Updated 15 April 2009   .

iPhone 2,1 Wishlist

Back to Page 1

Calendar App Improvements

The biggest disappointment for me in coming from the Palm OS based Treo is the Calendar app, which is very clunky to use in comparison. I could enter a new event in a few seconds on the Treo (you just tap a time slot and start typing the name, it will assign it your default alarm settings) but it takes much longer on the iPhone (click new, click the title, type a title, then set the time, then set an alarm). And while Palm's calendar app isn't exactly bloated with features, it has a few neat things I really miss now.

So here's my wishlist to make the Calendar app a bit snappier:

• Double-tap a time, or multi-touch expand a time period in day view to create an event at that time (should also work in week view, see below)
• Immediately enter text entry mode in the new event dialog
• When entering an event name, previous entries should pop up in a list below (as they do when entering locations in the Maps app). There's a handful of standard event names I'm always re-typing. Anything you can do to avoid typing on the iPhone is a big plus.

And some other features I'd like to see:

• Floating events, which drift along with the current day until deleted. Palm has these, and they're great for TODO items that you want to be reminded about at a certain time, and if you don't get to them then they'll remind you again the next day (they could be made to sync from iCal TODO items if they had a time field added)
• Arbitrary event alarms, not those hard-coded options (I want 13 minutes notice, or 4 days notice). They just need to change the hard-coded list to be spinners for minutes/hours/days (including zero, i.e. 'NOW')
• Add a snooze function for event alarms (again, I got very used to this on the Treo), as when you're busy it's common to not be able to deal with the reminder right this second, but if you don't get reminded again it will slip your mind when you do have a spare moment. Either a few hard-coded options (5/10/30 mins) or keep it flexible like the point above. Actually, same goes for the clock alarm snooze, it would be great if it said 'Snooze 5', 'Snooze 10' and 'Snooze 30' instead of just the one 'Snooze' button when it went off.
• You should be able to swipe delete or enter an edit mode in calendar list view for deleting lots of events (as you can in the Email app). Try deleting 10+ event items: click, edit, delete, ok for each one, euggh! Contrast that with deleting 10+ emails, which is a snap. These things should be standardized across all apps on the iPhone, the inconsistencies are really frustrating.
• You can't switch events between different calendars on the iPhone. When creating a new event you can pick a calendar, but it seems locked in thereafter, so make sure you get it right first time! Oh, and why don't the different calendar colors match up with those in iCal? In my iCal 'Home' is blue and 'Japan' is red, but on the iPhone 'Home' is red and 'Japan' is green. What gives? (it seems other people have these problems too)
• Please add a 'Week' mode like you have in iCal, it's very handy! I guess it would have to be in landscape mode, and you might need to scroll left and right a bit, but you'd still see a week at a glance.

A Slightly Better Camera

I'm not one of those people who thinks a cellphone camera should somehow be as good as a real camera (I'm kinda into photography), but the one in the iPhone 3G is pretty terrible. I just need it to grab lo-fi candid snaps when I don't have a real camera, or to grab pics of signs/notices/maps/advertisements etc. as I'm wandering around as an alternative to taking down notes. The current camera is almost good enough, but not quite: it's soft, can't focus close enough, and it doesn't handle even moderately low-light conditions well at all. Here's an example image I took, trying to grab some phone numbers from a travel guide in a fairly brightly lit room. I held it as still as I could, and experimented with different focal distances, but no luck. Yuck.

While we're at it, the camera app could handle being a little more sophisticated. Adding a 2 or 10 second timer button for those self-snaps would help: trying to keep your finger on the tiny shutter button on a touchscreen facing away from you at arm's reach is a bit of a challenge. Also, if there's any scope at all for controlling the camera's settings I'd love at least some basic presets to help it along (night, portrait, landscape, etc).

And does it really need those 3 seconds to initialize when you first launch it? What's it doing?!?

Storage Capacity Bump (32gb)

Ok, you always want more space, but... If I had a leeeeedle bit more then I could put my iPod Classic into retirement, and occasionally swap content in and out. But as it stands, 16gb isn't really enough, so I have to keep both the iPhone and iPod on active duty. Maybe that's their deliberate and carefully market researched ploy! Bastiches!

