t find anything. Pretty sure there’s an old screencast on YouTube but they’ve made numerous improvements. And I wanted to try out the screen recording feature in the new iPhone. More on that in a moment.

When I come across a long-ish passage in a book or magazine that I’d like to save, rather than just snap a photo, TextGrabber does some kind of OCR (optical character recognition) magic and gives you editable (and searchable) text.

As an aside, the screen recording above was done on the iPhone XS. Making screen recordings has gotten easier over the years but it was still a minor hassle to capture the screen on your phone. No longer. This feature is built right into the iPhone and it works great.