Here are the steps to pre-order a new iPhone. Be sure to follow this procedure exactly as outlined to secure your iPhone.
Some more stuff about burgers really? I promise this isn’t turning into a food blog.
This is a Storify embed post, so you may need to view it on my site to see it in all it’s iframe’d glory.
Here’s a simple, three-step recipe for creating the perfect burger joint:
Few have followed this recipe, and I don’t understand why.
In-N-Out? Great burgers, but no bacon. Let me repeat: you cannot get an In-N-Out burger with bacon. If you ask, they will say “no.” A burger with 20 patties? Sure. Bacon? GO AWAY. Fries are pretty bad (not that great fresh and worthless after they cool off a bit). Shakes are so-so. I get the feeling their shakes and fries are cheap because their prices are sooo low. They could stand to charge more and improve their offering.
Five Guys? Great burgers and bacon (although a little overcooked, typically). Fries are great and plentiful, but no shakes at all. WHAT. They went to the trouble of adding these fancy soda jukebox machines that let you pick from every soda flavor the Coca-Cola company has ever dreamt of, but there’s no milkshake button (I looked for like an hour). Also, what is with mixing Helvetica and Tekton together in your signage? Stop that.
Super Duper? Ah, here’s a contender. A little pricey and boutique-ish (well, it’s a SF-based place, so I understand), but the burgers are good and the bacon is there. Great shakes. Fries are good but could be better.
Shake Shack is great as I recall on all points. But I have to fly to New York to get one and that’s out of my price range. PLEASE COME TO CALIFORNIA I BEG OF YOU.
Here’s another Storify collection of a personal favorite set of tweets.
If your reader doesn’t show this content, you’ll have to view it on my site directly.
So recently, the FCC ruled that it’d be okie-dokey for the Internet to create tiers of service. What follows is a bit of fun about this very serious issue, one that may very well change the nature of the Internet. I urge you to educate yourself about the real threat of this decision after you read and favorite each of these:
(If you’re viewing this through a news reader, the Storify content may not come through; if not, you’ll have to visit my site to see it.)
Here’s a small innovation I could use from my smart phone (yes, an iPhone): personal hold music. Cause, who likes muzak? Here’s how it would work.
You make a phone call to some customer service center. You navigate their tree of options and end up being put on hold while waiting in line for a person to pick up. They then start playing something hideous while you wait. Personally, I think this is designed to encourage people to hang up, reducing their call volume. But: you have a secret weapon… you’re calling with a smart phone equipped with Personal Hold Music™®.
So, here’s what you’d do: you’d take the phone from your ear and on the screen, there’d be a convenient button to play your music. What would this do? Well, once playing your music with an active phone call, your smart phone would pay attention to the line… since you won’t be able to hear it (cause you’re listening to your sweet, rockin’ beats). If the sound from the phone call changes to voice communication (versus music), your music will be paused and what the person on other end said will be replayed. That’s the tricky part— making the phone recognize when to switch back to the active call. I suppose it would need to do so even for periodic “there are n people waiting ahead of you” prompts, but I could live with that.
This is an idea whose time has come.
I crave minimalism. So, Coin interests me, but I don’t think it’s for me. Here are some quick thoughts on Coin.
So, even if I were to buy one of these — effectively (at launch sale price) a $25/year (due to the battery lifespan) convenience fee — I’d still need a decent wallet to hold everything. I couldn’t get away with a slim phone card pocket case, for instance.
No, I think the future looks something more like using Passbook or even NFC… so, no physical cards. Bluetooth LTE identification for building access. A federal and state-approved method for presenting your identification through with phone. Maybe then you could just carry one card; one that serves as a backup in case you lose or damage your phone.
This is a response to this.
Sure, our smartphones can have a lot of personal information in them and much of it is shared with “the cloud”. Sometimes that’s the device manufacturer that is supplying services. Sometimes that’s a third-party company that makes a social network you want to participate in. Whatever. Let’s talk about Apple, in particular.
Apple asks you to sign in or register an Apple ID during the setup process for iPhone, but you have the option to skip this step entirely. Doing so will limit certain features of the phone. But if you want to create an Apple ID, Apple asks that you supply your name, your birthdate, a valid email address, telephone number, zip code, city, state, country and home address. But you can about these things. Apple doesn’t verify any of this information, save for the email address. And having an email address doesn’t really identify you— there’s no credit card involved in getting a Gmail or Yahoo mail account.
