Yeah, it could be better.

Neven Mrgan: Commoditize your complements

Tue, 14 Jun 2011 21:41:10 -0400

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.

iOS 5 Wish List, Item Three This, plus the ability to lock...

Fri, 27 May 2011 18:27:00 -0400

iOS 5 Wish List, Item Three

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.

iOS 5 Wish List, Item Two It was almost a year ago when Chris...

Tue, 24 May 2011 16:04:00 -0400

iOS 5 Wish List, Item Two

It was almost a year ago when Chris Clark wrote a post called A Services Menu for iPhone, and it still resonates with me today.

Every single day, I wish I could pull up the dictionary from iBooks or Instapaper, while I’m using Reeder or Safari. I constantly wish I could send a clipping to Pastebot from any app at any time. I want to invoke Readability (which is included in Reeder) when I tap-hold a link in Tweetbot. When I tap-hold a photo in Safari, I’d love the option to crop/rotate the image with PhotoPad or Pastebot before saving it.

This is quite possibly the most platform-opening idea I’ve seen any non-Apple-employee come up with, and I hope against hope that Apple implements something similar in iOS 5.

iOS 5 Wish List, Item One

Wed, 18 May 2011 14:20:54 -0400

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?

Thu, 13 Jan 2011 00:15:40 -0500

Who's Afraid of the Verizon iPhone?:

marco:

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

Wed, 05 Jan 2011 16:57:45 -0500

Neven Mrgan: Redundant data in the Weather app:

mrgan:

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.

Text Selection in Android and iOS

Tue, 14 Dec 2010 19:59:16 -0500

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.

The iOS has this interesting feature while you’re...

Sat, 17 Jul 2010 15:18:00 -0400

The iOS has this interesting feature while you’re scrolling: if you continue flicking while the page is still moving, no matter how slow it’s moving, or how minor the subsequent flicks are, the scrolling will accelerate cumulatively with every flick. It makes getting to the bottom of very long pages much easier.

But the software doesn’t care if the subsequent flicks are in the same direction, or even if you pause for a minute before continuing. If you catch the page mid-scroll, and your finger doesn’t leave the screen before your next flick, it will always be twice as fast, no matter how long you wait, or which direction you flick next time. It results in some really squirrelly behavior when you’re just trying to scan for something in a long text document…unless you’re aware of the behavior and know how to avoid it.

Spotlight for AppStore

Fri, 02 Jul 2010 01:56:00 -0400

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?

typonautobcorrection

Fri, 28 May 2010 19:46:13 -0400

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.

iPhone Accessibility: A Minor Problem I can’t imagine this...

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 20:07:34 -0500

iPhone Accessibility: A Minor Problem

I can’t imagine this is good UX for visually-impaired iPhone/iPad users.

On Having Standards (Double or Otherwise)

Tue, 23 Feb 2010 19:08:22 -0500

On Having Standards (Double or Otherwise):

Apple is essentially acting as the new-world publisher, and publishers have always had standards by which they’ve said “nope, we won’t publish that.” Anyone from the past century with a dusty manuscript in a drawer, which was rejected by a publisher, knows that this is just how the game works. You can’t get a bodice-ripper accepted by a “classics” publisher.

Not that Apple’s other third-party offerings are all “classic.” But anyway…click the link above to see the rest of my post about the sexy-apps-banned debacle.

Many people are arguing that Apple shouldn’t be selectively choosing which apps go into the App Store, and that they should instead fix their “parental controls” system. While I agree with the latter sentiment, I completely disagree with the former. I don’t see anything wrong with kicking assholes out of your store for ruining things for everyone. There comes a point when you say “Okay guys, we were willing to kinda just let it happen when there were only a few of you. Then there were hundreds. Then there were thousands. Now, everyone who isn’t a decades-old provider of this kind of stuff, kindly fuck off.” I can’t blame them.

But the point about the parental controls still stands. As has been widely noted, many apps in the App Store are labeled as “17+” simply because they allow unfettered access to internet content, textual or otherwise. As a result, applications like Instapaper have been saddled with warnings like the following:

You must be at least 17 years old to purchase this application.

