An Apple a Day Keeps the Covid away - It Doesn't, But Read On

Firstly, apologies for not posting a piece for you last weekend. A dose of COVID-19, two weeks in France with a week of work in between, finally did for me. I had plenty of sleep over that weekend, anyway.

October has already been a busy month for Apple with their latest releases. As I pitched a few weeks ago, the new iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max have received much acclaim. The updated cameras have received excellent reviews. 

The current iPhone 15 has seen a price drop. A colleague at work took advantage of our salary sacrifice scheme, ordered one, and is excited for it to arrive. It may be worth a search around if you are in the market for a new phone. I have also seen some reasonable SIM-only offers online as well.

Also, this month, Apple has pushed out their new operating systems, IOS 17 for iPads and iPhones, WatchOS10 for Apple Watches and MacOS Sonoma for MacBooks.

One noticeable thing with the new lock screens is that there is much more information. Perhaps not a big thing, but it looks ok to me. Sonoma now supports widgets. This update means you can have the same widgets on your MacBook as on your iPhone.

The screen savers now have a 'rolling' feature. My present screen saver looks like it's ply through a forest. If you shoot a photograph on an iPhone using the live feature, which gives you a burst of photos, you can use that as a screen saver, and the OS will use that burst of pictures to make a screen saver photo that appears to move.

Apple's integrated operating systems are proving excellent for writers. I may have written at the time, but whilst I was in France on a day visit to Dunkirk, I managed to use the free wifi and write that week's blog piece in the Pages app and schedule it to be published, all from my iPhone SE running IOS17.

For iPad users, there has, this week, been a new Apple Pencil. Many were expecting the reveal of the iPad Gen 11, but a pencil it is. Briefly reading through a few reviews, the thoughts are that this update is an improvement on the version that required charging via the lightning/USB-C cable, which was rather ugly and had few favourable reviews.

There we are, then. It's nice to be back on the blog, and a big thank you to all who come here to read my pieces.

Next week, I will update you on 'Beasting Dartmoor' and my writing aims and targets for the next few months.