Tag Archives: kids’ mode iPadOS

Weekly output: making your offline self harder to find online, Mark Vena podcast

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This week brought one involved project to a published state and saw another project reach the invoiced state, which is also good.

Screengrab of the story as seen in Safari for iPad.6/8/2021: How to make your offline self harder to find online, The Verge

This how-to on reducing your privacy attack surface turned me from a long-time reader Verge reader to a first-time writer. Researching it also helped me realize a few ways I’d left my own coordinates more exposed than necessary.

6/10/2021: Apple WWDC 21 Special Edition: SmartTechCheck Podcast (6-10-21), Mark Vena

This week’s edition of my industry-analyst pal’s podcast (also available in video form) featured a new guest: former Houston Chronicle tech columnist and now Forbes tech writer Dwight Silverman, whom I somehow seem to have failed to meet in person despite all the hours I’ve spent connecting through his city’s intercontinental airport. We discussed Apple’s WWDC announcements–and what it did not reveal at its developer conference, which was my excuse to rant once again about the continued absence of a kid’s mode in iOS and iPadOS. That defect was irritating enough two years ago and is now outright enraging after a year and change of pandemic life.

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Is it iPadOS 14 or iPadOS 13.8?

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It’s been almost a month since I installed iPadOS 14 on my iPad mini 5, and not much about my tablet-computing experience since has reminded me of that.

Why? Compare Apple’s list of new iPadOS 14 features with its brag list for iOS 14: Apple tablets don’t get home-screen widgets or the App Library, even though their larger displays might better fit those interface changes. Apple’s new Translate app, a privacy-optimizing alternative to Google’s? iPhone only for now. Even emoji search in the keyboard is confined to Apple’s smaller-screen devices.

Like earlier iPad releases, iPadOS 14 omits the basics of weather and calculator apps. I guess Apple still couldn’t find a way “to do something really distinctly great,” as its software senior vice president Craig Federighi told tech journalist Marques Brownlee in the least-persuasive moments of a June interview.

There’s also still no kid’s mode that would let a parent hand over their iPad to a child and have it locked to open only designated apps. The continued absence of this fundamental feature–even the Apple TV supports multiple user accounts!–is especially aggravating after so many American parents have spent the last eight months mostly cooped up at home with their offspring.

Apple did add a bunch of fascinating new features in iPadOS 14 for Apple Pencil users–but my iPad mini 5 and my wife’s iPad mini 4 don’t work with that peripheral.

This new release has brought lesser benefits that I do appreciate. Incoming calls in FaceTime, Google Voice, and other Internet-calling apps now politely announce themselves with a notification at the edge of the screen instead of indulging in the interface misanthropy of a full-screen dialog, and Siri shares this restraint with screen real estate. Safari catches up to Chrome by offering automated translation of their text and surpasses Google’s browser with a privacy-report summary, both available with a tap of the font-size button. I can finally set default mail and browser apps–but not navigation, the area in which Apple remains farthest behind Google. And a set of new privacy defenses include the welcome option of denying an app access to my precise location.

But as nice as those things are, they don’t feel like the stuff of a major annual release–more like the pleasant surprises of an overperforming iPadOS 13.8 update. And they certainly don’t square with what you might reasonably expect from a company that reported $33.4 billion in cash and cash equivalents on hand in its most recent quarter.

Weekly output: IFA, Pay TV 3.0, everything as a service, where to buy an iPhone 11, iOS needs a kids’ mode

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If you’re going to have a bunch of long-in-the-works stories finally post, you could pick a worse time than the week you’re at a journalism conference. This coming week has me at a different event: the Competitive Carriers Association’s conference in Providence, where I’m moderating a panel discussion on 5G wireless in rural areas. (Yes, readers, the title of that panel is 100 percent my fault.)

9/9/2019: 3 ways tech has gone astray at Berlin electronics show, USA Today

USAT took a day or two to post this, for which I was grateful–that lag gave me time to remember to throw in a quote that I’d forgotten to include when I first filed this last Sunday morning before flying home from Berlin.

9/10/2019: What ‘Pay TV 3.0’ will mean for viewers and channels, FierceVideo

This story started with the panel I moderated at a conference this this trade pub hosted outside of Denver in May, hence the above long-in-the-works comment.

9/10/2019: “Everything as a service” is coming—but we’re not there quite yet, Ars Technica

Some of you saw this feature on cloud services briefly appear last week before it vanished without explanation. As Lee Hutchinson, senior tech editor at Ars, later explained in a comment, the story got posted early by mistake. Yes, that is apparently a thing that is possible.

Since the first instance of this story didn’t feature any ads from its sponsor HPE–Ars correctly did not tell me the sponsor’s identity until after I’d filed copy that didn’t mention that firm anyway–it looks like the problem was some mixup on the advertising end.

Anyway, about this lengthy post: Researching the finer points of cloud storage and management services had me leaning well over my skis, but the experience left me with some helpful new sources to consult the next time I’m writing about cloud security and privacy.

9/12/2019: Ordering iPhone 11? The one thing wireless carriers might not want you to know, USA Today

You sort of have read this story before, and you will probably keep reading this as long as most of the major carriers continue to lock phones sold on installment-payment plans.

9/12/2019: The one feature Apple should have added to iOS 13 and iPadOS, Yahoo Finance

My daughter gets credit as the assignment editor on this: Handing over an iPad for her limited allotment of screen time kept reminding me of how unhelpful iOS is in this scenario. I could have written this any time in the last few years, but the impending release of Apple’s iOS 13 and iPadOS–neither with a real kids’ mode–provided a news peg for this story.