Wishes Fulfilled!

So even though this site is primarily about what we wish Apple would do, every once in a while it's nice to see some of our recommendations being implemented by the guys at Cupertino.

I'm sure that it wasn't entirely our fault that these features were implemented in products, but I'd like to think that Dear Cupertino has done it's fair share in influencing Jobs and the rest of the Cupertino crew to make these things happen.

It is with great pleasure that I can tell you that Apple is a company that listens to it's customers. Okay - so some of their decisions might not be as glamorous as we'd expect, (nor as popular), but at the end of the day - Steve is looking after you, the consumer.

Righto -- so it's great to see two wishes that have been made true;

1. The Biggest Little iPod In The World
   Wow - the third generation Nano may have come and gone - and with it, the 4GB iteration of the above - but the fourth generation has now landed, complete with 16GB of juicy flash goodness, and in a whole heap of different colors, too!
   We love it - it's another great Apple product.
   
   
   
2. iSights in the Monitors
   So we've now seen the arrival of the new 24" LED Cinema Display, and while some may not be a fan of it's glossy appearance, it's hard to deny the fact that it include an iSight in the monitor - that much is a given.
   However - we're yet to see some really-cool feature by Apple to make use of this second iSight - if you've got any suggestions for this second iSight, we'd love to hear them (just shoot off an email to joel.esler [at] me [dot] com).

If there are any other previous Dear Cupertino entries that I've missed but have now been given the green light by Apple, let me know in the comments.

Cheers,
Benny Ling.

Images courtesy Apple: iPod Nano, Cinema Display.

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.

iPhone HD

Dear Cupertino,

For those of us with large music/movie collections, how awesome would it be to have an iPhone or iPod Touch that has a small flash drive so the OS can run smoothly, but have a massive 80GB HD for all of our media. Yes please.

Thanks,

Ryan Stellato

Song Search

Dear Cupertino,

In iTunes you can search for a song, artist, etc. In Contacts on iPhone/iPod Touch you can search for your contacts. How come you cannot search for songs and artists on the touch devices. I know I've been in situations where someone has asked me if I had a certain song and I had to scroll through to find it. I would really enjoy searching for my music especially in playlists where there is no specific order.

It's short, but you know you want it too.

Thanks Love,

Ryan Stellato

iTunes Improvements, Part One

Dear Cupertino,

I love iTunes, really I do. It's the one app that handles all my syncing to iPhone, AppleTV, iPod, (unlike some other mobile platforms we know) and on top of that, it manages my entire music collection at the same time! It's completly awesome.

However, I do agree with people who are saying that iTunes is becoming far too bloated (code wise), and feature wise - I've seen iTunes 8 gobble up lots of RAM due to it's new grid album art view. Some people say it's now trying to do too much - but damn, it does it excellently!

Anyway, here are a couple of things we'd like to see in the next version of iTunes...

In the Maintenance category, we have:

1. Find songs without artwork - while iTunes sort of does this, it doesn't do it particularly well, often stumbling on tracks that have ID3 tags that differ from the iTunes Music Store tags. There are apps out there that do it (or pretend to, and screw everything up) but what we'd like to see is an Apple alternative. We love good quality album art, and the iTunes store provides.
2. Find dead songs - OSX has a all-encompassing search tool called Spotlight, no? And metadata indexing? Why doesn't Apple combine to two in some way to let iTunes find your dead music, those tracks which aren't where they used to be.
3. Rescan/normalize soundcheck and gapless values - for songs, this would be great as an option we could preform ourselves. This way, we'd have complete control when a song stuffed up our soundcheck values, or was playing with a gap. Rescanning it would then play the song, sans gap.
   

