Apple's iOS 9 public beta lands: El Reg pops it on a slab, strokes it up The Register has slipped the first iOS 9 public beta onto an Apple 'slab to have a bit of a go with the software. It's a solid, if not monumental, update for Apple's mobile operating system. There's nothing too earth-shattering for most users, but since it's going to be a free update for anyone running iOS 8, you're going to …
iOS 8 was the first release I've ever seen with flaws in the UI, the most noticeable of which was the size of the text on top (time, carrier, battery percentage, etc.) changing font size during certain transitions like zooming the screen occasionally during transitions like landscape to portrait. Say what you want about Steve Jobs, but he would NEVER have let something like that make it into a final release - much less remain from 8.0.2 through 8.4! He might have screamed at the developers and been a giant asshole, but it would have been fixed.
I've only ever seen the size of the text change on top change when running an older app that isn't built for the newer resolutions, and it is having to scale the display.
Don't get me wrong, iOS 8 is definitely flawed - quite a few app crashes and (third party) keyboards not displaying, and I'm not convinced that is all because of bugs in the applications / add-ons themselves - but the text at the top hasn't been a problem.
I've only ever seen the size of the text change on top change...
On the iPhone 6 Plus, the status bar text and icons are larger on the unlock screen than on the main home springboard screen, but smaller than used for non-scalable apps which is odd - so that's three sizes. Also during the boot process you can notice the black Apple logo change size once, so there's still some weird scaling issues in iOS 8 that are nothing to do with legacy hardware.
But nice to finally have lower case text on the keyboard when unshifted, even though it was too subtle a change for our eagle-eyed Reg reviewer!
Anyone else noticed the space bar drop below the bottom row of keys sometimes (iPad Mini)?
I've given up posting faults on the Apple forums, all that ever happens is an Admin deletes the post with some accompanying email along the lines of "we've deleted your post because it didn't meet our criteria"
iOS 7 introduced the big UI flaws - displaying the "last view" snapshot image when an app has to be restarted due to being booted out of memory, despite the app being configured not to.
And Safari temporarily displaying the "last view" snapshot of page when navigating back, only to replace it with the current page when it doesn't reload within 2 seconds.
In both of these situations, the screen's just showing an image, but there's nothing to let the user know that.
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I wonder if they're going to fix some of the more obvious stuff... Oh God yes. Please add:
- re-introducing the limit of max number of emails in inbox.
- allowing an easy bulk delete of emails in any folder.
- ...in fact a brand new email client bases on what we expect this decade.
- putting podcasts back into the music app.
- ditching that crappy photos icon.
- allowing ad blockers in safari.
- fixing all the weird scaling issues on the iPhone 6 Plus.
- allowing off-line maps.
- allowing moving contacts between groups.
- re-writing the awful clock app, especially the one on the iPad.
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