I’m generally loathe to provide tips on weird iOS wobbles, because too many of them feel like voodoo. But after a week of Slide Over failing on my iPad Air, I managed to get it back, and I figured my method might help other people.

Slide Over is a new feature in iOS 9. On iPads other than the iPad Air 2, iPad mini 4, and the upcoming iPad Pro, it’s the only means of getting two apps on the same screen, without jailbreaking. The way it works is through you pulling a narrow column across a portion of the screen by dragging inwards from the right-hand edge, in line with the Home button. You then select an app, use it, and dismiss it by dragging rightwards.

Only that stopped working for me pretty quickly. No matter how I dragged, Slide Over refused to make an appearance. All I ever managed to see was the little left-facing arrow temporarily display on the screen edge, noting precisely where I should be dragging from, if my fingers had the audacity to be in slightly the wrong place.

I reasoned that Slide Over must have gotten stuck somehow. Perhaps this isn’t what happened, but it seems logical enough. One thing I did know for sure is Slide Over failed shortly after I installed and tried to use updates for a selection of newly compatible apps. So I went into the App Switcher and swiped up on every single app, in that way that sets knowledgeable tech people’s teeth on edge, given that this is something you should never have to do on iOS.

I restarted the iPad. No dice. And the apps were all back in the App Switcher anyway. So I nuked them all over again, with much gusto, opened Notes, and tried dragging from the right. I saw a ‘glitch’ of Slide Over, continued dragging, and there it was, like it had never been away.

It’s hard to know what went wrong and whether it’ll stop working again, nor whether this fix is anything but luck. (Certainly, one other person I know with this problem tried quitting all the apps and restarting, and hasn’t yet gotten Slide Over back *.) I also wonder whether a specific app was to blame, such as Pixelmator. That’s a superb iPad app — highly recommended — but it’s also extremely resource-hungry. On my iPad Air, it sometimes fails to launch, due to heavy RAM requirements. On that basis, it wouldn’t surprise me if the combination of underlying demands plus Pixelmator plus Slide Over just proved too much for the feature. But I don’t really fancy testing the theory by messing up my iPad again, when I need it to write about iPad things.

Still, now I can at least get back to complaining about Slide Over’s shortcomings, rather than it not working.

* UPDATE: I heard again from the person who the fix didn’t work for. Turns out one of the Slide Over-compatible apps had a broken download and dimmed icon but still, for some reason, appeared in Slide Over. After logging out, restarting, and logging in, the app was gone. Slide Over then worked. Clearly, there’s an issue with Slide Over getting ‘stuck’ when iOS finds things it cannot properly deal with.

I wrote recently about iCloud back-ups failing on my devices after installing iOS 9. This story is, to my mind, a big deal, but has been curiously ignored by the majority of the tech press. As I noted, it’s clearly not sexy enough, and perhaps suffers from site owners/writers not having the problem themselves.

About a week ago, I was trying to troubleshoot this problem yet again and made my now regular trip to Settings > iCloud > Backup, waiting for it to state my iPhone 6s had never been backed up. Instead, it smugly noted it had backed-up overnight. This came as something of a surprise. The iPad, by contrast, still resolutely refused to back anything up at all.

I subsequently checked in every day to see what was happening. Most nights — although not all — since, the iPhone has backed-up to iCloud. Then, out of the blue, the iPad started backing up, too. If you’re now  eager to know, here’s the fix that I used to get all this working: nothing at all.

While typing this article, I almost misspelled iCloud as ‘iClod’, but that might actually be more appropriate. It’s pretty clear there are some fairly big issues with Apple’s infrastructure right now, perhaps related to its large number of users combined with new rollouts of hardware and software. And it’s notable that things aren’t entirely fixed for me either. My iPhone 5s currently states tyne “last backup could not be completed”, which was the error I previously got from the other devices. I’m also finding apps sporadically ‘stick’ when I’m trying to update them using the App Store.

What worries me more is how many people told me they were informed by Apple to wipe their devices clean and set them up as new, specifically to deal with the problem of iCloud back-ups. Data loss is almost never a solution to a technical problem, and it certainly shouldn’t be when it’s looking increasingly likely that Apple’s servers (or a combination of them and software bugs) are to blame. Certainly, if Apple ever wants iOS to be a properly professional platform, it’s not acceptable than even a small number of users will every year or two have to abandon everything and start from scratch.

