I’ve been using iOS 7 for a while now — for a couple of months on my iPad and about half that on my iPhone — so thought it was worth a quick summary of my experience. I’m certainly not going into the depth that Arstechnica have; I’ll do it all in a few bullet points.

The good

• Control Center. Switch on and off BlueTooth and WiFi without having to go into Settings. I’ve been wanting this since iPhone OS 1 so this is more than welcome!
• The look. It is controversial and it does take a bit of getting used to but overall I like it and it works well
• I didn’t find the new look to be as jarring as I thought it would be based on what I saw in the screenshots
• The “Today” view in Notification Center. All your notifications and stuff that’s happening shortly in one place. Felt like nice PowerPoint (Keynote, I suppose) material when I first saw it but I actually find it quite useful
• The “back swipe” gesture in navigation views that goes back to the previous screen. I noticed how useful it was when I started trying it in apps that don’t support it. Tweetbot I’m looking at you!

The bad

Like all the best upgrades, iOS 6 is almost entirely invisible. It works just like iOS 5 — which is to say, pretty well most of the time — but with some convenient new additions. Also, unlike version five, it’s been relatively stable throughout the beta process.

What’s new and what will you like? I’ve grown so accustomed to most of them that I had to look up the “What’s new” page on Apple’s website. Really, that’s a good thing. Invisibility is the fate of a feature that’s quickly integrated with how you use a device. (The thing that makes it tricky is that it’s also the fate of a completely useless feature that you never use.)

Instapaper

• The save page bookmark works with Google Reader. That is, it saves the link I’m reading rather than the Google Reader web page.
• Page turn. Rather than display the page as a long, scrollable single page, Instapaper paginates the document. You can “turn” the page much as you do in iBook or the Kindle app.
• Progress indicators. I like that it shows roughly how long a document is and how much has been read.
• Clean, minimal interface.
• The trick of reading the current page to make site like NYTimes (with page view restrictions) or LWN (pay walls) is a great idea but not completely reliable.
• Recent updates have been less stable. Going from day to night mode — an otherwise nice idea — almost always crashes. Putting the app into the background often loses the current location (it returns to the end of an archived article).

Pocket

It started with this image. Or rather the glitch that you can see in the middle of the screen.

It’s one of the screens in a new app that I’ve been developing. There’s lots of hard stuff in there but this is the first problem that has really stumped me. What it appeared to be was this: a text view (UITextView) on a table (UITableView) showed a nasty glitch when you tried to place the curser in the text box.

• Lytro — light field sensor photography – This “light field sensor” sounds amazing but I am a little skeptical. I’ll believe its potential more when I hear about it being used by “real” people rather than in controlled situations.
• QuickLook Plugin For Mobile Provisioning Files – If you understand the title and develop iOS apps you need this plugin!
• C and Unix pioneer Dennis Ritchie reported dead – It’s a sad week for the IT industry.

I’m very pleased to announce the new version of www.cut, a major release including an almost complete rewrite of all the UI code and a bunch of stuff under the hood. You don’t care about that, but it does bring you iPad support, the ability to lengthen already shortened URLs and the ability to sync your settings between devices using iCloud.

The iCloud bit, as with lots of stuff under the hood, means that it will only work on devices that run iOS5.

• The Rise and Fall of the Independent Developer – “My fear is that It’s only a matter of time before developers find the risks and expenses prohibitive and retreat to the safety of a larger organization. We’ll be going back to square one.”
• The Equality and Human Rights Commission’s choice is beyond belief – “But what these cases illustrate is that in certain areas compromise is not possible because the rights of different minorities are mutually exclusive. When one group refuses to fulfil its job description because it disapproves of another group, there is no middle ground, no give and take.”

The cartoon¹ for today’s Dilbert Day to Day Desk Calendar seemed appropriate for some things that are happening in the mobile software industry at the moment.

If you’ve not been following events — shame on you — then you can read all about it here. In summary, a number of small developers have been sued by a “patent troll,” that is a company that does not develop or make anything but demands royalties for the use of “intellectual property” it bought.

• Nearing the end of an era… – Some great images of Endeavour.
• Apple drops secrecy, confirms iOS 5, iCloud on tap at WWDC 2011 – Looks like it’s going to be an interesting WWDC…

Most developers of iOS applications have a love-hate relationship with the main interface with Apple.

No, let me re-phrase that.

Most developers of iOS applications hate iTunes Connect, the main impediment to a good relationship with Apple.

To be fair it has improved since it opened in mid-2008. One of those improvements has been the inclusion of crash reports. A crash report, in case you’re not a developer, is something that iOS devices such as iPhones and iPads write out when an application crashes. It includes all kinds of useful information, including some, but not all, of the internal state of the application in question. It’s very, very useful for diagnosing problems.