7 posts tagged “iphone”
While trying to make a call, the phone locked up, then the Phone application crashed a minute or two later when the screen went black.
To get the phone to respond, I had to hold down the home button for several seconds to do the iPhone equivalent of force-quit on the Mac, or ctrl-alt-del on a PC.
When the Phone app came back, the contact database had deleted itself in its entirety.
On the bright side, the Favorites tab still had numbers saved, but they were no longer associated with names. I don't know about you, but I stopped memorizing phone numbers a long time ago, now that cell phones can remember this for me.
"No problem," I think. "If I just turn .Mac push back on, everything will just come back from The Cloud. Except that 45 minutes later, no dice.
So by the time I got home, the database was still empty, so I tried to sync to iTunes. No dice, iTunes keeps locking up when trying to sync the phone.
AWESOME.
Eventually I got it to sync far enough to put the contacts back, but this is a royal pain in the butt. The iPhone 1.0 software never did anything like this, and until now, even on the v2 software, none of the core, bundled apps had crashed on me, even if the third party ones do regularly.
But now I can't trust the built in apps either. Including, most vitally of all, the Phone application.
What is the point of having an phone to begin with, if not to reliably make calls? Argggh.
Man I love the iPhone 2.0 software, let me tell ya.
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On the bright side, since starting this rant, iTunes is telling me that 2.0.1 just became available. Man this thing better have a truckload of bug fixes. Hoo boy.
So the reviews for the new generation of pocket solid state video cameras are reminding me of how fun it used to be to be able to take little videos on my old Sony Clie PDA, even if there were certain limitations.
While I'm really happy with my Nikon and am not looking to replace it, I like how all the current generation of cheap digicams have video modes, which are in any case much better quality than the old Clie could ever do, even if the megapixel count on most of them has gotten beyond ridiculous. Contrasting that, my wife's camera does have a video mode, but [a] it's her camera, and it would be nice to have one to bring around with me and leave hers with her, and [b] we never seem to use the video feature in the first place. Likewise, we have an old Sony MiniDV camcorder that, aside from the obligatory delivery room footage a couple of years ago, has hardly been used at all. It's a scary, beastly thing, it is.
Enter the Flip cameras and its many imitators, which are most of all small and simple, following Douglas Adams's advice in "What have we got to lose":
Some of the most revolutionary new ideas come from spotting something old to leave out rather than thinking of something new to put in. The Sony Walkman, for instance, added nothing significantly new to the cassette player, it just left out the amplifier and speakers, thus creating a whole new way of listening to music and a whole new industry. Sony's new Handycam rather brilliantly leaves out the zoom function on the grounds that all a zoom does is cost money, add a lot of bulk and render every amateur video ever made unwatchable. (They might, while they're following this line of thought, consider marketing a record-only video player, and video companies might consider releasing movies that are actually recorded in fast forward mode.)
He'll never know how prescient this was, as it's nearly exactly what the Flip offers: an iPod sized box, a lens on one side, and on the other a screen and buttons for "record" and "play", and that's about it. There are limitations, sure -- no optical zoom, SD quality video suitable for YouTube and old TVs but not fancy new HDTV sets, etc -- but the very simple idea is just that this device is small, simple, unintimidating, friendly, accessible, and ready to go.
Okay, so I'm sold on the concept, but maybe not on the limitations. Optical zoom isn't a "must have" -- after all, May's camera can do that if necessary -- but it's nice to have. Resolution better than SD/VGA isn't mandatory -- after all, higher resolution also means more wasted disk space, and I'm not Stanley Kubrick -- but a picture that looks "good enough" on a 720 or 1080 sized screen would be nice. I don't care about removable batteries and would actually prefer rechargeable LiON to AA, but swappable SD storage would be nice, but not critical.
Basically, it seems like there are a huge array of similar camcorders for relatively cheap (under $200), and even more digital cameras with video modes. So how does one choose?
Of course, this whole problem would go away if the iPhone could just do video. Well, aside from the fact that the iPhone camera isn't very good, but nevermind that, I'm obviously not picky.
Hmm....
The nice thing about the iPhone v2 software, and the App Store, is all the clever, pretty apps.
The annoying thing about the iPhone v2 software, and the App Store, is all the clever, pretty apps.
This has all obviously been discussed to death, and I don't have much more to contribute on that angle, so I'll leave it at that.
But one of the less-noticed aspects of iPhone v2 and the plethora of App Store toys is that the "springboard" home screen interface from the original iPhone isn't scaling very well. Sure, it worked great at first, when the phone just shipped with 11 applications on top and another 4 on the "dock", and it was still fine when the default list grew to 13 -- even then there were blank slots to fill in, so no problem there.