Applications in this category may also contain frequent and intense offensive language; frequent and intense cartoon, fantasy or realistic violence; and frequent and intense mature, horror and suggestive themes; plus sexual content, nudity, alcohol, tobacco and drugs which may not be suitable for children under the age of 17.

What’s worse, until a recent update to the iPhone OS, the Restrictions part of Settings.app didn’t actually work correctly. So, when you customized the settings “Allow apps rated 12+” the OS would actually disable whatever apps you had which were rated 12+. Thankfully, Apple has fixed that problem, but it’s still rather ridiculous that Instapaper — one of the most consistently adored apps in the community — comes with such a hefty warning label. All it serves to do is to a) dilute the meaning of such a warning, and therefore b) discourage people from using the parental controls at all.

It would make a great deal more sense to simply add one more category to the Restrictions system: “Unrestricted web access.” Put it at the bottom of the list, as the final level of restriction before “Allow all apps.” Alternatively, it could be made into a secondary option, where you could activate or deactivate apps with unrestricted access, while also performing deactivations based on the age-based ratings.

Pre-caching Google Maps

Tue, 23 Feb 2010 18:04:00 -0500

In thinking about the iPad, whether I would want one, and if so which version would I buy, I thought of a good idea for added functionality to Maps.app.

When you get ready to go on a trip, you pack your bags and toiletries, and if you’re anything like me, you’ll double-check your iPod (or iPhone) to make sure you’ve got whatever music and videos you’ll want on the trip.

But if you’re going on a road trip, you traditionally needed to get your maps in order, too. These days, I just use my iPhone for the task, but if I were to buy an iPad, I’d definitely like to have the larger, more-easily-scrutinized maps on that huge screen. But what if I decided not to buy the 3G iPad? It’s pretty much useless for maps once you’re out of WiFi range.

So, what if Maps.app were modified to allow caching of a plotted route? Say, you plot your route from point A to point B, and you tap a button labeled “Cache this route.” And the app would show you a progress bar (with cancel button) as it caches all map tiles for all resolutions along the way. And, with any cached route, if you tap on any button that would obliterate the route — say, the Search tab — a modal dialog would ask you if you’re sure you want to clear the cached route.

Maps.app currently does cache a certain amount if information on the fly, but only at the resolutions you’ve already viewed, and only for a certain amount of time (or until the buffer is full, and it has to rotate in new data).

I’m not deluding myself into thinking Apple would ever do this. But it seems to me that the sky is the limit in the software of these devices, and the answer is not necessarily to diversify your product into six unique SKUs. Steve Jobs knows this. It’s one of the first things he fixed when he came back to Apple: reign in the out-of-control number of motherboards, and by extension, products. Now, with the iPad, it does make sense to sell 3G and non-3G versions. But the truth is, I’d imagine at least one of each flavor will be cut from the lineup within six months. And for the people who can’t justify the cost of a 3G model, yet don’t see enough utility in the non-3G model, it really does make sense to add a little more cache-it-offline functionality to the cheaper models. And it could set a good example for the third-party developers to follow suit.

Feature checklist dysfunction

Wed, 10 Feb 2010 14:25:27 -0500

Marco gets it. Read his whole post.

marco:

The tech press loves checklist comparisons. Let’s evaluate the iPhone to see whether it’s a good product:

Sounds like a terrible product. I bet it will fail.

For those wondering, the bezel takes up almost exactly 1/3 of...

Fri, 29 Jan 2010 03:12:53 -0500

For those wondering, the bezel takes up almost exactly 1/3 of the front-facing real estate on an iPad. I’m not saying I dislike the design. Just observing, as I hadn’t seen anyone else measure it.

iPod plugins

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 21:41:58 -0500

Perhaps the biggest reason to allow multitasking on iPhone OS — for me, at least — is to allow media apps like Pandora or Last.fm to continue playing while you’re messing about in other apps. Honestly, when I try to come up with other reasons to allow multitasking, I have great difficulty coming up with scenarios that can’t (can’t) be solved with push notifications. Of course, the push notification service could potentially be improved to provide greater value and potential, but still: multitasking doesn’t seem to be necessary.

