/via Brian Shaler.

• Photo and video uploads now work on iPad 2
• Made the post status (such as “Draft”) more clear in the posts list

I use my iPad to write posts and, now that I have iPad 2, I hope to do it a lot more often while on the go. WordPress for iOS has been making very steady progress lately and this update is a very timely one.

Why are these updates key for me? Because iPad 2 would instantly crash when trying to add a photo to a blog post. I was able to work around it by using iPhone but it was pretty frustrating. Also, I write posts, save them as drafts, and then schedule them for publishing all from my iPad. This allows me to pick the time that a post gets published regardless of when I feel impelled to write it and also gives me time to edit them (which I did poorly on yesterday’s post). Being able to see which posts are in draft right in the posts list is a very welcomed update.

Thanks WordPress for iOS team.

Since posting about the iPhone apps that I use most I’ve had a few requests to do the same for the iPad. So, here are the iPad apps that I use most.

• Mail.app. I check, read, and write email on the iPad every single day. I actually prefer using the iPad to my computer for email. It forces me to be succinct and makes email fun again.
• Reeder. With Reeder on my iPhone, Mac and iPad I am able to keep up-to-date with my Google Reader account whenever I have time to read. In bed, on the go, and at my desk. Out of the three Reeder for iPad is the best.
• Instapaper. I tend not to use Instapaper on the iPhone all that often but I use it quite a bit on the iPad.
• Twitter for iPad. The Twitter application for iPad is better than any desktop or mobile application. It is just about every feature you could need or want.
• Dropbox. I share files between my iPad, iPhone and Mac using Dropbox more than any other way. And, having Notational Velocity + SimpleNote storing documents within my Dropbox share makes it easy for all of my devices to be wirelessly synced.
• SimpleNote. The only way I keep notes on my iPad/iPhone.
• Numbers and Pages. I use both of these applications fairly often. I bought them thinking that I would only open them occasionally but it turns out that having a real word processor and spreadsheet application is very handy.
• iThoughtsHD. I give a fair number of speeches and I like to use mind mapping for my speech outlines. On the go I use iThoughtsHD to put these maps together.
• VLC. Getting video into iTunes into the Videos app on the iPad is an exercise in frustration sometimes. VLC will playback just about any video and adding them to the iPad is a snap.
• Google Books. I read my books in Google Books so that I don’t have to buy books more than once (iBooks only works on iPad/iPhone).
• Angry Birds. The only game I keep on the iPad.

These are the applications that I use the most. I’m a fairly “light” applications user in that I spend a lot of time in a small amount of applications – rather than a little amount of time in a lot of applications. I see other people’s iPads and I wonder how they can possibly keep everything straight with so many applications.

There are, however, some applications that I use from time-to-time that deserve honorable mention. Flipboard, NPR, iSilo, iPod. Also, Devour.com is a great way to watch video on the iPad.

*Update 08/30/2011:* I failed to mention in this post that I use the core iPad applications (the apps that ship with the iPad by default) all the time. Safari, Mail, Maps, Music (iPod), Calendar – I use them all and often.

If you have any suggestions for applications that you think I would enjoy please feel free to send them along. My email address is on the front page of my site.

Doing JavaScript for mobile platforms? Maybe you should check out Zepto.js.

Update: Via Kyle Slattery on Twitter: Sencha.

I haven’t yet had any experience using jQuery mobile (I simply do not do too much JavaScript anymore) but I wanted to make sure that any “competitors” to such a popular framework gets some attention. Does that make sense?

However, I do like the way Marshall Kirkpatrick scoured Twitter and took the best tweets about the deal and featured them with commentary and context. Pretty nice.

/via Daring Fireball and Read Write Web.

Now, it appears, Google and Apple are at war in the mobile space and perhaps even other markets. To be honest I like both companies and their products so I don’t care who loses – I just know that I’ll be winning again because surely some great stuff is going to come out of the conflict.

