john d markers' weblog

Friday, January 02, 2009

Shame on Apple's iPhone Team

Here are the reasons I'd be ashamed to admit I worked on the iPhone team (if I were lucky enough to work on the iPhone team). I wrote about some of these issues way back in July of 2007 when I first got the phone, and only one (multi-recipient SMS) has been addressed. I'll update this post as features are added, bugs are fixed, or I discover new stupidity.
  • No copy-paste.
  • Amazingly, still no way to send or receive contact information. Combined with the lack of copy-paste this can actually force you to grab a piece of paper to write down something from a text or email message so you can then type it into the Contacts app. (Most absurd workflow ever?)
  • No option other than CALL for phone numbers encountered in email or web pages. How about the same little blue button you already have in the SMS and phone apps?
  • No picture messaging (MMS) and nothing even to let you know that someone tried to send you an MMS message. Your friends' messages just disappear into the ether.(Here's a lame (send-only) workaround that requires asking everyone you know what mobile provider they use and entering an additional email address for them into your contacts.)
  • Mail can't rotate to a landscape orientation. This makes some HTML emails extremely difficult to read.
  • No queuing and automatic retry of outgoing SMS messages when you don't have a signal.
  • In Safari, strange behavior where previously loaded pages reload when you reopen the application. (I'm guessing this has to do with cache-related properties of the page/HTTP response, but redisplaying a page after switching windows or closing Safari shouldn't be subject to the same cache rules as, say, hitting the back button.)
  • Speaking of the back button, a user should be able to hold down the back button and see history to choose something other than the last viewed page. Over a cell signal and for pages that don't want to cache, having to go back one page at a time is very slow.
  • No ability to say which known Wi-Fi network you prefer.
  • When listening to a track without album art, a screenful of nothing (well, a big gray musical note) while the artist and track info is squeezed into a tiny menu bar at the top of the screen.
Shame!

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