Laptop Internet Tethering

I know it's not as good as having direct access from the laptop, but for the occasional times when I'm away from home with the laptop and iPhone (and the stupid hotel wants to charge me more per hour than I would normally pay in a month) it would sure make life easier. It's soooo frustrating to have a nice big 15 inch screen and keyboard in one device, but not be able to use it because I need the network access that the little pokey device has. This is the sort of thing Apple normally does really well - providing a simple solution to a really common problem. Not necessarily the best, fastest, most technically superior solution, but one that works well and solves the problem.

Misc Wishes (in order, strikethrough points seem to be addressed by the 3.0 SDK)

• Sync via Bluetooth. My laptop has bluetooth, my phone has bluetooth, I shouldn't have to wire them up to talk. I know it will be slower, but it's a real pain having to swap my one spare USB port between the iPhone and a half dozen other things. Yes, I know there are USB hubs, but this is a Mac and I like to keep it simple and minimal
• Delete individual SMS messages, not the whole thread (everyone asks for it, come on Apple!). Maybe they just haven't thought of a good use case, so here's one: you've been texting back and forth with someone for ages, you don't want to lose that history, but they text you a password or credit card number which you shouldn't keep around in an insecure place like that.
• Email Filters - it's not a real email app without them, these days anyone with a semi-sophisticated online life is going to be getting mailing lists and newsletters they don't want just unceremoniously dumped into their inbox. I've had to unsubscribe from a few lists and re-subscribe with a separate gmail account to stop them flooding my iPhone's email inbox because it can't filter them.
• Music as an alarm sound - why not? The iPod Classic can. I want to set a gentle music alarm for 7:30am, and maybe a more aggressive 'beep beep' alarm for 7:40am in case the music didn't get me up. All the functionality is there, why not hook it up?
• Organize contacts into groups, and filter by group or all (just like in the calendar app). I want to keep business and personal contacts separate, and make temporary contact groups, e.g. hotels+taxis+restaurants on a trip away without polluting my whole contacts list
• Rotate photos in the Photo viewer (and keep them rotated). I swear I remember in the first Steve Jobs demo he was doing a multi-touch gesture to rotate pictures, did this somehow go away?
• Landscape mode in email. No brainer.
• I'd really like a desktop app for syncing/editing notes. I have a lot of notes from my Treo and no (legit, without jail-breaking) way of transferring them across, or making big edits on the laptop to take advantage of it's big screen and keyboard
• Search in iPod, just like you can on an iPod classic but the character entry would be less painful here. You could have a search box at top of each listing (albums, artists, songs, etc) exactly the same as in the contacts list. Sometimes tracks get lost/misfiled, or you forget the exact name of the track and don't know the artist name either. Why did they lose this feature? The only downside is a little screen space at the top of each list for a search field.
• How about a proper, complete call log? It seems to cull voicemail calls from the recent calls list, and I can see times calls were started against each contact, but no duration or end time. Under Settings->General->Usage you should be able to tap the 'Call Time' and 'Cellular Network Data' fields to see a full breakdown. This isn't just to be anal about your network usage (or evidence if there's a disagreement with them), it can be really handy to figure things out, like what time did such and such happen yesterday? I remember it was just after I spoke to Stuart, so look up what time that call ended and you know (again, I did this quite a bit on the Treo).
• Turn-by-turn nav, if possible (does it need an internal compass added to do this?)
• Flash in the browser. I used to hate flash, but so many sites use it now that it really makes the whole 'proper browsing on a mobile device' marketing pitch ring a bit hollow.

Feedback. Disclaimer.

As I'm still all old-skool Web 1.x here, there's no comments, which is good (no lame trolls) and bad. So feel free to contact me here if you feel an overwhelming urge to vent or say something helpful. I imagine there's some apps/hacks to get around a few of my gripes, and I'd love to hear them. I might end up posting any interesting comments back here too.

And it seems to be The Done Thing to declare that I own a bunch of AAPL stock, so yes, I seek personal fortune in Apple making their product better. BTW, owning the stock has more than paid for all the Apple gear I've ever bought. Go Apple go.

Delicious