It’s prob­a­bly not a good idea to be use bleeding-edge betas. That’s espe­cially true for a tool used daily, like a cell­phone. But I’ll freely admit that Apple’s iOS 7, announced Mon­day, has been itch­ing at me. Cultof­Mac told read­ers straight-out not to install it. But com­menters there and else­where have been report­ing few prob­lems and appar­ently it is pos­si­ble to go back to 6 if prob­lems arise.

So this evening I took the plunge. I used the method out­lined here and signed up at imzdl​.com. It all worked pretty well. And so far, so good. The bat­tery looks like it’s drain­ing a bit faster than before, but that’s to be expected of a first beta and it’s not the half-battery that the Chicken Lit­tles claim. A few apps have bombed on me, but only spo­rad­i­cally. Skype didn’t open at first, but a quick look at their sup­port forums found you just needed to delete and rein­stall the app.

Is it worth it? I don’t know. The new icons are still a bit rough, as reported, but more than that, their flat­ness looks out of place next to the 3-D icons that most iPhone apps still use. The new quick-settings bar is cool and the par­al­lax effect for back­grounds is cooler still (it shifts the back­ground as the accelerom­e­ter moves about, giv­ing it all a feel­ing a depth). We’re told that multi-tasking is more robust, but that’s not some­thing one notices imme­di­ately (besides, Android’s had it for years). I’ll update as I explore more. Guesses are that the sec­ond beta will come in about ten days—I’ll see if I can live with the first beta’s bat­tery hit until then.

This is an inter­est­ing update to the G+ Android app.

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This is just so depress­ing: the Face­book gorilla has bought its sec­ond mobile photo shar­ing app in recent weeks. Lightbox was a great app. It auto-posted to every­thing I cared about (Twit­ter, Face­book, Tum­blr, Foursquare, Flickr) but also had its own beau­ti­ful web­site that kept it above the fray. Light­box (my account is/was at http://​mar​tinkel​ley​.light​box​.com/) was what Flickr should have and could have become and it let me enjoy the fan­tasy while also dual-posting to Flickr (http://​www​.flickr​.com/​p​h​o​t​o​s​/​m​a​r​t​i​n​_​k​e​l​ley), which has stored my pho­tos since Mark Zucker­berg was in train­ing dia­pers. For more on the Flickr that never was, see today’s piece in Giz­modo, “How Yahoo Killed Flickr and Lost the Inter­net.”

Light­box is join­ing Face­book!
We started Light­box because we were excited about cre­at­ing new ser­vices built pri­mar­ily for mobile, espe­cially for the Android and HTML5 plat­forms, and we’re hon­ored that mil­lions of you have…

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