iSights in the Monitors?

Dear Cupertino,

I know you guys are probably working on this, but since you stopped making the iSight as a standalone camera, the people with Mac Pro's have kinda been assed out!

iMacs have the cameras built in.

MacBooks do.

MacBook Pros do.

The Mac Pro people are kinda left out there hanging a bit without a camera to be able to talk to the rest of us!

So Apple, when you do your next monitor refresh and change your monitors from fluorescent to LCD, how about you throw an iSight in there too?

Thanks,

Joel

Posts

It's not that we haven't been posting because of lack of topics.  Chandler and I have been very very busy.

We are both security/network computer people at our day jobs and since this DNS vulnerability has come out, I know I have been working a hectic pace.

We'll get back to posting very very soon.

In the meantime be sure an enjoy the MobileMe status blog started by Apple.  Awesome!  

DearCupertino,

More Blogs.

Thanks.

The most advanced phone on the planet! Worst. Camera. Ever.

Dear Cupertino,

There has to be some sort of e-villainy going on here. 2.0MP? Really? No video? I mean, really?

Come on.

Come on.

It's really your fault. Your customers aren't the type that settle for anything but excellence and perfection. Why would we come to expect anything less than 110% from 1 Infinite Loop? We don't, that's why.

With that being said: What. The. Hell.

Your camera, sucks. 2.0MP in a world where we're seeing 5.0MP devices in the wild of which are doing video is completely unacceptable, especially for hardware graced with that half eaten biblical fruit. Let's stop kidding yourselves here, do what you know is right; for us.

I'd like to show you something that just might help out:

iPhone Camera done right!

Thanks!

Louis Harboe

Personal Domain, let's get full about it

Dear Cupertino,

I love MobileMe. I love how it pushes everything between my Mac, my PC and my iPhone. I love how the me.com website look and feels. But I don't use it. At least not my mail.
Why? Well, as many fellow geeks, I own a personal domain and have me and my family's mail-addresses there. And there is no easy way to use it with MobileMe. I can forward my mail to MobileMe, but I can't send it from MobileMe's servers. I can set up a different account and send it from my ISP's SMTP-servers. That, besides from being clumsy, won't work when I am, for example, visiting a friend using another ISP.
Why doesn't Apple allow this? I can point (using CNAME) my domain name to me.com and use MobileMe to host my website. Why can't I point my MX record, or maybe just forward my mails and use a SPF record in a TXT string? Come on Apple...

Christoffer Möller

More iPhone Please?

Dear Cupertino,

We had a bit of a rant awhile ago about Syncing To-Do's and what not.  While Omnifocus pretty much takes care of that, there is one more issue that does need addressing.  Notes.

Seriously.  You have this great Note interface in Mail.app, and you also have this great Notes app on the iPhone.  They walk alike they talk alike, they even have the same Marker font.

Hows about we chuck some kind of magic syncing action between the two devices?  Notes!

Now, I refuse to believe that you would let something slide like that, so I assume that you have something up your sleeve.  I asked for OTA Calendar syncing, Mail push, and Contact syncing awhile back, and you built MobileMe, which is a complete overhaul of the .mac system in order to be able to accomodate these features.  So I refuse to believe that you would let To-Do's and Notes not sync.  So what do you have up your sleeve?

Thanks!

Joel + 4 other Dear Cupertino Readers

Bluetooth Headphones

Dear Cupertino, 

I love the apple earbuds but, sometimes I want to destroy them because of the stupid wire that gets in the way! (especially when mowing the lawn). So why couldn't you create bluetooth headphones using basically the iPhone bluetooth headset? It shouldn't be that hard, just take out the microphone and label them L and R and you have great wireless headphones.

Thanks!  

Tyler

Editorial Note:  I don't really like the idea of wireless headphones.  I already have my jawbone that I have to charge, my iPhone that I have to charge.  What else?  I don't need more devices that I have to plug in on a daily basis.  I could see the novelty in it, but I'll just sling my earphones around the back of my head for now.  But I can see what the author is trying to do here, and this is a request that I have received alot since I have started the blog.  By the way, I am receiving suggestions all the time.  I just haven't had a lot of time recently to put them up.  So, I apologize.  Will get more articles up. 

iChat improvements

Dear Cupertino,

I love iChat.  I love its integration with Address Book, I love its integration with Mail, I love the fact that iChat has an AV component.

Couple suggestions however?