The main screen started to become problematic when the 1.1.3 release in January 2008 allowed you to turn Safari bookmarks into tappable pseudo-apps, and in turn allowed you to set up multiple "pages" of icons. That was fine as long as you just had a handful of screens to deal with, but -- especially now that you can add both bookmarks and actual applications -- it really doesn't scale well at all if you start to have dozens of apps to keep track of.
On the Mac, handling lots of applications is no problem. They're all kept together in your /Applications folder (aka C:\Program Files for the Windows folks), the ones you're most interested in can be linked to from the Dock (aka the Start Menu), and the system is generally very efficient at letting you sift through to what you want. Not so on the iPhone now.
If I'm on the first screen on my phone right now, and I want to open up Shakespeare, I have to flick through five screens to get to it. So what had been a single action before -- "tap on icon" -- is now a six stage process -- "flick left, flick left, flick left, flick left, flick left, tap on icon" -- plus a much higher cognitive load, because, and here's the really fun part, things keep moving around, so you have to actually read through the intervening screens, just in case it changed.
The App Store application itself, as well as the link to it from iTunes back on the computer, has the ability to seek out & alert you to updated applications. Super. But when you download updates on the phone, it appears to create a second temporary copy of the app at the last screen, then either leaves it there at the end, or moves it back to the screen the original had been on.
If a screen ends up being asked to hold more than 16 apps, even temporarily, then things get out of whack. Let's say you're trying to reorganize an icon from screen 5 back to screen 3, but because screen 4 already has 16 icons, there's no room for the app we're moving to be stored there. "Who cares?," we ask, "it's not staying there anyway, right?" The phone cares, because you can't just go from screen 5 to screen 3 in one motion, you have to drag it over to the left, hover around the middle for a bit, then drag it over to the left again. In the interim, whatever you had at the lower-right corner of screen 4 gets bumped to the top-right corner of screen 5.
Okay, so you could get around that problem by leaving enough "holes" on the screen to keep that shuffling from happening. Fine. But it's already annoying enough as it is to have to go through 6 screens to find anything, padding it out will just mean even more screens to have to sift through. But it's worse than that, too, because if you download anything new, the phone will deposit the new icons on the leftmost screen with an empty slot to use, rather than the end of the list at the right. This approach seems reasonable and predictable, but if you can't remember what screens had free space, then this becomes unpredictable, and worse, it amplifies the problem of things seeming to jump around on you, especially as individual screens fill up.
On the other end of the equation, if having all these apps is more than you feel like dealing with and you just want to delete some, that's a cumbersome process also. The "fastest" way to do it is to hold down an icon until it wiggles, then tap the little (x) that gets superimposed over the icon to delete it from the phone. Fine. But next time you sync to iTunes, the application just gets copied back. Oops. Okay, so you can make a mental note to delete so & so from iTunes next time you're home, but then it's one more thing to remember. You hold your nose & use the Notes app, but then you have to go digging for the icon & flicking back to whatever screen it ended up on now, and by the time you get there, you probably forgot what it was you were supposed to be deleting. You could affix a sticky note to the phone to physically jot down a reminder, but isn't the whole point of productivity gadgets to steer you away from needing to keep track of little scraps of paper?
So that's three primary broken areas of the iPhone main screen that need attention:
Aside from that, sure, it works great this way, rah rah Apple.
I really think iTunes / Contact is the way out here, not necessarily search.
The Contact app (or the Phone interface to the same functionality) lets you define a scrollable list of favorites. You just flick up or down to find the one you need right now. It also lets you see what items were accessed recently, and the general browser lets you look either in one big flat list, or within any groups you've defined. This works well & needs little explanation for most people.
The iTunes app lets you browse in any of a handful of predefined ways (by genre, artist, album, song, etc), plus you can define playlists to impose whatever other organization you'd prefer. Again, this works well & doesn't need much explaining.
Either of those, with only minimal tweaking, would be a massive improvement over how the current Springboard approach handles having more than a couple of screens worth of apps to manage.
I think anything Quicksilver / Spotlight based, where you have to type what you want, would be overkill, at leI think anything Quicksilver / Spotli overhaul, sure I can see it appealing to some people. But I rarely find myself having to search for things in the iTunes app -- I just browse to what I was looking for -- and I can't picture myself using such an approach for my apps, either.
The bigger point through is that we need something better than Springboard, which was a great iPhone v1 approach that no longer scales well with iPhone v2.
