IOS Low-Hanging Fruit | Hacker News Reader

IOS Low-Hanging Fruit

daringfireball.net

42 pointsnsavant48 comments

Really? That's the best he can come up with? I've got a long list of low hanging fruit for Apple. I'd write them all out if I wasn't on my phone right now.

- Quick access to brightness. Add to notification center

- Quick access to airplane mode. Add to notification center

- Timestamps on Messages all the time

- Show current date without having to see calendar app. Put it in the notification center

- Real-time suggestions when you type, not this after-the-fact BS

- Clear all notifications

- Unlock phone without being forced to view notification. Happens all the time with events

- Rotate video. Damn orientation lock always ruin my videos

- A better system than bookmarks in the Maps app. Folders? I like to load up my map with bookmarks before a trip.

- Turn by turn navigation

- Offline maps

- Custom routes in Maps

- Better way to view/select alternate routes in Maps

- Formatted email signatures

- Non-ugly Tweet popup

- Fix bugs in new weather app. Keeps giving me forecast for PAST dates

- Do something with the empty space in the global search screen (home key).

- Bigger screen, but not too big

- Text in notes in calendar events are not selectable.

- Notification when address book is accessed without contact selector popup

- Make iTunes music home sharing actually work. Play music from my iTunes library on my phone when I'm at home. Play music from my iPhone library when I'm out.

- Add gmail-style reply/reply all toggle to Mail

- Better way to view conversations in Mail. Too much back button

- Cross app communication. Intents, Contracts, whatever.

- There's got to be something better that double clicking the homepage for multi-tasking

- Better spell check. Option to turn off Ebonics/lolcat mode that was added in later versions of iOS. Typing in iOS 1-3 with auto-correct was flawless. More difficult in 4. Typing in iOS 5 is pretty much broken. "Im" doesn't suggest "I'm" any more. When I type "u", I want "I". I don't want a teenie bopper version of "you"

> There's got to be something better that double clicking the homepage for multi-tasking

Slide up from the bottom of the screen (i.e mirror of notifications). It's so obvious, and comes with immediate cancellability of a potentially spurious move (not that I get much for notifications) if the animation is tied to the finger position (again, like notification center). The current implementation literally begs for it since notification center was introduced and it's not like it would need some insane amount of development.

It would probably get inadvertently triggered all the time at the bottom if it was that simple. It's bad enough having the entire top of the screen be a bad-touch zone.

What do you think of the current slide-up-with-four-fingers gesture?

Impractical on a phone.

> Show current date without having to see calendar app. Put it in the notification center

If your phone is on, hit the power button twice (power off, then power on) - the current date appears in the slide-to-unlock screen.

While Google & co were still sorting out the Honeycomb mess I got an iPad and here are my day to day gripes about iOS, most of which apply to both iPhone and iPad :

1) Turn by Turn Navigation - can't really think of living without it or paying for it. I've used it on Android quite extensively and it really is a solid product. For mere 29Mb and even with spotty rural data connectivity I got through 750 miles of navigation recently. Priceless thing to have on phone and even the iPad for people like me who hang it in their minivans.

2) Better multitasking - Android 4.0 multitasking is another neat thing - the clearly labeled / visible thumbnails of apps and easy ability to get rid of them comes in very handy. The way iOS does it is complicated.

3) Widgets - enough said!

4) Bigger phone screen - 4" seems like the minimum, all soft buttons will afford more screen real estate.

5) Better memory management - My background apps aren't killed as many times on Android whereas even with the upgraded RAM iPad 3 reloads Safari pages at least couple times a day.

6) App to app communication ability - Intents/Contracts style.

7) Better iPad notifications - eliminate alerts altogether and make the notification window span greater horizontal area on the iPad.

8) Bundle more useful apps with the OS - no alarm clock shipped with the OS, no podcast app for the iPad. Wtf?

9) iTunes sync is still very flakey - wired or wireless. I don't remember when it worked on its own the last time.

10) Swype - license Swype stuff, pretty please :)

11) Constant nagging for passwords for App updates - this bugs me a whole lot especially since I have a stronger password. Once I've setup a screen lock - this is fairly unnecessary.

I guess it would just be easier to stick with Android - by many accounts ICS is very usable on newer tabs, so may be I will try the Transformer TF300 out instead of waiting on iOS 8.

