..insanity later

Not being a friend of hundreds of bookmarks cluttering up my browser, I'm using Delicious to store links to developers, web services, tutorials and other stuff. On my Mac I've been using Pukka for quite a while now to access my delicious bookmarks, on my iPhone I've been using Tags. This has all worked fine for me, until I made the big mistake to sign into my Delicious account with my Yahoo! ID.

Since then it's all been a huge pain in the ass. Once you've used your Yahoo ID, you can't login to your account with your old username and password anymore, and there's no going back. Unfortunately this is breaking compatibility with a lot of 3rd party delicious apps. Yahoo! really butchered the whole transition.

Pukka is already compatible with Yahoo! IDs, and even though the transition hasn't been perfect, I had everything on my Mac running again after a few hours of pain. Not so on my iPhone. Tags isn't compatible with Yahoo IDs right now. That’s bad for me, but at least the developer had the decency to remove the app from the AppStore, to prevent users from accidentally purchasing it. So I had to look for an alternative in the AppStore.

There are a few delicious clients out there, some compatible with Yahoo! IDs, some not. But the incompatible ones all had a disclaimer in the description, warning you about the problem. The best choice for my needs seemed to be Tasty. To make sure that there wouldn't be a problem, I took a close look at their website, to see if there are any problems with Yahoo! IDs. But everything seemed to be fine, so I spent the 4€, expecting nothing but awesomeness.

You can already guess what happened next. No Yahoo! IDs supported. I was stuck at the login window, welcoming me to the only delicious client I'd ever need. What a cruel joke. But what is really making me angry is what happened next. I wrote an email to the Tasty support. No answer. I've reported a problem to the iTunes Store support. No reaction. Now you can say it's only 4€ we're talking about here, but if this is the usual behavior in the AppStore, how am I supposed to trust this system? After this experience I'm going to think thrice before I'll purchase anything more expensive than a few bucks. 

Apple has to implement a system for trial versions, or give unsatisfied customers their money back. Instantly. That’s the only way to handle this. In my case the App is not only crappy, it isn't working at all. That feels like fraudulent behavior to me, and casts a shadow on Apple and the developers of Tasty. 

Update: The developer of Tasty has contacted me, and he's working on an update that supports Yahoo! IDs. It will be submitted to Apple soon, and he has also changed the AppStore description to let people know about the current problems with Yahoo! IDs. So it looks like this thing will be sorted out soon. Nice.

The iPhone is making backups all the time. So often that it can get pretty annoying, when you just want to sync some new podcast episodes, and you end up waiting for the backup to finish. But there's a big problem with these automatically generated backups. When it comes to restoring them, it's always all or nothing.

They're working just fine, when you're upgrading to a new iPhone for example. You just plug in your new iPhone, restore your backup, and it's in the exact same stage that you've left your old iPhone. It couldn't be easier. 

But what if you want to start from scratch? What if you just want to restore some of your apps, and not everything else? Well, then you're screwed. 

I've restored my iPhone a few days ago, and I wanted to start from scratch, to get rid of some junk that accumulated over the past month. My iPhone 'feels' much better now, but I had to pay a big price for it. All in-app settings are gone. The most important data were stored on various web services, like my notes on SimpleNote for example, or synced to a desktop app, like Things. But what about my achievements in games? Gone. Several month of Birdbrain statistics? Gone. Stuff I've stored in Momento? Gone.

That really sucks, and I think it's Apples responsibility to do something about it. They should make it possible for you to choose which data and apps you want to restore, and which ones you want to discard. The way they're doing it right now is seriously flawed, and I can only hope that they'll do something about it asap.

I know that the iPod Classic isn't exactly Apples flagship product anymore, but it's the only model in their current iPod lineup that can carry my whole music library, and I'm still using it on a regular basis, even though I have an iPhone. It's a decent music player, but I'd really appreciate it, if Apple would take the time to fix the major deficiencies it has. 

One thing that is really annoying is its awful implementation of iTunes U. If you can even speak of an implementation. Of course you can sync your iTunes U files to the iPod Classic, but that's pretty much it. There's no menu item for iTunes U, so you have to search for iTunes U in your playlists. That would be tolerable, if there really was a useful iTunes U playlist by default. But there isn't. You end up with two different playlists, one for audio, one for video, that contain all iTunes U files without any further organization. 

This way it's almost impossible to figure out which file belongs to which collection, and what the order of the associated files is. iTunes U is offering some amazing free content, but this way it's really unusable on the iPod. The sad thing is that the iPod is already doing it right with very similar content, the podcasts. Now is it really too much to ask to implement iTunes U the same way?

The other thing I'm missing on the iPod Classic are the Genius-Mixes. These really only make sense if you have a lot of content on your device, so they would be perfect for the iPod Classic. Normal genius playlists are working just fine on the iPod Classic. So what's keeping Apple from implementing the Genius-Mixes as well, other than not giving a shit about the iPod Classic customers?

With the iPad launch coming closer, and first screenshots of ported iPhone apps showing up, I'm becoming more and more afraid that many apps for the iPad are going to be not so great. 

