There’s a play by Vaclav Havel (the poet and president of the Czech Republic) called The Increased Difficulty of Concentration. It’s a long time since I read it, but the title is what continues to speak to me. The latest developer beta software for the iPhone (as well as for the iPad and the Mac) also touches on this theme with a brand-new feature: Distraction Control.
Even the name is reassuring, and this is what it does. You know how you’re visiting a website and things happen that you don’t mean to, like pop-up windows, sign-in banners or other content overlays? Annoying, right?
Distraction Control is designed to hide such stuff when you’re using Safari, whether on the Mac, the iPad or the iPhone. Even the name of the feature sounds alluring.
When I spoke to Apple it was clear that it’s not designed to permanently remove ads. Well, you can almost hear advertisers sigh with relief, even if the rest of us quietly groan.
Anyway, this is about clearing the screen of other unwanted items and as such is very welcome.
It’s a new addition to the arsenal of features Safari offers and which will be at their most advanced in this fall’s general releases. These include Highlights, which let you see relevant information from a website more easily, and improvements to Reader, so that it can provide a summary and a table of contents for an online article.
