iWork Improvements

Righto - more and more suggestions! Keep em coming to joel [dot] esler [at] me [dot] com!

Dear Cupertino,



I love the simplicity of iWork. It's a great alternative to the Microsoft Office Suite for Mac, and, being an Apple product, you know that It Just Works. Creating fancy slideshows in Keynote is as easy as creating professional ones, and writing a letter or a resume in Pages is but one click away. Numbers, while not as fully-featured as Excel, makes spreadsheets easy for the uninitiated.

However, there are two things I'd like to see in the next iWork update:

• The ability to copy and paste data into the graph data box in Pages.
  Why this isn't already a feature I don't quite understand, but graphs in Pages seem a lot harder to do than their Numbers counterparts. Unless I'm missing something profoundly simple, this just isn't possible with Pages graphs. Pages' graphs in general, are not intuitive, they're finnicky, and generally require a lot of messing around to work right.

• One click line of best fit.
  Again, unless I'm missing something that's staring me in the face, I'm not quite sure why it's so hard to draw a line of best fit for the data given in a Numbers graph. Numbers is great in that it automatically shows us the sum, average, max/min values of any selected data, but seriously - why no line of best fit? This is another feature that should have come standard. I mean, sure, it can be done - but it should be easier than that, Apple.

That concludes my rather short list of iWork suggestions. If I've missed anything you'd like to see added, shout out in comments below.

Thanks,
Benny Ling.

iPhone + iTunes: A perfect combination.

So we've been doing a couple of iPod and iTunes improvements, but what about the awesome iPhone and iTunes combination?

There are just a couple of suggestions we have in mind...

Dear Cupertino,

• Folders for applications on the iPhone.
  Please, for those of us that are hitting your 144-apps barrier, we need these desperately! We'll not only be buying more apps from the App Store as a result, but also using our iPhones more if we can find these apps and store then in folders. Repeat app usage would also go up. I mean really, Apple. There are more than hundreds of useful apps on the App Store, and yet you limit us to only 144 of these?! Not to mention, the 9 page limit on home screens... needless to say, it's incredibly annoying to have to swipe through 9 pages of apps just to find that one you want...

• Ability to arrange Apps on the iPhone from iTunes
  Now - I hate dragging around apps on my iPhone. When you have full home screens, dragging around apps is a pain in the proverbial - for example, dragging an app from home screen 4 to home screen 2 - with a full home screen 3 inbetween. An app then gets displaced from home screen 3 (as you can't drag over more than one home screen at a time), and then you have to waste time dragging the displaced app from home screen 4 back to home screen 3... Seriously, have I lost anyone yet?! See how complicated it is?!
  If we could only arange our apps from iTunes - dragging with a mouse is so much easier than dragging with your finger.

• Some sort of interaction with iTunes when your iPhone is plugged in.
  Say you have your iPhone plugged in, and you get a text message. Instead of displaying that text message on the iPhone screen, iTunes would then pop up something on your Mac/Windows display saying that you've got a new message... Same goes for phone calls and so on.
  

There are a whole lot more fixes that we want - but they're far too numerous to list here. Leave a comment, though - any new material can be provided via Joel - shoot him an email at joel.esler[at]me.com with any ideas you have about Apple improvements, and we'll do our best to make something of it.

Oh Apple - one more thing. Where are my push notifications?!

Ah well, 2.3 it is, then...

Thanks,
Chris (with parts from Benny).

What we'd like to see: iPod

Right, seeing as we've reached 50 posts with the day before yesterday's "iTunes Improvements, Part II", I thought I'd say how awesome you guys are.

Without you, there'd be no Dear Cupertino - so get those submissions in, guys! Email Joel at: joel.esler[at]me.com Exams are finally finished now, and seeing as I've got a a bit of spare time, I thought I'd share the iPod love...

Dear Cupertino,



So we've heard that Apple might be making the MacBook Air out of carbon fiber, and we've also heard that Apple might be releasing iPhone OS 2.2 sometime within the next few days, but what about the unloved 17" MacBook Pro?

