Not too late for 3.0 magic (part 2 of 2)

And now Part 2. The real deep impact feature. I call this feature "email application icon badge count". Here's how it works...

Do you ever want to know how many emails you have waiting across 2 or 3 email accounts. But the email icon just shows the total number of emails? Totally unhelpful.

In this new feature, Email gets a new configuration screen that let's the user assign each corner of the email icon with a specific email address and one of 4 colors. Alas, now I can see when I have 4 emails in my gmail account and 20 emails in my work account. That matters to be. And it sure is a nice capability.

My needs are now fulfilled. Thank you Apple. I guess I'm not really fulfilled yet. I'm just praying Mr. Jobs will read this and consider my 2 last needs in iPhone. I may possibly close down this website if Apple implements these last 2 features. That would be ok.

I'm eager that Apple will help me out after reading these 2 needs. I'm hopeful Mr. Jobs will show up in June and do some video editing, then truly wow the crowd with SMS silence and email icon counts. I can already hear the standing ovation.

Not too late for 3.0 magic (part 1 of 2)

Dear Apple,

I am thankful for all the new features coming in 3.0 this "summer". My final
plea now comes in 2 parts.

Part 1. Please add a capability to completely block popup alerts for text messages. I want an SMS silence mode so I can focus on email or web surfing or demonstrating my cool iPhone without having text message alert notifications pop up. Even the name popping up is annoying. I know you can do this. Please help.

Thank you Apple. I implore you to implement this before the final 3.0 release.

On the eve of the keynote...

I'm not too excited about the keynote. I think the best we can hope for is a surprise appearance by Steve Jobs in the last few minutes. He comes out to a standing ovation, calms the crowd, then does a 60 second demo of new iPhone cut/copy/paste features. Wow. Then he receives a 5 minute cheering standing ovation and Apple is reborn again. This is the kind of excitement we really need at MacWorld.

May I please Have Helvetica Notes Font?

Have you seen this trick about getting the "Notes" app to display text in Helvetica font instead of this annoying default cursive font. http://theappleblog.com/2008/10/28/change-notes-font-on-iphone-ipod-touch/ Gosh this default Notes font is so painful. Can't Apple just make the font nice and readable by default for the rest of us?

When do we get CalDav sync?

After extensive research I am convinced we need iPhone to allow over the air calendar sync to any CalDav server.  This would truly open up iPhone for the enterprise.  Apple, can you make this so and decouple over the air calendar sync from Exchange and Mobile Me?

Tales from a BlackBerry friend...

So one of my colleagues dumped his iPhone 3G and went to a BlackBerry last week.  He struggled with iPhone 3G battery life, even with my recommendations.  But at the end of today he confessed the truth I knew he would come back to, as he said to be "There's no secret, it doesn't do the internet that well...let's keep it real.".  Yep, you know he misses his Safari browsing on iPhone!

Inbox Shuffle

New concept for iPhone. Inbox Shuffle. Basically it let's you rotate through all email inbox folders for any open email account. Wouldn't that be useful? Instead of backing out of all the folders all the time you just get circulated through the inbox folder. Apple make it so please. Really I need this asap.

Landscape email - the $700B bailout feature

Yep. Landscape email. How many times have you naturally turned your iPhone in landscape position and just expected the email to flip to landscape mode like Safari. This is the $700B bailout feature we all need to prevent a terrible iPhone usability crash nobody wants to live through. I vote yes. I am the worldwide representative of the iPhone Congress. How vote thee Apple Senate? I move for this bill to be included in the 2.2 vote.

Time to email a contact

Here's the deal. A feature in the contacts application that let's you email a contact to someone. When emailed it would send the contact record as a vcard over email. Perfect. Please implement Apple. We need this and beg of you.

email Group By Amendment

Am I the only one using iPhone who needs a more advanced email group by feature?  You know what I mean.  Specifically I want the email to have a divider line for "today", "yesterday", "last week", "two weeks ago", and "old mail".  Think Thunderbird-like interface.  How great would that be to just have the iPhone email client display a very subtle divider of email by these groups so I could efficiently see how well I am doing in processing email from today and yesterday.

