Neven Mrgan: Commoditize your complements -
here are some other ways Apple makes money:
- Share of wireless carriers’ plan fees
Unrelated to the conversation at hand, but it’s something I’ve seen mentioned several times, by several different people, over the past month or two. Do we know that Apple still gets any share of carrier revenue? From the original iPhone launch, I was under the impression that this revenue sharing agreement was not only unprecedented, but also contingent upon Apple’s exclusivity deal with AT&T in the US. Which has, of course, expired.
I’d certainly like to know if my understanding is wrong.
(Source: steelopus)
This, plus the ability to lock screen orientation in landscape. I don’t need it all the time, but often enough to have an option.
Of course, this is the sort of thing that wouldn’t work well on older, non-retina-display devices. However, I sincerely doubt that Apple will allow iOS 5 to be installed on any device that’s two years old or older. That’ll leave only the current iPod Touch and iPhone 4, plus the newer variants that come out alongside (or shortly after) the big iOS 5 reveal.
See what I meant about not having much to wish for? Most of my iOS wishes have been granted by the app developers.
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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.
Who's Afraid of the Verizon iPhone? -
Whenever I’ve overheard conversations about smartphones in real life, by “normal people” (not geeks like us), it has always been clear that the true battle happening in the U.S. phone market wasn’t iPhone versus Android, but iPhone versus Verizon.
The decision that people were discussing wasn’t “Do I get an iPhone or an Android whatever?”
It was always “Do I get an iPhone or do I stay on Verizon?”
I get the feeling that very few people except anti-Apple geeks really care about Android itself.
One thing that’s important to note, in this mental calculus, is what happened to all of the folks who adopted Android phones over the past year, no matter what their initial reasoning was. Many, many of them have become extremely rabid proponents of Android (or their particular device) simply as a matter of course.
I’ve had a number of friends on Tumblr and Facebook mention this VZW iPhone thing to their friends list, and invariably someone posts something like “Just get a Droid, they’re fantastic!” And, also invariably, the commenter is someone who six or ten months ago wouldn’t have been able to tell you the difference between a smartphone and a feature phone. So, these are the folks who just really enjoy their Droid (or Evo, or whatever), and haven’t ever spent time with an iPhone, so they assume it just can’t be quite as good. Perspective is hard to get when these devices are so expensive.
But then there are the folks who ditched an iPhone 3G for Android, so the last iPhone they’ve experienced is Apple’s resting-on-their-laurels device. I’ve seen a number of these people (or folks with similar stories) become truly rabid about Android over the past year, year and a half. They’re the first to rip your head off in a conversation, and they’ve likely bought two or three of the latest-greatest Android phones over the past twelve months.
I still think your assessment of the iPhone/Verizon situation is on point. But it’s important to note that Google has not only been playing a strong handset/subscriber numbers game over the past year or so…they’ve also been very effectively creating promoters. It’s a game that Apple knows well. I don’t think Google plays it as well as Apple does, but they are playing it well.
Neven Mrgan: Redundant data in the Weather app -
If you’re a serious weather junkie, you might use a special weather app to get your daily klimate kick. And if you’re Edward Tufte, you might think the iPhone weather app is “a bit thin”. Me, I don’t mind it - it’s a nice, big dashboard view of the weather features I care most about.
But here’s something crazy: the app shows the same exact data twice. Look:
Today’s high and low predictions (44/41) are shown below the city name, and then again in the day list. They’re the same exact numbers, always.
The best explanation for why this is so comes from Geoff Pado: because the weather widget in Mac OS X shows it that way. And the widget does so because you can collapse it. See:
Of course, it’s possible that there’s some other, more rational explanation. I’d love to hear it, but Geoff’s guess sounds right to me.
So, this would ideally be fixed. And it would make room for a feature I’d really like to see in every weather widget, on the phone or TV or wherever:yesterday’s weather. The point would be to give me some indication of how much cooler/warmer I should expect to feel as compared to yesterday. See, I don’t really know how to judge absolute temperature values. Which coat do I grab at 55º? How about 43º? If, however, I knew that it would be 8º cooler than the previous day, I could act appropriately.
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.
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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.
