Adapting to iOs 7.1

So, after putting my iPad back to AppleJail yesterday, it feels like I have a brand new iPad. I jailbroke it from iOs 6 and unbroke it to iOs7(.1). It is different. No other way to put it. I mean, I had to google to even understand how to kill apps! But after an evening of fiddling with it, I started to get a hang of it. I think it'll grow on me, just like any other new os has before. I mean, I am a happy Win8.1 user now too, even though (long term MS person as I am) Win8 had me pretty much on my toes at first!

There are several really cool things about iOs7 - things that originally were part of the reason I jailbroke my iPad in the first place - but there are agravation points too. Let's do a little break-down of these, even though I recognize that I'm already a bit late in this game, iOs7 being old stuff already ;)

Category cool: new swipes

1. Pinch with four or five fingers, halfway (or up) to get to the open apps cards view, all the way to get to home screen
2. Swipe with four or five fingers to switch between apps - this is the best thing in my opinion!

You can turn these off in the settings if it happens to be an agravation point to you.

Category cool: the open apps cards view

Even though it annoyed me at first, that I had to KVG (Finnish acronym for look in the effin' google) how to kill the open apps, I actually like this new view! And, for those of you who ended up here because you needed to google this same issue, here's the answer: you swipe the app up and over the edge to close it.

Category agravating: the wallpaper zoom and move around

This was the first thing I noticed. My wallpaper was moving around. I don't like moving around stuff, it makes me motion sick, so I went to the settings and more guessed than new that it could be turned off in the wallpaper settings. It's the not so obvious Perpective Zoom setting (you need to the wallpapers settings and tap the wallpaper open to preview), that needs to be turned off if you don't want the wallpaper to be moving around.

Category agravating: the flying windows

I have this kind of stuff turned off in my Windows too. I don't like my apps to be flying this way and that when I launch and close them, I want them to appear and disappear. So far, I have not found a way to disable this on the iPad though, so I just need to learn to live with it.

Category *meh*: the overall design

I don't really like the flat, grey, thinline design, but can't say it would exactly bother me either. I mean, the icons are pretty ok, but the title row e.g. in Safari is, for lack of a better word, boring. It goest to the same design as the new Facebook look and feel. Seems unfinished. Like it's missing some CSS or something. Don't like that either, for the record.

Category cool/agravating/*meh*: the controls panel / highlight search / notification swipe down

Where-ever you are, you can swipe out the controls (music, camera, flight mode, wifi...) from the bottom of the screen. This is one of those things that was missing in iOs before (esp. the wifi, bluetooth etc. controls) and one of the reasons I jailbroke my iPad, and now, there they are :) Swipe from the bottom and you get them :)

Highlight search is mostly a nuisance to me. I don't really use it, never have, and now it pops out in the top of the screen just by a simple mis-swipe of a finger on the screen. Oh well, goes to the category of "learn to live with", I guess.

As for the notifications, I mostly hate them and don't use them, so it's only calendar appointments and new email, that will ever be visible in my notifications swipe down (I believe it has some other proper name, but I can't remember it). Anyhow, it falls nicely from the top of the screen and opens a full black screen with whatever notifications you have (enabled).

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Ok, what else? I had some trouble with certain apps after the update, and whether the reason was the unbreaking & restoring or simply the updating, can't know. Anyway, Instagram and iKeepass had some glitches.

Instagram, well, it so happened that at the same time their server was down and I was unaware of this, so my troubles might have been non-existent. Anyway, I did some googling and found that some other people had had problems with Instagram after updating to iOs7, so again, who knows?

iKeepass had me for a time there too - it launched nicely, asked for my master key when I tapped to open my database, but after typing in my key, it gave me blank. I so totally rely on my Keepass for passwords that this was a major issue (even though I can access tha database on multiple devices). At that point I decided to try the reset all settings -trick to get my apps to work properly.

I'd been reluctant because of the extra work that means, to go through your settings to reconfigure everything after the reset. But it worked. iKeepass revived and Instagram too, as soo as they had their server running again, that is.

All in all, I'm quite happy with the iOs7 so far, if you disregard the couple things that go into category "learn to live with" (I have found live in general is easier, when you learn to live with the stuff you can't change). It gives me most of the same things as jailbreaking did (since the multi-user thing actually pretty much broke after a month or so).