Saturday, October 15, 2011

The missing iPhone and iOS 5 PDFs - found

Pay phones. Fax machines. Printers. All vanishing.

Documentation too!

I went looking today for PDF documentation on the iPhone 4S and iOS5. I didn't find much, and what I did find was out of date or incomplete. The "User Guide" Safari bookmark in Emily's 4S pointed to a web site that didn't describe use of the camera controls on a locked phone [1],[4].

I found the iPhone User Guide For iOS 5 by Apple as an iBook, but it's ePub only. There's no Apple ePub/iBook reader for OS X [1]. Kindle, sure. iBook, not so much.[3]

Google failed me, but old fashioned clicking found support.apple.com/manuals and the iPhone User Guide for iOS 5 (pdf) and iPhone 4S Finger Tips. The Finger Tips PDF and physical handout do describe how to use the camera from a lock screen.

- fn -

[1] Double click the home button from the lock screen. Brings up sound and camera controls against lock screen background. Camera response time is now faster than most dedicated cameras; about 3000% faster than my iPhone 4. I figured this out on my own, but later found it in the user guides I located. Because we restored from backup I suspect we wiped out the URL that is part of the default iOS 5 install.

[2] Many recommend http://www.adobe.com/products/digitaleditions. This is, obviously, an Adobe product. I try hard to avoid Adobe's sofware. With the exception of Lightroom the quality is poor and the installers are insulting.

[3] Yes, Apple's missing OS X EPUB reader is ... astounding. My response has been to only get Kindle books.

Update 10/16/11: In the 24 hours since I posted Apple has updated their manuals site and added links from the support page. Guess they were just catching up post launch. [4] The URL for iPhone help that I couldn't find is: help.apple.com/iphone.

4 comments:

  1. My Kindle does not support EPUB. Yours?

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  2. Sorry, bad wording in my post.

    Famously, Kindle doesn't support EPUB. I was contrasting their desktop client for OS X to Apple's nonexistent desktop reader.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Roger! :)

    A Kindle-related question: Is there any way to sync all my data on the Kindle through the Amazon cloud and not only content purchased from Amazon?

    ReplyDelete
  4. Alas, beyond my kindle knowledge. I only have kindle.app for iOS and OS X.

    ReplyDelete