I learnt a weird new fact about Italian today while watching an Italian YouTube cooking video.
There’s no word for “nut” in Italian.
The language only has words for specific types of nuts: walnuts, almonds, peanuts, hazelnuts, etc. In a sense, this is logical, since most of the plant parts described in English as “nuts” are diverse and botanically and anatomically unrelated. A bag of mixed nuts in Italian is called a bag of frutta secca, which literally means “dry fruits”.
Rewinding to this morning, after I did my two ethics classes I backed up my iPhone and then went into the city to the Apple store to buy myself a new release iPhone 16. My current phone was an 11, so six years old, and the battery life was really starting to degrade noticeably. In fact for the walk I did on Tuesday I started with a fully charged phone, and it was almost empty by the time I got home. So I decided it was a good time to upgrade.
I traded in the old phone for partial credit on the new one. I got an iPhone 16 Pro model, with the superior camera. I take a lot of photos, and the extra telephoto focal lengths are the biggest feature for me. When I got home I spent some time checking out the camera features and I’m pretty impressed. Also the new camera control button is pretty cool and should be extremely useful.
I had to restore the phone from my backup, which went smoothly, but took some time. My old phone had a leather case which I liked. but I noticed the cases for the 16 only come in silicone, which I dislike the feel of, and polycarbonate plastic, which seems tacky to me. Also the case doesn’t allow the phone to lie flat like my old one did, due to the protruding camera lenses on the back. That was one of the main reasons I had a case on the old one. So I opted not to get a case at this stage. I’ll see how I go with the naked phone for a while before deciding if I want a case or not.
New content today:
Ha! Finally iphone got a camera button!
I was working on a different make of a mobile phone, specifically in the camera application team. I was there almost the whole development time of the device. This was maybe fifteen years ago, so I don’t remember everything perfectly.
In the prototype hardware, the device had a physical camera button. It worked pretty well, and had multiple functions. However, in the last prototypes, maybe six months before the publication of the phone, and of course in the final model, there was no camera button.
Why? Because some manager high enough had gotten his hands on a new iphone, which didn’t have a camera button. So we had to remove it. We were annoyed them, and I’m still a bit, but a very small bit.
Of course half a year later the company did release a new phone with a different operating system, and that one was very close to our phone – but it had a camera button.
So, I’m glad Apple finally saw the need for a camera button, if only fifteen years later we almost had one. 😀
(The phone and the camera app were praised by the users and reviews, so it was mostly good.)