Now, in terms of media apps like Pandora and Last.fm, I got to thinking: would it be possible to introduce a new type of app that is simply a plugin for iPod.app? Imagine, if you will, if Pandora were made available as another listing on the “More…” screen. Start up the streaming from within iPod.app, and you can go play in other apps to your heart’s content. Or, if Last.fm is more your thing, you could stream your music the same way, through the plugin in iPod.app; or, if you want to play your own on-board music, you could turn on scrobbling, which would also continue to happen in the background.

Now, I know this suggestion is a pretty big break from iPhone interface convention. Currently, the iPhone OS and the AppStore are built on the premise of “one app, one icon.” So, my recommendation would mean that, after downloading Pandora to your device, you would not see a new icon on the Springboard. But I do think that this sort of expansion of the core OS could be a very good idea for everyone.

Perhaps it’s just my enthusiasm for the iPad, and the various UI differences that it brings. Largely, this idea came to me when I realized what a waste of space the Pandora app would be on the iPad. I’m quite anxious to see what types of innovation the iPad helps to spur in the iPhone/iPod Touch OS, since they are — at least in some sense — competitors in the market.

Message Control

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 15:01:00 -0500

It’s what they do. They’re working on computing products that are several years out from production (or even introduction), and not a single person will ever open his or her mouth about it. And honestly, I think that’s a great way to do it. Mystery breeds curiosity, and in Apple’s case, fanaticism. And sometimes it pays off big, but only when they also master the messaging that does get out.

In January 2007, Steve Jobs gave what I believe might be his Magnum Opus in the introduction of the iPhone. Not only was the device simply revolutionary (at the time, against my usual MO, I believed that particular marketing-speak was actually on-point), but the structure of the presentation was absolutely perfect. The flow of the information that Steve presented was really conducive to getting everyone excited, on the edges of their seats, and dying to know more. He set it all up with context. He pointed and laughed at the horribly Photoshopped mockups. He did the quick, teasing reveal of the device he had in his pocket. And then he showed people how to use it, by using it. And narrating. And being fucking excited.

Yesterday, though, the iPad presentation was simply horrible and awkward. It pains me to say it, but as awkward as Phil Schiller has always struck me, Phil’s portion of the presentation was the only bit that got me excited about the iPad. The iWork software was really nicely done (and new!), and Phil was good at describing what he was showing, and his enthusiasm struck me as genuine.

Compare that with Steve Jobs, whose mind seemed to clearly be elsewhere. Now, if rumors are true (and I usually doubt they are), then it’s likely that Steve was hoping to present more/bigger news yesterday, possibly with regard to media services for iPad. But regardless of cause, it seemed clear that Steve was either disappointed, or pissed, or otherwise failing to focus on the awesomeness he held in his hands. Possibly the dumbest thing he could have said, he said several times: “It just all works.” Scott Forstall said the same thing a few times later on.

As some have already noted, Steve’s demonstration of web browsing on iPad just felt like an awkward session of watching Steve Jobs dick around on the web. There wasn’t much in the way of narration, and it felt as if he just forgot we were all there. Compare this with the presentation of the first-ever iPhone, and the contrast is stark. Steve was genuinely excited to show us the multitouch gestures, the new ways to interact, the fancy scrolling and rubber-banding, and the awesome ability to rotate the screen for better viewability. With the iPad? Not only did Steve take for granted that we all know the gestures he was making, but he also didn’t make hardly any allusion to the fact that the super-phenomenally-popular iPhone is this thing’s older sibling.

Now, I know in theory that this should actually be a good thing. When introducing a new style of device that fits in between your mobile phone and your laptop computer, you really have to tread a fine line with the comparisons to either device. Because, on the one hand, you don’t want to knock your other devices because you want people to keep buying them. And on the other hand, for the people who already own both of those other devices, you need to give them a good reason to buy this fancy new dealio.