Apple reporting of late is even weirder than usual, and broadly appears to take one of three forms:

• Apple is THE BEST and we love EVERYTHING it does
• Apple is THE WORST and we hate EVERYTHING it does
• Apple did something we brushed aside last year as trivial, but it’s fixed now, so we’re going to pretend we were FURIOUS at the time and that this minor change is more innovative than sliced bread, GPS and heart-rate monitors combined. (And, no, Heston, you cannot have that as a new menu item for your restaurants.)

This means we see relentless rumours, pro-Apple and anti-Apple opinions and reviews, but oddly little reporting when things go somewhat wrong for a bunch of people. That sort of thing doesn’t get enough clicks/eyeballs/ad impressions and so falls by the wayside. Hence, I suppose, why I’m writing about a problem here. And that problem is this:

With iOS 9, iCloud back-up is dead for some people.

Yeah, just imagine that as a headline. Your eyes would gloss over it, before settling on IPHONE 7 MIGHT BE MADE FROM BEES and IPHONE 6S LESS BENDY WHICH IS THE MOST AMAZING THING EVER. But this kind of stuff matters, because iCloud is supposed to be Apple’s future for storage, and robust enough to protect all of your data and memories.

I have three iOS devices. The second they were updated to iOS 9, iCloud stopped working. I’m sure some journo colleagues will merrily claim this is down to some tech halo of doom or other, given how often things appear to go wrong for me during updates; but this is no laughing matter, because iCloud back-up is critical. More to the point, a quick search online finds plenty of forum threads about this issue, including on some major Apple websites that have yet to report on the matter. (There are, pleasingly, exceptions.)

What actually happens varies somewhat by user, but mostly you’ll find the Storage section in Settings helpfully noting that you’ve ‘never’ backed-up, when you have. Your device’s next back-up size will be listed at a suspiciously low 0 bytes, with each app beneath listing ‘no data’. On attempting to make a back-up, it will crank on for a while, get towards the end and not complete. If Apple’s servers and software are feeling particularly mischievous, your iCloud storage will drop like a stone, even though none of the back-ups have taken. (At one point, my 50 GB of space was down to about 15 GB free, despite me, according to iOS 9, having no actual back-ups.)

People posting on forums have been offering solutions. Turning iCloud off and on again. Resetting network settings. Deleting the back-ups you have, and then attempting to back-up manually until it actually works. According to people posting on Apple’s forums, Apple support naturally notes it’s the “first we’ve heard of this” whenever people call, and depressingly goes to the old fallbacks for seemingly any iOS-related problem these days: either restore your device from a back-up (assuming you can make one—some users under iOS 9 are even having problems with iTunes), or set up your device as new.

The second of those is especially troubling. Setting up a device as new means you don’t have access to your old data. In my case, that would mean losing progress from all games, hundreds of hours of work in the likes of Korg Gadget, and more. Data loss is not an acceptable solution for what appears to be a nasty iCloud bug that Apple has yet to acknowledge. (And Apple helpfully blocked sideloading in May, which would have been a way to restore important data manually.) More to the point, people on Apple’s forums claim they’ve done these things and it makes no difference anyway.

From what I can see, the only solution to this is to wait and hope things will start working again (and, if you can, remember to make regular iTunes back-ups, like you’re living in the Stone Age). That’s some way from ‘it just works’. Perhaps if more publications would make a noise about this, there’d be more hope and less waiting. As it is, I have to wonder if a lot of people will just give up backing-up altogether, putting their data at risk, and leading to misery down the line when a device abruptly stops working.

I was today pointed at Benjamin Mayo’s blog post Apple Now Requiring All Apple TV Games To Support Siri Remote Input. As the title suggests, Apple will enforce Siri Remote support for Apple TV games. This is a problem.

On Twitter, I’ve had people argue otherwise, suggesting everything is fine. Developers will just find new methods of control input that work nicely with the Siri Remote. This is more or less what happened on iPhone, when people (including yours truly) initially dismissed it as a games machine, due to its lack of non-traditional controls. In the event, devs worked past perceived limitations, and we ended up with amazing and intuitive titles like Zen Bound and Eliss (most recent versions linked to here — buy them both).

There is a difference, though. iPhone was a blank slate, and developers took — and continue to take — full advantage. The Siri Remote is by design a more conventional input, because you use it to control something on a screen across the room. There isn’t really any comparison between the two, and I fear the Siri Remote’s comparatively basic input options will lead to a glut of iOS games becoming less innovative as a result.

