Posts Tagged ‘Stocks’
Dear Apple: What we want to see in iPhone 4.0, part 2
January 17th, 2010
Dear Apple: What we want to see in iPhone 4.0, part 2
First, I want to take a moment to thank all of you. The response to the first open letter has been incredible, and it wouldn’t have been possible without your suggestions. This is the second in a series of letters from you, the TUAW reader, to Apple. This time around I received over 1500 emails with suggestions on how to improve the next iPhone’s hardware.
While the next iPhone is expected sooner this year than in past years, and the hardware design has most likely long since been finalized, it’s clear that plenty of you have your own ideas of how you want the next-generation iPhone to look and work. With that in mind, even though the next iPhone’s hardware may be a done deal, let’s hope Apple uses your suggestions in a future iPhone (or, if they use these suggestions in the upcoming one — congrats, you guys are genius-level industrial designers!). Remember, these suggestions and desires don’t necessarily align with the ideals of better battery life and 3G call performance… it’s a wish list, not an engineering manual, and we do realize that reality can easily get in the way of the perfect design.
Just like last time, because there were so many suggestions, I needed to whittle them down. To do that, I tabulated how many times a feature request was made. If more than 40% of you mentioned it, it made it into the letter. A lot of you want to hear the one-off suggestions so I’ll add an extra letter onto the series at the end of its run to address those.
Remember, this letter deals only with iPhone hardware. If you made suggestions about any of Apple’s built-in apps (Mail, Maps, Stocks, Calendar, etc) you’ll see those in the next letter.
Without further ado, I present your letter to Apple:
Dear Apple,
While your hottest competitor isn’t off to the best start, that could change on a dime. Most smartphone users, it seems, use the same apps. So what differentiates the phones? Well, the OS and the hardware. We already addressed the OS. Now let’s talk hardware. Here’s what we’d love to see:
1. Status indicator light.
90% of us want this. Some of us think a series of green dots (ala the MacBook’s battery indicator lights) that flash when we have a new text or voicemail message would be cool, while some of us want a pulsating light like the sleep light on a MacBook. A few of us even think an illuminated Apple logo that pulsates when we’ve missed a call would be novel. While you may laugh at the last suggestion, it illustrates the fact that we’re dying for a status indicator light in some form.
2. A new design casing.
90% of us think the 3G and 3GS are starting to look their age (and hey, in tech, a device that hasn’t changed looks in 18 months looks ancient). We want a thinner casing – approaching iPod touch thinness, if possible (a tough request, we know, considering how much room the radios take up in the iPhone). We also want the new iPhone casing to have a look that mimics the industrial design of the aluminum unibody finish on the MacBooks – in other words, we love this mock-up Gizmodo did.
3. Front-facing camera.
80% of us want a front-facing video chat camera. Why? Because 80% of us believe we are good-looking enough that the people we talk to want to see us. It might also be good for conference calls: turn the iPhone to its side and see up to three people on your screen at once.
4. LED flash. 
Yeah, 75% of us believe the iPhone blows at taking low-light pictures. It’s not exactly unreasonable to ask for a flash on phones nowadays.
5. 5MP+ camera.
70% of us want a new 5MP camera (or above) to go along with that new LED flash.
6. OLED display.
70% of us think the iPhone’s 320×480 screen is a little too dainty for today’s standards. We want a higher screen resolution to make our text and games pop and we think that higher res should be 480×800 on an OLED display for its clarity, thinness, and battery saving abilities.
7. 64GB storage.
We’ve downloaded over 3 billion apps. Add those to the video we’re now recording on our iPhones, in addition to all our songs and photos, and one thing seems becomes obvious: 32GB doesn’t seem enough anymore. 60% of us ask that you plop 64GB of flash RAM in the next iPhone.
8. 802.11n.
We’re dying to have Wi-Fi syncing, but we realize that 802.11g might not be fast enough. 50% of us want faster wireless so we can sit on our couch and sync the latest photos and videos we took with our iPhone to the computer in the den.