That’s actually similar to another problem they had: they didn’t compare it enough to the other products in the marketplace. Of course, Apple is usually good like that. They don’t want to bash the Kindle. They didn’t really bash any other competing products when they introduced the iPhone. But what they did do was to look at those devices, and point out the specific ways in which they wanted their new device to stand apart. All they said about the Kindle was that it paved the way, and that they were going to stand on its shoulders. More needed to be said, if for no other reason than to point out who will be in the market for one of these things. Most people who say they won’t buy one are saying it because they don’t see this thing replacing their laptop. This means you’ve failed to tell them why they would want one. The message should have been clearer, especially after years of no messaging at all for this product.

So, the problem — as I see it — is that in reality they didn’t nail it when they really needed to. Steve didn’t nail it. I really think he needed to draw our attention to the fact that the iPad is a much larger and supercharged version of the iPhone, and that simply by nature of its sheer size, it is an extremely different type of platform. Things that could never be done on iPhone can be done on iPad with ease.

Of course, Steve can’t shoulder all the blame for a badly-done presentation. Scott Forstall, whose presentations have usually been well-received, made a pretty bad blunder. In terms of organization of content, the first major demonstration he gave on the iPad was a one-eighth-screen demo of an iPhone app. Really? That’s the first thing you want to show the world on your new device? Usage of 1/8 of the screen? You don’t do that with a “magical” device. You show how truly effing magical it is, and then you follow up by saying “by the way, all of your iPhone apps will run on it right away, so you’ve got a little time to fill the AppStore with awesomeness for iPad. Now, my Pokemans. Let me show you them.”

Everyone points to Steve Jobs as a great presenter, with an innate ability to get you wanting their latest piece of kit. But the truth is, in terms of keynote presentations, the only one I’ve ever gone back and watched multiple times was Macworld January 2007 (iTunes link). I’m hoping, next time they introduce something brand new, that they’ll do a better job of getting me fired up. I know they have it in them.

"When the Mac first came out, Newsweek asked me what I [thought] of it. I said: Well, it’s the first..."

Wed, 27 Jan 2010 17:00:00 -0500

“When the Mac first came out, Newsweek asked me what I [thought] of it. I said: Well, it’s the first personal computer worth criticizing. So at the end of the presentation, Steve came up to me and said: Is the iPhone worth criticizing? And I said: Make the screen five inches by eight inches, and you’ll rule the world.”

- Alan Kay

I disagree. I think it’ll take us perhaps one more year to realize that they absolutely NAILED IT with the iPhone. The weight, the size and the ergonomics of the iPad are going to eventually prove themselves as sub-optimal in terms of everyday use. Better value than a Kindle or Nook? Of course. But that’s not saying much.

The iPhone is the form factor that will “rule the world,” specifically because of its portability. If Apple turned the iPhone into a “head unit” that could be plugged into larger screens and input devices, then I would think they are realizing the dream. But this tablet form factor is a concept that has always bugged me as “that’d be fun, but nowhere near ideal.”

Getting it right the first time

Sun, 24 Jan 2010 21:25:20 -0500

One would imagine that this post should be wrapped into my multitasking post from the other day, but I felt it necessary for this point to stand on its own:

If, by some strange chance, Apple finally allows us to multitask in the next major release of iPhone OS, I urge every currently-published developer to really take a moment to assess what it will mean to their revenue stream as it currently exists.

As an example, let’s take Pandora. Wouldn’t it be great if you could just fire up Pandora, exit the app, and go browse through NetNewsWire? Well sure, it would be fantastic for the end user, but I can easily see how Pandora’s advertising revenue would go directly through the floor. Same thing with NetNewsWire: if you can leave it running all the time, downloading your feeds in the background, that will dramatically decrease the amount of face-time each user gets with those ads.

Now, I’m not suggesting that this is a Bad Thing. Clearly, the platform needs to evolve enough to allow some form of multitasking, and I even think the “blessed apps” model could be the perfect solution. But the problem, really, is that there are several new types of “economies” that have sprung up from within the confines of this platform. And when you change a fundamental operating structure of said platform, it is bound to have consequences to those economies — some predictable, and others unpredictable.

