Nit-picking iOS

Everybody seems to be nit-picking Apple lately so I wanted to get in on the action. I have a couple things that bother me about iOS... one old, and one new.

You know how when you double-click the home button on your iPhone and this little tray lifts the icons up on the screen and reveals this dark linen business underneath? Well, I kind of like that... and that has been part of iOS for a while. A couple years ago they added the notification center that you could pull down from the top. I'm a fan of notification center, but the implementation bothers me.

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America's Cellphone Darling

The iPhone 5 is out! The most surprising thing about this release is how technology media, and the common American consumer, seems to be turning on Apple. A couple years ago when the iPhone 4 came out the big story was about the antenna problems. Consumer Reports gave their first "poor" rating of the iPhone and everybody flipped out. The negative press got way more attention than the positive. I think that set the tone. For the last couple years the big stories about the iPhone have been the ones that are criticizing it. Maybe everybody got sick of hearing how good it was. Maybe everybody is still sick of hearing how good it is.

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Breaking Bad, the halfway point

I'm still processing that last episode of Breaking Bad. I liked it, but I didn't. There was a lot of excellent sequences. It was a technically impressive finish to the first half of the season. However, it felt weird. I don't know how to describe it. Something didn't feel right about it.

There are a couple reasons why it might have seemed jarring. The first, and most obvious one, is the timeline. It has taken us 4.5 seasons to get through just over a year of Walter's life. In this episode we skipped over 3 months in a music montage. Breaking Bad has always made the viewer see the excruciating details of starting a meth enterprise. We were aware of pretty much everything that Walt was up to. In this past episode he started supplying meth on another continent and we didn't see anything about how it worked. We didn't see them trying to figure out the distribution network or anything. In the past Walter would have demanded to know exactly how it was all going to go down, and we would have been there to see it as well.

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