The Good and Bad in iOS 11 and watchOS 4 – TMO Daily Observations 2017-09-20
Kelly Guimont and John Martellaro join Jeff Gamet to talk about what they like in iOS 11 and watchOS 4 along with what they don’t, and Kelly asks for some iPhone 8 buyer’s advice.
Show Notes
- iOS 11 and watchOS 4: compliments and complaints
- iOS 11: Apple's Big Productivity Upgrade
- Kelly's iPhone 8 dilemma
- TMO Daily Observations Twitter feed
I’m another happy Apple TV user. I ordered one the minute Steve Jobs made them available in 2007 and I’ve been watching my Apple TV far more than my Cable Box ever since. Not only for films and TV shows, but also for music videos (as well as music) and sports and podcasts and news and educational stuff, foreign TV and games and YouTube and Livestream — I have 278 Apple TV apps, though not all are installed. I just installed the latest OS on my TV, iPad, iPhone and Apple Watch with no problems, which took an hour or so.
I’m using tvOS 11.0 right now and TV episodes that I’ve watched are indicated by a white circle containing a checkmark in the bottom right-hand corner of the thumbnail pic, just like they’ve always been. However, Apple has NEVER similarly marked MOVIES that you’ve watched in the Apple TV’s “Movies” app, I presume because they assume that everyone remembers which films they’ve seen. Well, I have over 800 movies and many of them have similar names, like all the Star Trek or Star Wars films, so having an “already watched” indicator would be very useful. Even more useful would be the ability to search only purchased films in your LIBRARY, like you can in the macOS “iTunes” app. And more useful than that would be a list of films you’ve already watched and — better yet — a “Continue Watching” list of films that you haven’t finished! All of those are missing from the Apple TV “Movies” app and all but the indicator are missing from the “TV Shows” app.
One annoyance I have about tvOS 11 is that “Purchased Movies / All Movies” is now listed in the order that you bought the movies rather than alphabetical order, so it is next to impossible to find a movie now! No, that’s not true — I just found a movie that I recently bought hundreds of movies down the list, so I have absolutely no idea how Apple has organized this list. Chronologically? No. Maybe by the Directors’ middle names? No. The average age of all the actors in each movie? No. If I were cynical I might think that Apple’s purpose may be to force you to use SEARCH to look through through ALL of their movies, 99.999% of which you haven’t bought, to find the one you bought that you are looking for, hoping that you’ll be tempted to buy another movie. But I like and trust Apple, and tvOS 11 has only been out one day, so I think that this is just a glitch that Apple hopefully will quickly fix.
Not many people are talking about tvOS 11 and I don’t know why. I found so many problems as well. I do hope apple will fix some things in future updates like the ability to mark a movie or tv show was watched or unwatched on the Apple TV. Even in iTunes now there is no visual blue dot, it just shows watched or unwatched in the info, not the cover art. I don’t know who made this decision at apple. Before I could tell if a new episode was added just by the dot on the cover art. Now I have to go and look at every file/episode in the info.
The new tvOS is so slow also but I do have a huge library. Yet the previous tvOS never had any lag.