getwired.com

1. Preferred URL handling (monikers) – Specific URLs or shortcuts should be able to launch a designated program that is able to deal with them. In particular, you should be able to set a preferred application to intercept http(s)://twitter.com, @username, and http://facebook.com. Similar examples exist. This isn’t terribly different from the way iTunes and YouTube are handled in the iPhone today. In Windows with files you would have historically assigned an application to a file extension. In this case, I get lots of email from Twitter with users that have followed me – in order to decide whether I want to follow, block, or do nothing, I need to look at their profile. However Twitter’s web UI on the iPhone leaves a lot to be desired – I’d much rather have http://twitter.com/getwired open my preferred Twitter client (Tweetie 2) instead of Safari. This is an easy fix and would be easily added by apps for web services that matter.
2. Soft “silent” switch/meeting mode – I can’t believe nobody at Apple has a spouse that hasn’t ragged on them about this. The hard switch for silencing the iPhone is indeed handy – but it sucks. You’re in a meeting, you silence your phone. Two hours later you miss a call because it’s on silent and you don’t feel it shimmy in your pocket. Conversely (I JUST heard my iPhone ding for new mail – timely), most people want to hear their phone during the day, but not at night. Let me set times that I don’t want to be disturbed, or better yet, be smart enough to look at iCal and say, “he’s in a meeting now, I’ll shake instead of ring.” If my spouse calls me after the meeting then, ring instead of shake. It’s after 8, don’t ring. Get it? Good. I don’t care if you kill the hard switch, frankly.
3. A flash for night photography – It’s really a shame that the most popular smartphone can’t take photos at night. This can’t be a huge hurdle for Apple to overcome – Droid has one and it works quite well.
4. True multitasking – It’s not critical – but man it would be handy to have certain applications that could stay running in the background. Not every app needs to – perhaps it could be a classification of an applications where the app needs to pass a more stringent power management and CPU utilization test. Twitter, Facebook, IM applications, clock applications, security apps (see my point below about a security framework too) – there aren’t a ton, but there are several categories that would be immensely useful.
5. Better battery – with or without multitasking, the battery needs to be improved. Consensus said the 3GS was supposed to be better here, but isn’t. Network connected and display hungry apps eat power – that’s life. We need more juice – and I DON’T want a replaceable battery, thanks Motorola. Just one more thing to break.
6. Background pubsub for REST-based or SOAP-based services – Barring true multitasking, it would be awesome if there was a background daemon that apps could pass queries through and have the daemon process and launch the app if results change or match. It’s a primitive idea – but a web service API abstraction daemon could be a cool trick at enabling web services but allowing Apple to keep CPU/battery utilization down to their own terms.
7. Stay awake – I love using my iPhone in the kitchen – but I hate the fact that if I leave it open with a recipe on Safari, it eventually dims and locks. Sure, you can disable that by diving in to settings, but then it’s disabled across the board. See below about gestures – perhaps allowing me to swipe that initially re-locked screen lock back to the left as you would to unlock it, and holding it there for a couple of seconds would make a stronger “click” that would let me keep the screen locked on (to “pin” it) – until I use the iPhone’s top button to finally put it back to sleep when I’m done. This also applies when listening to music in the car.
8. Gestures/chording – Things I wish I could do even on a locked iPhone: 1) track forward, 2) track back, and 3) pause. I propose that even when locked, an iPhone that is playing music should let you 1) swipe two fingers to the right, 2) swipe two fingers to the left, and 3) swipe two fingers straight down the screen in order to perform those tasks, respectively.
9. RFID reader - perhaps I’m ahead of the curve here – but I believe that RFID will become more and more commonplace – and (see authentication, below) it would be great if I could use RFID as an identification tool for products, but also as a mechanism to secure the phone. Regardless, given the number of apps today that do bar-code scanning, if Apple added the RFID functionality I believe it would be rapidly adopted by app developers.
10. Better “authentication” – Security PINs suck. Sorry, they do. RFID (as suggested above), fingerprint or other immediately available physical factor security is faster, more convenient, and usually more secure, than just a PIN. The beauty of RFID is also if I walk away from my iPhone, it locks itself again. Here again gestures could also do a better job – a series of finger or multi-finger swipes in one or more directions could, like a signature, be my auth mechanism, and be done without looking at the iPhone.
11. Consumer-compatible IR transceiver – a phenomenal way to both have an “in-box” remote for Apple TV or Macs, but also to allow app developers to create universal remote applications.
12. Print from iPhone – when looking at recipes or documents on my iPhone, I often wish I could print them directly to my Mac in the other room. Perhaps this could be a MobileMe feature?
13. Mac <-> iPhone Safari tab sharing – like Print from my iPhone, I often find myself looking at a webpage on my iMac, but then “I’ve got to run”, or vice versa I’m out and about and see a great page but won’t have time to read it – it would be awesome if I could tell Safari on my iMac “Move this tab to iPhone” or “Open on iPhone”, and on the iPhone if I could similarly hold a link and select “Open on Mac”. Again – cool feature I would use regularly, and could be a MobileMe feature. I have broader wishes about the iPhone acting more like an extension of my computer, but I’ll save that for later.
14. Barcode optimized camera – there are several good apps for reading barcodes today. These use pretty advanced techniques (pre 3GS) to compensate for the awful farsightedness of the iPhone camera. Meaning they’re rather unreliable unless you’re patient. This is a useful, and growing, scenario – the iPhone should be able to focus better at close distance to snag a picture of a barcode.
15. MuSync/AppSync – this is a pet peeve of mine. I buy most of my music on my iPhone, and most of my iPhone apps on my iMac. I have a MobileMe subscription – any music or movies I buy while on the iPhone should also (optionally) be downloaded to my Mac as well. Meaning I buy them at the office, they’re automagically on my iMac when I get home. Similarly, when I buy an app on my Mac, I should be able to (say, if it can be reached via WiFi) say, “Install on iPhone” as well.
16. Application access improvements – I don’t know why Apple has such hesitance at improving access to applications. They killed off Applications in the Apple Menu, and now it’s either in your Dock, you use Spotlight, or you dive into a stuffed Applications directory. The iPhone isn’t much better. The Spotlight on the iPhone is an admission, in my opinion, that everyone at Apple’s iPhones became unwieldy too. It may mean folders, it may mean some other kind of hierarchy – but someone in usability at Apple needs to spend some serious time thinking about how to make apps easier to navigate on an overloaded iPhone.
17. Management and security framework – If there was any question about this, read my earlier post. Apple needs to build in a framework that lets enterprises control what an iPhone can access, and have the ability to ensure that that role remains intact. I’m happy to describe my request here in more detail if anyone would like.
18. Different vibration for different people/tasks – Seriously – I can’t be the only one miffed that the shimmy for “you’ve got a spam email” is the same as “your spouse just emailed you”. Duration of shake, number of shakes, etc – all can be used to create patterns that could be assigned to different individuals. As mentioned earlier, this would be very helpful when I get a call from my spouse during a meeting when it’s set to silent.
19. Different reminder and SMS customizability – See 17. At 15 minutes before the hour, my company chirps. It doesn’t matter what day or what hour, someone’s got a meeting. And the reminder tone is the same. It would be really great if you could set more than just ringtones to be customizable – so you could know it’s YOUR SMS message or YOUR meeting reminder. Not someone else’s.
20. MobileMe integration for photos – photo interaction on the iPhone is not really impressive – I have a lot of my photos up on MobileMe Galleries – it would be ideal if the photo app on the iPhone was a first-class MobileMe consumer and offered me the option to view my MobileMe galleries.
21. Turn by turn directions – My parents visited the other day – and they came bearing Droids. It’s really a shame that the 3GS, which could technologically do this, cannot. I really think that Apple needs to add this.
22. Attachments at the top of the email – Somehow, Apple needs to figure out how to have email attachments appear at the top of messages instead of at the bottom. It’s a minor thing – but on long emails, it’s a nuisance.
23. Ability to set Bing as the default search engine - Yes, really.
24. Adopt the “refresh” paradigm designed by AteBits for Tweetie 2 as a standard across the iPhone – This works by pulling “down” on the list of items currently displayed. It’s a great design.