I totally agree with most of this list but I just wanted to let you know that the iPhone does indeed include an alarm clock, and many other time-related utilities, as part of the Clock app. I don't have my iPad here with me, but if I recall correctly this and a couple of other useful apps are inexplicably absent on the iPad.

The iPad does not have Clock, Weather, Stocks, Calculator, Voice Memos or Compass.

However, the iPhone does not have Photo Booth.

Not having used an iPhone recently I missed that Clock app was there - but yeah weird that it is missing on the iPad along with calculator!

The first thing I do when my iPhone alarm goes off is reach over, pick it up and start mashing for the snooze button. Can't do that with an iPad.

I fail to understand why people ask for these simple utilities to be included. I find it interesting that on one side you see people complaining about apps they cannot remove and on the other saying that they are sorely missing.

(to be clear: the two sides are not iOS and Android, just different people)

A lot of people cook with recipes displayed on their iPads; a timer is super useful there.

I guess the clock app is out because it demands another background process? Who knows with Apple.

there is plenty of clock apps with timers in the store.

+1million on Swype. I have an Android phone, DroidX, and can't even think about typing without Swype now. On my iPad on the other hand, I constantly groan when I have to type one letter at a time.

It seems to me that intents/contracts is the biggest low hanging fruit and being able to embed info in your icon (the way calendar does) is the biggest low-hanging fruit.

Removing google dependencies matters to apple not users.

I agree whole-heartedly with the dynamic icons.

- Weather apps that display weather directly on the icon (I don't understand why Apple never did it for themselves).

It would be trivial for iOS6 to implement a protocol where the OS could "poll" the app for a new icon only when the icon is visible, and only occasionally for performance.

This is why Google does not copy many of the iPhone's features https://www.google.com/search?tbo=p&tbm=pts&sclient=... (link to patent search)

Not really seeing why Gruber thinks Win8 "contracts" are "richer" than Android's intents/content providers. They're pretty much identical (though "contracts" has a much clearer name).

I would say Android is richer, or at least more extensible, though I think Win8 has a potentially more effective UI.

He missed one, IMHO: apps which can live on the springboard or the lock-screen. I'm not anticipating that Apple will do these, mind you, as it complicates their simple UI scheme, but it's a clear advantage for Android power-users.

I'm hoping that they plan on making a big push on cross-app communication. I also hope that they're investing in their platform from an e-commerce perspective: paid upgrades, trials, video previews, better analytics, better coupon/promotional codes, etc.

I'm still surprised that URL Schemes[1] aren't used widely. Facebook uses them to implement Facebook Connect, and sites exist[2] that try to aggregate various apps' schemes, but it'd be nice to live in a world where they were well-known and reliable enough to use instead of having to integrate individual third-party SDKs.

1: http://mobiledevelopertips.com/cocoa/launching-your-own-appl... 2: http://handleopenurl.com/scheme

They'll probably add this. Windows 8 supports lock screen notifications as well. It's really great to see your next meeting and weather right on the lock screen.

A million times no.

The Android homescreen is incomprehensible to me as an iOS user and the main reason is the clutter and weird alignment.

It's opt-in, is it not? Phones are very personal devices, and if you don't want yours to be that way, then don't use the feature.

Honestly, the biggest reason I want it is for things that apps aren't allowed to access anyway: a global control on the Springboard to disable WiFi, or change screen brightness, for instance.

Apple has never been a company that believes in opt-in. Rightly or wrongly (and, to be fair, usually rightly), it's a company that believes you having the choice to do something it thinks is dumb is a bad idea.

And the fans lap it up. "A million times no."

Counter-point: the iPad multi-tasking gestures, which are disabled by default.

I haven't thought of the specifics, but I think I'd prefer accessing that from the multitasking view or the pull-down notifications. That way I'm not as interrupted from using my app.

The Android homescreen can look however you want including almost exactly like an iphone.

Which Android home screen? Unless you're on a pure Android device, it's the home screen of your manufacturer. Or whichever you downloaded from Google Play.

Multiple users for the iPad would be another.

Yes, please. People don't often share their phone, but the "family iPad" has become a fairly common phenomenon.

Another missing feature is scheduled downloads. I want my podcast apps to be able to auto update without having to manually run them just before I leave the house. And no, having to sync through my computer is not an Apple level UX.

This is one of the things I miss from Android since I switched.

