The IT Nerd

So I’ve been using iOS 7 for a couple of days and there have been a few things that annoyed me. But they were easy to to fix and I’d thought that I would share how I fixed them so that you won’t have to wonder how to address these if you feel the same way:

• Text or iMessages with first names only: iOS 7 changes a behavior that users of iOS 6 or earlier have been used to by only displaying the contact’s first name in Messages. That’s fine unless you have multiple people in your contact list with the same first name like I do. Then it’s a #fail. Here’s how to change that. Settings -> Mail, Contacts, Calendars ->Contacts. Now find Short Name and turn it off.
• Battery Life: I noted that my battery life wasn’t what it was like under iOS 6. I traced it to three things:
  • AirDrop: When it’s on, it’s constantly looking for iPhones to share data with. Which means it is using your battery life. Turn it off and if you need it, use Control Center to turn it on. Just don’t forget to turn it back off when you’re done.
  • Frequent Locations: I spoke about this feature here. Since it’s always on, it’s always using battery power. Do yourself a favor and turn it off.
  • Background App Refresh: It’s handy to have apps that constantly update themselves. But there’s no free lunch as they consume battery power to do it (not to mention add to your data charges). Do yourself a favor and go to Settings -> General  -> Background App Refresh and disable apps that you don’t want to refresh in the background constantly (Like Shazam. Why does that need to constantly refresh? Anyone?). However, you might want to consider keeping apps that use Location Services such as Strava or Google Maps on.
• Moving Wallpaper: A new feature in iOS 7 is the wallpaper appears to pan around as you move your phone to give a three dimensional like view. It’s called a parallax effect. This was cool for about a day and then got a bit annoying for me. Here’s how to turn that off. Go to Settings -> General -> Accessibility. Turn on Reduce Motion.

Does anyone have any fixes for things that they’ve found annoying in iOS 7? Post a comment and share your wisdom.

This entry was posted on September 20, 2013 at 8:00 am and is filed under Tips with tags Apple, iOS. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.