The other angle people are taking is that Apple’s keener on Wii-like gestural input, since the Siri Remote has an accelerometer. Cynics will point out the Wii is a console from 2006 and therefore nearly a decade old, but many of its games are still fun, and gestural input is intuitive. The thing is, Apple’s remote is significantly more restrictive and looks to be more awkward for games than Nintendo’s.

In the initial Apple TV promo video Apple ran at its recent event, someone was shown playing racer Asphalt 8 with said remote (held between two hands), and it looked faintly ridiculous and a little painful. Crossy Road was also demoed, using the remote’s small touchpad as a directional controller. That looked OK, but showcased the kind of title likely to find traction on Apple TV (i.e. very basic casual games), and it still had me thinking of cramp.

But even Wii comparisons don’t really hold up. Nintendo’s controller works fine for browsing menus and app UIs, but flip it on its side and it’s a fairly capable, if slightly basic, games controller. By contrast, flip Apple’s on its side and you see the difference. Buttons are crammed towards the centre, and there’s no physical directional controller. The latter issue can be readily dismissed if you’re not desperate for it to be 1987 all over again, but the former means you’re largely limited to tilt/tap or swiping with your left thumb.

The concern is Apple’s rules will severely limit even remotely complex fare on Apple TV from a control standpoint, or those games will have to figure out an extremely dumbed-down mode specifically designed for the Siri Remote. This will affect more games than you might realise. Games that rely on twin-stick/two-thumb input (commonplace on iOS) will have to revert to single-thumb input, with auto-aim for shooters. Platform games could be very tricky to implement. Flick up to jump? Urgh. And anything requiring directional control and action buttons could be a problem. When your new controller may have trouble supporting games that need anything beyond tilt-and-tap or directional controls alone, that should send alarm bells ringing.

As Andrew Bryant remarked to me on Twitter, it won’t be a surprise if Apple changes tack, on realising a AAA title it wants to bang on about at a keynote cannot come to Apple TV with these restrictions. Additionally, I know plenty of game devs, and they’re often keen to rise to a challenge. I suspect we’ll, despite Apple’s decisions, see at least a reasonable number of innovative titles on Apple TV. Here’s hoping on both counts, because as I recently wrote for Stuff, it would be a crying shame if a piece of hardware that could be broadly transformative for gaming ends up as yet another also-ran.

The BBC reported on Friday that it’s once again illegal in the UK to rip CDs to your computer. This might come as a surprise to you. First, you might not have been aware this was illegal in the first place. Secondly, you might be nonplussed that the pathetic changes to the UK’s fair-use laws have in part already been dialled back, but there you go.

About a year ago, I wrote for Stuff.tv about government changes to personal copying exceptions, and how they didn’t go far enough. My argument was (and is) that while companies should be allowed to weld DRM to released media, individuals should be able to circumvent it for personal use, as long as there’s an expectation of ownership with the purchased media. (In other words, you shouldn’t be able to ‘back-up’ music from Spotify or video from Netflix, but you should be able to make personal copies of CDs, digital books and comics, DVDs and games.)

The key sticking point is plainly noted in the BBC piece:

A judge ruled that the government was wrong legally when it decided not to introduce a compensation scheme for songwriters, musicians and other rights holders who face losses as a result of their copyright being infringed.

UK Music estimated the new regulations, without a compensation scheme, would result in loss of revenues for rights owners in the creative sector of £58m a year.

In other words, because you’re not rebuying again and again, rights owners potentially lose money, and so they want something for nothing. They should somehow be ‘compensated’ for you making personal copies of items, for your own use. I imagine they’re pretty angry about the portable nature of digital files, too, since they can be used across devices and platforms, without you having to rebuy for each new machine. Naturally, everyone ignores the fact people have finite money, and people still very much into music are still buying it, often on physical formats; they’re now just once again being punished for having the audacity of wanting to back-up this content.

At the time of the Stuff piece, given the craven and half-arsed nature of the changes in law, it never occurred to me that we’d go backwards and end up again at the status quo. The BBC adds in its story that it’s “unclear how the change will be enforced”, but then it’s almost never been enforced. What is clear is that once again we have industry representatives effectively punishing those who pay for things. All this does is piss people off. By making it illegal to rip your own CDs to your own computer and legally listen to the music you paid for, these organisations are hastening the decline of income from said purchases, not protecting their artists.