iOS 17.1 And What I Like

Hi folks. Enough of my whining and now I’m going to tell you what I actually like about iOS 17.1. In my postscript to my last post I mentioned that I like the fact that you can favourite songs in your music library and recently, I started playing around with that to see what it was like. Well, I think it’s great that we can do this now and I hear that iOS 17.2 there will be an option to create a playlist called Favourites and to be honest, I think that should’ve been the plan all along for this particular aspect of the software. Besides, there should’ve been a Favourites playlist by default, instead of being an untitled playlist if one chooses not to put their own title to a list. I keep my list small, because I know that they can take up potentially megabytes and possibly gigabytes if they are large enough.

I like Favourites because I have some compilations which are actually collections of band’s albums, such as Van Halen, Deftones, Metallica and LINKIN PARK who are among those with studio album collection boxed sets on iTunes over the years. Even Disturbed and Slipknot are not immune to this trend, but I didn’t snap up studio album collections for every band because I wanted individual albums by the majority of my artists. With Van Halen, I chose them because I know the albums from the David Lee Roth era well enough, that I can listen to an individual album from it as I please. With Favourites, it is much easier to cherry pic for example: the entirety of Van Halen I, or 1984. I did both albums, during the summer on my album listening kick and it felt good, to go back to younger days.

Other things which make me happy about iOS 17.1 is that with emails, I can move messages with known email addresses right to the intended mailbox I created for example: I have one just for Alan Cross and all my emails to him, when I have a question, comment or I am giving him a link to look at, potentially for his website. With iOS 17, I had to manually go to the mailbox, but with iOS 17.1, it has the old option from the past saying “Move to” so-and-so after I decide to move the message, rather than delete it.

I am happy to have more of a choice back, when it comes to assigning ringtones and text tones to people again. With iOS 17, you could only assign ringtones as ringtones and text tones, as text tones. Thankfully, we got half of that back from how it was before in that we can assign text tones from both ringtones and text tones, but not all of the same freedom with ringtones. In a way, it makes sense because these new text tones are too short to be used as a ringtone anyway, but others may not be such as the classic ringtones from way back in the day before 2013. However, I’m not going to knock this one because I’m just happy to have that option back.

About my postscript in the last post, I had discovered that in the music app, compilations are hidden, even if they are unhidden as an option for listening and sorting, by Apple and I wonder if this may be a part of the reason I had gone through all this trouble and upset, with my music library, which is still kinda messy and looks like it had been trampled upon by software bullies. But seriously, my library is still a mess with albums still broken up and no syncing with iTunes, when it comes to downloading new music or TV show episodes as of iOS 17.1. I had reported my issues with the option for compilations being awol to Apple Support in the app and I hope that there are tech experts working on this problem. Right now, I am just happy to be able to favourite songs I want to hear if I am in the mood, even though I am an album person at heart. That is why I had been bitching about this issue, in my last two posts and I will not let go of albums that easily. I am guilty of cherry picking songs, but I’m trying to fix that in my iTunes library as much as I can. Unfortunately, I can’t do that with every single album because not all albums are available in the iTunes Store right now. For example: Flash Harry by Harry Nilsson is not available now, but it was in early 2019. I only purchased and downloaded the song Harry, because I am a Monty Python fan and because it is sung and written by Eric Idle, with help from his friend Charlie Dore. I hope that some day this will come back so I can purchase the remainder of the album, as apposed to running to Youtube to listen to the whole thing, without the option of picking songs on my own time, to listen to again and again. I used to do this as far back as CDs and favourites gives me that option again, without having to create a playlist. There are countless examples of this from back in the day, so I won’t attempt to go through them all. Anyway, I hope that you are enjoying iOS 17.1, even with its flaws I had pointed out and especially the ones in the Music app, which are no less important than anything else on our iPhones and iPads.

One thing I’ve been wishing for and which has not happened yet with iOS or iPadOS, is that we should be allowed to choose the sounds for all applications, besides Mail and Calendar. For example: I have sounds which will be great for the Weather app or any Weather app which I use which has Push notifications as a part of what they offer. The native weather app is obviously one of them, but I have others which do not have their own sound and use the default sound, chosen by Apple. The other reason I mentioned this is because I don’t like the current sound which is used for iOS 17, as it gets away from tradition as for the past 16 years, the default sound for a third-party apps and some native apps outside of Mail and Calendar has been Tri-tone and we have all grown used to it. Now, the default is Rebound, which sounds nice and is not too jarring. However, the fact that it doesn’t make you start like Tri-tone is rather counterintuitive, when it comes to alerting people to my mind, none of the new ringtones or alert tones for iOS 17 are especially outstanding and the fact that the default is changed, it’s not great. As similar sentiment with Siri and its classic tone being replaced by the quieter tune, rather than tone.

For one thing, these new alerts are hard to hear in noisy environments and the classic alerts are perfect for that, so why screw something up like this and have people miss alerts, which could be related to business or something else important, such as a Transit application Alerting one to their bus arriving, or a critical weather alert such as rain headed our way in the next 10 minutes. I mean, not everyone uses their iPhone the same way and Apple should know this, but it seems that some people who work there and who make decisions as to how the latest iOS software is constructed, have forgotten. So, my hope is that someday either with future iOS 17 or iOS 18 updates, we will get The option of assigning a sound to all applications, besides Mail, phone, messages, reminder and Calendar. I use certain sounds for certain reasons, some of which I cannot explain in this blog. Others I leave alone because they just don’t suit me and they are simply too quiet. Hopefully something will give and will be allowed this option in the future. Otherwise, besides my problems with iOS 17 I think it is pretty good so far. Let’s hope that things get patched up and fixed soon, so that future updates will be more or less like they were, before iOS 17 came along with no missing options and as little bugs as possible.