iOS 17, So Far

Hi folks. It’s September 23rd and today, I am going to talk about iOS 17, on a Queen related blog? Yes and I will explain why further down and this certainly shocked me, when I had discovered something odd about the newest generation of Apple’s iOS software. It had come out on September 18th (10 years to the day) as iOS 7 and they both have parallels to each other. First of all, both updates came with new ringtones and a newly enhanced voice for two of (what were) the English speaking Siri voices. Oh yeah, there were also new voices for French Canada and such too back then! However, iOS 17 is far superior than the predecessor by 10 Years in that there are many other additions over that time and of course, we have many new voices, all be it different versions of them from when they had first appeared on iOS 10. For those who use an app called Weather Gods, there are new lock screen widgets, as we find out in this link. I don’t use any widgets (besides battery), but I know there are others who may so I am putting this here for those who do and enjoy navigating them, stacked or not. Personally, I don’t like them on my phone . https://www.applevis.com/forum/ios-ipados/weather-gods-lock-screen-widgets-configuration

One thing I should mention is that for those of us who use VoiceOver, we tend to use a single voice as a default voice and that is exactly what it is. However, sometimes it gets screwed up and we hear other things which we aren’t supposed to hear, when navigating websites. Sometimes, a foreign language shows up, even if you have “Detect Languages” set to off. So, to remedy this problem, add the same voice using “Add New Language” which matches the country you live in. For example: if you are using a US voice, then you simply add US and add the voice you are using and switch the rotor to languages and go either up or down, to US. Then, the voice will behave as it should, with no strange languages or unintelligible words being spoken. This is one thing that blind people who use the iPhone don’t understand and they figure that something is wrong with their device. In fact, nothing is wrong and that’s just how the default voice works, because the language detection feature works from there, no matter whether you speak English, or any other language throughout the world.

With VoiceOver, I find the new per-voice settings to be kinda fun to play with, depending on the voice. Not every voice is created equally and as such, options are different depending on the voice you want to change either: WPM minimum or maximum, pitch range, sentence pause, or Timbre. With the latter, it either makes the specific voice sound either like a robotic chipmunk, or a demon. With other voices you can set roughness, breathiness and other things, but you can’t go back to a previous version of a voice. Like I said, not all voices were created the same and as such, have their own unique options and idiosyncrasies to them. Just explore and if you don’t like what you had set up, just reset the voice back to default. To further drive the point of my statement at the beginning of this paragraph Home, here’s a link to an episode of a podcast which discusses three of the voices which have all the settings I have touched on. https://www.applevis.com/podcasts/finely-tune-voiceover-speech-best-suit-your-needs-preferences-ios-voice-settings

As for the ringtones, there are plenty of new ones to choose from and the same with text tones. However, with this new generation of iOS we cannot use one for the other, meaning we cannot use a ringtone as a text tone and vice versa. However, if you have set up Ringtones and text tones for either default or for people in your contacts, they will stay the same, unless you change them today. You haven’t lost anything, it’s just that you cannot confuse one with the other so to speak. Basically, Apple is saying this is for this and that is for that. If you’re going to explore both the ring and text tones, I suggest doing so outside of that in the sounds and haptics settings such as: voicemail, mail, new mail, etc. if you do that, you will not run into that problem and a friend of mine had, when she explored the ringtones and the text tones and by doing so, accidentally changed her default tone and has to find a new one, rather than the one she likes. By the way, I noticed that the new text tones are quieter than the ringtones! Huh!!!

With Apple Books, there was an issue with the audiobooks which was fixed with this update in that two of my books which had chapters, didn’t allow me to access them individually and if I wanted to go to a specific chapter, I had to go through the entire book by skipping ahead through each chapter until I found the one I wanted to hear. Like I said, that was fixed and I am happy and I hope this is not broken again in future iOS 17 updates.