The huge addition of screen real-estate comes in handy for more complex apps, apps that display huge amounts of text, or other media that benefits from the large screen. But many of the little tools that are available on the iPhone don't really need such a large screen, and if you don't really have enough to show, chances are that your app is going to look pretty awful. The problem is, that most developers will probably port their apps anyway, because Apple doesn't offer a decent way to deliver apps with a relatively small functionality.

You can actually see this problem already on Apples iPad website. Why do you think Apple doesn't ship iPad versions of the calculator, the clock, the weather app or the stocks app? Because they wouldn't live up to Apples standards, if you'd just blow them up to the iPads screen. Another example for this is the contacts app. It sure looks good in horizontal mode, but if you rotate the iPad, you're left with ugly black borders on the top and bottom, because they didn't have any content to make use of that space.

I think this is a general problem of the iPad OS, Apple has to come up with a good solution for smaller apps, maybe some implementation of widgets. This way developers could get small apps on the iPad, without running into the dilemma of having too much screen real-estate, and users would benefit from it too, if they could take a look at a selection of smaller apps with a single gesture.

iPhone apps are looking pretty horrible on the iPad, but porting them to the huge screen doesn’t make sense for many of them. That’s why we need something in between.

Missed the latest episode of Lost? No problem, just watch it on Hulu. Wanna check out a new album? Ok, just go ahead, listen to it on Spotify. Maybe you prefer a decent internet radio? Just tune into Pandora. Afterwards you could watch a bunch of Youtube videos, if you wanna kill some time.

Isn't it great? Sure, if you're not living in Germany, where Hulu, Spotify and Pandora are prohibited, and YouTube seems to block any video that could be of any interest. 

These regional restrictions are really pissing me off! Why can't the content owners take the step into the 21st century? Within the internet there shouldn't be any artificial borders between countries at all. If I'm able to understand an undubbed episode of Lost, why prevent me from watching it? They should be able to find some advertisers for an international audience, if that’s their problem. 

The same goes for the iTunes store by the way. Why can't they just implement one big international store, with all content available for everybody, no matter from which country they are? But I guess that’s just too much to ask, isn't it?

Remember these old dock connector cables with the tabs on the side, that you have to press to release the plug from an iPod? I remember how weird the new shorter plugs felt, when I first got them. It took me while to get used to them, but now it's exactly the other way around. Every time I'm using one of the old cables it feels totally weird, and it's a pain in the ass to unplug them.

March is traditionally the time of the year where Apple gives us a preview of the next major version of the iPhone OS. Things might be a little different this year, because of the iPad launch, but I guess that they'll invite the usual suspects in the not so distant future to talk about iPhone OS 4.0.

Considering that iPhone OS 4.0 will most likely be the foundation of their iPhone business until mid 2011, they'll have to introduce some significant improvements, to stay ahead of the competition. I'm using my iPhone like crazy, and I'm quite satisfied with it, but there are a few things I'd like to see in the next iPhone OS.

For starters, Apple should refine their homescreen concept. Like I've written before, I'm not really satisfied with the current user experience, and considering the reactions on Twitter, I'm not the only one who thinks that way. A first and easy step to reduce clutter would be to stop forcing apps on users they don't want to use. Just give us an option to hide unused Apple apps. Now that's easy, but if they really want to improve things, they'll have to come up with something that goes a little further. A way to aggregate apps into categories would be great, maybe some sort of stack implementation? The big challenge is to do it without losing the basic concept that people got used to over the past three years.

That's not easy, but Apple has shown often enough that they can pull it off. Just think about the beautiful implementation of copy & paste for example. Speaking of copy & paste, I'd love to see a clipboard history on the iPhone. If you've ever used that on a Mac or PC, you'll know how much more convenient it makes copy & paste.

The refined homescreen should be accompanied by a vastly improved lockscreen, the current implementation is really poor. You shouldn't have to unlock your iPhone to get a quick overview of what's going on. Right now you can only see the latest missed call, message or push notification on your lockscreen. There isn't even a way to see if you've received an email, without unlocking your device. That has to change, no doubt about it. You should at least be able to see how many calls, messages, mails and push notifications you've missed. Ideally there should be some kind of API for developers, to let them bring additional information to your lockscreen.

Homescreen and lockscreen are both affected by Apples current implementation of push notifications, which is far from being perfect. Apple introduced them as an alternative to running 3rd party applications in the background. While they can't make up for background enabled apps in all use cases, they are doing just fine for a lot of things. I'm using them a lot, and that's where the problems begin. First of all they are very intrusive. No matter what you're doing, they just pop over your current application and interrupt whatever it is you're doing. This isn't a big problem when it happens once a week, but when you have to deal with it a few times a day, it's getting really annoying. It's even worse when you're on the phone, and it's chirping and beeping all the time. Is it so hard to mute the notifications during a call? Another problem is that the notifications aren't stored anywhere, so when you receive 5 notifications in a quick row, you miss the first 4 of them, and there's no way to figure out what's going on.