Last weekend I rolled out an updated theme for this site when your browsing it with an iPhone. The main reason for this is my mobile photos. When I post a mobile photo my site automatically Twitter’s a link to it, like this, and a lot of people flood in to view the photos and some of them are on iPhones. I wanted this site to load a lot faster than it did before for these mobile photo pages and this definitely solves that problem.

However, another reason to do this theme came up last weekend. Someone asked me about fishing, particularly this fairly large bass that I caught this summer, and I had trouble, on my own iPhone, on my own site, to find that photo. Turns out I hadn’t posted it yet! It was taking forever to search the site and I got fed up with it. But, now I’ll be able to find stuff quickly given that this new theme works site-wide and has a really great search option right at the top.

Those of you without iPhones may be wondering where your theme for this site is? It is coming. I’ll be working to add all Webkit enabled mobile browsers first (e.g. DROID) this weekend and then will be moving onto other mobile browsers until I squash the majority of them.

Happy mobile browsing.

iphone.facebook.com

One of the very first web apps for the iPhone and one that Apple has promoted during it’s Keynote addresses – Facebook had a good start in providing a great experience for iPhone users. The only problem is that they haven’t updated it in forever. This interface is lacking so much I’ll simply have one wish. Update it please!

The Facebook iPhone application

Without a doubt the Facebook iPhone application is one of the best designed iPhone applications available. It was also one of the first. Overall it is a fantastic way to access Facebook on the iPhone. However, here are my suggested additions:

1. Likes and comment notifications should link to the appropriate item. As it stands the app let’s you know that someone commented or liked something you’ve shared – but it doesn’t tell you which thing they like or commented on. Annoying.
2. Facebook’s “like” feature needs to be accessible from the app.
3. Support for Pages, Groups, and Events would be nice.

Facebook proper

While I’m jotting down my demands, I might as well put these few things in:

1. Referencing people on Facebook is simply not possible. I suggest that Facebook add the ability to add your Twitter username to your preferences. That way @cdevroe would actually be linked to my Facebook profile on Facebook and my Twitter profile on Twitter.
2. An obvious future feature is search. Not just people, event, group, and app search (that is already there), but searching through public status updates, wall posts, links, etc.

You have to wonder if Facebook was a more open platform, like Twitter is, from the beginning would some of this work have been done for them?

(Yes I typed this entire post on my iPhone.)

Here is how I’m doing it. I’m posting both mobile photos and notes with the WordPress iPhone application. If I have something to share that I can’t fit into 140-characters, I will be logging those posts into the mobile notes category. Rather than posting my mobile photos to Flickr or Brightkite I’ll be sharing them in the mobile photos category. The WordPress iPhone application automatically resizes the photos to no more than 640-pixels wide. Both the mobile notes and photos will be linked to from Twitter, automatically, using a similar syntax of “Mobile photo: “Title of photo” – LINK”.

The script I’m using for this is the same one I was using for posting photos, links, etc to Pownce. I’ve since updated it and will be sharing that code here once I’ve licked a few bugs, integrated it with Bit.ly instead of TinyURL, and made it a little easier to configure. I’m using Dreamhost’s fairly simple CRON job panel to run this script every 10 minutes. Stay tuned for that code in the near future.

I’ve also made a slight change to the way the Mobile photos category is displayed. Instead of just showing the title of the mobile photo this page now shows a small thumbnail of the image. Since these images can be in both portrait and landscape modes, I had to do some jiggery pokery to only show a portion of the image, without resizing them. Thanks to Jason Santa Maria for helping me with some of the CSS.

Viewing these pages on a mobile phone with a browser that supports text only will still be a bear, I’m sure, but they should load much faster now on iPhones, iPod touches, Android-powered phones, and the upcoming Palm Pre.

For my next trick, I’ll be changing the way the videos category and posts are displayed.

And I thought the llama suggestion was going to be tough to write?  What the heck does this suggestion actually mean?  It isn’t like I was able to ask who suggested it, because it was suggested anonymously.  What’s worse is that it was voted for 3 times!