1)  One contact window.  I personally have three jabber accounts (one being Gmail), one AIM account, and a Me.com account.  This takes up almost my whole screen in lateral space.  How about one contact window?  I mean, Chax figured out how to do it, take some intel from Chax, and some intel from Adium on how to combine contacts, and you've got it!

2)  Yahoo IM?  I am probably guessing that you have a contract with AOL to only provide support for Jabber + AIM.  But if that's not true, then let's get Yahoo on board?  Yes, I understand their protocol isn't standards based like AIM or Jabber and I'm not going to expect to you to integrate with MSN.

3)  Allow for some resizing of the contact list.  I have hundreds of people in my contact list, and that's only on my company's internal server!  Let alone all of the contacts I have through AIM and GTalk!

That's all, just a couple thoughts.  Thanks!

Joel 

Me.com licensing

Dear Cupertino,

Check this out, here's a thought, instead of charging one fee for every piece of software, how about, for those people who are MobileMe customers, allow us to buy software per account?

Meaning that I can not only buy Apple Software and download it through my MobileMe account, but it's also licensed that way.  So I can have a certain piece of software on every computer that belongs to my MobileMe account?  So I can buy a MobileMe licensed version of iLife, and not 10 different copies.  Or iWork maybe?

All I'm saying is that, why do I need to make a trip to the store, and make you waste all kinds of packaging, paper, trees, gas, time, etc..  When I can just download an app straight from Apple.com, and then deploy it to all of 'my computers'?

Thanks!

Dear Cupertino Reader

Bluetooth is for more than headsets?!

Dear Cupertino,

We have the iPhone, we have the Aluminum Keyboard; can they be friends?

I mean, they both talk the same language. I'm sure they have a lot of catching up to do. Let's put them in a room together and see what happens, hell, we'll throw a bottle of cheap scotch in there too.

Imagine the possibilities of taking your keyboard/iPhone on a short trip and having an amazing amount of functionality within two pieces of equipment. Given the eventual enterprise applications built within 2.0 and the endless possibilities of the App Store; keyboard control of your iPhone is just, plain, sexy.

Sexy.

Thanks!

Dear Cupertino Reader.

Back to my Mac, from my iPhone

Dear Cupertino,

What would be really cool would be if it was possible to use your iPhone or iPod Touch to access all the files on your Mac, like a "Back to My Mac" style service. However, you would just be able to browse the Finder and access files, not so much VNC kind of app.  That would be so useful if you forgot something at home.  Combine that with OTA Bonjour network printing and compatibilty with Wi-Fi projectors, and you'd be set.

Thanks!

Will

The biggest little iPod in the world

Dear Cupertino,

It's time, it's time for the 16GB nano.

The biggest workhorse in your arsenal, the nano does so much more. It does much more than play the music it holds. Given the color options, the size, the switch to SSD's, and now the inclusion of video -- let's kick it up a notch.

Make the 4GB and the 17'' iMac best friends in heaven, explain to the 8GB why his older brother had to "move on", and let's get a leaner, meaner, more capable nano to take his place on stage. Can anyone really see a downside to this? Can you visualize the glory? I know I can.

Imagine going into your iPod. Navigating arguably the easiest and most refreshing UI out there. Selecting option after option so effortlessly, almost as if you, the customer, have been asked what you want. What happens when you get to the part about capacity? Oh, what's that?! Yes, that's 16GB of pure power. I don't know about you guys, but I can't wait to put a full lossy collection of ELP on there. Don't forget to pick up a set of Ety ER4-P's to really let those vocals shine!

Thanks!

Chandler & Christian

PS, thanks for welcome Joel, great to be here.

Some more administrative stuff

Two quick things, 

First, I added another blogger to write with me!  Friend of mine by the name of Chandler Bassett. He's a fellow Mac guy as well,  he'll be writing articles and taking feedback.

I'm also interested in adding maybe one or two other bloggers as well, to get alot of different points of view.  Kind of a Gizmodo/Engadget style of writing?  If you are interested, please feel free to email me here.

Second, In all the moving around that took place with the domains..  The rss feed moved as well.  So I put the RSS feed over on Feedburner for syndication.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/DearCupertino is the address.  Please subscribe there with your favorite reader.

Digg and Digg Buttons

First off, as you can see, I added Digg buttons to all the articles.  That way, you can digg up your favorite story or submission.

Second off, someone kindly submitted the whole blog to Digg already.  Click here to go Digg it up!  Thanks!

iTablet

Dear Cupertino,

I've received about 20 emails on this subject, so let me consolidate them all into one post, plus add a little color commentary about it as well.