Instead of splashing the notifications on the middle of your screen, Apple could just enable a little sign in the status bar on top of your screen whenever new notifications arrive, optionally accompanied by an acoustic alert. Then all they need is a way to take a look at your notification inbox, and push notifications would be a lot more comfortable. In addition to that they should enhance the push settings with system wide quiet hours, during which all acoustic alerts are muted. I'd also like to configure how long my screen lights up after receiving a new notification. The current standard time is annoying and wastes valuable battery life.

In addition to these enhanced push notifications, I'd still like to see background enabled 3rd party apps. When I'm on my way somewhere on a saturday afternoon, I wanna be able to listen to a Bundesliga radio stream, while ranting about it on Twitter. If that sucks the life out of my battery, that's a risk I'm willing to take. End of discussion.

Another element Apple introduced with iPhone OS 3.0 is Spotlight. And it has been completely useless for me so far. One of the main problems is, that it doesn’t search within 3rd party apps, where much of my content is stored. But besides that, it doesn't even seem to work properly within the Apple apps. It simply doesn't find certain notes within the notes app for example. But even if it finds something, the displayed informations are almost completely useless. How am I supposed to differentiate 5 mails from the same person, all with the subject 'Re: yada yada yada'? At least give me 2 lines of the email body! Considering the small screen real estate of the iPhone, I'm having doubts if Apple is going to be able to fix Spotlight and make it a really useful feature.

The next big thing is wireless syncing. That should be a no brainer, because it would make things so much more comfortable. Don't you just hate it, when you have to hook up your iPhone to your Mac, just to get your latest songs?

Apropos songs. Let's talk about the iPod app for a while. I'd really love to see a full blown podcast client on the iPhone, that can update all your subscriptions directly on the device, without making me jump through any hoops. And it should always be in sync with my iTunes Podcast directory. I wanna be able to start listening to an episode on my iPhone, and seamlessly switch to the Mac without any active syncing on my part involved. The same goes for iTunes U subscriptions. Of course that includes the ability to subscribe to podcasts and iTunes U collections directly from within the iTunes app. Another detail Apple has completely fucked up is the missing horizontal scrolling for long song or podcast titles. Even my first iPod was able to do that, why isn't it possible on the iPhone? 

Last but not least Apple has to make some changes to the AppStore, but there's so much wrong, that it requires an article on its own. Just so much: Let me update apps from multiple accounts/stores at the same time, and shut the fuck up about my age!

In addition to these things there are a still lot of enhancements I'd like to see, like a unified inbox and full body search in Mail, a fullscreen mode in Safari, an equivalent to the camera roll for files, wireless sync and different fonts in the notes app, a smarter auto correction, and a way to quickly change the most important settings, like switching WiFi on or off for example, or my long time favorite, the landscape mode off switch.

I know that some of these features are possible via jailbreak, but that's no reason not to ask for them. Apple should reach out for the perfect user experience, and i hope that they'll deliver it. Plus one more thing of course. And iTunes X.

Don't you just hate this? Flash is crashing so much over here, that I'm getting real sick of this dialogue. There's nothing we can do about Flash's crappy performance and stability, besides trying to avoid it as much as possible, using tools like the awesome ClickToFlash, but there is something you can do about these annoying crash reports. By simply disabling the '..unexpectedly quit' dialogues.

All you need is a simple Terminal command:

defaults write com.apple.CrashReporter DialogType none

To turn them back on enter:

defaults write com.apple.CrashReporter DialogType prompt

Be aware that this will turn off all '..unexpectedly quit' dialogues, not only the ones regarding Flash. But if something fishy is going on with another app, which very rarely happens to me, you can always take a look at what's going on in the Console.app.

Today I've installed two new apps on my iPhone, and once again I ran into an inevitable problem, that seems to haunt me ever since Apple invented the wiggling icons. I had to rearrange my apps. Why? Because the two new apps just didn't feel right on the down right corner of the 4th homescreen. It's hard to explain, but it really bugs me when I have the feeling that my apps aren't in the perfect order.

So I started moving them around, first on the iPhone, and after a few minutes I connected my iPhone to iTunes, to make the whole process a little easier. But only to discover that what looked good on iTunes, didn’t work for me on the device. Like it almost never does. So I went back to moving icons around the iPhone, without finding a completely satisfying solution. Usually it gets a little better, if I don't look at my apps for a little while, and take a fresh look after a little break. 

But I still haven't figured out the best concept for a perfect set of homescreens. I separate all games on the last homescreen, and I'm fine with that, but I can't get my head around the other apps. The famous 1stand20 screen is quite easy, because it's reserved for the best apps, presumed their icon isn't intolerable. But how do you arrange the rest of the apps? Do you categorize them by what they're doing? Or do you try to find a good appearance only based on the look of the icons? And what about those apps with really crappy icons, where are you supposed to keep them?

It gets even more complicated when you consider that you're used to certain positions for certain apps. TV Forecast for example has always been on the 3rd row in the 1st column of its screen. Why? Probably just because I'm used to it.

I'm wondering if I'm the only one wasting so much time on these little details, and how you're handling this little problem. So if you've found the solution for this, please let me know.

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