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July 27, 2007

Good tools help you juggle

When I taught myself how to juggle, I learned that you take it in steps. First step is to practice tossing one ball from hand-to-hand with a consistent arc and positioning. Toss catch. You need to be able to do it repeatedly while just watching out of the corner of your eye. Toss catch

Step two is to add a second ball in your other hand and do the same consistent arc. Toss the first ball right-to-left, and toss the second ball left-to-right just before the first one reaches the top of the arc: toss-toss catch-catch. It’s this two-ball motion you need to practice the most.

Now here’s the thing. When that toss-toss catch-catch motion feels incomplete, like there’s something missing at the end and you just want to keep going without that awkward pause you get after catching the second ball… that’s when you add the third ball. Suddenly you’re juggling, and the motion doesn’t feel incomplete any longer.

The sensation of that moment - when one motion feels incomplete - that’s the closest thing I can come to how I feel when something I’m using is well-designed well but has a lack someplace. It’s designed well enough that I can start to get into a groove: toss-toss catch-catch. But then something happens that incurs that awkward pause - and I start looking around for the equivalent of adding the third ball. How can I make it feel like a complete motion?

I guess I spend my time trying to find the things that help me juggle.

Posted by jim at 09:53 AM

Give me my account list

I monitor four email accounts with my iPhone: .Mac, my account here at niherlas.com, my Gmail account, and my work email.

When my iPhone gives me a happy bleep to tell me that new email has arrived, the Mail app icon on the home screen just tells me how many unread messages I have. That’s cool, I don’t want it to even try to tell me what account(s) those messages are in. The home screen for Mail does that quite nicely - listing all my accounts and letting me how many unread messages there are in each.

But here’s the situation: I get that happy “you have mail” beep, and pick up my iPhone. I unlock it, tap Mail. Looky here, I’m still at the last message I was reading in Mail. Tap top-left, wait for transition to message list. Tap top-left, wait for transition to folder list. Tap top-left, wait for transition to account list. Now, and only now, can I see which accounts have new email and navigate to those new messages.

Awkward. I want a shortcut - double-tapping the top-left for example - that take me directly to Mail’s account list regardless of where I currently am in Mail.

Posted by jim at 09:24 AM

July 21, 2007

Egg McDuke

Tracey Futhey, CIO of Duke University in a statement released Friday:

“Cisco worked closely with Duke and Apple to identify the source of this problem, which was caused by a Cisco-based network issue. Cisco has provided a fix that has been applied to Duke’s network and there have been no recurrences of the problem since. […] Earlier reports that this was a problem with the iPhone in particular have proved to be inaccurate.”

Kevin Miller, Duke’s Assistant Director of Communications Infrastructure, back on Monday when the whole highly-publicized kerfluffle started:

“I don’t believe it’s a Cisco problem in any way, shape, or form.”

Kevin Miller, your extra-large order of crow is waiting. Who wants to bet that he was once one of those admins who tried to forbid MACs (sic) from the network because AppleTalk was “too chatty”?

Posted by jim at 11:04 AM

July 20, 2007

UW: "No iPhone troubles here"

Oren Sreebny, Director of Emerging Technology at University of Washington in Seattle, WA, quietly notes in his blog that UW has had 124 people with iPhones authenticate to their campus WiFi networking the first two weeks after launch - without any of Duke University’s much-reported problems.

If it turns out Duke’s problems (2 iPhones supposedly taking down 20-30 WiFI access points) are Cisco or configuration-based, their assistant director of communications infrastructure, Kevin Miller, is going to have an awful lot of egg to wipe off his face…

Posted by jim at 02:58 PM

July 08, 2007

iPhone 1.x Update Wish List

So I didn’t even last 7 days - I bought an iPhone on Thursday thanks to the serendipity of window-shopping at the U Village Apple Store just as they got their “second wave” of iPhone stock.

Having used Apple products for well over two decades, I’m well aware of the Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field. I know what to expect from 1.0 software running on 1.0 hardware. With iPhone, you can tell that Apple was very self-aware of their own history as well. What iPhone does, it does amazingly well. The screen is sharp (I was using it in full, cloudless, no-shade-for-yards sun without problem), hard to scratch, and very responsive as a touch interface. The apps work well, the connectivity works well, and I’ve had no problems with data input (then again, I’m not a hardcore long-practiced thumb typist of Blackberry or Treo vintage).

