Originally posted 2009-08-30 13:37:19

Salespeople may live from a suitcase, but I’ve lived from a PDA for over a decade. I’ve bounced from Palm to Windows Mobile to BlackBerry before landing on my iPhone about six weeks ago. I love the big, crisp screen, the usability touches, and the abundance of apps–I tap the App Store icon far too often for my bank account’s viability. This is my favorite PDA so far.

However much I fawn over my iPhone, though, I still bump against its limitations and cringe when its flaws puncture my desires. I beseech Apple to make the following six changes:

1. Make the Home Button Take a Picture

Designers talk about \”affordances,\” which Wikipedia defines as \”the easy discoverability of action possibilities\” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordance). In the current context, affordances describe what the device leads you to do with it. For example, the device fits easily in one hand and has an obvious speaker on the face, near the top, \”affording\” bringing it to your ear, screen to your cheek, and holding it with one hand while engaging in a phone call.

Launching the Camera app turns the iPhone into a digital camera with one large button–the Home button–aching to be pushed. The button affords pushing, and correlates to the one large button on a single-purpose camera that photographers use to snap a picture. Pushing the button, however, kills the Camera app and returns the iPhone to its multi-purpose state, losing the digital recording of the Kodak moment in the process. To take a picture, you must instead push a software widget-button that’s close to the Home button, but not close enough. With the iPhone’s accelerometer the phone can detect whether it’s being held in a typical posture for taking a picture and should respond appropriately (go Home or snap picture) very nearly every time.

What You Can Do

Camera Genius offers an alternative to the Camera app that, among other things, turns the entire screen into a camera button. No longer do you have to press the tiny widget-button, so it’s easier to take a picture. This still doesn’t address the Home button affordance, though, so you’re probably still as likely to miss recording cherished memories.

2. Put Folders in the Launcher Interface

Between the App Store and the SDK, Apple built the infrastructure to foster the creation of hordes of apps, and the development community has responded with over 65,000 of them. If you ignore the apps that synthesize flatulence, you still have hundreds of App Store apps you can install. The iPhone’s interface, however, places you three actions or fewer from only 36 apps:

1. The four apps on the bottom of every screen (tap the app)
2. The 16 apps on the first screen (push the Home button to go to the first screen and tap the app)
3. The 16 apps on the second screen (push the Home button to go to the first screen, swipe once to go to the second screen, tap the app)

Launching other apps requires either multiple swipes to find the app before tapping, or swiping from the first screen to the Search screen and plodding through the virtual keyboard in a series of taps and mis-taps to find the app you seek. You can try to memorize which screens your apps occupy in the launcher and group similar apps to minimize extraneous swipes in eyeball searches, but installing new apps slots them into the first available space. Rearranging apps across screens requires the dexterity of a pickpocket, so trying to create a logical ordering that you can memorize can be frustrating.

If Apple would build folders into the launcher interface, however, you could easily group similar apps together and be three actions away from 260 apps (the four on the bottom, 16 folders on the first screen, and 16 apps in each of those folders) and a fourth action from 256 more (16 folders on the second screen with 16 apps in each of those folders).

What You Can Do

I know of no software solutions. If somebody developed an alternative launcher, Apple would reject it from the App Store anyway. You’re stuck optimizing for your most-used 36 apps: put your four most-used on the bottom panel, the next 16 on the first screen, and the next 16 on the second screen. Then practice swiping, searching, and tapping.

3. Improve the Typing Correction

Apple chose well when it opted to trade a physical keyboard for a larger screen. Spreading Need for Speed’s raceways across more pixels outweighs the utility of the BlackBerry’s chiclets. Apple also did a good job of working within virtual constraints to try to make the intrinsically inferior software keyboard the best it can be. Popping and zooming each typed key provides instant feedback for what you type, and the built-in autocorrection seems optimized for one-off combinations (i.e. you seem to have typed the key next to the one you meant). This autocorrection isn’t configurable, however, and too often changes my text messages just as I hit \”Send.\” I once tried to text a female coworker, several years my junior, that I’d see her on Monday. \”C u mon\” became \”C u mom.\” Confessing to a pretty young blond that you think of her maternally can get you on HR’s watch list in a hurry.