Peaceful and Ready for 2.1

As I await 2.1 for iPhone today I'm calm and peaceful. Rather than a rant today I'd like to note the excellent battery life I've experienced recently. I did not even have to do an intraday recharge yesterday. I'm excited about even further improvements and welcome 2.1.

Contacts filtering improvements

So there are lots of times where I know a person's job title or I have some keywords in the "notes" field of the contact entry.  It would really be nice if the iPhone contacts application would search on these two fields (title and notes) when a keyword filter is typed in at the top of the contacts application.  Apple -- please look into this and save us from the limitation of the first name, last name, and company filter.  We need more fields searched.  We demand more.  Maybe even make it configurable?  PLEASE?

SMS Preview - Enough is Enough

I recently read a great call to action to have Apple update the SMS Preview feature so you can lock it out completely -- Enough is Enough This really is a very serious problem with iPhone and is by far one of the most significant limitations of iPhone that needs to be addressed. Can anyone say 2.0.3? I hereby submit "Additional security features for SMS Preview" as another amendment to the iPhone Bill of Rights.

2.0.1 agony

Is it just me or is waiting nearly 2 hours for iPhone 2.0.1 upgrade simply unreasonable?  Whatever it takes, and I mean whatever it takes, Apple simply must spend more engineering time on the upgrade process.  This is absolutely ridiculous how long this is taking.  I need a simple backup and upgrade process, not a second job.  I sincerely doubt most people would wait this long.

UNREAL iPhone battery issues with 2.0

So this Friday and Saturday night I ran a very serious iPhone battery experiment.  Here is the summary of my test case.  This is by far the most disturbing issue I have observed with iPhone 2.0 running on the original iPhone (circa July 2007 iPhone). 1 - I charged the battery to full power and it was fully charged at midnight. 2 - I played a game on the iPhone for five minutes each night at midnight. 3 - The battery went down slightly from game play (about 1/16). 4 - I then hit the home button in the middle of playing the game, went to the home screen. Note, I did not hard-kill-exit the application (i.e., I did not hold the home button down for 7 seconds to ensure the app terminated, I just went to the home screen like a normal user would). 5 - I went to settings and turned off all radios (phone, wireless, etc.). 6 - I turned off the iPhone and went to bed. Not a reset, just turned off. 7 - I woke up around 10am, turned on the iPhone, and the battery was at 10% and issued the 10% battery warning. How do you explain this?   Seriously what is going on?  The iPhone should have been at least at 90% battery life still.  What is draining my battery?  This is no OK.

Kudos to iPhone Alarm Developer Guy

Just wanted to offer my official kudos to the iPhone Alarm Developer Guy.  Most users probably have not noticed, but iPhone 2.0 OS now automatically sorts alarm entries in the correct order from earliest to latest time.  I am so thankful!  This is a great update and sure beats having the alarm entries show up in the order they were created like the old 1.1.4.  Super Kudos iPhone Alarm Developer Guy....now can you please take over as lead developer on contacts?  Then after that maybe you could even get involved in making the iPhone iPod application display song names and artists in that cooler, smaller, nicer font like the Apple Remote application does.  Am I the only one who noticed how nice that is in Remote?  I can actually see the entire name of my songs. There remains so much work to do on iPhone 2.0.  Let's just say my last few blogs are the underpinnings what Apple needs to do in iPhone 2.1.1.

