iOS 7

Photo: ipadsforeducation.vic.edu.au

AllThingsD is reporting that updating school iPads to iOS 7 failed to restore the supervision profiles, meaning that all of the protective filters put in place were lost.

“Apple did not realize that installing iOS 7 would remove our (and thousands of organizations across the country) safety protection measure, which now makes the iPad devices unfiltered when accessing the Internet away from school,” said a memo from the Manitou Springs (Colo.) School District 14 to parents. “In the short term, the district will be collecting iPad devices at the end of each day until the safety protection measure is reinstalled” … 
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Over the past few days, several iOS 7 users have been reporting issues with sending and receiving iMessages. A quick (partially successful) fix has been to Reset Network Settings inside of the iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch Settings app. However, this mostly has only been working for outgoing iMessages.

Instead of sending as an iMessage, texts have either been reverting to SMS or just hanging without ever sending. Now, Apple has told the WSJ that it is aware of the issue and it is working on a fix for an upcoming software update:

“We are aware of an issue that affects a fraction of a percent of our iMessage users, and we will have a fix available in an upcoming software update,” Apple said in a statement. “In the meantime, we encourage any users having problems to reference our troubleshooting documents or contact AppleCare to help resolve their issue. We apologize for any inconvenience this causes impacted users.”

In the meantime, Apple is recommending that users contact AppleCare. We’re not so sure that will solve anything as this is clearly a software issue that Apple has acknowledged (in the same statement!) will be solved with an actual update. As our own analytics have shown, Apple is widely testing iOS 7.0.3, so perhaps this will be the release with the answers to our iMessage troubles.

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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmRA_tML2tE&start=675]

During President Obama’s live remarks addressing the government shutdown and Obamacare site outages today, the U.S President compared the issues with healthcare.gov to an Apple product launch (via WashingtonPost):

Now, like every new law, every new product roll-out, there are going to be some glitches in the sign-up process along the way that we will fix. I’ve been saying this from the start. For example, we found out that there have been times this morning where the site’s been running more slowly than it normally will.

And we’re going to be speeding things up in the next few hours to handle all of this demand that exceeds anything that we had expected. Consider that just a couple of weeks ago, Apple rolled out a new mobile operating system, and within days, they found a glitch, so they fixed it. I don’t remember anybody suggesting Apple should stop selling iPhones or iPads or threatening to shut down the company if they didn’t. That’s not how we do things in America. We don’t actively root for failure. We get to work, we make things happen, we make them better, we keep going.

He is of course referring to the release of iOS 7.0.2 last week, which brought fixes for a lock screen passcode bypass flaw and other small issues.

Obama is a confirmed iPad user and is frequently seen carrying around the device so perhaps he’s speaking from some 1st hand experience…
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Mashable reports that Major League Baseball has demo’d using Apple’s iBeacon indoor mapping technology to provide live baseball fans with a whole range of personalised and interactive experiences when attending games at stadiums.

An update to its At the Ballpark app provides both practical assistance and additional entertainment and interest.

By loading the free app when you get off the subway and head towards the stadium, it immediately knows you are at Citi Field. It populates a ballpark guide with information specific to the stadium, so if you were to enter Phillies’ Citizens Bank Park, the entire experience and data wouldn’t be the same.

As you near the gates, the app displays your ticket’s barcode on screen, as well as a map of where the seats are located. If tickets are loaded into Apple Passbook or purchased online through certain ticketing partners, the app will automatically pull them up … 
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Velocity is a new speed reader app for your iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad that helps you read faster by presenting one word at a time using a technique called Rapid Serial Visual Presentation. Studies have shown that using Rapid Serial Visual Presentation helps increase reader’s reading speed because it forces the reader to stop reading out loud inside their head (subvocalization), and suppresses the tendency for eyes to backtrack the line while reading and searching for the end of the sentence. Generally a reader’s average reading speed is two hundred words per minute, but Velocity supports reading speeds up to one thousand words per minute.

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Last time Apple checked in during its Q3 2013 earnings report it announced the App Store was home to 900,000 apps and over 375K designed specifically for iPad. Today, the App Store has now reached 950,000 apps and quickly approaches 1 million with Apple accepting 50K new apps in the last two months alone. The news comes from app discovery service Appsfire, which regularly tracks new and updated apps added to the App Store.

Apple often celebrates milestones for its App Store with some type of giveaway or contest for users. Earlier this year it made a number of premium apps available for free to celebrate the 5th anniversary of the App Store and also gave away a $10,000 App Store gift card to announce the 50 billionth app download. We wouldn’t be surprised to see Apple do something similar for the 1 millionth app on the App Store.

Apple has likely seen an increase in new app submissions in recent weeks, as a long list of developers update and release new apps to accompany last week’s launch of iOS 7 and the new iPhones. At the current rate, it will take Apple just another couple of months to hit the 1 million mark.
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iTunes gift cards are a great gift for iOS Device users. They can be used to purchase content from the iTunes Store, App Store, and iBookstore. However, entering in the string of characters to redeem the gift card balance has typically been a pain with the touch keyboards on iPads, iPhone, and iPod touches. Like iTunes 11 on the Mac, iOS 7 moves to solve this problem. You can now use your device’s camera to scan in the code.

Go to the main/featured page in whichever store you choose and to get to the redemption screen, scroll all the way down, and press on redeem:

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Setting up your email in iOS 7 is just like setting it up in earlier versions of iOS. Just like before, you are able to have Gmail set up in the Mail app. To set up your email you would go to Settings, then tap on Mail, Contacts & Calendars, and then press Add Account. By default in iOS, Gmail is set to archive your emails as opposed to deleting them. Archiving email keeps the messages in an Archived folder, but Deleting moves them to the trash.

If you are viewing your inbox, and you swipe from right to left on the message, you do not get the option to delete the message. Rather, you get an Archive option or a More option. The More option gives you every other option except for deleting the message. You could always tap on More, then press Move Message, and then choose the Trash folder. That’s rather tedious for a simple task:

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For some people, the font sizes on the iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch are too small. Sometimes, these small fonts prevent people from using or purchasing the iOS devices. Thankfully, there are multiple solutions to this potential issue. Below, we’ve rounded up the old fixes and new fixes in iOS 7:

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Previously, I discussed how to have your iOS device read text for you in iOS 6, and in iOS 7 it works pretty much the same way – but with some little differences.

As in iOS 6, there are two different ways to make text speakable on an iOS device. But before we do that and discuss how to do it, let’s first set up our iOS device so we can do it:

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Yesterday iOS 7 came out. There was a massive rush to try to install and it download it. The one thing that we were not prepared for or made aware of was the need to have up to 3.3 GB of space available in order to download and install iOS 7. The reason you needed 3.3 GB available is that the 900MB download of iOS 7 also needs to move a lot of stuff around during installation.

If you are like us, you might not have that 3.3GB of space needed on your iOS device. We’ve spent the last year downloading music, videos and apps to the point where our iPads tell us to stop. So now we need to delete some of our stuff.

Once you free up your space on your device, and back up your device, then you will be officially ready to download iOS 7. In this how-to I will discuss the two different methods to free up storage space off the device, either from the device itself, or managing the device while being connected to the computer through iTunes…

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