iPhone

TMP — iOS App Changes

Fandango47 Comments

Every Monday, Paula Light, with her The Monday Peeve prompt, gives us an opportunity to vent or rant about something that pisses us off. And today I’m really pissed off. As a matter of fact, I’m standing at the precipice of ending my WordPress blog.

As most of you know, I blog using my iPhone and the WordPress iOS app for the iPhone. The block editor on the the iPhone is next to impossible to use because there is just not enough real estate on a relatively small smartphone screen to make it feasible to use. But the good news is that the WordPress iOS app has the option to create and edit our posts using the classic editor.

However, when I went to the App Store app this morning to see what updates were available for all of my apps, I saw that there is an updated version of the iOS app, version 16.9, that is available. And then I read with horror that “The classic editor will soon be unavailable for creating new posts.” WHAT?I have been sticking with WordPress since last August when it “decommissioned” the classic editor and tried to force us to use the block editor. I love blogging and WordPress is the best blog hosting site available, so I wanted to continue to blog on WordPress. Besides, the “wp-admin” site still supported the classic editor for new posts and to edit draft posts. And the iOS app for my iPhone still offered its version of the classic editor option for creating and editing posts.

As of today, if I go to my laptop, I still have the classic editor option  via “wp-admin,” although a number of my fellow bloggers have said that it’s no longer available to them, so it’s probably a matter of time (maybe days if not hours) before I, too, lose it.

But if they’re also taking it away from the iOS app, that’s the last straw for me. I give up. Trying to create posts on the iPhone using the block editor, and even the so-called “classic block” within the block editor on the iPhone is just not worth it anymore.

So if this is the way it’s going to be, I am either leaving WordPress altogether, or I’m going to cut back on blogging considerably. I won’t stop reading and commenting on your posts, but I probably won’t be posting much on my own. I’m sorry, because all of you, the community of bloggers I’ve come to know, are important to me. I consider you to be my friends. But I’m just not going to put myself through this block editor nonsense that WordPress is foisting upon us.

If it does come down to discontinuing my blog, I’ll let you all know.

TMP — 5G or Bust

Fandango17 Comments

Every Monday, Paula Light, with her The Monday Peeve prompt, gives us an opportunity to vent or rant about something that pisses us off. Today I’m more irritated than peeved, but Paula wants us to share. I apologize that this is, for me, a lengthy post. Anyway, here we go.

I’m the last holdout in my family. I’m the only remaining iPhone user. All the rest — my wife, my daughter, and my son — have the Pixel smartphone from Google, which is an Android device. My son has always had a dislike for Apple products and has been a big fan of all things Google. So ever since Google introduced its mobile operating system, Android, he’s opted for Android devices. And when Google came out with its own smartphone, the Pixel, he was one of the first to order one.

Then, around three years ago, my persuasive son managed to convince my wife and daughter to ditch their iPhones and switch to the Google Pixel phone. But despite the pressure from the rest of my family to follow suit, I did my best Charlton Heston imitation and said, “I’ll give you my iPhone when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.”

At the time we were an all Verizon Wireless family. Except for my son, whose wireless carrier was T-Mobile. But when Google introduced its own cell service, known as Google Fi, my son was quick to jump on board. Google FiAnd then, in late 2019, he managed to convince my wife and daughter to upgrade to the latest Pixel model and to ditch Verizon and switch to the Google Fi for cell service. Once again, I was the lone holdout because I was concerned that Google Fi was optimized for Android devices and wouldn’t work so well on an iPhone. But my son assured me that it would work on an iPhone and then he pointed out that Google Fi would cost about half as much per month as Verizon. So I caved.

The good news is that Google Fi has, indeed, worked fine since I joined with the rest of my family. And because the four of us share the plan, my portion of the monthly wireless bill has been less than $30. So yeah.

Then, this past November, I traded in my iPhone 8 Plus for the iPhone 12 Pro Max. I upgraded primarily because the iPhone 12 is the first iPhone model to support blazing fast 5G connectivity. And that was enticing.

But when I got my new 5G-capable iPhone set up on Google Fi, I discovered that Google Fi does not support 5G on iPhones. My 4G LTE connection worked fine, but 5G? Fuhgeddaboudit. Google Fi does support 5G on compatible Pixel and other Android phones. But not on iPhones. I went to the online Google Fi help center to find out when Google Fi would start to support 5G and here’s what it said.

Right now Fi 5G is not supported on iPhone 12 series; we’ll keep customers updated on the latest via our help center.

So I recently contacted the Google Fi help center and was informed that the Google Fi engineers are working on it but have no date for when Google Fi will support 5G on the iPhone. Hmm, sort of like the WordPress happiness engineers are working on fixing the iOS bug I’ve been whining about for almost five months, but have no date for when a fix will be available.

I admit that with the lockdown, not having 5G on my iPhone hasn’t been a problem because I hardly leave my house and our WiFi is plenty speedy. But with people getting vaccinated and the likely reopening — hopefully — of society by this summer, I’m giving Google Fi until November of 2021, the one year anniversary of getting my iPhone 12, to come up a 5G fix for iPhones. If it’s not available by then, I’m going back to Verizon Wireless.

Fandango’s Flashback Friday — March 5

Fandango30 Comments

Wouldn’t you like to expose your newer readers to some of your earlier posts that they might never have seen? Or remind your long term followers of posts that they might not remember? Each Friday I will publish a post I wrote on this exact date in a previous year.

How about you? Why don’t you reach back into your own archives and highlight a post that you wrote on this very date in a previous year? You can repost your Friday Flashback post on your blog and pingback to this post. Or you can just write a comment below with a link to the post you selected.