The rumored iTablet.  Apple taking the iPhone technology and making it bigger.  Touchscreen notebook.  iPhone being a bit bigger so that someone can use it as a book reader.

There are so many topics that this was written in about, however, I feel they all cover one thing.  Just basically a bigger form factor iPhone, or a touchscreen laptop.  I think is an interesting idea for a couple reasons, one I'll touch on here, which is basically UI, the other I'll post about later in a totally different topic..

The tablets that are out there, with MSFT Windows on it, have not have the tablet technology implemented correctly.  All the tablet is, it a computer with a pen as a mouse.  This is not a tablet.  By definition yes, but it doesn't feel like a great computing experience.  

An example of what I mean by this, take cut and paste for instance.  Or say you want to save, the picture on this post off.  Right now with present tablet tech, you'd have to put the pen where you want it, line it up, hold the cursor down, and select the text, just like a mouse, then Click on the Edit menu, click copy, click where you want it, then click paste.  Yuk.

In my opinion, if I want to copy an image, or a piece of text, or a section of a webpage (much like the technology Apple has to implement a webclip for dashboard), I should take the pen, draw a circle around the piece i want to select, click the pen and drag it off.  Done.  That's the way it should be implemented.  Little things like that.  It should be intuitive.  I have used tablets, and I don't think they have the tech correct yet.  I don't think the writing tech is where it's at yet.

Now, a company out there called Axiotron has developed a piece of tech called the "Modbook".  Which as they say is a Macbook, which some extra software and hardware.  It's getting there, but I don't know if this is "it" yet.  Plus, the price point is too high for a normal user.

Please, if you have more comments about your ideas for the iTablet, please leave them in the comments.

Thanks!

Joel + about 20 others.

iPhone General Enhancements

(Please read the entry inline, for my comments, in italics.)

Dear Cupertino,

Come home and set my mobile in its dock and have all of my phone messages available on my computer screen, both home phone and mobile.

I assume this reader is talking about his visual voicemail.  I could see how this would be handy, but it would be difficult to implement.

Answer the mobile and home phones on the home phone.

You might want to look into something like Grand Central from Google.

Have the transmitter antenna for my wireless phone outside the house far away from my head.

While I see this would be a good idea, I don't see an easy way to implement this in any fashion.

A button on my phone that could answer during meetings with customized answers such as: This is Mark, I see you have called, I'll call back soon, can I call you on this number nnn-nnn-nnnn? Or 'please send me a text/ email'.

What you should do is set your voicemail answering message to this.  Then if people call during a meeting, tap the top standby twice.  This sends people straight to voicemail.

When reaching an associates phone message, have available the ability to send a test.

I don't know what this means.

Schedule delivery of phone messages so that I could leave messages at odd hours that can be held until the listener retrieves then.

Yes, this would be ideal.  Basically having a way of delivering voicemail straight to a person without actually having to call their phone.  That way, you want to leave a reminder on your co-workers voicemail at 3 in the morning, and not wake your coworker up.  You can do this now, but it's not easily done.

Have auto attendant triage calls so that only emergency or family calls can disturb me at certain times, perhaps, limit the ability to ring through to certain address book entries or require caller to agree to a prompt such as 'Is this call urgent?' or 'Is leaving a message an acceptable choice."

You need to look into Grand Central from Google.  This may be able to solve your issues.

Thanks!

Mark (with comments from Joel)

Location based weather on the iPhone

Dear Cupertino,

One thing I'd really like to see is location based weather updates for the iPhone. I would have it so that the first location listed in the weather app would be one such that it would find your current location and then tell you what the weather is where you are. There, of course, would be the ability to add other locations like it is now, but one that would change based on your current location would be handy. This is just something I thought of earlier this week when wanting to know what the temperature was outside. It would have been nice if it told me what it was in the area I was. 

One extra thing to do with the weather app. I want it to update the icon like it does for the calender so that you always have an accurate representation of the weather.   There could be an option to have this change with location as well.

(Editorial Note -- I think this is a great idea.  You could even do it now with location based services such as AGPS and Wifi Triangulation services.  I don't know if you'd want to fire up the GPS everytime you checked the weather.)

Thanks!

Jeremy

Posts

Administrative newsy note.

I'm not always going to just post ideas submitted, I am going to provide alot of commentary and what not as well.  I realize that this is a new blog, but I have been blogging for about 4 years now, and am well accustomed to it.  