I’ll do my best. I’m going to separate this suggestion into two posts. This first one is called “Web applications that I use on my iPhone”. The second will be called “Web applications and sites I use to stay in the loop”. How is that? Good? Good.

I have over 4Gb free on my 8Gb iPhone 2G. So I don’t install a lot of applications, store a lot of music or photos on my phone. Surely I must use a large number of Web applications or sites to get things done on my iPhone? Well, not really.

I have tried a lot of different Web applications on my iPhone.  I always like to see what sticks.  But for me, these are my most frequented URLs on the go.

Brightkite – As I’ve written about so many times in the past, Brightkite is quickly becoming my favorite social network to update while I’m mobile.  It automatically updates Twitter for me, which was what I used to update, so it is a two-fer.  The granular preferences and notification features are gold.

Hahlo – Since there are still a number of people that I follow on Twitter that have yet to make the jump to Brightkite, though I believe they will at some point in the future, I still have to “check” Twitter from time to time.  And, to be honest, that is where most of the conversation is anyway.  When I asked for help via Brightkite, and it updates Twitter, the number of answers I get via Twitter is much higher than on Brightkite.

This isn’t to say that Hahlo isn’t probably the best iPhone Web application I’ve ever used.  It is certainly the best Twitter Web application built for the iPhone. In fact, from the remarks I’ve read and discussed with others, it still beats the native applications without beating a sweat.

Flickr mobile – A site most definitely not built for the iPhone experience, but it works, and I don’t know any alternative.  I’ve tried Exposure and, while I admire the skill of Frasier Spiers, I do not think Exposure is the right approach to a native iPhone Flickr application.  For quick updates, m.flickr.com works for now.

Google Reader – Every now and then I will read a few posts on the Google Reader iPhone interface.  I don’t do this very often, but it is on my home screen and so it is getting a mention here.

Wait, that’s it?  As far as Web applications is concerned, that is it.  That is all I use frequently.

 

What web applications do you use on your iPhone?

FriendFeed, of which I’m a member, recently launched an iPhone-friendly version of their site.  Notably, however, they’ve done it in such a way that I much prefer to some of the ways other sites have done it.  They detect the iPhone’s mobile browser and automatically format it for you, rather than requiring you to remember the URL of the iPhone-friendly site.

Flickr, on the other hand, has a mobile Website that – while it works fairly well on the iPhone (though it isn’t built for it) – is not interchangeable with the normal Website.  What I mean to say is, if someone links me to a Flickr photo on my iPhone either via Twitter, FriendFeed, or even through an SMS message – I’m forced to be taken to the full-fledged, slow-loading Website without so much as the choice of loading the mobile version.  At least with Twitter I’m able to simply prepend the URL with m.*, which switches the site into “mobile mode”, and see the same content.  Flickr’s URLs for their mobile site aren’t hackable.

FriendFeed does have hackable URLs ((Just insert /iphone/ into any URL.)). Combine the hackability of their URLs with the detection of the iPhone and you’ve got nearly a perfect solution for iPhone users.

Side note: I love the FriendFeed looks nearly the same on my iPhone as it does on my personal computer.  FriendFeed’s design lends itself to this because of its simplicity, lightness, and straight-forward “the content is the design” approach.

Source: FriendFeed iPhone interface.
Via: TechCrunch: FriendFeed Finally Gets iPhone Friendly ((I don’t like the use of the word finally in this title.)).

Gizmodo took the time to compare the prices, monthly plans, and plan features for the original iPhone, the iPhone 3G, and the leading Smart Phones on AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint.  What you’ll find is that the iPhone 3G will cost you more than the original iPhone after 2 years but it will cost you just about as much as the other leading Smart Phones on the market.

Hat tip: John Gruber.
Source: iPhone 3G’s True Price Compared.