Sluggish contacts performance in iPhone OS 2.0

So I am that guy with over 1,600 contacts. Yep, for real, that's how many I have. 1,674 contacts to be precise. I consider myself a power user. Allow me to express my frustration with iPhone OS 2.0 performance when it comes to contacts. After installing the upgrade on my original iPhone, any time I open contacts up, whether directly via the contacts application, via the phone application, or even from the Google Maps contacts button, I have 10 seconds of hang time. This is a lame problem. I am talking about 10 seconds of my screen being frozen and nothing I can do. No scrolling contacts, no home button exit, nothing. So what's up Apple? I have this feeling iPhone 2.0 is doing this crazy query against the SQLite database every time it loads contacts. Something like select * from contacts table. And for some reason the index is not being updated on my contacts. Can someone from Apple please look into this problem. It is so stifling to my every day use. I am sure if you loaded up 1600+ contacts in the original iPhone and added notes to about half of them you would see this problem. OK part 2 of this rant. What is up with the contacts search implementation. This is incredibly frustrating for power use. I cannot believe I am the only one commenting on this implementation. Let's be honest, the people using this search are going to be power users. So here are the 3 iPhone Bill of Rights Amendments I propose for improving contact search. 1 - The iPhone contacts search box shall have a setting to allow the user to set the contacts search box to always be visible at the top of the application even when scrolling through contact entries. 2 - When the user clicks on the magnifying glass icon at the top right of the contacts screen, the contacts search box shall appear and the cursor shall start blinking in the contacts search box along with he keyboard to type in a search string. No need for 2 more touches on the screen to activate the search box. Get Mr. iPhone Alarm developer to fix this....that guy is so smart. Speaking of which, thanks iPhone 2.0 for deleting all my 8 pre-existing alarms during the upgrade. Lame. 3 - The iPhone contacts search shall provide full text searching of the contact note field by default. Right now it looks like just first name, last name, and company. Maybe a few other fields as far as I can tell, but seriously please make NOTE searching work.

Original iPhone agony with iPhone OS 2.0

So here I am, waiting over 2 hours for iPhone to do some kind of backup process.  This cannot be normal.  The fact that it is happening is inexcusable if you ask me. "Backing up iPhone....."  Is anyone else experiencing this?  I am having a completely terrible experience syncing my iPhone with iTunes ever since I installed OS 2.0.  Sure it is progressing, but really, over 2 hours?  I have 2.2 GB of music, 1.2 GB of video, and 1 GB of photos.  Maybe my 1,600+ contacts?  Can you handle that iTunes?

Review of the review of the reviews

Alright. I think we all need a simple macro summary review of all the reviews of the reviews of iPhone 3G. I'll keep it simple. Looks to me like battery life is very weak and those of us who need more battery life than iPhone 1.0 will be disappointed. As for the rest, better sound and a gps without turn by turn instructions simply do not excite me. So I will upgrade the software on my original iPhone and enjoy the appstore, but come on apple...how could you let us down on this battery issue.

The true iPhone 3G expectations

So here I am reading all about the iPhone 3G and truth be told, I was expecting more. Here's the executive summary of what I expect Apple to update in the coming months with the core applications. Enough already let's get these features implemented Apple. The people deserve better. 1 - Email Searching: Need a basic email search. I think if you watched the "Google Talk" lecture/video on email management you would understand that searching email is more important than managing multiple email folders. Or at least they are similar enough in importance that you should implement the search as well. 2 - Making Contacts from Phone Numbers: So when phone numbers show up on a web page or in an email I like that iPhone let's you dial it. But how about 2 more buttons called "Add Number to Contact" and "Create a New Contact". This would be helpful. 3 - Calendar Searching: A basic calendar search like the new contacts search is definitely a must have for executives and for regular folks using the iPhone. Must we beg for you to make this common sense feature into the calendar? Seems so rational to me. 4 - Notes Sync: Doesn't anyone else want to sync their notes with Outlook? This seems like another big miss to me. So simple why not? 5 - Turn off SMS popups: Oh yes, how could I forget. I just blogged it below but once again I need to emphasize. Apple, will you please, please provide a setting so I can turn off SMS notification popups completely. Why is that so hard? We need this kind of control.