9. RFID.
Why? Besides some pretty cool near-object-based interaction, imagine the next iPhone eliminating the need to carry car keys or credit cards. Key fobs and ’smart’ credit cards use a type of RFID called Near 
Field Communication. NFC consumes very little power, so it’s attractive to add to mobile phones. Instead of using our keys to enter that new Prius, imagine just having the doors auto-unlock when we get in range of our car, or by launching an app.
Better yet, let us leave our wallets at home. What if Apple teamed with Visa or MasterCard? We download the Visa app and use it to review our purchase right on the screen, then we simply swipe our iPhone at checkout and we’re on our way. And we’re sure you guys at Apple wouldn’t mind take a half percentage point of every transaction too (from the credit card companies, not us!). You’ve already redefined the music, movie, mobile, and (soon enough) publishing industries. We think the credit card companies could use some Apple ingenuity as well.
10. Multi-touch casing.
This one seemed like a long shot until recent rumors, but 40% of us would like to see some Magic Mouse-type love applied to the iPhone. The iPhone has a lot of surface area that isn’t the screen. What if this currently un-utilized area could be transformed into a multi-touch surface? Imagine each side by the home button and speaker slit as a multi-touch area. When playing a video game in landscape mode, this new multi-touch surface could be used as physical buttons for some games, saving the display from your fingers and allowing you to see more of the action on screen.
So there you have it: our suggestions for future iPhone hardware. But we’re not done. We’ve got a lot to say about the iPhone’s built-in apps. So get ready, and thanks for listening. You’ll be hearing from us again soon.
Sincerely,
The loyal readers and iPhone owners of TUAW.
TUAW Readers: The next letter will be published one week from today, on Sunday 1/24. We’ll be telling Apple what we want from the next iPhone’s built-in apps. So if you have any suggestions for the next version of Mail, Calendar, Messages, Phone, iPod, Photos, Camera, Stocks, YouTube, Maps, Weather, Voice Memos, Notes, Clock, Calculator, or Compass (whew!) email me attuawiphone [at] me dot com (by mid-day, Friday, January 22nd at the latest)!
A big thanks to the 1500+ of you who contributed to this article. ‘White iPhone’ credit: Rodolphe Desmare.
TUAWDear Apple: What we want to see in iPhone 4.0, part 2 originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sun, 17 Jan 2010 20:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Tags: Address, Apps, Battery Life, Competitor, Desires, Feature Request, Genius Level, Hardware Design, Hope Apple, Industrial Designers, Iphone, Iphone 4, Last Time, Mail, Maps, Next Generation, Perfect Design, Stocks, Whittle, Wish List | 
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Dear Apple: What we want to see for iPhone 4.0, part 1
January 11th, 2010
Dear Apple: What we want to see for iPhone 4.0, part 1
A week ago we asked you, the TUAW reader, to help us tell Apple what you want in the next iPhone: the OS, the apps, the hardware. Within two hours, I had over two hundred emails in my inbox. Within four days, the email total topped 1,100. As I was shifting and sorting through all your suggestions, one thing became clear: you love the iPhone, but you want to see it better, more intuitive, and more versatile – and you know how the iPhone can accomplish those goals.
This is the first of a series of letters to Apple on your behalf, telling the gang in Cupertino what would make their wonder-phone even more wondrous. This letter strictly focuses on the iPhone OS in general – the home screen, navigation, and settings. Future letters will deal with hardware and applications.
There were so many suggestions, I needed to whittle them down. To do that, I tabulated how many times a feature request was made. If more than 50% of you mentioned it, it made it into the letter. If you guys want to see the others (most were one-offs or had less that 15% of you requesting it), perhaps I’ll add an extra letter onto the series at the end of its run.
Remember, if you made suggestions about any of Apple’s built-in apps (Mail, Maps, Stocks, Calendar, etc) or hardware, you won’t see those here, but in an upcoming letter dealing specifically with those areas.