Starting today, mobile photos that used to show up on my Flickr account, will now be on my site. You can see the first one which is a photo of the TVs in the lobby at ViddlerHQ. I plan on adding a new section, to the main navigation, to handle mobile photos and notes that I post while on the go – but I’ll worry about that later. I am going to wait until I get a few mobile notes and photos up before worrying about how the site handles them.

Thanks to Owen Winkler, via Twitter, for hooking me up with this plugin that enhances WordPress’ built-in email-to-post functionality. Now, from my iPhone, all I need to do is select a photo and email it to a special email account I’ve created, and it will be posted here on my site within 5 minutes of me emailing it. Works like a charm.

As with the Photo section, all will be available through the feed – so there is no need to change subscriptions up at all.

I’ve also modified the way that my automated processes for notifying Twitter and Pownce of new mobile photos works. Now, both of these processes are pointed at this sites feed, rather than at Flickr. So all links will be pointing back to here instead of there, and will be for any new post not just mobile photos.

Another big step forward in bringing it all together. For those taken notes, I’ll be digesting the entire strategy to bringing all of my content onto my site sometime in the future when I’m nearly done. For now, subscribe to my feed, if you’d like the play-by-play of how I’m experimenting with this.

Next up? Links. (But probably not for a few days.)

These four TVs show weather, news, stock market information, company profiles, and much more. These are in the ViddlerHQ lobby.

But that isn’t all, I can now post to this site using my iPhone (which I’ve tested once so far), using the mobile admin plugin. Although a little slow, even on Wifi, the interface works really well on the iPhone to write up quick mobile notes.

I’m really happy with these two solutions so far. Now I just need to get WordPress to recognize the iPhone’s email attachments (photos) and I’ll be well on my way to bringing it all together.

Update March 20, 2008: After using this mobile interface, I’m finding it way too slow even on Wifi on the iPhone. I’ve now begun searching for a simple, mobile interface that is optimized for working on slower bandwidth connections. Any suggestions?

A few things that become apparent quickly is that the interface is pretty heavy, making load time a bit annoying. The interface is usable, but slow. Also typing a link to anything is really tedious. With the iPhone not having copy/paste (yet?), and the characters needed to write an HTML link hidden beneath the iPhone’s keyboard layout hierarchy – I am not sure I’d ever bother to link to something.

A possible fix for this could be a button to create a link. Or, I could use Safari Mobile’s built-in email link feature and post to my site that way.

I’m still figuring all of this out, but as always I’ll try to report my findings. Next up, mobile photos.

Update: Edited to include links now.

As it stands I post what I’m currently doing to Twitter, I am testing out Pownce with mobile blogging, events, links, and files, I post mobile phone photos to Flickr (as well as the occasional screenshot), videos go on Viddler, bookmarks end up on Ma.gnolia, tasting notes end up on Cork’d, and my thoughts on Apple products find their way to TUG.n.

It is exhausting, and starting to become a little bit of a headache.

There are definitely many pros to using each of these services, as I believe each and every one is built very well for their purpose, and each have their own thriving community of users that make you feel right at home. Services like Viddler and Flickr also make sharing videos and photos extremely cost effective. Even with these benefits I always feel as though I’m spreading myself out too wide, so I think I’m going to start pulling all of these bits together here on my site in some fashion.

As it stands, I use my front page as the main way to show the latest activity on each of these services. This has been fine for a while but I now would like to change from aggregating everything to storing everything here, and perhaps pushing updates to the services, rather than the other way around. This isn’t going to be an easy thing to accomplish at first, but once I get everything setup, I think I’ll be much happier and have much more control of what and how I share.

There are a few other benefits to this change, at least for me. Cutting down on distraction is always a goal of mine and my most recent try at this has been to remove a huge portion of my Twitter and Flickr “friends” so that I cut down on a lot of the noise. I’ve also switched the Twitter notices preference to not include @replies from people I am not following, and this has really cut down on the chatter that I’m not even part of. I believe I went from seeing hundreds of Tweets per day to now only seeing a few an hour. Actually, I’m not even seeing that many since I’ve now decided to keep Twitterrific hidden in the background until I need it. I’ll still see @cdevroe messages, so that will still be a valuable way to communicate, but will also cut down on distractions. A win-win.