But wait, there's more! In the metadata section, we have the following suggestion:

iTunes is great for managing a large music library and I’m constantly using the search feature to find a song or album of interest. However, I think that the program needs to allow room for some new metadata fields:

1. Ability to tag/label songs as clean or explicit. Currently, songs downloaded from the iTunes Store come with these labels but when you import your own music from CDs you own, the tracks come in sans clean/explicit labels. You also can't see the tags for existing media in your library, nor edit them. This would be nice for parents to be able to restrict the music younger children could access in the library. Adding this feature would become akin to adding stars to songs - instead, how about you give it a clean/explicit rating?
2. Automatic lyrics import - iTunes already supports the addition of lyrics but this must be done manually on a per-song basis which can be annoying. There are many widgets and programs that automatically fetch lyrics for currently playing iTunes songs - so surely it'd be just a matter of querying some database for the info?
3. Better and more fields, eg: an "Original artist" field - for those excellent cover songs, when we just have to hear the original, more fields for catalog number, music label, and release type (i.e. bootleg, deluxe/special edition, EP, promo, remaster, single). Yet more fields for original release date and/or re-release date. Those of us who like nothing more than to look at our epic collection of 999,999 ID3 tags (per song) would appreciate it.
4. Subtitle support - for remixes and alternate versions.
5. The ability to modify play/skip count values, including batch addition and subtraction.
6. Ability to replace existing album artwork with art downloaded from the iTunes store. The current method of doing this requires manual removal of existing artwork before downloaded artwork appears.
7. BPM and key detection.
   

Phew, we're almost there! Apologies for the long-ish post. In the Video section, we've got:

Apple has started selling videos on the iTunes store and the program has evolved from a music jukebox to a complete solution for music and video management. However, it is lacking some critical features, such as:

1. The ability to purchase high definition 1080p media from the iTunes Store. 'Nuff said.
   
2. The import of unencrypted Blue-ray, DVD, HD-DVD media (AUDIO_TS and VIDEO_TS directories) or conversion support to H.264 - which has excellent scalability for viewing on our 1080p LCD TV's.

If there's anything else I've missed, or something you'd like to add to the list, leave 'em in comments.

Thanks,
Ian Rawluk.

iPod Classic 240GB

Dear Cupertino,

I was extremely excited today as were all the other Apple fanboys about the “Let’s Rock” keynote presented by King Jobs himself. I was extremely impressed with the new iPod Nano and cannot wait to see it in person. Although the iPod Classic didn’t necessarily get an upgrade rather than a price drop and a capacity downgrade.

The new iPod Classic comes in a 120GB (Silver, and Black) size as a standard.. No high end, no low end. The Previous iPod Classic came in an 80GB version and a 160GB. So why the downgrade? Well other than the major price cut there really is no explanation.. Those of use with large music libraries (I have over 150GB of music and 300GB of movies) want the largest capacity for our music players giving us our media where ever we go.

The sad part of this is that Toshiba (the suppliers of the iPods hard drives) have just announced a 240GB hard drive that happens to have the same dimensions of the previous iPod’s 160GB drive...

So Cupertino would you mind explaining to us why we have to suffer the pain of having only 120GB of our glorified Media with us at a time rather than a whopping 240GB?

Wouldn’t it be nice having ALL your movies, music, and photos with you where ever you go?

Please Cupertino, pretty please...

Thanks Love,

Ryan Stellato

iPod Visualizer

Dear Cupertino,

I wish the iPod had a visualizer. If iTunes has it, and most other media players on the market have it, I see no reason why the iPod doesn't have it.

Even if it were something that we could look at and go 'ooh' and 'aah' while we're playing our music, even something as simple as constantly changing album art (ala the iTunes Artwork screen saver in Mac OS X) would suffice.

Thanks,
Dear Cupertino Reader.

Editorial note: I think I know why Apple hasn't added a visualizer to the iPod's growing list of features... Battery life is the main concern here. If you take a look at your CPU usage when you've got the iTunes visualizer turned on, you'll see that it does take up a decent amount of CPU time - something that impacts on how much battery life you have. Of course, in a portable device such as the iPod and even the iPhone, battery life is paramount - so features that unnecessarily eat CPU are cut out. I'm sure if you somehow manage to take a look inside the iPod OS, you'll see code that is as efficient as possible - all to save those magical clock cycles.

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

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.

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