impressions of iOS 7

I’ve made a few jokes about iOS 7 here. But in fairness, I have an iPod Touch I use to listen to music while writing and for testing how my books look in iBooks, and I upgraded it to iOS 7. It’s not all that different from iOS 6, just a little shinier. But there are several little things I like about it:

-The number buttons on the lockscreen are much bigger. It’s a lot easier to unlock the screen one-handed.

-You can control the music playback from the lock screen. It is pleasant not to have to unlock the device to change which song is playing.

-Speaking of control, the new Control Center is nice. Swipe up from the bottom of the screen, and you can control the music playback, the wifi/Bluetooth, and quickly access the camera, the calculator, and a few other commonly used apps. Granted, Apple “borrowed” this feature from Android. But to be fair, Android “borrowed” quite a few things from iOS, so no sense worrying about it.

-You can get to the Spotlight search by swiping down on any home screen. Since I have something like 22 gigabytes of music, and I sometimes I want to play a particular song without digging through several levels of menus, this is nice.

-Navigating in the Music app is easier, because everything is just slightly bigger. Granted, that means more scrolling, but it’s easier to accurately tap on items.

I don’t use the iPod Touch for anything except music and testing how my books look in iBooks, so I can’t really speak to iOS 7’s other features. That said, iOS 7 does make the iPod Touch into a better music player.

-JM