This week, I've spent some time digging for hidden iOS Easter eggs and learning about little-used iPhone features. It reminds me that while mobile technology isn’t particularly hard to use, it, like every piece of technology I’ve used over the last 30 years, still follows the 80/20 rule.
The 80/20 rule states roughly that 80% of people use just 20% of the features of any given piece of technology. That’s not a criticism of us or the technology, it’s just that we tend to home in on the tech features we need and ignore the rest.
It all works out swimmingly until we need to use the tech for a new task or find that we have a feature knowledge gap that we need to fill ASAP.
As someone who covers tech for a living, I don’t think I follow the 80/20 rule, but I certainly learned this week that I still do not know iOS as well as I thought I did.
I can forgive myself for not knowing all the Easter Eggs, which you can read about here. After all, they’re not utility-related, just hidden messages from Apple to the ardent fans.
Most of the iPhone iOS tips I learned about this week, like using Notes to scan documents (this is how I file expense reports) and hiding my email by using Apple-generated disposable ones (goodbye junk mail in my real inbox), I know about.
However, I was somewhat surprised to realize I didn’t know about setting reminders to launch by location. In other words, instead of just setting these alerts to launch by time, I could set the reminder to pop up when I arrive at home, my office, or some other location. I have to say, that makes a lot more sense than time, as does a reminder popping only when I’m messaging a certain person. That’s pretty brilliant.
Along with the 80/20 rule, there should be something called the 60/80 rule, which describes how we (me) forget 60% of the stuff we learn 80% of the time.
The other day, my wife and I spent 30 minutes at home making a shopping list in Notes. When we arrived at the store, I notice that I’d neglected to format it as a checklist, which always makes it easier to check off items as we pick them up.
I selected all the text, chose the checklist format in Notes, and then, accidentally hit return, thereby deleting my entire shopping list.
There is no “Undo” menu option in Notes and so we reconstructed the list from memory.
Later, multiple people on Twitter reminded me of “Shake to Undo.” that’s an iPhone feature I’ve known about for years but never use. I was kind of embarrassed. Would I prefer that there was an icon or menu item to handle undo in Notes? Sure. But I guess shaking will do. Hours later I opened the shopping list in Notes, which was still empty and, yes, I shook the phone. Wouldn’t you know that despite leaving the app to do other things on my iPhone, it still worked?
My point? None of us, including me, know our technology as well as we think we do. It’s a reminder that it pays to spend a little more quality time digging in to investigate unexplored avenues because you just never know when you’ll need some portion of that 80%.
The next Eclipse
We’re about a year out in the U.S. from the next full solar eclipse (when the moon passes between the Sun and us). In my neck of the woods, around New York City and Long Island, it looks like we’ll only get a partial eclipse. I’d have to travel to my mother-in-law’s house in Rochester a year from now to see it in full. That’s near the Great Lakes, so it could be pretty spectacular.
I remember that last eclipse, which I could see from New York City. Back then, I was working at Mashable, and we had roof access. I took a nice Nikon with a 90X optical zoom lens, set it on a tripod, and snapped away. Unlike a certain former President who shall remain unnamed, I did not look directly at the eclipse (never do that).
Now, with smartphones with 10X zoom and 100X digital zoom, I wonder what people will capture next year. Of course, digital zoom usually uses AI and I’m not certain how those systems were trained to interpret an eclipse.
In any case, let’s talk about this again next year and develop plans for safely capturing these rare celestial occurrences.
That’s all for now on this busy holiday weekend.
Happy Easter to those who celebrate.
Be good to each other