My iPhone Feature Wishlist- 10 Software Fixes I Hope To See Soon

Date August 7, 2007

After one full week of use, I really have been enjoying my iPhone. User interface candy for sure. Every so often I hit a rough spot with usability, but the overall user experience so far has been great.

Chris Pirillo had an interesting quote about the iPhone a few days ago in his post “20 Reasons I’m Happy with the iPhone” (a follow up to “20 Reasons I’m Not Getting An iPhone“):

Don’t buy it for the hype - TRY it for the hype, but buy it because you’re tired of the shit everybody else keeps shoving into your pocket.

My iPhone Feature WishlistMost if not all of these are software fixes. Hope to see them soon in an upcoming OS release:

  1. Multiple SMS recipients and group based SMS sending. This is so sorely missing from the feature list, that I’m almost certain I just haven’t figured out how yet. Anyone?
  2. Rotatable screen for SMS sending to get that nice big chunky keyboard you get in the web browser.
  3. Fast app switching- give me a gesture based ALT-TAB-like switching device.
  4. Automatically sync the camera roll to my desktop on sync.
  5. Allow me to sync my yahoo calendar or any iCal/vCal.
  6. When I’m looking at a map point and I tap the up-down “directions” button, pre-fill the ending point value with the point I’m looking at instead of clearing it. OBVIOUSLY, this is going to be my point of arrival (or origin).
  7. Make it a little harder to accidentally call people I haven’t talked to in years. It’s far too easy to accidentally dial phone numbers- usually when you are trying to view a contact’s details.
  8. Allow draggable reordering of weather cities.
  9. Unlimited access to YouTube, and fresher Featured and Most Viewed collections- these were stale within 24 hours of walking out of the Apple store. Currently YouTube access is limited to a very small subset of what’s available on the site. Right now I can’t view any of the videos I’ve uploaded to YouTube.
  10. Background page rendering in Safari. Rendering seems to halt when you pop a new window and take focus away from the current one.

Facebook’s Ridiculously Cool Story Types Preferences Widget

Date July 17, 2007

Ok, so who on the Facebook design team is an aspiring bedroom DJ?

The widget below, which looks like a multi-track mixing console, allows Facebook users to reign in fine grain control over the frequency of which “stories” are presented on their dashboard.

Don’t care who’s been writing on Joe Schmoe’s wall? Turn down the volume on the “Wall Posts” slider and you will see less of those story types in your news feed. Always want to know when your friend’s relationship statuses change? Turn up the volume on the Relationships slider and you’ll see more of those story types in your feed.

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Apple Attempts to Sneak Safari Browser Onto Windows Boxes Via Quicktime Updater

Date July 8, 2007

I haven’t installed Apple’s Safari browser on my desktop computer yet, but this is what showed up when the Apple Updater just ran (see screenshot below).

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Presentation: W3C’s Shawn Henry - “Web Accessibility Guidelines Update”

Date July 7, 2007

Warning: This presentation will help you sleep through a stampede of horny elephants, but you should watch it anyway.

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How to Load and Unload Google Maps Without Using the BODY Tag

Date July 6, 2007

I recently ran into a situation where I wanted to display a google map on a single page of a CMS website. The CMS uses a standard header for all pages which renders an identical BODY tag for all pages of the site.

Since the google map is only present on one page of the site, including the gmap onload and onunload event handlers in the body tag on every page is not practical or desirable (the functions being called are absent and throw javascript errors on non-map pages). Unfortunately, all of the google maps API examples use the body tag to attach functions to these events.

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