If you’ve been blogging for less than a year, go ahead and choose a post that you previously published on this day (the 5th) of any month within the past year and link to that post in a comment.

This was originally posted on March 5, 2018 on this blog. It was a Monday. But it was…

Not a Typical Monday

iPhone in the toiletEver had one of those Mondays? I don’t mean a typical Monday when you wake up with the realization that it’s Monday. I am talking about one of those Mondays, like the one I’m having today. It started when I woke up this morning.

As I always do as soon as I wake up, I turned on my iPhone. And, just as I also always do, I brought it with me into the bathroom. I placed the device on the wire shelving above the toilet, lifted up the toilet seat, removed my man-equipment from its hiding place, and proceeded to do what needed to be done.

Upon finishing, I tucked myself back in and noticed that the iPhone started to slip from the wire shelving above the toilet. Oh shit! And that’s when time began to move in slow motion.

My eyes widened as I saw my iPhone slowly become airborne. I tried to react as quickly as I could. I reached out toward the falling device, but my timing and my aim were both a little off. The iPhone had just enough of a head start, and my reactions were just a touch too slow, to grab the device in mid-air.

And then I heard the sound of the splash when my iPhone plunged into the toilet bowl. Oh the horror!

My options were limited. I couldn’t flush the toilet because my iPhone could have been sucked down the toilet trap and into the city’s sewage system. So, despite my misgivings, I reached my hand down into the yellowish water and retrieved the iPhone.

I shook it a few times over the bathroom sink to try to get any liquid that may have gotten inside of it to drain out. Then I grabbed a towel and dried it as quickly as I could. Once dried, I put it aside and washed my hands.

I examined my iPhone, hoping that it was still in working order. The home screen still showed all of the icons and I could still navigate to view my email, check the web, open the weather app, and go pretty much anywhere I needed to go. Yup, it seemed that the phone, despite its plunge into the toilet bowl, was still working. Phew!

My next test was to see if the telephone aspect of the iPhone was still functioning. I was relieved when it worked as expected, although I admit that I didn’t put the phone right up next to my ear. I used the speakerphone.

But then a message starting appearing on my iPhone’s screen every few minutes. It read, “This cable or accessory is not certified and may not work reliably with this iPhone,” which was strange since there was no cable or accessory plugged into it. I turned the phone off and back on, but the message persisted. Uh oh. Something was amiss.

A few hours later, when my battery was down to about 50%, I inserted the charging cable into my iPhone. Good news! The device was, in fact, charging! And the error message disappeared.

So despite plunging into a urine-filled toilet bowl, my iPhone seems to be fine. I have decided, though, given that it was submerged, albeit ever so briefly, in a toilet bowl into which I had just peed, that the bathroom is going to be off-limits to my device from now on.

I sure hope the rest of my Monday is going to be more typical.

Written for today’s one-word prompt, “typical.”

TMP — It’s Complicated

Fandango14 Comments

Every Monday, Paula Light, with her The Monday Peeve prompt, gives us an opportunity to vent or rant about something that pisses us off.

Three months ago, on November 3rd, WordPress launched its latest version of the iOS app for the iPhone/iPad and it automatically uploaded to my phone. I discovered that it had a serious bug in that updated version, a bug that prevented me from liking or commenting on posts that I visited from my reader. I initially wrote about it here. And it you’re a regular reader of my responses to Paula’s The Monday Peeve, you know I’ve posted about it here several times as well. Like here and here.

Well, I’m back with another peeve about that as yet unresolved bug. On February 3rd, the three month “anniversary” of the buggy release of the iOS app from WordPress, I once again contacted the “Happiness Engineers.” I wrote:

Three months. That’s how long it’s been since WordPress released version 16.0 of the iOS app. As soon as I loaded that release on my iPhone, I noticed that I could no longer, from either my Reader or my Notifications, like some other bloggers’ posts nor could I leave a comment on them. It was as if, even though I was logged on to WordPress via the app, the app didn’t recognize me as a logged-on WordPress user when I went to those sites. After doing a lot of troubleshooting on my own, I realized that I could like and leave comments on posts where the blogger’s address had “.wordpress.com” in it. But for those blogs that don’t have “.wordpress.com” in the blog address — even my own blog, which is “fivedotoh.com” — I could not like or comment on them when I visited them. I have been engaged with various happiness engineers multiple times since November 3, 2020, when that version 16.0 of the iOS app was released, and have been told that the bug has been identified and replicated and that the app development team has been working on a fix.

Here’s the response I got.

Our team has been working really hard to try and find a fix on this, but it’s been a lot more complicated than it might appear. Thank you for your understanding!

It’s complicated? Thanks for my understanding? Are you fucking kidding me?

Hey, I’m sorry if you’re getting tired of hearing about this, but it’s Monday and Paula has invited us to rant about something that pisses us off. And this really, really pisses me off.

Cleaning Up His Act

Fandango9 Comments

As the groom stood at the alter watching his bride-to-be marching slowly toward him to the tune of “Here Comes the Bride” he was overwhelmed by a feeling of reverie. He couldn’t wait until they recited their vows and the pastor gave him permission to kiss the bride.

But then a feeling of dread crept into his consciousness as he remembered that he hadn’t cleared the browser history and the cache on his iPhone, leaving open the possibility that his wife might discover all of the pornographic sites he regularly visited and the images and videos he had saved. And if she did find them, it could spark a very rough beginning to their young marriage.

Written for these daily prompts: Word of the Day Challenge (groom), MMA Storytime (overwhelmed), Fandango’s One-Word Challenge (reverie), The Daily Spur (permission), Your Daily Word Prompt (cache), and Ragtag Daily Prompt (spark).