iPhone Music Store Gifting?

Dear Cupertino,


I'd love to be able to give iTunes gifts from my iPhone. We can do it from the iTunes Music Store via iTunes on our computers, so why not from the iPhone version of the iTunes Store?

All we would need in terms of UI would be a button below the current "Buy Now" one, or a different interaction - say, hold down the "Buy Now" button to gift that particular song, movie, or TV show (but not App Store apps) to any of your contacts on your contacts list.

Gifting on the iPhone wouldn't just be handy if we wanted to give someone a song that we liked, or a TV show, nay, gifting on the iPhone would also come in handy if we needed to give someone a gift for their birthday at the last minute, or while we're out and about and can't find the perfect gift in a brick-and-mortar (that's a real store, folks, as opposed to an online store).

Gifting on the iPhone would also benefit those who don't usually have an internet connection at home, too. With the iTunes Store on the iPhone now available on cellular data networks, those sans-internet would be able to gift from the comfort of their homes, all without having to put on "real" clothes and go outside (shudder).

So yeah - iPhone Music Store gifting. Pretty please?

Thanks,
Pia Francisco.

Comments below, folks - and as usual, all DearCupertino wishes/improvements can be directed to:
joel [dot] esler [at] me [dot] com

Multiple Genii

First up, hope y'all had an awesome Christmas. Whatever you did, whatever presents you got, I hope you enjoyed your holiday. Anyways, it's back to work now with yet another Dear Cupertino post from yours truly. It's one that has been floating around for a while, so, enjoy!

As usual, if you've got any suggestions for any Apple products that you'd like to see, shoot off an email to Joel: joel.esler [at] me [dot] com is the one you want.

Dear Cupertino,



With iTunes 8, you gave us the Genius feature. It's an awesome feature that is actually, pretty cool. From the Apple website:

The new Genius feature in iTunes 8 creates the perfect playlist. Just select a song, click the Genius button, and iTunes generates a playlist of songs from your library that go great with it. You decide how many songs appear in your Genius playlist — 25, 50, or 100. Refresh your Genius playlist to get new results. Or save your Genius playlist so you always have it.

One thing that the Genius playlist of iTunes 8 lacks is creation of a Genius playlist from more than one source song. Sure, we like it when we can make a playlist based on songs that "go great with it", but what if we're looking for a more specific taste?
Having the ability to create a Genius playlist based off more than one song would be incredibly useful in this scenario.

I can't see why Apple wouldn't implement this - surely it wouldn't involve that much more code.

Thanks,
Benny Ling

Clear and Focused

Just a simple one today, folks. As per usual, if you've got any suggestions, or any thing that bugs you immensely about any Apple product, shoot a rant across to Joel at: joel.esler [at] me [dot] com, and he'll be more than glad to read it.

Dear Cupertino,

User Interface inconsistencies bug me. It is really annoying when the UI in any particular application don't function as you'd expect it to. This is particularly true when UI inconsistencies aren't the same across applications - even when said applications are built on the same set of APIs as one another.

For instance, the search field in the iTunes Music Store is on of those things that is just plain annoying.

The problem stems from the field not being able to "clear and focus" itself at the same time. If you've already got something typed in, and the field isn't currently focused (ie, doesn't have the blue highlighting around it), then you can't just hit the X next to your search term and start typing for another search - nope, you have to click in the field again so you can type in that field.


It's one of those UI inconsistencies that really get up my nose - and I want to see something done about it. Almost every other search field that implements the small X that clears the field and refocuses it so you can start typing it immediately seems to work right - so why not one of Apple's most widely distributed products, iTunes?

Apps that I have open at this moment which manage to do this right include: NetNewsWire and Chax's Log Viewer for iChat. Even Firefox's Google search in toolbar manages to automagically select the text for you when you click in the unfocused field, ready for you to start typing.

Everyone who has an iPod has iTunes (unless they're just plain disturbed), so it's one of those things that you would think Apple would go about fixing - this "clear and focus" functionality seems like a standard object in terms of coding Cocoa applications, but it's broken across the board in iTunes - neither the iTunes Music Store search field or the Music Library search field exhibit any "clear and focus" functionality at all. Poor effort, Apple.


Oh well, I guess I'll just have to wait for 8.0.3.

Thanks,
Benny Ling.

Ed's note: post idea from here. Props to Daring Fireball, Bjango, and the excellent range of ngmoco:) apps from the app store.

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).

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.

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.

Advanced IP Firewall Options

Dear Cupertino,

I have but one very short request.

Can we please have more advanced options for the built in IP Firewall?

We understand that security is paramount in OSX, but if we'd feel so much better if we had more options for the IP Firewall. GUI options, at that. We love sexy tick boxes and aqua-luscious radio buttons.

For those of you who don't know what an IP firewall is, read the ipfw chapter into the FreeBSD manual here.

If you're after the man page for OSX's built in ipfw (and the command-line arguments you need to pass to configure more options), you can read all about them here.

Thanks,
Zach / quine.

Editors note: If this is post is a little short, my apologies. Truth be told, I'm a little out of my depth here.
Expect more posts soonish. In fact, I've got a great iTunes improvements one coming right up...

iTunes App Store Gifting

Dear Cupertino,

I'm a huge fan of the App Store. Lots and lots of great quality apps are found there, but there have been the odd one or two...

One thing that is missing, though, is the ability to gift apps. Dear Cupertino, if we can gift movies, TV shows, entire TV seasons, and any music track we desire, along with custom playlists, I'm at a complete loss why we can't gift apps to friends who deserve good quality iPhone/iPod Touch apps.

Don't get me wrong, the App Store is a huge part of the iPhone/iPod Touch OS, and it's confusing why you're not letting us give the gift of a great app.

I'd love the option to gift App Store apps.

Thanks,
Benny Ling

Editorial note: If you're wondering why National Treasure 2: Book of Secrets is more for me than it is for you, it's because I'm Australian. For The Win.
While I don't have a US iTunes account, I'm fairly sure that doesn't allow App Store gifting either.

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.

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