Apple will have your credit card information if you give it to them. There are avenues for buying the phone itself with cash. And if/when you sign up for an Apple ID, you’re asked for a credit card, but you can decline to fill that in. For app purchases, you can always buy iTunes credit from any number of retailers and redeem them for use in the App Store or the iTunes store.
The GPS and location services on your phone are activated during the setup of the device. If enabled, location services can report the phone’s location to Apple. If that bothers you, then don’t enable location services, or turn it off under the “Privacy” section of the Settings app.
Again, location services are an opt-in feature. Micro-location still falls under location services which are easily disabled.
If you make purchases in the App Store or iTunes store, Apple can build a purchase profile about you. But no one is holding a gun to your head to buy these things. If you’re really worried about Apple relating your love for Phish, then you can load your entire CD-ripped collection onto the device through a computer. It’s also possible to jail break most iPhones and load software onto it through “alternative” sources (not recommended, but there you go).
This part of the article assumes you’ve bought an iPhone 5s. Well, the A7 processor does track your spatial movement through an accelerometer but this information is only shared with applications that have been given your permission to use it. If you are wary of those apps, then don’t grant them permission and simply delete them.
Apple will store photos you take with your phone on iCloud in a personal Photo Stream if you have enabled iCloud and Photo Stream to begin with. Apple cannot, however, force you to take selfies even if you do use iCloud.
The iPhone 5s does use a sensor under the home button to allow you to unlock your device using fingerprint identification. The process for enabling this is simple, but requires a training process that is user initiated. The iPhone will not scan your fingers without enabling Touch ID.
So here’s what Apple can really know, for absolutely certain. That a device of theirs with a particular serial number was purchased and used with a SIM card with a specific serial number and phone number (this is communicated during the phone activation process). That’s it.
As for any of these other things: Apple will only have them if you give it to them yourself. Your identity, credit card, location, behavior, movement, face and fingerprint are all safe from Apple. Now, your wireless carrier might know more information about both you and your location (based on cell tower usage), but that would be the case regardless of what phone you’re using.
In short, there’s nothing to fear here but fear itself.
Marissa Mayer made the inaugural post to Yahoo!’s Tumblr blog, announcing they were acquiring the service for $1.1 billion dollars (all cash). By modern measures, this seems like a pretty good deal. Remember, they also bought GeoCities for $3.6 billion in 1999 (valued at that amount, it was a stock exchange).
But, what gets me is this bit of her post (and echoed in the official press release). It reads, and I kid you not: “We promise not to screw it up.”
That’s in there because Yahoo! has a poor record of not screwing up things. GeoCities, for one. Flickr was on life support until only recently (I think Instagram and the Facebook buyout of that service for $2 billion had something to do with it). Upcoming.org was another victim of their embrace, languish and shutdown strategy. The Archive Team folks are still backing up that service. Maybe Archive Team should get a head start on Tumblr. Just in case.
But the worst part about that particular sentence is there’s no way for them to live up to it. No way. Cause, let’s face it, “screw it up” is a pretty subjective measure. And the folks measuring it have a very fine measuring stick:
So basically, they can’t touch it at all without breaking that promise.
Literally, she said “we promise.”
Can you imagine an Apple exec, taking the stage at a main Apple event, promoting a Dell computer that has been optimized for running OS X, and sold exclusively through Apple’s own store? Well, that’s basically what Google did yesterday at Google I/O by announcing they were to sell an unlocked, no-contract Samsung Galaxy S4 running the stock Android OS and sold through Google’s Play store, for $649.
Why did Google buy Motorola for $12.5 billion? And what a slap in the face to all the other Android hardware companies.
The Android ecosystem is truly amazing. And mind boggling.
Here’s a Storify post assembled from a bunch of Tweets I just made inspired by the Google I/O presenation this year. Larry Page said there should be a part of the world set aside for unregulated research and science. Well, I think it should be called Google Island…
(if you’re viewing this through a news reader, the Storify content may not come through; if not, you’ll have to visit my site to see it)
TL;DR version: Sophisticated phishing attacks can be hard to detect for most. As software developers, we need to build better detection, prevention, and countermeasures into apps and services that relay and present these messages so users will be less likely to fall victim to them.
The Onion is a satirical news web site that looks like a legitimate news company. They make their living at spoofing the real news. So, they should be keenly aware of the fact that things aren’t always as they seem.
