5 Things iPhone OS 4.0 Needs to Include
1. App Groups
Initially, several screens filled with colorful app icons was fun. Flicking around from left to right was just part of the experience. Eventually, most users began to wonder if there wasn’t a better way to categorize their apps rather than just having them float around in random positions. And if you wanted to make any sense of your screens by systematically positioning your apps; you were met with an never ending time-consuming process as soon as you added a new app. Amazingly, 3 versions of the OS has not addressed this need. Perhaps that’s why so many users jailbreak their iPhone to use a more user-friendly OS. Take note Apple.
2. Safari Search
I’m not talking about searching for lions or tigers or zebras on an African plain — rather I’m talking about one of the most fundamental capabilities one needs when sifting through large amounts of text — TEXT SEARCH! I can’t count the number of times I’ve ended up on a gigantic blog and need to find one snippet or comment only to give up after having scrolled the entire page and missing it. On a computer I’d just hit CTRL+F and search. A new iPhone OS needs this feature.
3. Merge Contacts
There are many ways we get duplicate contact information in our iPhones. Whether we sync to popular contact management software, receive vCard profiles in MMS or email, or simply inadvertently create a new contact in the process of quickly trying to get an email out. The point is that duplicate data creeps into our address book one way or another. If you have ever attempted to clean this up you know that it turns into a time-consuming process testing the extent of your sanity. A native function of the address book app should allow you to merge contacts on a field by field basis choosing which data to keep. Not terribly difficult to do.
4. YouTube Account Management
The YouTube app is fun and useful… unless you have a YouTube account and want to do something useful with it. iPhone 3Gs allows you to upload video taken on your device via your YouTube account. A very cool feature. But any attempt to edit details of your video — let alone delete the video — requires you to login to the actual YouTube website. You might be saying, “That’s okay, I’ll just access my account via Safari on the iPhone.” Sadly, both the Touch and Mobile versions of the YouTube website don’t allow this functionality either. In order to make any meaningful changes to your videos (i.e. edit comments, edit tags, edit names, delete, etc.) you will have to view the Full version of YouTube within Safari. Lame and/or fail.
5. Multi-Tasking
I personally don’t buy the argument that iPhone hardware isn’t capable of handling multi-tasking. Even if users were limited to only 5 concurrently running apps it would be better than what we have now. There are some things we do in one app that we would like to leave to a background process while we move on to another item. For example, if we are waiting for a webpage to load we might want to check out Facebook. When we leave Safari to go to the home screen in order to start Facebook; Safari stops working. That means if I come back to Safari (even a couple minutes later) the page I had meant to navigate to will still be in limbo. Am I really to believe that a few processing cycles can’t be diverted to a separate app? Surely email I’ve “sent” in the mail app is still delivered even when I leave that app. Why can’t the same be applied to other apps?