I’m going to begin working on one service at a time, slowly bringing it all together, and giving each a home here on my site. I’ll try my best to keep a log of my experiences doing each of these, jotting down why I’m handling it the way that I am, and asking for feedback as I find the best solution for me as I go forward. Of course, I’ll be using WordPress as my backbone for this – as I’ve always found it to be extremely flexible and powerful enough for me to do just about everything I want to do.

I’m looking at this as both a fun project and an experiment. Have you ever thought of doing this, or can you point me to some good examples of those who have?

What do geeks do when they have a little free time on their hands? They accessorize! On Sunday I found myself wanting to play with my iPhone’s camera. Since getting the iPhone, and even more since I because posting mobile photos to Flickr, I’ve wanted to try out new ways of distorting, enhancing, and affecting the images capture by the iPhone.

The make-shift macro lens

A few years ago one of my digital cameras just decided it didn’t want to work anymore. It wouldn’t turn on. Actually, to be more accurate, the thing wouldn’t turn off. Turns out that there was a small screw inside that busted up the innards. No idea how that happened.

Well, like any self respecting geek I kept the camera’s body around for a few years always thinking I’d do something with it eventually. You know, the same way car enthusiasts keep around old Corvette parts thinking one day they’ll rebuild those. That’s me with electronics – only, I’m horrible at rebuilding things, but fantastic at ripping them apart.

I figured that inside of this extraordinarily complex device I would surely find some way to manipulate the way the iPhone took photos. Turns out, I ended up with a fairly decent macro lens for the iPhone.

The macro lens on the iPhone

Obviously this thing isn’t built for the road, but it works in a pinch. I just took some double-sided tape, wrapped the lens from the camera’s eye-piece in it, then used a paper clip to fasten it to the iPhone. Yeah, I know, prize winning engineering indeed.

I am not sure how I’ll end up using this, but I’m glad that I know have it in my bag should a reason to use it arise. It does a fairly good job and I’m happy with the outcome. I’m looking forward to finding a way to build a fish-eye lens now – and I’m open to suggestions on how exactly to pull that off.

The obnoxiously large light

The iPhone doesn’t have a built-in flash. Some mobile phones with cameras built-in actually have a pretty bright flash, but the iPhone has none, zip, zilch. I’ve never really cared about that, but I can see why when people switch from a phone that has it would complain.

Last year at SXSW’s keynote featuring Will Wright’s demonstration of SPORE (which has a release date of September 7, 2008 that I’m excited about) Adobe graciously gave away some odd little lights. Each light has a small handle on the side that lets you crank it up to power the light. Pretty neat little gizmo, so I fastened it to a mount that came with my old iSight and voila, instant light for the iPhone. Here is a photo of it.

This isn’t anything special, of course, and the results are a bit meh. But I thought it good enough to use when I might need it. The iPhone is terrible in low-light conditions so anything helps.

Conclusion? The lens is going in my laptop bag and the light will probably stay home.

Update March 21, 2008 — I’ve now recorded a video demonstration of the macro lens in action.

This is the 500th post to cdevroe.com.

My iPhone, is one of these
Photo credit: Erik Kastner

Sure, it seems like a fun little project (especially now with only needing to visit jailbreakme.com on an iPhone) to crack your phone and install all sorts of neat tweaks and full applications that let you do interesting things – but so far it has seemed unappealing to me.

Most of the applications that I’ve seen has been from me messing around with someone else’s iPhone. However, with that little bit of experience I’ve seen that most of the applications currently available were not applications that I felt warranted me hacking my iPhone. Don’t get me wrong – I think it is really cool that you can use Terminal, Remote Desktop, Apache, and a whole slew of other applications in the palm of your hand – but I don’t need those applications in my palm of my hand.

