A Long-Awaited Upgrade; or A Photo Map for iOS 7
/I'm a big fan of my iPhone and iPad (and I've written almost a whole novel on the latter) but until today I was still using iOS 6, the previous version of Apple's mobile operating system. (If the previous sentence doesn't mean anything to you, you can probably safely give this post a miss.
My reluctance to upgrade was primarily due to three reasons:
- It requires an upgrade to iTunes 11, which I've been avoiding for reasons
- The visual redesign is an atrocity
- The Photos app has lost my favourite feature, the Places map
In case you don't know what I mean by the last point, the old iOS 6 Photos app allowed you to see all of your photos on a single map, a feature from which I have always derived an inordinate amount of satisfaction.
Look at me, I've been places!
The new version does allow you to view a map of all photos taken in a single year, which is a perfect replacement provided you don't take photos in more than one year.
Without any real advantage to the upgrade, I'd not been too worried about sticking with iOS 6. However, over the months since the new version came out it's become a prerequisite for an increasing number of apps. The final straw came when I thought I'd be clever and use iCloud to export the most recent chapters of my first draft to my PC, at which point they promptly became converted to a new format and inaccessible on the iPad. "Aha," says the Pages app, "you just need to update me and I'll be able to open them!" Yes, but the app can't be updated without upgrading to iOS 7 first. It Just Works (Except For When It Doesn't).
Now that Apple has finally made remaining with the current version more unpleasant than the alternative, I made yet another attempt to find a replacement for the Photo map. You'd think there would be plenty; it's fundamentally a quite simple idea. Unfortunately I'd never previously been able to find one, but yesterday I finally found it: Picture-Map!
It's a splendid little app that does exactly what I want, which is to display all of my photos on a single map. You can't tell from the screenshots, but you can actually have proper map pins rather than thumbnails. I'm more than happy with it. Turns out there's also a free version, but I can't tell what the difference is.
With that dealt with, I finally gave in and upgraded. To tell the truth, I'm starting to get used to the new design, although I wouldn't yet say I like it. But at least I'm now up to date. And the new version of Pages only requires a single tap to tab and indent, rather than three, which should improve my overall typing speed by about 40%.