by Jeff McKamey
New Operating Systems
IOS is now 10, OSX is now MacOS Sierra, and iWatch is 3.0
Photos:
iPhoto is now called Photos, and it lost the ability to export a webpage but they have added a whole bunch of stuff.
The niftiest feature is the categories, when you first install Sierra, it will spend hours, or if your library is large enough, days analyzing all the pictures in your photo library. If you type a single letter in the search window, you will see all the categories that start with that letter. Some, kind of overlap like luggage, backpack, and sunrise, sunset. There is only one category for guns, pistols, or rifles called firearms…..
Faces threw away all your hard work labeling all the faces your library, and now you have to start over from scratch. The reason is it uses a new algoritm for analyzing all the other things as well as faces.
The map function is much improved, and the memories button collects like pictures for you.
Edit photos includes a Bandaid function and a markup function. The Bandaid works pretty well.
Siri
Siri is now on the Mac, you can ask Siri to do a whole bunch of things. Hold down command space to activate it. Some things you can say are:
- Show me all the Word documents
- Show me all the spreadsheets from 2010
- Show me pictures of firearms, will show you the last duck hunt…
Also most things you can tell Siri to do on your phone works on the Mac.
Storage
They now let you put your desktop and documents in your iCloud. But if you have a woefully small solid-state drive, which you got saddled with, by buying the cheapest MacBook Air…..Sierra has a solution for you!
Go to the Apple menu, Click Storage, click Manage. Store in iCloud is the new setting, and it will take any document you have not opened in forever and put it in the cloud for you leaving room for new things. If you try to open a file that is in the cloud, it will download it to your computer and open it just like it never left! Supposedly this feature does not count against your Gigabytes of storage you have to pay for.
Copy and Paste Between Devices
This only works if all your devices have the new OS’s AND they are on the same iCloud account. When you copy something on one device whether it be your iPad, iPhone or computer, in a few seconds you can paste it to another. The copied item only lasts two minutes and then expires so it isn’t stuck in the cloud forever.
IOS 10
Mail received a filter for unread messages. This has been badly needed for a long time! You can now unsubscribe from a mailing list by hitting a button instead of digging through the email.
Photos on your IOS device gets the same search features as your Mac.
If you hate pushing your home button, go to — Settings, General, Accessibilty, Home button and change it back the way it was.
iWatch 3.0
This is how the watch should have worked when it came out over a year ago! The biggest feature is that everything is faster. It does that by pre-loading anything you might click on, into memory, and when you click on it, it shows up pretty much right away. It used to take 10-20 seconds to bring up the weather, stock market, or pretty much anything else on the watch. If you were lucky, sometimes a full minute….
It used to be faster to pull out your phone, hit the weather button, and put it away than to wait for the watch to bring up the weather! You can now scribble a reply to a text message on the screen, it will recognize your letters one at a time and turn them into text.
iPhone 7
It is now waterproof! I do not recomend putting your phone in the water, just watch a video of the thousands of people that have done it already:
Note that it is only marginally waterproof….
The new iWatch is water resistant up to 50 Meters, so you could swim with it.
Jack
It has no headphone jack, it comes with an adapter. The adapter did not work very well with my bose headphones, the headphones did not seat well in the jack, and there was static… Also there is no easy way to charge you phone and listen to you tunes with your headphones anymore. Maybe it is apples secret plan to get people to not listen to the tunes at least once a day when they have to charge their phone.
Louder
The new iphones are twice as loud as the old models, and the big one has a second speaker on the other side of the phone for stero sound.
Camera
They have improved cameras, but only the 7Plus has the second camera with the 2X zoom.