Well, recently, their Twitter account was hacked. Compromised by the “Syrian Electronic Army”. And now you can read about how they did it. The Onion’s tech team published an article about it: How the Syrian Electronic Army Hacked The Onion. Go read that now to get some context for what follows.
In short, it was a targeted attack. An email that was baiting the writers at The Onion to come and see an article about their organization. And look— it’s on The Washington Post! How exciting. The text of the link was an address that pointed to “http://washingtonpost.com/…”, but the link itself pointed to another site entirely. I’ve come to call that kind of link a “forged link”; a fraudulent and deceptive hyperlink. The phrase also works in the sense that such a link is deliberately crafted to deceive.
Stepping back a bit, for those that don’t understand how that works. An email message can be like a web page, where most anything in the email can be linked to a web site. Could be text, could be an image, or even white space. So, an address to something, like my own web site would be like this:
http://bradchoate.com/
But see how it isn’t linked? It looks like an address, and it is, but unless it’s written this way, it won’t be usable:
<a href="http://bradchoate.com/">http://bradchoate.com/</a>
This is the HTML representation of a link, and this is how they’re written, but the bits in-between the < and > symbols are hidden from view when reading a web site or email message, since those are instructions to the computer; not really something for a human to read. But that was me being honest. What if I wrote this instead?
<a href="http://reallybadwebsite.com/">http://bradchoate.com/</a>
and remember, you don’t get to see it that way in the actual email message. You’d see it like this:
Now then— the link to my site is still shown, and now it’s underlined, which means you can click on it. But, where you go when you click on it is somewhere altogether different. That’s how the forged link works. The link that the unsuspecting recipient at The Onion clicked on did not take them to “washingtonpost.com”, but instead, to a different web site that looked very much like a Google.com account login page. When that happened, it should have sent off alarms in the mind of the user— “why did that happen?”. But instead… at least for one or two that got this far… they entered their Google credentials and unknowingly sent them to their attacker. And, after sending the login information, they were simply passed over to their actual Gmail account, which probably displayed their email since they were likely still logged into Google.
The tech guys at The Onion give some advice on how to protect yourself from this kind of attack. But these recommendations put all the onus on the end-users:
Well, I prefer to place more blame on everyone else.
The fact that this email included a forged link like this and was not flagged in some way is frustrating. Computers are great at spotting a discrepancy like this— especially for pure-text links— and they should be helping us to be safe.
Of course, it could have been an image of a link to washingtonpost.com that was linked the bad web site. In that case, it may be necessary to use text recognition on images that are linked to see if they’re misdirecting.
If the message did reach the inbox, it should be flagged in a way to identify the forged link, and the fact that this is coming from a stranger (someone that has no correspondence history) and as such, links clicked on should be programatically and visually verified.
A programmatic verification would check the domain of the link against a database of known risky web sites.
A visual verification would involve (at a minimum) showing the user the actual link they’re about to visit. But it could also display a screenshot of the web page so they can see where they are about to go in a safe way before they actually visit the site.
Currently, some email apps offer some visual verification in the sense that if you put your mouse pointer on top of a link and hold there for a second or two, it will reveal the link address in a “tip” window. That’s cute, but not good enough.
The user’s web browser allowed them to enter sensitive information (data into a password field) on a site they’ve never done that on before. The user should be warned— even before the keypress registers in the password field— that they are about to do something potentially risky. Something akin to this, but generalized for any untrusted web site asking for a login (and doesn’t call you an idiot, ideally).
And again, the web browser could check the domain against a database of risky sites (including all of these free web hosting services, God bless ‘em). A stronger warning should be given if the user is trying to enter sensitive information on a web site without a secure connection. These types of attacks rarely ever use a secure web site, since that requires money and creates a paper trail that can be followed.
To sum up, there are many gaps to be filled in here. As software developers, we have to stop telling people that they are to blame for falling for these tricks. Let’s at least give them some better tools to arm themselves against the “Syrian Electronic Army” and other hackers out there.
Earlier this week, I got the following email from my Mom:
From: Mom
To: Brad Choate
Subject: Fwd: unauthorized access
I think you will tell me to ignore this. Right?
————— Forwarded message —————
From: Strife, C Frederic (FRED STRIFE MD) <[email protected]>
Date: Thu, May 2, 2013 at 4:31 AM
Subject: unauthorized access
Dear Valued Staff,
We suspect an unauthorized access on your account. To ensure that your account was not compromised, please click HERE http://updates.a.nf/ to confirm your identity and update your account.