So, perhaps for most of the people that have installed some of these applications, games, and fun user-interface tweaks it has been a matter of entertainment. They figured they could, so why not? But I think that starting in February/March of 2008 we’re going to see much more refined applications that have value to nearly all iPhone users rather than just a small portion of those that like to edit configuration files on remote servers while eating dinner at a restaurant.

iPhone application wish list

What do I see coming? I’m sure my imagination isn’t powerful nor creative enough to speculate but I can say what I’d like to see. Here is a short list of the things I’d like to do with my iPhone:

• Contact sharing via Bluetooth to iPhone and non-iPhone alike.
• The ability to delete all photos!
• File system access via Safari for file upload processes.
• Quick, easy, screenshots. Skitch mobile?
• Hack Safari and add a better cache!
• When on wifi; be able to stream music from other iPhones/iTunes.
• Oh, I almost forgot. Flash that doesn’t rob battery. (I know, a pipe dream).

Useful applications for the masses will be available on the iPhone in short order and I’m looking forward to it. Any experience the developers of the applications that are already in existence can gather before an official SDK is released in February will only make them better – so I am ok with letting everyone else work the bugs out for me. Strange, I’m normally an early adopter, but this time I’ve decided to sit it out and watch the others play.

Have you hacked your iPhone? Have you found any compelling applications? What would you like to see next year?

My friend Matt, a fan of all things Apple and future switcher, owns a laptop. Actually it is a tablet-PC and has all of the latest hardware and software including a 64bit processor and gobs of RAM. Though my blood runs thick with Mac-cells, I know a good piece of hardware when I see it, and Matt’s laptop is top-of-the-line. There is only one problem; it came pre-installed with Windows Vista.

I’ve only got limited experience with Vista but from that limited experience I have drawn the opinion that if I were forced to use the Operating System full time I’d likely jump off of a bridge. This isn’t to say that I’m not willing to admit that in many ways Vista is vastly superior to its predecessors (like, say, in the security department) but I don’t even like the way that it does these few things better. You know what? We’ll get into this at a whole different time, b’okay?

So Matt has a great laptop that runs Vista. Fast forward to ‘the other day’ and Matt picked himself up a brand-new shiny iPhone. If you know Matt, and some of you reading this do, you’ll know that at this point Matt’s blood is practically boiling with excitement. He probably can’t shut his mouth for even a second and his hair has gone straight. This kid wanted an iPhone pretty badly.

Matt Dottle approves

Matt calls me: “Dude, I got an iPhone! Now what do I need to do? Just go home and plug it in right?” My reply: “Yeah. Everything should work man you just bought an Apple product. Go home. Make sure you have the latest version of iTunes and you should be all good.”

I think by now you realize where this is going. Matt installed the latest version of iTunes, plugged in his iPhone and received the following message: “iPhone not recognized in this version of iTunes.” This message is a bit of a misnomer but I’ll skip right to the part where I explain what is going on here.

During the iTunes installation Vista blocked the iPhone’s USB driver from being installed.

It is pretty much as simple as that. I don’t care if there are good or bad reasons for why this happens. And I don’t care whose fault it is because I’m blaming both Apple and Microsoft for not displaying an error message about how to fix the issue. But I think this sucks.

Oh, you know what sucks worse: If you are running Windows Vista 64bit you can not use iPhone. You will get this same error message mention above only you won’t be able to solve the issue like we did. It is merely a footnote on Apple’s Web site under minimum system requirements for iPhone. I am not sure if this is Apple dragging its feet on a 64bit driver for Windows or if this is something on Microsoft’s end.

So here is how you fix it in the 32bit version of Windows Vista; You need to turn off UAC, User Access Control, before you begin the iTunes installation. So if you’ve already installed iTunes, uninstall it using the same installer that you used to install iTunes, then turn off UAC by opening your Control Panel and searching for User Access Control in the top right hand search box. Install iTunes again, and voila!