With the Music app, I actually like the new Crossfade feature (in and of itself), but I don’t like how it works on streaming services. It does not sound like it does on Radio when songs are mixed into each other from the end to the beginning and in fact, the beginning fades in and that really gets my blood boiling. However, if it is set just right, it sounds closer to how it would if you were listening to a radio station, or a live stream of one. The obvious differences there is no station ID and all the music is from your library, whether you have a mast a collection or collected songs through Apple Music. Either way, I believe that if you wanna listen to an entire album listen to it properly and not use Crossfade. It would ruin the entire experience of hearing an entire album from front to back. If you’re listening to songs in a random order according to genre, that’s a different story and the same with the playlist. I have my Crossfade set to 3 seconds, 1s, 12s 3 seconds (whatever that means). Either way, it sounds the best for me under the circumstances.

Clock has received a welcome upgrade, and that we can now set multiple timers. This is great especially if you’re using more than one washing machine or dryer, when doing laundry. Or, if you are doing many tasks which requires you to set a time for each one of them individually. The best thing is that you can run them at the same time and you can create a new timer when you launch the app, unless you have one or more timers going already. In that case, create a new timer first and then if you have another one which you need at the moment as a recent timer, go ahead and use it at the same time and they will both go off with the alarm you set for them. You can even change your alarm by tapping on a timer and going to where the alarm can be set and you can make the change as if you are setting up a new timer. So, no problem. Right?

Now, we get to the Queen related part to iOS 17, as it relates to me and it is a byproduct of what I’m about to tell you here. There is one flaw with iOS 17 so far which has nothing to do with the ringtones or the alert tones. It has everything to do with the Music and TV apps and how they sync up when you purchase new music, or new TV shows and episodes of TV shows. Before iOS 17, I would purchase either new music, movies or TV shows and I would download a previous episode of The Simpsons. For some odd reason, The Simpsons is my go-to TV show for syncing up my music with TV and everything in both apps and respective libraries. I don’t know why, but that is just how it is. In the past, I would download from the TV app and today, I purchased Freddie’s 2019 compilation Never Boring on iTunes. I tried the usual thing of redownloading a Simpsons episode, but for some reason things did not sync up. What happened? I don’t know, but I had tried deleting an entire season and redownloading it and nothing worked. So, I tried deleting again and this time, I decided to try downloading from the iTunes Store app and it worked from there. Why?

The clincher for me was when I went into my Settings app, general, iPhone storage and then review TV downloads. This includes both TV and movies including anything I may have purchased from the Classic Albums series. I tested this out on the A Night At The Opera Classic Albums documentary and the same thing happened. What was that same thing you may ask? Well, when reviewing TV downloads, those episodes were missing from there when I had re-downloaded them onto my phone from the TV app, but when going into the iTunes app, I found them under TV and movies respectively, then downloaded them again and when I did that, everything showed up as if nothing was wrong and my TV seasons and movies were all there, in the TV app and when reviewing TV and movies in iPhone storage. . Just a note of warning, it will probably say “Play” when you wish to do the download back onto your phone or maybe even your iPad and this may confuse some of us. However, if you tap the “Play” button, it will download everything as is and it will all be back and everything will match, with both the TV app and with iPhone storage. Can you imagine if you have a lot of TV episodes, seasons of shows and a bunch of movies to download onto your iPhone 15, if and when you upgrade to it? For some reason, both books, TV shows and movies do not come back by themselves when doing the upgrade to a newer phone. I do not expect this to change any time soon and now, I hope I will never have to upgrade, because of this flaw.

There seems to be some sort of disconnect between apps in iOS 17 and I hope that Apple learns about this. I will be talking about that on some platforms like Youtube and for various Youtube channels, whose main focus is Apple in the coming days. My guess however, is that this may not be fixed until iOS 17.1 or later. However, I will be mentioning what I have put here, somewhere else on the internet including Youtube, if and when the opportunity presents itself if the YouTuber asks how iOS 17 is going for you.

Everything else I use works just fine and even composing blog posts like this has been no problem. I hope that if you are blind and you have the newer iPhones, you will update to iOS 17 and consider my suggestion about adding on the additional voice, consistent with where you live or the language of the voice you use. I am a seasoned user, but even those who are also seasoned users and teachers may have had problems such as what I had outlined above. Happy downloading and enjoy the new generation of Apple’s iOS software. I promise that the next post will be more related to Queen and in fact, it will be on Thursday.