Sure, but it's a new platform, with a lot of potential. :-)
I wanted to play around with what works and what doesn't, figuring that some of them would be gems, and others would be pointless.
I hadn't really anticipated that the iPhone UI itself would become the annoying part.
Seeing as today was the day of the much-heralded 3G iPhone launch -- such as it was -- some thoughts on it seem called for (currently, 33,947 times called for, it seems). (Addendum, 10 minutes later: now we're at 216,814 hits. So there you go, give me a moment and I'll try to get us to 216,815.)
A big part of the question for original iPhone owners has been whether it even makes sense to upgrade. The only hardware changes appear to be GPS, which the original phone can approximate by cell tower or wifi base station triangulation, and 3G data speeds, which also mean a higher monthly phone bill and shorter battery life. The other components -- CPU speed, storage capacity, camera, screen, etc -- all appears to be unchanged.
The bigger change, which original iPhone users get for free, is the updated system software, and the new App Store. While this means long overdue improvements to the built in apps -- contact search, wireless push sync of mail, calendars, & contacts, scientific calculator mode, parental controls, and a whole lot more -- the flagship feature is the iPhone SDK that third parties can now use to develop using a toolkit both similar to and unique from the ones available for traditional computers. While some computers are starting to have built-in cameras, the rest of the iPhone hardware remains unique: few if any laptops or desktops have touch screen controls, motion sensors, or geographical self-awareness, not to mention the fact that it's, you know, a phone. There's a line of thinking that this represents the birth of a new generation of ubiquitous computing, an idea that has been on the drawing board for 20 years now, but still just gradually starting to come together.
So, now that the prelude is out of the way, how has the first 24 hours of life with iPhone 2.0 been? Some random observations.
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I'm glad I'm not working at an Apple store for this. With the original iPhone, the store part of the transaction was about as simple as swipe a couple of bar codes, swipe the credit card, and off you go. On the launch day last year, a line that went out the door, down the corridor, then back up the side of the mall was processed in about 90 minutes, no chaos, no problem. (Or so I was told -- somehow I ended up being the only one that had the day off that day, so we went for ice cream instead. Yum, ice cream. Then Bijan called to ask if we had any iPhones left, and could I set one aside for him. Heh.) This time around, to prevent the revenue lost to iPhone unlocking, the activation had to happen in the store, or you can pay extra to avoid AT&T, but either way, Apple gets their money up front. Which is nice for Apple, but not so much for the customers today, not to mention their employees.
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I like the idea of push mail and push sync. Reliable synchronization of personal data has been tantalizingly close to "ready to go" for years now, but it still never quite works in practice. Part of the problem, as anyone that has to merge software patches would recognize, is that can be hard for a computer to know which of two versions of a piece of data it should go with. For example, if you add a friend's email to your mail client, aad their phone number on your cell phone, then what should happen they get re-synced? As far as .Mac sync seems to be concerned, the correct answer appears to be any one or more of "make one record with both the email address and the phone number fields", "make two completely overlapping, redundant records for your friend", "leave one record but make the fields repeat over and over and over and over", "randomly omit some of the data", or "update someone else entirely." Who says software has to be deterministic, right? The appeal of push sync, in part, is that it reduces the opportunity for this kind of error, by always keeping the devices coordinated right away, without letting changes pile up and lead to bigger problems later.Two problems with this are jumping out at me as a first gen iPhone owner: (1) this doesn't appear to help, and in fact may still be making worse, the existing redundancies in the data, and more importantly (2) this appears to force the iPhone to have a lot more chatter with the server than was happening before. For new 3G users this shouldn't be a big deal, because it's like a DSL modem: the data connection doesn't interfere with voice services on the line, and it's fast enough that these bursts of sync communication should happen more quickly. But with the original 2G phone and the EDGE data service, it's looks like a potential problem, because EDGE behaves like a traditional analog modem: you can't use voice and data services simultaneously, and the connection is so much slower than 3G/DSL/etc that the sync conversation with the server takes 10x longer than it would otherwise. As a result, since upgrading to iPhone 2.0 on Thursday, I'm getting far more complaints that "the call went straight to voice mail" than I ever was previously. This is frustrating, and the first tangible thing that starts to make upgrading to 3G hardware make sense, but for now I'm just turning push back off and dealing with it. (Weirdly, it seems like the push service may be cellular only -- even when a wifi connection was available, it seemed like the EDGE connection kept popping up and so blocking incoming calls. Is it true that MobileMe/.Mac sync push to the iPhone only happens over the phone wireless link?)