I’m happy that there is a solution, and I’m not that bitter, it just took way too long to find the answer to this problem and I would love to see Apple or Microsoft handle this issue a little better. Having a better error message would go a long way I think.

Combine this UAC headache and the fact that we couldn’t activate iPhone for him until the next day and you see why we were frustrated.

My next story will be about Epson’s printers. Have you had any crappy tech experiences lately? Pingback this post if you have.

My precious!

Ok. So what do I think of the iPhone? As you might have already guessed, I love it. For the entire weekend I rarely got onto my Macbook to do anything except sync my latest settings of my iPhone to the computer. The iPhone is a great mini-computer for getting most of your core Internet activities done like checking/responding to email, surfing the web for information, or other simple daily tasks like this.

I won’t get into the speed of the EDGE network or how the virtual keyboard is. To me these are non-issues thus far and I don’t have much to compare these two things to since I have never had a cell phone that used the Internet, nor a full sized hard keyboard. I can type pretty fast on the keyboard and the Internet is nearly as fast as being home on Wifi. So again, both are non-issues.

Again, it is the little things

One of my fellow line-waiters John Gruber did a fantastic job giving his general overview of each feature of the iPhone the other day. My impressions are on par with John’s except that I’ve found myself typing just fine. Be sure to read his thoughts if you’d like to catch some of the nice things about each “feature” of the iPhone.

However, I’d like to extend his list a little bit to remark on some of the little things I’ve noticed while using the iPhone that I think make the experience all the more enjoyable.

The weight of the iPhone came as a surprise to some. Yes, it feels heavier than it looks. To me this make the iPhone feel tough and rugged when compared to the way it looks. I think the fact that we’re seeing people surprised at how tough the iPhone actually is, is because it doesn’t look very rugged. It looks elegant, which doesn’t usually mean tough. However the weight of the iPhone makes it feel very rugged to me.

The speed of the interface is something that I was very skeptical about. The commercials led me to believe that the interface was just as fast, if not faster, than switching windows on my computer. In my relatively little experience with mobile phones – the interfaces on these things have never been described by me as “snappy” or “fast”. However the iPhone’s interface, in general, is incredibly fast. When speaking with John Gruber in line, he remarked how the iPhone’s “one app at a time” focus really lent itself to being able to be very fast. The iPhone doesn’t need to show windows inside of windows or multiple layers or even windows on top of windows. The application that you are currently looking at is obviously getting the priority in the Operating System which makes the iPhone blaze.

The sleep, volume, silent, and home buttons are the perfect combination of buttons that were decided to be “hard buttons”. Although one can easily adjust the volume in most applications within the iPhone’s interface, you can also use the hard volume control on the side of the iPhone. The same goes for the silent and sleep buttons – I never have to “turn on” the iPhone to use these options. And the home button is definitely far better than keeping the “doc” visible and having a “desktop” button or something. I’m really glad the iPhone has a home button.

Within each application on the iPhone there are small, hidden gems that you will only find through experimentation or someone telling you that they are there. Like the ability to turn on the caps lock key, or tapping the top bar to auto-scroll to the top of the page in Safari (both tips came from John Gruber’s site), etc. None of these small interface features are handed over, but once you find them you love them.

Of course, I want more

Keeping in mine that, technically, this is iPhone 1.0 which includes all the hardware and software that came in those beautiful black bags on Friday, I have a few things that I’d like to see improved. I’m sure that, internally, this is build 10,000+ of the iPhone’s OS and its applications, but from my perspective it is still 1.0. Being such, I fully expected to have the wish list that follows.