I hope Apple is listening, because the readers of TUAW have spoken, and this is what they have to say:
Dear Apple,
While it’s clear the iPhone is the best smartphone on the market right now, you have a lot of competition creeping up. We want to help you blow them out of the water with the iPhone OS 4.0. Here are our suggestions:
1. The lock screen needs to change.
90% of us want a new lock screen. We think the current screen that only shows the date and time, and only the most recent missed call or SMS, is not particularly helpful. If you get a text message, then a calendar alert, and then a push notification, the only one you see is the push notification message. Being able to swipe through them or have a table list would be far more useful. But even then, we still have to enter our four-digit unlock code to see if we’ve received any new emails. From the new lock screen we want to see all the calls we’ve missed and the number of new emails and texts we have. We want to see which apps have sent us push notifications, and what appointments are coming up. We want a brief overview of all the new data we’ve received to be presented to us before we have to enter our unlock code.
Let’s extend the features of that new lock screen to …
2. A new home screen. The iPhone is the smartest phone on the market. Make is smarter. Introduce a location-aware home screen.
Over 90% of us also want a new home screen – and we want it location aware. Let’s say we live in London, but travel to continental Europe many times a month. We’d love to turn on our iPhones in the country we just landed in and see the local weather, currency, transit maps, and news displayed right on our home screens. Not only would it save us time and money, it would save something just as valuable to an iPhone owner – battery life. If all these things were displayed on the home screen the first time you turn on your phone, you wouldn’t have to open five different applications to get what you want.
Imagine a ‘Genius Location’ feature as well: the iPhone would show you (through an app like Yelp – or a new Apple-branded app) what restaurants or businesses are around based on your ‘likes’ in your home town. We know you were granted a ‘Transitional Data Sets‘ patent for a location-based home screen back in February 2008 – let’s hope this sees the light of day in iPhone OS 4.0.
3. That new home screen? Let us access it by vertically swiping.
Imagine this: no matter what home screen page you’re on, if you swipe up you are presented with a ‘feeds screen’ that works much like an RSS page. This feeds screen could be set based on in-app preferences so we could fully customize it. Ours might show our latest Facebook posts, last five emails received, our To Do notes, our Mint.com balance, missed calls, text messages, and upcoming iCal events. The guys at teehan+lax have a pretty cool mock-up of this feeds screen, but the killer feature would be how you could access it from any app page – by vertically swiping.
4. Overhaul app navigation.
85% of us think it takes too long to swipe through all our pages of apps. Even though iTunes 9 made a step in the right direction by allowing the user to organize apps and home screen pages visually, there has got to be a better way. Swiping through ten screens to get to the last apps page is tedious.
Wouldn’t it be cool if you could press the home button and see all the home pages on one screen? The guys at Ocean Observations think so. Check out this concept video of what this feature would look like (their ‘Cover Flow Multitasking‘ concept is quite cool as well). Don’t want to do it their way? Give us stacks, give us folders, give us App Store-like category views. Just give us something that makes it easier to get around our deluge of apps.
5. 85% of us want multitasking and 3rd party background apps (but not at the cost of battery life).
There’s not much more to say on this matter, but Palm does it, and if you can find a way around their battery drain, we want it!
6. Almost 80% of us want Flash, even if it’s a bad idea.
No, not camera flash (we do, but that’s for the next letter). We want Adobe’s Flash Player, though Flash on the Mac is a giant performance and stability headache. Get your heads together with Adobe and make it happen (and fix the Mac version while you’re about it, please).
7. We love that you introduced landscape mode across virtually all apps in iPhone OS 3.0, but 70% of us want the ability to selectively turn it off.
Give us a setting to switch off the automatic “turn to landscape mode” when the device is turning. Why? When we lay in bed on our side we can’t read our mail. The app is always turning and that’s really annoying. A system-wide ‘ignore orientation’ switch would be a good start; app-by-app options would be better.
8. When we leave an app, we want it to remember where we were.
If we click on a link in an app that takes us to Safari or if we switch apps to copy/paste, 70% of us want the app to remember where we were in it when we come back to it. Some apps do this, some don’t. Make this an OS-level feature so they all do it.
That Stocks app? Cute, but the Yahoo! Finance [iTunes] app is so much better. We don’t need both on our phones.
