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!