Similarly I'd like apps to be able to register things to be uploaded so that even if the app is not running the OS will finish the upload.

Something I thought about earlier that would be nice: automatic geofencing based on my interests. So if I'm on vacation and I mark "burgers" as an interest, I get pinged when I'm close to a popular burger spot. May already exist but didn't take the time to look.

That sounds like an interesting project for an indie app developer. foursquare, highlight, and others have been working on geofencing stuff, so it's not impossible.

Georeminder does that: http://www.skumancer.com/georeminder

Sounds exactly like Oink (built by Milk). It was shut down and the team acquired by Google.

That's completely doable as a app (I'm a professional 3rd party app developer).

Foursquare Radar does pretty much exactly that.

One of my most used third party apps has become Firefox Home, flawed and feature poor as it is. Browser sync is a can't live without it once you've tasted it feature and seems like a no brainer to add now that everyone is on icloud. Most people think of navigation as Android's biggest advantage over iOS but Chrome sync in ICS seems bigger to me.

Inverting desktop to phone sync, remote desktop seems like an even bigger killer feature that no one's really done right yet.

Facetime w/o wi-fi seems like a no brainer.

Swiping between emails and tabs would be nice.

Swiping emails in list to mark as read/unread ala Byline would be great.

ID browser as ... desktop safari ala Atomic and a few others would be nice.

Some sort of gesture or hack to make all hover based nested menus not close instantly.

An ad blocker (again avail in Atomic or Sleipnir) would be godly but Apple seems very unlikely to implement a large scale one. Honestly the only adds I really want to block are the pop ups "Did you know the website for the article you want to be reading right now made an app! Click 99% of the pixels in this window to further delay consumption of the content you came here for."

> but Chrome sync in ICS seems bigger to me.

Not to mention full-fledged Firefox and Firefox Sync on most devices 2.1+

The problem for Apple is that adding browser sync to iCloud isn't enough. Most people aren't browsing with Safari on the desktop. That means unless Apple

(a) loosens up on third-party browsers (unlikely based on past behavior) and/or

(b) opens up sync APIs for third-party desktop browsers, including third-party browsers on Windows (possible, but at least somewhat uncharacteristic and potentially tricky technically),

Android is likely to maintain its edge in browser sync.

Of course the same logic suggests that browser sync to desktop IE is potentially an under-appreciated advantage for Microsoft and Windows Phone. That's blunted a bit because, based on Microsoft's previous announcements, new versions of IE (including, presumably, whatever version adds browser sync) aren't going to make it to XP, but that's still a significant universe of potential sync targets.

Focusing on "low-hanging fruit" (things iOS' competitors already have or that are obviously missing) is important, but after a point Apple's going to need to break new ground and innovate.

Siri is a great example of this: iOS already ha voice control and nobody was complaining about it; it's just that nobody was really using it because it wasn't very good. Apple didn't get to where it is today just by cloning and refining things.

I'd greatly appreciate it if Apple improved their dialog system. It isn't uncommon (or at least it was in the past, maybe this has already been fixed) when performing an update in iTunes to get a large number of dialogs in a row.

Also, while it may be difficult, it would be nice if there was a way to improve the experience when running games that use Game Center. (They often force you to put up with the game running slowly as it tries to connect and it annoys you by showing you two dialogs; I think the typical OpenFeint experience is a little better.)

And mobile browsers should allow extensions.

The expression "low-hanging fruit" usually means small things that are easy to pick off, for just as much benefit as harder things. It's a useful term for potential development work that might have outsized gains for the efforts.

Gruber seems to be using it instead to mean things that are easy to think of, regardless of their size or worth, which strikes me as a journalism-centric worldview.

Why hasn't humankind cured cancer? It's such an obvious next step. And when we do, I can write an article about how there are fewer things to have walkathons for.

Yeah, I was thinking about the same thing. Weird article name. A lot of things people brought up in this thread are nice to have, but not fundamental things that Apple needs to work on.

It would be nice to fix some of the UI issues though.

iPhone should have home screen gestures. Define your own shortcuts - e.g., draw a C to open Calculator or M for Music. Diagonal downward swipe to turn down brightness, diagonal upward to turn it up. Inverted V to toggle airplane mode, etc.

Less clunky file-management. I'm speaking out of ignorance as to how the API works, but there is such wide variance and unpredictability in how apps handle file import/export and sharing between existing apps.

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