We’ve seen this type of thing before, with the ongoing complications that arose from the initially-forbidden-and-later-granted ability for paid upgrades from within an app. Those problems were less about screwing up revenue streams for the developer, and more about maintaining a consistent business relationship with the end-user, but the basic problem is quite the same: when you fail to implement a certain facet of your OS in the most logical way, from the get-go, there will be consequences, either for the developer or the consumer.

The Obligatory Multitasking Post

Fri, 22 Jan 2010 03:15:00 -0500

As I’ve mentioned, I’m not one to hop onto the hot-button topics. I just don’t see the point. Why state what’s obvious to everyone?

But, in the case of multitasking on the iPhone, I’ve felt for quite a while now that nobody is really putting a finger on what multitasking could mean for the iPhone, were it to show up tomorrow. And I think a large part of that is because everyone knows the core iPhone apps so well, at this point, that there is no real novel way to look at the problem. People try to sell us on the idea of multitasking by pointing at the Jailbreak community, but seriously: HIC SVNT DRACONES.

But today, I had a pretty nice revelation: there is a hidden multitaskable app on the iPhone 3GS, which I’ve known was there all along, yet never had any interest in using. It’s the Nike+ app, and it is switched off in Settings.app by default. The problem is, without investing in the dongle, you’ll never get a chance to see how excellent and unique this app is.

Lately, I had gotten myself involved in using RunKeeper Pro, after having bought it nearly a year ago in a flash of wishful thinking. Everything was going wonderfully, until one day I had a minor problem with one of RunKeeper’s features. I eventually got it solved, but that moment of uncertainty made my eyes wander. I looked on CraigsList for a used Nike+ kit, and I googled around for some first-hand comparisons. I’m no dummy: just because Nike+ has been around longer and is much more widely-accepted, doesn’t mean it’s actually a better tool for the job. I’ll leave it at that, as this isn’t an app review blog.

So, while looking through the Nike+ config panel in Settings.app, and in reading Apple’s knowledge base article on Nike+, I was reminded of the fact that this app has access to the contents of the lockscreen while the iPhone is asleep — similar to what iPod.app does, but there’s a major difference. With Nike+, if the screen is asleep and you click the home button, the custom workout screen is displayed, and your current run stats are recited to you, over your music (if it’s playing). This stats screen will be there even if you have exited the Nike+ app, since it is a multitasking app. So, the take-away is that, when the screen is asleep, the user is given the option to send a function call to the Nike+ app by pressing the home button once, even if the app isn’t running in the foreground. This is unique to only this app on iPhone. The only comparable lock-screen functionality I can think of is the double-tap for iPod controls — which, incidentally, still work while the Nike+ lockscreen is active, but the layout of the controls is seamlessly integrated into a modified Nike+ lockscreen.

Also, similar to the “call in progress” (green) and “tethering is active” (blue) banners, Nike+ has its own banner (red) when it’s active in the background. When you take a phone call, the red banner is replaced with green, and the workout is paused. I believe the same is also true when a call comes in and you’re tethering, but the tethering does not disconnect. So, as a UI guideline, there is only one pulsating banner at the top of the iPhone screen at any given time.

Anyway, it’s been mentioned once or twice lately — on at least one blog (yeah, I’m taking it all with huge grains of salt) — that we could potentially see “rationed multitasking” in whatever forthcoming iPhone OS release we may see this year. If that’s the case, I sincerely hope that an updated SDK will allow third-party developers to manipulate the lockscreen (and its home button behavior) and “announcement banners” (for lack of a better term). Because, as much as I kinda prefer RunKeeper over Nike+ as a runner’s service, I’m thoroughly impressed with the OS-level integration that comes from this quasi-third-party app. And it’s kind of exciting that its impressiveness has been hiding directly under my nose.

Also, just as an afterthought: Even though the Nike+ app is technically not deletable, it’s super-nice that we can just flip a switch in Settings.app if we want it to be gone from the home screen. Technically, the same can be done for Safari, iTunes, AppStore and YouTube, via Restrictions. But it would be really nice if every non-deletable app had a similar switch within the Restrictions panel.