Tech Tock

My Top 5 favorite things about iOS 5. 

1. Notification Center: Seriously a godsend. Now you can watch a movie and not have it stop every time your obsessive friend texts you. It also offers widget support, currently having Stocks and Weather widgets (which can be turned of in settings). It works just like Android’s tray, but looks a whole lot better imo. 

2. Twitter Integration: Twitter is everywhere! You can tweet videos from YouTube, photos from Camera & Photos, your location from Maps, and links from Safari. Supports 3rd party apps as well. It works very smoothly, has a very eye catching ui and gives you a twitter bird chirp notification once your message has been sent. Hopefully this idea of social  integration transcends with Facebook integration soon. 

3. Reminders: Poor To-Do list App Store apps… I’m sorry, Reminders is hands down the best GTD app available. Location based reminders are so simple to set up, they work much more naturally than a time based reminder. The less fidgeting the better. 

4. iCloud Support: This is nothing new to me, already having used MobileMe for the last 2 years. iCloud still doesn’t feel fully baked but it looks like it is headed for bigger and better things. For one, iCloud handles notifications now, check an iMessage on one device and the badged alert will be gone on the other. Photostream is also pretty nice except for it has its limitations too.. (Can’t delete photos from the stream, photos delete once they become 30 days old, can only hold 1000 photos). In the end, it is nice Apple is bringing the exchangesque features to the masses but I hope this doesn’t become the next Twitter whale. 

5. Text Tones, Tones Shop: Custom text tones are now a reality. Apple even has a slew of offerings from Star Wars sound effects to voices from Clueless. Though I haven’t really customized mine thoroughly yet, it’s nice that Apple is finally offering this level of customization. The gap between normal phone functionality and iPhone functionality feels smaller.