There. That’s it. That’s all I want from my 2010 Apple iPhone. Is that so much to ask?

On Twitter, I was reminded of course that metadata (the lack of it) isn’t just a home media problem. It’s pervasive in our lives – especially the more you let technology into your life. I’ll expound upon that later.

In my first post I mentioned WinFS, and why it was symptomatic of the “metadata problem” that we all live with today. I’ve chosen to hone in on home media just because it’s something that we all live with – specifically the problem I mentioned earlier, where we all have media goo that we’ll never share again. Those memories that you took the time to photograph or record – may as well be buried in a cave somewhere never to be seen again.

The key problem here is two-fold. 1) You’ve recorded onto “analog” media. Hey – even if it’s a DVD, you have no way to truly “search” it. Photos are a “hand index” media only unless you begin with digital photos (check out the upcoming post on iPhoto and iMovie as they relate to that). 2) Any references that you may have had to the content of the images/video become lossier the longer you go from the time of capture to the time you try to “catalog” them. You can’t remember which day was which, which cousin was who, or where that boat tour was, and what the name of the lake was that you went across.

Truth be told, we’re all innately horrible at capturing these kinds of details about events and memories. Only the lucky person gets to recall exactly how to get back to where they were driven once without needing a map or directions. Most of us need notes, maps, or other tools to recall the small details – the kinds of things you want to recall when viewing the photos or videos with the kids a year later.

When was the last time you set the metadata properties for a Microsoft Office document you were working on? Wait – you didn’t KNOW you could add metadata properties to Office documents? Well – even if you did, you haven’t set one more times than the number of thumbs you have. I know. Don’t lie to me.

For this reason, I am electing to define two types of metadata. Intrinsic – that which can be innately, directly gathered from the media itself, and extrinsic. My example in my first blog entry in this series, the above example of Office documents, and to a large degree WinFS’ design (as most of us would have experienced it) are all extrinsic. Much like taking the time to catalog a series of 35mm photos or slides, or edit a bunch of VHS-captured memories into any form of tolerable viewing (perhaps even with captions or cataloging), nobody does this. We don’t have the time to do this – at least more than a few times and then we tire of it. Thus, “memory to media goo”. The cool new device or media type becomes frustrating because our initial intention – to share memories with others or preserve them in a useful way for ourselves, is just too damned hard.

Simply put, using extrinsic metadata to organize anything sucks. Even if it works in theory, it doesn’t work at scale, in real life. We all give up and stop trying to use it for all but special cases.

Instead, intrinsic metadata is the future. In my next post, I’ll be discussing intrinsic metadata, what it is and how it works (when it does) and where we’re all going from here.