• Better integration with Gmail. Right now Gmail marks things as “being downloaded” when I look at them either via Mail.app on my Macbook or on my iPhone. This causes some frustration since I’d like all of my email to be “everywhere”. To fix this, I think either Google or Apple will have to update it so that it marks it as being read on the iPhone or not. Either way, the email “works” – but it could work a little bit better. (Side note: On the first day of release, the Gmail integration was wrought with problems ranging from getting duplicate messages to simply not working with Google App’s hosted domain email. These issues have been fixed, presumably by Google, over the weekend. So ++ to them.)
• Though I haven’t used the “Notes” feature yet, I could see a huge amount of improvement being done here, which might make me want to use Notes on the iPhone. Simply saving the notes saved as RTF files that are synced to your computer into ~/Documents/iPhone Notes/ would suffice for me. Why create notes that you can’t really use? A work around is taking a notes contents and creating an email out of it, which can be done fairly easily.
• iCal integration seems to work “ok” but I have the same complaints as others. If I have separate calendars within iCal they should also be separate within iPhone’s calendar application. And, when syncing with my Macbook, I shouldn’t have to choose only one calendar that the iPhone can write to. I am not sure why there is this limitation. Something else I noticed is that if I setup an iCal alert on the iPhone it works perfectly but it doesn’t work within iCal. It shows up in the application but iCal never shows me the the alert when I asked it to. Not sure why, perhaps this is a bug.
• The camera feature should allow a photo to be taken by tapping anywhere on the screen. I think some people would hate this because it would cause a lot of accidental photos to be taken, but taking photos of yourself and someone else with the iPhone is very hard with only a small button to push. Perhaps this could be a setting? Can has Photobooth for the camera? I don’t care about the crazy bulging eyes and stretching chins stuff, but it’d be nice to have the ability to take black and white photos or something simple. Obviously this is a minor, minor update that I’d enjoy seeing to the Camera feature.
• Small browser cache? From what I’ve been able to tell Safari on the iPhone only caches the current page you are looking at. Reloading a page is fairly quick but the second you navigate away from a URL the cached version is lost. I have an 8Gb iPhone, I wouldn’t mind dedicating even a few hundred megabytes to Safari’s caching if it would mean that hitting the back button wouldn’t reload the page.
• Normal headphone jacks “don’t work” with the iPhone because the iPhone’s input jack is sunken so low into the casing of the iPhone. Jason Kottke resolved this by actually cutting his headphones a little bit to allow the jack to sink in deeper. There are several add-ons being offered to make this easier, but I am unsure why this was done in the first place?
• The iPod allows you to update your set of icons on the button of its menu. I think this should be an option in all applications on the iPhone including the home screen. There are a few web applications that are being released for the iPhone that I’d love to create a shortcut to from my home screen. The first button I’d get rid of from the home screen? YouTube followed by Stocks. I simply won’t use those things on my iPhone too often.
• Google Maps on the iPhone is amazing! But I feel this application will probably receive the greatest number of updates over time. It is perhaps one of the most “complex” applications on the iPhone and using it is a delight most of the time. However, there are a few usability problems when you switch from searching for a location to getting directions to that same location. (I’ve found that it is easier to save locations in your Google Maps bookmarks.) I’m sure these little things will be improved soon and that integration with the rest of the phone’s applications will happen in the future. One of the first things that comes to mind is to tell the camera application where you are using the Maps feature, which would in turn write the Latitude and Longitude to the photos.

I’m going to cut this list short because, as I said, this is a 1.0 release and one that I’m overwhelmingly happy with. I’ve found the iPhone becoming an extension of my laptop in ways I hadn’t considered before. I knew that I’d find the iPhone useful, I didn’t expect to want to use it more than my laptop.

What are your thoughts on the iPhone? Any wishes that I didn’t cover?

MeToday: June 5, 2007

Do you want an iPhone as much as I do? Am I alone in my thoughts being primarily about the iPhone since the new ads were released? Gah!

Oh, not sure what a MeToday is? Take a look at these great video versions of a MeToday or you can look at all of the great photo versions of a MeToday – both will give you an idea of what a MeToday is.

I can’t wait for my MeToday on June 29, 2007.