(c) 2013 Webmaster Inc
Now, my Mom is not new to computers. She’s been using them since the ’80s. But she is susceptible to social engineering, because prior to the Internet, she wasn’t trying to be conned all the time. So, every now and then, she forwards an email like this to me, asking if it is legitimate or not. I typically just give a short “Nope; just delete that.” kind of reply, but this time, I decided to give her more to learn from. Here’s my reply:
To: Mom
From: Brad Choate
Subject: Re: unauthorized access
Yes, you can ignore an email like this. There are too many warning signs to even consider this is valid at all:
The email subject alone is enough to give me pause: “unauthorized access” — all lowercase, and a phrase that is purely meant to scare you and lure you into this trap.
At best, it was sent to you by mistake. At worst, it’s a link that will take you to a web site where it will attempt to install software on your computer than could contain a virus. But in this case, it is sending you to a web page that looks like this:
There’s nothing here that tells you you’re on a Google property. It isn’t explaining the situation further at all. It’s simply asking you to hand over your email address and password. They will then take it and attempt to use it to access your email. Why? To sift through it to obtain information about you, or useful things like information about other accounts. They could also change your password to lock you out of it. An email address is often used as a way to verify access to other accounts. They could request a new password for a bank account or your Amazon.com account (which could be discovered from your email history), which would send information to your (now compromised) email address for how to reset that password.
So, thanks for asking, but this is just a poor attempt to gain your email account credentials, pure and simple. Don’t fall for these.
More information on how to spot these right away:
http://www.microsoft.com/security/online-privacy/phishing-symptoms.aspx
http://idtheft.about.com/od/preventionpractices/ss/phishing_scams.htm
-Brad
This spammer was pretty lazy, actually. This is one of the more obvious ones. Some will mimic an email notification from a legitimate service like Gmail, or Yahoo! Mail. And the website itself is also pretty basic and not an attempt to appear to be any website you might recognize. Even the link in the email is unobscured. My guess is that they don’t really have to try. There are enough people that will simply click on that link and fill in a form like that without thinking much about it. (I did find it funny that they’re putting a captcha here… is this form being spammed?)
Be on your guard. As I explained to my Mom, obtaining your email account can open you up to other problems, including accessing other accounts that may be tied to your email address. At the very least, your email account could be used to propagate more spam and phishing attacks like this one.
Additional resources to educate yourself about phishing:
From year to year my work tools change. So, periodically I like to capture the state of my work environment on my computer. I’m a software developer (both web and iOS) who dabbles in design. Here’s the latest snapshot:
Bold items are essential apps. The others make life easier, but I could get by without them. Price legend (based on today’s prices; subject to change): $0 = free; $ = less than $10; $$ = more than $9.99, less than $20; $$$ = more than $19.99. I have more apps actually, but I can’t recommend them as strongly. I have given 5-star ratings to all of the above apps on the Mac App Store.
So I should probably give a bit of a recap to bridge the gap I’ve created from not posting here for a few years. Since then, the most notable change for me has been my work situation. It’s changed, but it hasn’t. Six Apart San Francisco merged with Videoegg to form Say Media. I transitioned to Say when that happened. Before that, I had already stepped back about a year or so prior from active work on Movable Type. MT lives on, under the care of Six Apart as it exists today in Japan, where it is in good hands.
Here at Say, I’ve had opportunity to work on a wide variety of products and services with Python/Django, NodeJS, Objective-C and yes, Perl too. We’re developing modern publishing tools as well as ad delivery tools (for web publishing, these go hand in hand). Say also owns a number of sites, like ReadWrite, SplatF, Remodelista and The Kitchn. One of my colleagues wrote about what we’re up to in terms of our direction and focus and sums it up nicely. And we’re hiring — if you’re interested, drop me a line.
And personally, while I’ve been away from my blog, I have been posting semi-frequently on Twitter, and on Please. Fix. That. where I rant about broken things I come across.
Other than that, the wife and kids are doing fine. We’re enjoying our 9th year in California. We own a house as of a couple of years ago and we have two parakeets.
There, you’re all caught up.
Observed in iOS 8 (β 3).
I typically configure my email apps to not automatically load images. On occasion a spam message gets through the winding maze of spam filters put in front of them and I'd rather not reward the sender with any kind of verification that their arrow met it's mark.