In any case, the iPod has gone through a number of revisions and is a solid product that doesn’t need many revisions. However, there are a couple of ways that the best portable media player on the market could be made even better...

• A "Shuffle by Album" option on the iPhone and iPod Touch - would be great when we want to listen to different music from different albums, obviously.

• The ability to browse by Album artist in the navigational menu.

• Support for Cover Flow to sort by Album Artist, instead of just by Artist name.

• Enable transcoding of Apple Lossless to 128kbps (or better) AAC on the iPod - which I think is currently enabled for the iPod Shuffle.

• The ability to browse artists by the "Sort Artist" field tag (from the file's metadata) instead of the "Artist" tag, but only if it is set. This will help get rid of duplicates caused by featured artists or remixers entered into the Artist field.

• 802.11n Wi-Fi. Wi-Fi of any sort would be desirable in any form, but seriously, Apple - if other nameless media players have it, why not on the iPod?

Thanks,
Ian Rawluk

Editor's note: Ian, you're a full-blown legend, mate! Thanks for all your submissions so far.
Image courtesy Apple.

Getting Back to Basics...

So as a follow up-post to iTunes Improvements, Part One, there was just a couple of interface-related things I might have missed...

Posts are few and far between these days, so keep those submissions coming! Shoot 'em over to joel.esler [at] me [dot] com, and the Dear Cupertino monkeys will hammer on their keyboards for a while and spit out good quality posts... Or meaningless gibberish, one of the two.

Dear Cupertino,

iTunes is awesome, but lately it has become bloated with features and now runs sluggishly as a result.

What happened to the original Apple design modus operandi of "less is more"? John Gruber, of Daring Fireball fame, has even said that: "Figure out the absolute least you need to do to implement the idea, do just that, and then polish the hell out of the experience" in regards to iPhone App design, but doesn't the same apply to most Apple apps?


One of the main reasons people like Apple is because things are so much easier to do - even if features are sacrificed for usability and/or aesthetics. Oh yeah, it's happened before - firewire anyone? Going back even further, floppy drives, anyone? The invention of ADC was practically so USB, power and display signal could all be done through the one cable - even if users didn't want these features.

To point you in the right direction again, I've compiled a list of iTunes interface improvements, as follows:

• The ability to search lyrics and restrict your search to only the lyrics field.

• Make the grouping tag work like it does on the iTunes Store. If you browse the Complete U2 collection that Apple advertised, you will see that the collection breaks down per disc with titles of each original U2 release in the set. You can then hide or reveal the tracks on each disc by clicking the arrow on the left side of the header. I would like to see something like this implemented in iTunes, especially for classical albums, which often contain multiple symphonies on a single disc.

• Support for lyrics display on iTunes, not just on the iPod.

• Multiple artist support in the browser pane.

• Improved print layouts with album artist support.

Thanks,
Ian Rawluk.

Editors note: Now, these improvements are all well and good, but I personally don't think these are the improvements should be making to iTunes.
iTunes, being in it's 8th revision now, has simply become one of those apps which we can't live without - but at the expense of simplicity and aesthetics. Sure, the new grid view is "pretty cool", but is it really needed?
In this blogger's opinion, Apple needs to do what it did with OS9 and scrap it, and start from scratch. iTunes was originally a media player, and while the iTunes Store is a big part of that (5 billion songs can't be wrong) it needs to do what it does best - play music.
Lately, though, it just seems that iTunes isn't a music playing app, it's a spending-money app. All these Genius features are excellent in terms of music recommendations, but in reality they're just another way for Apple to get you to spend money at the iTunes Music Store.

Now, I can't blame Apple for trying to make money - they are a business, after all. However, it does bug me when these so called "features" are really thinly-veiled attempts to suck more money out of consumers. If I like a song, I'll look it up in the iTunes Store, preview it, and then buy it if I like it. That's what the iTunes store is for, and for that, it works beautifully.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that iTunes needs a massive overhaul - forget all the extras (5 visualizers, ooh!), and get back to basics, 'cos that's what Apple is all about.