Hey, Apple! Your keyboard is worse than BlackBerry’s AND your autocorrect is worse than BlackBerry’s AutoText! Pick one or the other, bot not both! I had my BlackBerry’s AutoText so well configured that I could reproduce the entire Wikipedia in about 17 keystrokes. Copy that functionality!

What You Can Do

Buy TextExpander and configure it aggressively. Don’t use it just for misspellings–put your frequently typed words, phrases, and emoticons in there. And then hope Apple will cut a deal with SmileOnMyMac to integrate into the OS so it runs in the background and affects typing in all apps.

4. Allow Apps to Run in the Background

Apple trusts no one like it trusts itself, and grants privileges to its own applications that it withholds from others’. Like the convenience store that permits only one student shopper at a time to combat shoplifting, the iPhone will allow only one third party app to run at once. Apple’s own apps, however, can shop as they like. To see an example of this, start playing a song from the iPod app, then return to your home screen and launch Contacts. Your music still plays.

The implications of this policy can neuter some third party apps, or at least hamstring them to less than their potential. Social locating apps like Loopt, for example, bring you closer to your friends and get you invited to nearby parties only while you dedicate your multi-tasking high-powered device to the single task of announcing your location. You can’t even play Solitaire while you wait for an invite. TextExpander, mentioned above, works only partly as well as it could.

What You Can Do

As the iPhone commercials say, there’s an app for that: Backgrounder App. Unfortunately, it requires jailbreaking your phone, something my risk-averse genes haven’t yet permitted me to do. Talk on the Web, though, claims Apple is discussing how to allow third party apps to run in the background. Let’s hope they figure out how to do that.

5. Give Us a Command Line and a Programming Interface

The iPhone is a general-purpose computing device, as long as someone programs the purposes elsewhere. Programming the device on the device would allow power users to exploit the computer power resting in their hands to solve problems in the moment. We don’t need access to a GUI library–just give us an editor, a command line, a place to save code files, and a scripting language: Ruby, JavaScript, Scala, or anything besides Lisp. Let me write a quick app to solve The Locker Problem or to massage my Contacts database. Don’t require me to write it on my Mac, apply DRM, and upload it to my device. Unlock the power that’s there so I can, too.

What You Can Do

This thread and this thread outline why you’ll probably never see this from a non-jailbroken iPhone.

This thread (wow–is all the good discussion on Stack Overflow these days?) lists some possibilities, none of which I’ve explored. Maybe web-delivered programming environments like Zembly or Bespin can help to fill this void, although those environments will never allow you to work with data on your iPhone (like your Contacts data).

6. Allow App Store Competition

One of the reasons for the iPhone’s success is the easy-to-find, easy-to-use app distribution model that developers can plug into without having to create their own virtual storefronts, figure out how to accept credit card payments, etc. Kudos to Apple for creating the App Store and integrating it with iTunes to ensure that every white-earbud-toting person on the planet (which is nearly everyone) has access to it. There’s an app for that because there’s an App Store for that.

Apple: now that you’ve enjoyed a year of First Mover advantage, open up your App Store to competition. Let people distribute their apps through other venues. If the App Store is truly the best solution that you tout it is, it will continue to flourish. Both developers and consumers will use it because it’s better, not just because it’s the only option. Most people will still use the App Store exclusively, and the competition will help direct your efforts to improve how the App Store works.

What You Can Do

Jailbreak. I realize that this item essentially requests Apple to endorse and institutionalize jailbreaking. If they do it, however, they can control it. They can divide trusted apps from untrusted apps. They can have a way for customers to reset their devices to \”trusted only\” and make that a standard support procedure. They can embrace the tinkering without undermining the foundation of their product. Think of the relationship between Mac OS X and MacPorts, in which Unix gear heads can set up an alternative to the Mac OS X environment in a proceed-at-your-own-risk scenario. All I’m asking for is an iPhonePorts.

Conclusion

Some of what I seek will probably never happen, as it would require Apple to relinquish more control than they’re willing to cede. They continue to head down a path of more, not less, control, and their financial results seem to reward that strategy. They as yet have no incentive to change course on the control issues. Nudging them from that course will require stiffer competition from Android, Palm, or some other competitor.

Apple will continue to grow the iPhone, however, and I think we’ll soon see background threads (which will enable improved autocorrection), launcher improvements, and at least improvements to the App Store. In the mean time, I’ll continue to live from my iPhone.