When I do want to look at the images in an email message, I click a button to do it. For the Apple Mail app, that button is at the top-right corner of the window. Load Images, it says, and that's what it does. For iOS, you get a message with images and it just looks kind of broken. Large patches of the email are missing content and with no explanation to be seen... not until you scroll aaall the way to the bottom. Ah, there it is:
...a "button" to load images for this message. OK. Tap. Now, scroll aaall the way back to the top and start reading again with the context of the images.
Why is this button at the bottom? If there are suppressed images, shouldn't I be given the choice to display them at the top of the message? Maybe like this:
Ah, better.
Apple: please fix that.
Observed in iOS 8 (β 3) and iTunes/Mac (11.2.2 (3)?).
Both the iOS Music app and the iTunes app on OS X suffer from this bug: you can't order your playlists. No, I'm not talking about the songs in a playlist, but the playlists themselves. I'd like to have easier access to some of my more frequently used playlists, but they're unhelpfully ordered alphabetically:
Oddly enough, my "90's Music" smart playlist is at the top in iTunes, but at the bottom of my smart playlists on iOS. But nevermind that-- I want to order them manually.
Apple: please fix that.
Observed on iOS 8 (β 3).
Here are three different screens on iOS. All of them allow you to control whatever media you have playing (in my case, an excellent remaster of Distintegration):
From left to right: the Music app's "Now Playing" screen, the iOS control center and the lock screen.
Three contexts. Three very different locations for the play controls. Can this be a little more consistent? At least keep them on the bottom half of the screen so they're easier to reach?
I'd also appreciate some distance (or simple removal) of the volume controls.
Apple, please fix that.
Observed as recently as iTunes 11.2.2.
The iTunes Store has a really annoying usability bug around swipe gestures. Go to the home tab of the Movies part of the store and you'll see a number of content "wells"... many of these are side-scrolling areas where you can view the movie posters. For each of those, you are able to use two-finger swipes (on a trackpad, single-finger swipes on a Magic Mouse) to scroll these left and right to view more content.
But, the very same gesture is used to navigate backward and forward through the store (similar to how it works in Safari for browser history). What makes this so bad is that the gesture does different things based on where your mouse cursor is.
Here's a screen shot to illustrate the problem a little bit:
There are three regions highlighted above:
This is madenning. It means I have to pay attention to where the mouse cursor is resting any time I use these gestures. And if it is resting on a scrollable region, I need to also observe where the scroll bar position is, so I know whether the gesture will result in scrolling that area versus moving me to a different page (and even more tricky, since OS X doesn't show the scroll bar in a resting state).
Apple's Multi-Touch Gestures article documents all of them and even calls out the exception for the "Swipe to navigate" gesture:
Note: If there is horizontal content to scroll, this gesture will first scrolls (sic) to the end of content and then it will move to the next page.
So what's the solution? I would recommend following the pattern used on iPad: drop the forward/backward history navigation for the iTunes app and switch to tabs for different areas of the store or just simple forward/backward buttons if necessary. Stop doing two things with the same gesture.
I made a short video to further illustrate the problem:
(This video should be viewed full-screen so you can see what's going on a little better.)
Apple: please fix that.
Recently, I was browsing the iTunes TV catalog and decided to take in a one-minute video for HBO's True Detective series. So I click on the play button in iTunes to watch the trailer. Then, a gripping 30 seconds later, it stops. Why? Because iTunes is only showing me a preview of the trailer.
Here's an illustration of the problem:
This is stupid.
There are bright folks over at Apple, but I guess they haven't figured this out. So here's a simple algorithm for iTunes to implement:
If both conditions are met, just allow the video to be shown in it's entirety without requiring the user to download it to their iTunes library.
Apple, please fix that.
Okay, hear me out. I don't think Apple would ever bring an actual mouse pointer to the iOS user interface. I hope not-- it might bring the beach ball cursor with it. And touch isn't going to take a back seat to the mouse on that platform. But I think there's still room for a mouse. I'm talking about games.
First person shooters are so much better with a keyboard/mouse combination. Sure, they're kinda playable with a decent game controller, but us die-hards will always prefer the "WASD" keys and a trusty gaming mouse over anything else. If Apple were to think of the mouse as a game controller, they might just warm to the notion of allowing them to pair with iOS devices (as they do for keyboards).
At the same time, I think Apple would be right to reject apps that would try to require a mouse to operate. You wouldn't want to allow apps to ignore touch altogether since it's the primary input method. But as a supplemental input device, I think the mouse would work well for certain apps.