10. 60% of us want a universal “documents” folder.
We want one location, accessible to all apps, to store documents on the iPhone. Whether we need to send that PDF via IM through Nimbuzz or via email through the built-in Mail app, it’s no problem. Either one can do it because the docs are all stored in one place, accessible to all apps. (We realize this breaks the sandboxing model that prevents one app from blowing away data belonging to another one, but we have every confidence you can make it work.)
11. Better Support for Codecs and Add-ons.
It’s not just Flash, you know. WMV and AVI still rule on lots of sites. Let us see them (60%).
12. The iPhone is a hard drive with a screen, so….
Give us Disk mode in the OS. 50% of us want to use our iPhone as an external USB/Wi-Fi hard drive.
FYI, Apple, this is just the start. We’ve got so many more thoughts to share with you about the next iPhone’s hardware and apps. So get ready, and thanks for listening. You’ll soon be hearing from us again.
Sincerely,
The loyal readers and iPhone owners of TUAW.
TUAW Readers: The next letter will be published one week from today on Sunday 1/17. We’ll be telling Apple what we want from the next iPhone’s hardware. Want a different enclosure? Camera flash? RFID? OLED? Email me at tuawiphone [at] me dot com (by mid-day, Friday, January 15th at the latest)!
A big thanks to the 1100+ of you who contributed to this article. iPhone homepage sketch by reader ‘Fab.’
TUAWDear Apple: What we want to see for iPhone 4.0, part 1 originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sun, 10 Jan 2010 21:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Take your apps to the table with these iPhone icon coasters
November 29th, 2009
Take your apps to the table with these iPhone icon coasters
With over 100,000 applications available, there’s no shortage of ways people are using the iPhone’s features. But how about on the coffee table or in the dining room?
A new website is offering sets of coasters featuring the iPhone’s default application icons. According to the website, the coasters are genuine app icon enlargements from the iPhone 1.1.4 firmware. They also have a non-slip cork backing and are heat resistant. If you or someone you know is a big iPhone lover, this would be a great one to add to the holiday wish list.
iPhoneAppsCoasters.com is offering three sets including:
- “Core Apps” featuring SMS, Calendar, Phone, Mail, Safari and iPod
- “Home Apps” featuring Notepad, Settings, Camera, Calculator, Clock and Address Book
- “Media Apps” featuring Maps, YouTube, Stocks, Video, Weather and Photos
The three “sets” each retail for around $19 USD. Here’s some shots of the coasters:
Gallery: iPhone Coasters
Thanks to Chris Pirillo
TUAWTake your apps to the table with these iPhone icon coasters originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sat, 28 Nov 2009 22:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Tags: Address Book, Address Maps, Calculator, Chris Pirillo, Clock, Coasters, Coffee Table, Core Apps, Cork, Default Application, Dining Room, Iphone, Nbsp, Notepad, Phone Mail, Safari, Stocks, Tuaw, Weather Photos, Wish List |
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The Secret Behind the Real Time Web; A Video From Inside FriendFeed
August 14th, 2009
The Secret Behind the Real Time Web; A Video From Inside FriendFeed
There’s no end of talk about the benefits of the real time web these days, but what’s going on behind the scenes? What do the nuts and bolts look like? Is it standards based code on scalable servers? Is it hyper-active little elves?
FriendFeed product manager Dan Hsiao and company intern Ross Miller released a short video today from deep inside the core of that innovative company that Facebook just paid $50m in cash and stocks to purchase. Now that FriendFeed has had its exit, the staff must feel comfortable opening up a little to the world and letting us see what really goes on there.
Sponsor
We thought it was elves, but this is probably the most scalable solution available. Just snap on more of the same infrastructure and you’re ready to rock and roll.
Posted in Read Write Web |
Tags: 50m, Deep Core, Exit, Infrastructure, Innovative Company, Little Elves, Nuts And Bolts, Nuts Bolts, Real Time, Real Video, Ross Miller, Scalable Servers, Scalable Solution, Stocks, Time Web, Web Video |
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