Apple hit it out of the park. The nay-sayers will rightfully have egg on their face, and Apple is gonna sell so many of these its gonna be scary.

However, as Mike Davidson said, it’s “like someone assembled the finest orchestra the world, but decided to leave out the trumpets.” That is - what iPhone does it does very well. But there are things that it just doesn’t do, and they stand out like missing trumpets. One gets the impression that the product team chose to omit features for the 1.0 rather than half-ass them.

Rather than focus on what the hardware doesn’t do such as GPS, or 3G, or memory cards, I’d prefer to focus on what the software doesn’t do. Because that can be changed - and I’ll wager that much of it will be changed in future updates, especially considering that Jobs has already been talking up what an excellent software platform the iPhone is. So without further ado, here’s what I’d like to see in some future iPhone 1.x software updates:

Arbitrary Selection: There’s no gesture in iPhone’s 1.0 repertoire to select. The tap is a double-click, it opens/activates the object. The tap/drag is a contextual action - it gives you the insert-positioning loupe, or moves around on a zoomed page. The flick moves between items in a series. However, you can’t select an arbitrary object on a page in order to perform an operation on it - such as cut/copy/paste, Save Image to Photos, Save Sound to iPod, Apply as Wallpaper, Download, and so on. Arbitrary Selection is a gateway feature and is a requirement for other potential software features such as: Save Images from Safari/Mail, cut/copy/paste, or meaningful document editing.

Document Management: This is another gateway feature - required if you want to store/edit/view supported document formats (Word, Text, Excel, PDF). Images are managed in Photos, Audio and Video in the iPod application. But there’s no analogue for… well.. Documents. With iPhone 1.0, the only place for this is in Mail, with your documents as attachments. (The Notes application isn’t even the beginning of an answer here - see Gruber’s comments on Notes in his iPhone First Impressions). If you want to be able to save a linked Word doc from a web page, use a PDF as a presentation, or have a reference file on your iPhone - you need a way to manage all that. I don’t see it on my iPhone yet.

Full-Resolution Image Support: I haven’t heard this mentioned much. iPhone’s image support seems to be limited to 320x480. Images synced from iPhoto are downsampled to 320x480 (or 480x320). Take a picture with the camera and view it in Photos - zoom in and it gets jaggy well before a 2MP picture should be jaggy. Receive an image as a mail attachment - same thing, regardless of actual image size. Same thing for images viewed on web pages with iPhone Safari. I haven’t gone back to the video of the WWDC SteveNote, but I seem to to recall that he zoomed in deeply and got sharp images during that demo - doesn’t seem to work that way on the 1.0 release. There are certain uses where this really stands out as an issues - images of diagrams, for example. Such as iSubwaymaps.com.

After those big three - which have a fairly broad impact - these others seem more like one-shots:

Disk Mode: We’ll probably see this when Apple figures out Document Management. Whether it’s a Disk Mode, or a Sync Folder between your iPhone and your Mac, I want to have a way to move Documents directly from my Mac to my iPhone.

Video Capture: Don’t quite understand why iPhone doesn’t do this yet. Don’t want to use the CPU/power to encode the captured video to an acceptable format? Don’t know, but I’d expect we’ll see this one added.

Video Out: Wow, that support for PDF files is nice. Wouldn’t you love to be able to plug your iPhone into a projector and make a presentation? How about show your videos or view your photos on a television like you can on your iPod? Yes. Video out, please.

Stereo Bluetooth Support: You’d need a stereo bluetooth headset that also has a good microphone on the market first - so look for this feature to hit when Apple has a product.

iChat: Perhaps omitted as a sap to AT&T (sell more text messages), or axed to make a clean 1.0. Seems a no-brainer.

MMS: Another one of those features that must have been chopped to make a clean 1.0, I’d expect to see it sooner rather than later.

Games: This will come when (not if) Apple creates a real SDK and method of iPhone Application certification.

Posted by jim at 10:48 AM | Comments (0)