Yeah, it could be better.

As of now, I’ve spent the longest chunk of time since the original iPhone release with no real wish list for the next device/OS revision. I still don’t have any notable hardware wishes. I could probably live happily with my iPhone 4 for years. But on the software front, my wishes are starting to come from unlikely places.

My first wish is to have a reliable, fluid connection between my iOS devices. If I’ve got my iPad with me on a train (it’s wifi-only, and I don’t pay AT&T for tethering), and I receive an SMS or MMS on my iPhone, I want to receive notification on my iPad, and I want the ability to view/respond without having to pull the iPhone out of my pocket. This, of course, would be roughly akin to the Blackberry Bridge app, but without the inherent colossal failure: email and calendaring are, of course, already present on the iPad.

Also part of this bridge, it would be nice to answer calls from my iPad, as if it were a bluetooth headset. Whether or not the iPad has 3G shouldn’t matter; all it needs is an interface and an audio I/O connection over BT. And, since voice/SMS has its own pricing scheme dependent upon usage (regardless of interface), there should be no additional fee for the bridge; there is no opportunity for abuse.

Somewhat related to this, Mac OS X used to have a feature that allowed you to dial a phone number, from the Address Book app, through your Bluetooth-paired cell phone. This feature, somewhere along the way, was removed presumably for security concerns. I would imagine there’s a chance this feature could make a return now that the iPhone is so popular, but I’d at least like the option to initiate a call like this through the iOS Bridge I’m wishing for.

Release Candidate One:

Engadget (via Daring Fireball):

In the browser, you long press on text to bring up your anchors, then drag and tap the center of your selection — boom, copied text. In text editing fields, however, in order to select a word you must long press on the word, wait for a contextual menu to pop up, and then select “select word” — a completely counterintuitive process. In the message app you can long press to select only the entire message.

…this segment of the quote, as cherry-picked by me from John’s larger cherry-picking, applies just as much to iOS as Android.

On iOS, text selection is largely up to the app developer. There’s a lot of text you simply can’t select in apps; try selecting a song name in the iPod app, for example… no dice. Sometimes long-holding an element of the UI lets you copy the entire text of the held element, such as in Messages and Calculator, with no fine-selection mechanism. In Safari and other “web views” you long-hold and it selects the nearest word (or contents of the nearest DOM node, it depends on your zoom level) and then you can fine-tune your selection by dragging handles before hitting the Copy button. In text fields, long-hold doesn’t give you any selection, but gives you a menu to select the nearest word, or select all text, then you can copy. Still on text fields, if you double-tap-and-drag in one motion you get a selection over the dragged area, and you can then hit Copy.

The problem doesn’t lie in how many different ways there are to copy things — whether from an editable field, from a read-only block of text, etc — but in how smartly it’s implemented. I don’t hear Topolsky or Gruber complaining about the multiple use cases that we encounter when selecting/copying/pasting. I hear them saying that the implementations of those use cases in Android aren’t very user-friendly. iOS select/copy/paste has a number of different implementations across the OS, but almost all of them are smartly implemented and reasonably consistent.

As an example, in the URL field in Mobile Safari, there is a handy shortcut: if you double-tap in the middle of a URL, the selection automatically anchors itself at the very end, and selects everything backward to where your finger is. Is this inconsistent with the rest of the system? Yes. But it’s also a very well-informed design decision, and is very likely to be a welcome implementation almost every time you encounter it.

So iOS 4.0 comes with extra added benefit in Spotlight where you can search the web or search Wikipedia if you haven’t found what you’re looking for. But how hard are they gonna collectively slap their foreheads when they realize they could quite nicely put a Search the AppStore item in there?

By far, the most common typo I make on the iPad virtual keyboard is typing an “n” or a “b” instead of a space. So, I end up with a large number of combined words like “combinednwords” or “largebnumber.”

One thing I noticed is a bit different between iPhone OS 3.1 and 3.2 is that 3.2 will auto-correct “thisthing” to “this thing.” Steve Jobs even had an “oops” moment in his iPad introduction which very slyly showcased this. But now, with these typos I mentioned above, it seems like a no-brainer to extend that auto-correction feature to include properly-formed words which are concatenated with a random letter.