Perhaps they are working on this already... Cringely thought so. Let's hope this year's WWDC and iOS 8 has a fix for this.
It's ridiculous that, in 2014, you cannot add music or videos to your iPhone or iPad without using iTunes. Let me talk about my brother a bit. This story involves him.
I recently gave my brother an iPad I used to use. This follows a long tradition of ours: my handing down older PC computers I had retired from my stable. But, I ran out of those many years ago having switched to Macs. He wouldn't want a Mac (new or old), but was happy to take the iPad off my hands. He's a PC user, and yes, has iTunes... but, he uses iTunes 10.3 and not going to upgrade to iTunes 11. Period.
Well, that's a problem, since iOS 7 on this iPad requires iTunes 11 to sync. But iTunes 11 doesn't use the Coverflow UI anymore, so it's no good. So, herein lies the problem he faces: how to get his music onto this iPad. Here are his options for doing that without using iTunes sync:
He's frustrated by this complexity. His son has an Amazon Kindle Fire and he was able to load music onto it from a USB flash drive quite easily. "Can't I just do that with the iPad?" Nope.
There's a similar situation for video. There's a movie-length video that's in the public domain and he wants to add it to the iPad. Can he just download it with Safari and add it to the video library (like you can on a "regular" computer)? Nope. Can it be imported from a USB flash drive using the iPad Camera Connection Kit? Well, yes and no... I was able to import the video (after naming it with a lowercase, "8.3"-style filename from a folder named "DCIM"), but it went into the Photos app as if it were a personal video... there's no way to load it into the iPad Video app's library.
Why are these hoops there and why must we jump through them? Some are probably there due to contracts with music labels and movie publishers, but I bet some are there to encourage users to use iTunes to manage their media. It is, after all, far easier to get media to these devices if you buy that media from the iTunes Music/Movie stores.
Getting a MP3 into your music library (or a video into your video library) on an iPad or iPhone should be as easy as tapping on a link to download it from Safari, or to open an attachment from an email message. At least, that's how easy it is on a Mac. You should be able to connect to a USB flash drive or hard drive and import the media you want from there, too.
Why engineer barriers for the consumer? Apple, please fix that.
Something I run into often enough, so it deserves to be blogged.
I use the "Hide Application" OS X command a lot. I rarely ever minimize a window. I prefer to hide the whole app. I try to keep my laptop screen pretty focused, since it's a smaller space to work. So I often use the "Hide" shortcut key (⌘H), to hide the current application and will repeat that a few times to clear the deck.
But OS X won't allow me to hide all of my apps. No, one has to remain unhidden. Even though you can't truly hide the OS X Finder app entirely (the desktop and any icons on it remains on-screen). But hey, I'd even be fine with hiding everything but the wallpaper and Dock.
The annoyance from this "one app must remain" rule is that if you hide the last unhidden app, it either: won't let you (new as of Mavericks), or will unhide the last hidden app (prior to Mavericks). This is never a welcome behavior. Never.
And, if you hide the last app on a given desktop with any full-screen apps running, it will pan over to an adjacent full-screen app (one of the 200 new features in Mavericks, I think). Why?
I guess what I should be doing is selecting the app I really want to use and use the "Hide Others" command, which will hide everything but that app. Yeah, okay, I can. But still, this seems like a silly, arbitrary rule to me.
One of the best features for a new user on OS X is search. You can search for so much! Of course, there's Spotlight search to search for documents, mail, contacts, applications and so forth. Another awesome feature is a search field in the Help menu (Shift+Cmd+?) to search for menu options and application help. But one of my favorites for teaching a new user how to configure their Mac is search in "System Preferences".
It makes quick work of locating just where to go to set up a printer, or add a mail account, or any number of other settings for your Mac.
SO WHY ISN'T THIS AVAILABLE FOR iOS?
This should have been present when iOS was first released, but here we are at version 7 of iOS and still no search for the Settings app. Is it because the location of settings is obvious? No. Is it because there are just not that many settings? No.
In fact, there are so many settings in iOS, the group of "General" settings is not even on the screen when you first launch settings: you have to scroll to get to them. I count 35 rows in the Settings app before you even get to the third-party application-specific settings. This. Needs. Search.
Apple, please fix that.
This blog is for long-form posts, but the bite-sized gripes go to Twitter. Follow the pleasefixthat user there to catch them all, including retweets from other annoyed Twitizens.