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So it's a nice day and all when 500 or 600 applications can simultaneously morph from vaporware to shipping product, but maybe some of these were maybe a little half-baked, hm? With the old phone software, I very rarely had any problems. (And if you ignore the bane that is data sync, there had been basically no problems with crashes and the like for around six months now.) But since the new software got installed, I've already had several hard lockups -- no response at all, had to force-reboot the phone -- and even had to restore it (which was fun because it got back stuff I don't care about, like the fact that it was only syncing the "For iPhone" playlist from iTunes, which I never would have been able to sort out again from scratch, but it blew away and couldn't recover my SMS history, call history, call favorites, web site login cookies, stored cities for the Weather app, stored stocks for the Stocks app, yadda yadda yadda).But the worst is all the app crashes now. While it's nice that each app sandboxes all its data so that, one might have assumed, problems with one app shouldn't harm any of the others, in practice it seems like many of the apps I've tried are unstable, and when one app crashes, I can't seem to get anything else to launch, even if it had been working previously. And this is right after a full restore, which is "iPod/iPhone Troubleshooting-ese" for "the problem persists after nuking the system software from orbit, so the cause has to be either the data or the hardware". In this case it's safe to assume that the problem is the data (read: "the new apps"), but it's frustrating not being able to go in and carefully zap the offending .plist file or cache folder that so often resolves similar problems with the old version of OSX.
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Also frustrating is that, it's already a full day since the App Store launch, and *none* of the apps seem to have any updates yet. Okay, sure, so it's just one day, and I'm sure the developers are all out swimming in their shiny new barrels of App Store Monopoly Money to celebrate, but come on, they have to take care of their early adopters if they want to sustain their new businesses, right? Supposedly, though I can't find documentation of this at the moment, one of the iPhone 1.x updates introduced the ability to gather statistics when an app crashes, and send that data back to Apple on the next sync, so that common failure modes could be profiled & patched. Is Apple capturing this data for third party apps too, and if so, is it getting shared back to the developers? Hopefully.)
- Compounding the last item, and maybe I'm just being thick here, but I don't see the best way to delete an app in the first place. Is there a way to delete from the phone, or do you have to delete it from iTunes and then have it disappear on the next sync?
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It's interesting, and possibly a big improvement, that an iPhone configured for push-sync of calendar & contact data no longer is able to sync this data with iTunes automaically when plugged in. This is good for me, because I have data going back to my first Palm Pilot in the late 90s, and it was starting to take way too long to sync everything to the phone; now that's no longer necessary. On the other hand, if the sync with iTunes just got so much more clever and fast than it used to be, then why did it start doing a big, glacially slow backup job every time I sync the phone? With the old one, it seemed like it would start the sync by backing up some key data (I'm not sure what, but it never took longer than 20 or 30 seconds or so), then dive in to the rest (which would be the bulk of the time required to finish a sync run). Now it's the other way around, and worse: it can spend an hour or more backup up the phoe (I can only assume it's making a new full copy of everything, everytime, rather than trying to just compare changes since the last backup), but then because the slow items have been removed from iTunes, the sync itself seems to finish within a couple of seconds after the backup. Two steps forward, ten steps back.
I'm ready for my bug fixes now, guys.
Okay, so I'm guess I'm going whole-hog with the Flickr thing. If you're interested, I've been uploading batches of photos from the iPhoto library.
- California 2007
- More zoo pictures
- The Police play at Fenway Park (iPhone pics)
- The Dresden Dolls play at Paradise
And on that note, I'm off to see Amanda Palmer of the Dresden Dolls play with the venerable Boston Pops. Wheee!
Actually, for the most part, more than enough has been said, and will continue to be said, about the next generation iPhone, announced today.
It looks nice, but for what it offers over the original hardware-wise -- basically, just 3G networking (at a higher monthly cost) and GPS (which is nice, but improvised well enough for my needs using cell tower triangulation on the original) -- I'm happy to stick with the first gen model for another year. The software upgrade & third-party software appeals to me more, but the original one gets that for free anyway, so no loss there.
I will say, however, than I'm awfully glad I won't have to be selling the damn things. For some reason, I was the only person on the payroll (out of of something like 100 people) that had the day off for the original iPhone launch[1] By all accounts, it was a madhouse. A well-organized & efficient madhouse, sure, but a madhouse. It helped tremendously that, especially with the EasyPay handheld registers, each transaction was handled quickly, and the line was cut down to nothing in short order. Unfortunately, that won't be possible this time around.
Pity the poor bastards that will have to work at an Apple store on Friday, July 11, from (surely) 6pm to midnight that night.
I'll be thinking of them as I have a nice dinner, and maybe watch a movie, or just have a beer, read, and relax.
