Category Archives: iPhone

A smartphone with a decent camera

iOS 15.4 improvements

iPhone

Finally!

One of the more obvious enhancements in iOS 15.4 for the iPhone is the ability conferred on FaceID which allows unlocking of the phone while wearing a mask. It works well and is very fast, though sadly it’s restricted to iPhone 12 and later. I still stubbornly insist on wearing a mask in the land of SUVs and gun rights, so this is nice to have in the supermarket.

But a relatively unsung enhancement – only 15 years after the introduction of the iPhone – is the added provision of nested mailboxes in Mail, denoted by the arrow. Click the arrowed item and the underlying mailboxes are revealed. For one who adopts fairly structured mail storage methods, this is huge, as my large number of mailboxes has now become quickly accessible, just as on the desktop OS:


Nested mailboxes.

The other very significant enhancement which has gone largely unremarked is the great improvement in voice recognition. For a device with a small screen and a near useless keyboard, the error rate in recognizing spoken words has fallen by an order of magnitude. What was borderline useless is now suddenly quite competent. As an example, I dictated an email with the names of the last six despots ruling the Russkies* and voice recognition got every one right!

iOS 15.4 is a significant improvement, for these issues alone.

* I was making the point that assassination is a remote hope, and that the first five had all died in their beds, and the sixth is likely to. Their leaders may whack subordinates with impunity, but seem to survive just fine.

A cool iPhone case

iPhone

Thank you, Emily!


The coolest iPhone case on the planet. Click the image.

Not a single ‘control’ on this iPhone case does anything, but does it look cool or what? I saw it in the light-as-champagne Netflix show ‘Emily in Paris’ starring the gorgeous Lily Collins and nothing is calculated to put you in a better mood. The world’s most beautiful city with a gorgeous British/American girl. And no ordinary girl, as her dad is none other than rocker Phil Collins. The apple does not fall far from the tree when it comes to talent, though Lily’s looks are a step up from Phil’s!

A handy Apple ProRAW converter for the iPhone

iPhone, Technique

Getting Apple ProRAW into Lightroom.

One of the nice features of recent iPhones is the option of taking pictures in Apple ProRAW, Apple’s uncompressed and relatively unmanipulated photo format.

What prompts this piece is the excessive default sharpening of JPG images by the iPhone. As a colleague has pointed out, this has been worse and worse since iPhone 4.

The snag is that my Lightroom is version 6.4, and as I have no need for later ‘enhancements’ or the annuity toll they bring, I have not ‘upgraded’. Nor do I need a cloud-resident version of LR open to Adobe’s potential piracy and fee extortion. My LR is bought and paid for – once. But it cannot import Apple ProRAW files from the iPhone.

Wanting to compare the Apple ProRAW files with JPG I needed to get the former into Lightroom, and found that one way of doing this quickly is to connect the iPhone to my Mac Pro, logging on to iCloud Photos. That’s at iCloud.com, not Photos on your local drive.

After selecting the desired image, click and hold the mouse pointer on the file to be downloaded and you will see:


Downloading a RAW as DNG.

The resulting DNG file can now be imported into Lightroom. In my case the JPG was 4mb and the DNG (which is an uncompressed version of the RAW file) came in at 26mb. But, heck, storage is cheap.

The differences in compression and the related artifacts are very noticeable. First the DNG file needed +1.4 stops of exposure increase to match the JPG. Here are enlarged center sections:


JPG on the left.

You can do this in batches in iCloud Photos. Highlight selected files using the shift or control key and download as above.

The DNG files can now be sharpened as deemed necessary in Lightroom, avoiding the excessive native sharpening in the iPhone for JPG images.

Jony Ive on Steve Jobs

iPhone

A sad anniversary.

Steve Jobs died ten years ago today.

Here’s the tribute from his chief designer, Jony Ive:



The power of curiosity, the desire to learn rather than to be right, the willingness to take risk. All the dictates for a successful life are there.

You can see my picture taken on the last day of the life of a great man here.

No more identity theft

Hall of Shame, iPad, iPhone, Ramblings

Hasta la vista, Zuck.


No more theft.

iOS 14.5 for the iPhone and iPad will be released shortly. Unlike previous versions of the operating system, apps which would require the user to opt-out of tracking their activity now will require the user to consciously agree to be tracked. The opt-in screen appears above.

Why is this a big deal?

Let me flashback to to my son’s 6th grade year in California. That was in 2014. As we were walking home I noticed that all the kids in the playground were busy staring at their smartphone screens.

“What are they doing, Winnie?” I asked in all innocence.

“Facebook, Dad”.

This set me off on a process of discovery and disclosed what has to be the greatest evil of our time. Not only was Facebook absorbing and wasting huge amounts of time for these fertile young brains, it transpired that it was tracking everything these kids did even if they were not on Facebook. And unless you have been in a nuclear blast-proof bunker the last few weeks with no access to any sort of connectivity, you will also know that Facebook extended its evil ways as an organizing vehicles for traitors, seditionists and insurrectionists. Censorship of hate speech be damned, thanks to Mr. Zuckerberg. The people who stormed the Capitol on their Pig’s orders on January 6, 2021 had organized their meetings on Facebook and, to a lesser extent, on Twitter.

But it gets even worse. 4 years ago a very close US presidential election awarded that same Pig the Oval Office thanks to the Russkies’ massive campaign of disinformation on …. yup, you guessed it, Facebook. And every time those seditionists clicked on the site of their local guns and ammo supplier, Facebook was there making money off their clicks. Zuckerberg was, simply stated, being paid by the makers of deadly weapons.

Now Zuckerberg is up in arms about Tim Cook’s privacy decision. He argues that the requirement to opt-in to being tracked will make your “….advertising experience worse.” Excuse me? Is there something like a good advertising experience?

Come to think of it, while you are at it, you might as well install an ad blocker on all your devices to cut the noise and disruption ads cause in the reading experience.

So when iOS 14.5 is announced, I advise all iOS users to upgrade immediately and refuse to opt-in to tracking of their activity. If you prefer to be watched, sold, tracked, filed and numbered while enhancing Mr. Zuckerberg’s bloated net worth, then stick with your Samsung cell phone. iOS 14.5 works on iPhone 6S or later.

As for my son, he gave up Facebook shortly after the experience explained above, and has never been happier or more productive.