But since this blog started I've received about 200 suggestions and emails, and am just trying to filter through all the duplicates.  I've posted a couple that stand out a bit and will be drastically improving the commentary as well.  Right now, there is alot to wade through, and will be taking the awesome hundreds of suggestions I have received and consolidating the duplicates, making sense of the ones that don't and posting commentary on the products or ideas that I have received that I don't think Apple would make, and why.  Thanks.

iApp integration

Dear Cupertino,

While I may realize this is as much Adobe's fault as it is Apple's (Probably more Adobe's..)

One idea I'd like to see is to have Apple work on integrating iPhoto/Aperture with the Adobe Creative suite. When in photoshop you should be able to select an "import from iphoto library" option. That would be sweet.

Thanks!

Dear Cupertino Reader

Get Info

Dear Cupertino,

When you click on a dock icon till you get the pop-up menu, why can't you "Get info" on an app without first selecting "Show in  finder" ???

Get info should be one of the options.

Thanks,

Dear Cupertino Reader

Apple Home Server

Dear Cupertino,

For families with more than one mac who want to keep pictures, movies, and music the same, or just be able to access it easily from all computers the Apple Home Server is made for them. Uses 802.11n or wired networking, uses bonjour to find all your computers in the house. Here are some pictures of the idea.  (This guy was kind enough to send a picture!)

Thanks,

Tyler

(Editorial Note -- Time Machine or the Apple Extreme Base station with a Drive attached via USB, I believe, fills this need.  You can have all your machines backed up and even use the drive for Network Attached Storage, it has 802.11n, and 4 Gig ethernet connections on the back.)

Moved the Domain around a bit

Sorry about that for anyone that was trying to visit the site.

You may notice a bit of a change, I moved the blog from my .mac account over to blogspot.  That way I won't exceed my bandwidth stats, and I won't have to do funky stuff to get all the custom javascript code to work.

(I love iWeb, but sometimes it can be difficult)

So, now the blog is here.

Over-The-Air syncing with iTunes

Dear Cupertino,

Okay, you have figured out MobileMe, which figures out OTA syncing with iCal, Mail, and Address Book. Three things I actually filed a feature request for in the Apple Developer portal.

However, there is one part that you haven’t implemented yet. Syncing of Music with iTunes. Obviously you know how to do it, as the AppleTV does it. But it seems to me that if your iPhone comes into your house, and automagically joins your home Wireless Access point, bonjour should find the machine it’s tied to to sync, and sync its music.

Thanks!
Dear Cupertino Readers

MMS on the iPhone

Dear Cupertino,

I’ve had about 30 people write in with this one. Frankly I agree. Now I don’t know everything there is to know about iPhone and Cell technology, but it seems if every other phone in the world can send photos through MMS, why can’t the iPhone?

It’s great to be able to send photo’s via email, but you know, sometimes (read: never) I don’t know the email address of my friend’s phones. Please? MMS.

Thanks!

Dear Cupertino readers

Copy and Paste on the iPhone

Dear Cupertino,

I literally received about 10 emails and more than enough comments about this one already, and the blog hasn’t even been up 24 hours yet.

There are several people that sent this in, and while I won’t name them all, I think them all to be correct. Copy and Paste on the iPhone. I received an awesome email today, a very long email, and funny enough, the email was written on an iPhone. So without further ado, I am going to post it here for all to see.

“There are currently 3 major ways to copy text on a computer: menu bar, keyboard shortcut, and the right click. The first two options are largely unfeasible on the iPhone: the menu bar because it takes up too much screen space to be practical, and the keyboard because it doesn't exist.  So the only two options are to find a right click analogy on the iPhone or go with something entirely new. The first option is better because 1) it is easier for users to understand as it corresponds to something they already know, and 2) because it is easier on apple since they already know how to implement it.

The right click I have in mind is the tap and hold. This gesture is basically unused right now on the iPhone, which is a shame because it is so basic. Tap and hold only does one thing currently: if you tap and hold on a link or picture in safari, a popup window appears with that link's info. In iPhone 2.0, using this gesture on a picture will bring up a menu of actions, one of which is download... Basically exactly what a right click would do. So apple seems to understand that the tap and hold has to become the new right click. All they need to do now is to make it universal, by which I mean that tap and holding pretty much anything will cause a context sensitive menu to pop up.

