Aaron Landry

Scrolling, originally uploaded by s4xton.

A lot of people have dug into some of the things they like and don’t like about the iPhone. John Gruber does a nice job and all the big technology blogs have chimed in about some of the big missing things with the iPhone such as a lack of clipboard, no Safari Keychain, and no IM client. Also, there are some iPhone bugs that I assume are going to get fixed such as the mail client sometimes reporting millions of un-downloaded messages, Recent Calls in the Phone application can sometimes be inaccurate and Safari and Google Maps can get overloaded and crash.

Update: Ben Higginbotham has a nice list of ten of these bigger things that are important as Apple moves closer and closer to developing the divine Jesusphone.

Each of those things could be its own post. Some are not easy fixes nor simple improvements. Instead of going down that road, I wanted to touch on ten things that Apple could possibly quickly fix with their first iPhone software update. Most of them are just UI quirks:

1. Driving directions mode should remember the address you just found. Let’s say you plugged in an address and it plots a point on the map. You click the little “driving directions” button in the bottom left. You get a “Start:” and “End:” field and both are blank. I think it should auto-fill one of the fields, especially as there is already a button to switch the contents between the Start and End fields. Yes, I’m aware if you click on the point you go to the information page and you can scroll down for driving directions. Wonder if you’ve scrolled away from the point? Wonder if you wanted to do it in one step instead of two?

2. iPhoto synching. I’m really surprised that everything syncs automatically except for pulling photos off of the iPhone and putting them into your iPhoto library. Right now after I sync the iPhone, I have to open iPhoto, download the photos manually and then manually re-sync the iPhone to update. I wish I could set a preference for it to just do that all for me.

3. To Do lists. They’ve been in iCal for years and I use them for non-date specific things I need to get done. iCal on the iPhone is slick. Where’s my slick To Do lists?

4. Remembering what you didn’t finish typing. This one drives me a little nuts. If you’re typing a text message or a URL and decide you want to switch apps to look at something before finishing it, it totally forgets everything you just typed when you go back to that application. That’s not really necessary is it? Update: I’ve found that this isn’t always true. I need to test it more.

5. Vertical scrolling in Safari, Mail and other applications. First off, scrolling on iPhone is generally very cool. Unfortunately, if the page is extremely long, such as an non-paginated thread on MNspeak.com, to get from the bottom of the page to the top of the page you need to flick the screen constantly for thirty seconds. The motion you use is similar to a naughty cat unrolling an entire roll of toilet paper. Getting to the top of the page is required to edit the URL, refresh the page, or add a bookmark so the ability to scroll quicker or jump to the top is important. The Phone application and iPod application have a lovely quick scroll feature on the right that takes you right to the section you want. Apple should implement this in the other applications. Update: Mike Lee in the comments adds that you can double tap the top menu bar to fly to the top of the page. Neat! Thanks! For scrolling to the bottom of a page and for Mail the quick scroll could still be used, though.

6. Selecting multiple items. I think other people have complained how hard it is to delete 20 emails or to send someone multiple photos when you can only do one at a time. I don’t think it’d be hard to add a new gesture or two. If not, I’d be satisfied in Mail if allowed for the left-to-right swipe to be applied to multiple items and have the delete button apply to all you’ve selected.

7. Foreign characters. Am I the only one that spells naïve and fiancée? There’s people in my address book with the names Gräbner, Córdova and Kästner. Sometimes I’ll text with friends en español. How do I get extended characters? Apple probably already has this figured out so they can release the iPhone in Europe; I hope they make the functionality available in the US version.

8. The Weather icon. The calendar icon updates itself automatically with the current date. The weather icon stays sunny and 73º. They’ll need to change this anyway for a European release as 73ºC is hot. I didn’t notice this until a friend pointed it out yesterday after using the iPhone for the first time. “It’s 73º out?” Now it bothers me. Thanks.

9. Quicker navigation in Mail. To get from a message in your Inbox in one account to a message in another account takes six steps. I like in Apple Mail for OS X where you can view all accounts at once. As well, the iPod application can show “All Songs” if you have multiple albums by the same artist.

10. That period and comma everyone else complains about. It’s frustrating that you need to go to the symbols page to type a period and comma. On Monday a friend asked me why she couldn’t use a double-space for period. Does RIM have this patented? Update: Mike Lee adds in the comments that you can hold the symbol key and drag your finger to the symbol you want. Cool! I’m going to see if I can get used to that.

Despite these little things I still love the iPhone. As friends from the hiptop community know, I’m a stickler on a lot of the little UI things that I think could be improved. I’m pretty confident that Apple will address most of the things I mentioned. We’ll see, though.

Apple iPhone, originally uploaded by s4xton.

“Everything changes in June,” I said back in January. Well, I don’t have an iPhone. Not yet, anyway. Ed and Justine asked me on Thursday if I was getting one; I told them I wasn’t going to jump into it right away. I’m going to wait awhile. So maybe I’ll get one Sunday, I said.

Dave and I skipped yesterday’s crowds and visited the Apple Store in Southdale early this afternoon to play. What you’re reading on all the other blogs is right: it’s not just hype if it lives up to it. Amazing device.

The first thing I did was played with the keyboard. I could see it self-correcting my typos immediately but my first completed misspelled and uncorrected word was after my second sentence. That was also when I was trying to type without looking. At first, I felt like human fingers might be too big. Five minutes later I figured that it won’t take long for me to type on it while not looking at it most of the time. Seriously.

The pinch zoom with photography and the browser is fantastic and felt natural. I came home and had the urge to pinch my MacBook Pro screen to zoom in and out. Someday.

Browsing overall was nice. There’s a little Safari “Missing Plugin” blue block where Flash content should be. That icon, to me, strongly implies that a plugin may some day show up. Perhaps the ball is in Adobe’s court. I can’t imagine the iPhone couldn’t handle Flash.

One issue with browsing was going through a page quickly: even though the page was loaded it wouldn’t always display promptly. A placeholder checkerboard would sometimes appear on scrolling and that part of the page will render a couple seconds later. The other thing was the browsing speed. On a WLAN I figured it’d be a bit faster, but it was certainly useable. Those two things are very small complaints being that almost every other aspect of the browser is phenomenal.

Dave and I skipped over to the AT&T store on the other side of the mall where we were able to spend more time with the iPhones there without people breathing down our necks. I turned off the WiFi on one of them to test the EDGE network speed. Slow, as you might expect. Not that much different than the Danger Hiptop service I’ve been used to though. The Safari preferences on the phone allow you to turn on or off JavaScript, Plug-Ins and Pop-up Blocking.

We had a late lunch at the California Pizza Kitchen a couple windows down from the Apple Store and spent most of the time going back and forth if we should get it or not. We’re both under existing contracts with T-Mobile and neither of us are thrilled with our current devices. We’re both Hiptop expatriates and decades long Apple users both personally and professionally. If neither of us had contract penalties imposed on us, we’d both have iPhones now. Then we thought that if you’re going to pay this much for a device, what’s an extra $200? Well, it was enough to deter our decisions today. Maybe I should sell another $200 worth of stuff on eBay to justify it to myself.

Does anyone want to transfer T-Mobile contract? I have a sweet three-day weekend plan at a nice price they don’t offer anymore.