This is Technology Bytes, episode 72, for July 21st, 2021.
Technology Bytes is a microcast where I share brief bytes on interesting technology.
Enjoy, and here we go.
This week I want to talk about Developer Beta 3 in all of the platforms.
You’ve got the iOS, iPadOS, the watch, the television, Apple TV, I mean.
I’m not going to talk about the Vision Pro because I don’t own one of those, so I don’t really have anything to say about that.
I’m going to cover some of the things that I’ve actually talked about in the microcast over the past weeks, but very briefly cover some of the continued frustrations that I’m facing, and then we’ll see what progresses from there.
Some of the really nice things that have been added for Developer Beta 3 I have discussed in previous episodes of this microcast.
One of those is iPhone mirroring.
I used it when it first came out, and then it kind of fell by the wayside, and then I started using it again, and it is really cool because there are things I do on my phone where I lean back in my office chair, pull it out of my pocket, do whatever I’m supposed to do, or whatever I do, and then put it back.
With iPhone mirroring, I don’t have to do that, but one thing I found out that if my computer is controlling my iPhone and then I pull my iPhone out in that environment and try to use it, things go a little haywire.
It eventually recovers, but it is not easy, and it is a little time-consuming, but it doesn’t really crash.
It just sits for a while until it tries to figure out what you want to do, and so I found that if I want to use my phone, I need to turn iPhone mirroring off, or maybe only use it when I’m outside my office, and then it doesn’t really care.
Other things I’ve talked about, the Safari Highlights, which I just did last week, continues to be there, semi-useful at this point.
Apple Fitness Plus is still good.
I still like that on the TV, although I found out this week that if you don’t have a watch that’s running the beta version, or now maybe the public version of watchOS 11, then you can’t use the Fitness Plus app on the Apple TV.
That happened to both my daughter and my wife, and I didn’t know that was happening.
I hadn’t read that was happening, so that is a little bit of an issue when it comes to Apple Fitness Plus on Apple TV.
The other thing that they’ve added to Apple TV is what they call Insight, and I think Amazon calls it X-Ray or something like that, but basically what it does is provides on Apple original content information about who’s on the screen at any given moment, so you can activate it by either swiping down or pausing the show or movie, whatever you’re watching, and then it will show you who’s on the screen at that moment, and then you can click on that and follow it through, see what they’ve been in before, what is their name.
You may remember them from another show, so it’s kind of interesting to be able to look that up.
I know it’s not new.
Other people have done it, but I think it is useful, and I do like it.
The other thing that you can do with the Apple ecosystem is I can do the Apple TV Insight on my phone while I’m watching whatever it is on my actual TV without interrupting the show.
If I do it through the Apple TV interface, then I am pausing the show, or I’ve cut off some of the bottom of the screen to be able to read what I want, but if I’m using my phone, I can look up that information and read it while the show continues to play on my TV.
So those are some pretty cool things that they’ve added to Developer Beta 3.
So just in the basics of things, the Developer Beta 3 seems to be a little more stable.
It seems to bring along more apps, although I don’t have too many problems because many of the apps I use are Apple’s.
But again, as it goes through the different versions of the betas, then things do get better.
If there were little breakdowns, I continue to write things to Apple, and so in the next few minutes, I’ll talk about some of those frustrations.
So I already talked about my frustrations with Apple Fitness+, and haven’t written that to Apple yet on their feedback because I don’t know that it’s their fault or something’s broken.
I think it’s my fault because I just didn’t read to know that that was going to happen when I put all of my devices, even the ones in my family public-facing environment, on the beta.
So that one may be on me.
So one of the ongoing frustrations I have is the customization of the home screen, and it really comes down to icon colors and things like that.
So the company that I work for, their basic color is shades of blue, and so I put our company icon on my screen.
I have that turn on when I get to work, and it puts my phone in work mode.
I’m able to put my icons for the apps that I use at work around the icon for our company so that it doesn’t cover it, so that’s pretty cool.
And then I tint everything blue in the customization, and that’s kind of cool.
But the problem with that is that tint is not just applied to my work environment.
When I leave work and it goes back into my home environment, it keeps that blue shade, and I have to change it back.
I have written that up because I don’t think that it should be that way.
I think your tint should follow your focus mode, and I’m hoping that changes over time.
It hasn’t happened in the first few betas, so we’ll see what happens next.
The other problem that I have is they’ve generated, maybe self-generated, third-party apps into a dark mode on their icon, and they don’t always work.
So not that they don’t work in dark mode, it’s that they’re constantly in dark mode.
And so regardless of what my phone system says, many of the third-party icons on my screen are very dark, including everything in the…
what’s the screen to the far right where it lists all your apps?
Whatever, the app library.
And so that’s kind of frustrating, and I have written that up.
Safari continues to be a problem for my one work site.
I think I’ve mentioned that in the past.
That has not been fixed through the betas.
I still don’t understand what it’s doing.
But every other browser will access that site with no problem on the beta.
It’s only Safari.
So I don’t know if it’s our internal developers that have written something that just doesn’t work in Safari, although it used to.
And I did a test where I went back and booted off of an external drive into the previous version of macOS, which is the Sonoma one, and Safari works fine.
So it’s still something in the new one, in the Sequoia version, that has an issue.
The last thing that’s a bit frustrating is HomeKit.
That seems to be breaking my connection to the Hue world, and very many of my lights in my smart home setup are from Hue.
And it seems like every time either I have a power outage or my internet goes out or I update the beta to the next one, I have to remove all the Hue lights from my home and then add them all back, put them all back into my automations.
It’s just super frustrating.
So while it continues to grow, it continues to get better, even though we don’t really have any of the Apple Intelligence stuff yet, which is probably what most people are interested in, that might not even be there in any significant way when iOS 18 is released, putting myself on the beta has not been that painful.
I’ve enjoyed the little changes that I’m able to control and the frustrations are just part of the world of living in the betas.
If you have any comments or questions, I’d be more than happy to reach out.
You can send them to technologybytes at merrickfamily.com.
But that is all I have for today.
I want to thank you for listening to the Technology Bytes microcast, and I look forward to the next time we are together taking another bite of technology.
Microsoft Mechanics www.microsoft.com www.microsoft.com