Since this is supposed to be about copying text I will limit my analysis to what should happen when you tap and hold over text.  First off the menu pops up on the bottom half of the screen, and the top half centers on the place tapped. If it is zoomed out, the text zooms in to become readable. The first, and for our purposes the only, item in the menu is HIGHLIGHT. When this option is selected, the menu screen goes away, and the word closest to where you touched becomes highlighted blue, with two transparent and pulsating semicircle icons flanking the word. The straight line of each semicircle is the text boundary for the highlighted region. Each semicircle is draggable. When you drag one of them, the loop comes up for precise placement. When you have highlighted exactly what you want, tap on the highlighted region to open the clipboard menu, copy being the first option, or double tap on it to automatically copy and deselect the text. To deselect without copying, either select CANCEL in the clipboard menu, or double tap anywhere outside the highlighted region. I feel a double tap is necessary because a single tap would cause too many accidental deselections.

At this point you probably have two questions. 1) okay... So now how do I paste? And 2) wait a minute, in editable text the tap and hold gesture brings up the loop, so how do I copy editable text? Both fine questions with a very similar answer: the keyboard/menu bar. In any editable text field the keyboard is accessible, so whenever you want to paste anywhere or copy from editable text, you have access to the keyboard. You may have also noticed that in some keyboards there is a dark grey menu bar right above it, usually with PREVIOUS and NEXT buttons in it. Well, why not make that menu bar persistent, and allow clipboard functions to be accessible from it? I'm thinking 5 persistent keyboard menu bar icons. From left to right: menu, highlight, copy, paste, done. Menu is basically the command modifier key. Tapping it turns the entire keyboard into app specific actions: print, font, indentation, basically stuff that wasn't important enough to put into the menu bar.  Tapping the highlight icon creates the double semicircle highlight thing around your text curser. Tapping copy copies highlighted text. Tapping paste will paste the last copied text starting at where the text curser is, and tapping done will make the keyboard disappear.

That's the basics of it. There are a few extra things to be taken into consideration, but nothing a bit of product testing can't solve. My approach allows you to copy text wherever there is text. Everything from album names in iTunes to the 10:35 PM in your menu bar is fair game to my approach. And most importantly, my approach does so in a way that is super easy to understand, using simple gestures and unburied menu options that even a novice user will eventually stumble upon.”

Thank you Max for writing it down like that.

Thanks Apple!

Dear Cupertino Readers

My First Day on the Job

Well I started this blog this morning, and, as you can see from the front page, I already have over 3000 hits at the time of this writing. So THANKS for the awesome response.

(Yeah, and being posted on Gizmodo helps a bit I guess)

Anyway, I have received about 50 emails full of suggestions, (of which I had to write them all back and ask for manual confirmation of a disclaimer!

I also added some text to the front page that gives me permission to use the suggestions that are emailed to me. (The disclaimer) The hard part for me is going to be sifting through the duplicates, but I guess that’s what I get! I promise I won’t blog about the blog or about me on here, (I’ll save that for my personal blog) this will all be Apple stuff, but thanks for the response!

Oh, and to answer the question I have received about 10x already, why did I name the blog “DearCupertino”. Because DearApple, DearMrJobs, and DearSteve.com’s were all already taken. Parked.

To-Do's

Dear Cupertino,

I’m not going to start off this blog by simply posting a bunch of stuff I’ve said elsewhere, but I wanted to say this first.

To-Do’s. You have a great system of To-Do’s within OSX, and I have a bunch of suggestions for them, but first, let’s start with the biggest thing.

To-Do Syncing with the iPhone.

See, now you have MobileMe coming out, you have the To-Do system within OSX, you have the technology to do it, it would probably take you guys literally one day to write an update to the iPhone and an app that would sync To-Do’s from your system to the iPhone. Even if I had to plug it in (not go through the push system of MobileMe) to sync the To-Do’s, I’d do that.

Even though it’s not ideal, and preferably should be a push technology through MobileMe. Having one set of Global To-Do’s easily accessible from any device, always up to date, without having to use a 3rd party website.

Ideal.

Thanks,
Joel

Welcome

Hello, my name is Joel Esler, you may recognize my name from such things as the Internet Storm Center, the Internet Storm Center Podcast, or my main blog at www.joelesler.net

I started this blog, (and subsequent projects stemming from it) with the intention of writing down all the things I wish Apple would build, or features they’d place into their products.

I don’t know if anyone from Apple will read this, it would be cool if they did, hopefully take some of our suggestions and run with them.

I use the pronouns “our” and “we” because I want people to email me with suggestions. I am of the reality that eventually, I will run out of ideas. I’ll need some more from you guys. So please, email me at the link on the right.

I see various other websites trying to do the same thing, but they are essentially parked. No one is doing anything with them! So here we go!

See you on the email!