I love my iPhone. It took a while to ween me away from wanting to actually be able to store and organise my files, control directories, copy files on and off my 16GB £400 memory card, install applications that haven’t been through your ridiculous process, copy and paste (until very recently) data etc.. etc…

None of that really matters though, because the processes that you have put in place to achieve the functionality (for the most part – still annoyed I can’t put files on my 16GB £400 memory card) is sufficiently slick that I forget that I ever had a pictures directory where I could organise my images, or a documents file where I may store items that I consider to be ‘documents’. As did I forget that I liked to be able to copy and paste data because whenever a piece of data was somewhere, and you wanted it to be somewhere else, there was a nice little button that said ‘move this data in some useful way to this other application’. Great.

The problem with this system, is that when you don’t get it right, it’s annoying. It’s very annoying. I was stuck for a year with 16GB £400 memory card / phone that I couldn’t use to ever share contact details with anyone else by any means other than email. ‘I’ll just text you their num….’, oh wait… there is absolutely no way to achieve this without a pen and paper. Really!?

The latest – navigating to an event with the location stored in the extensively marked-up ‘Location’ field in the event. There is no way to request that the iPhone show you how to get there from your current position (which it also knows). So.. in order to get to the ‘Location’ of an event, you have to edit the event, copy and paste the location. Close the event. Open Google Maps. Paste the location. Request that it kindly show you how to get there. This seems like a perfect place for another one of those context-driven buttons. ‘Directions to Event from here’. Yay!

Somebody replied to my tweet on this subject by saying ‘Location!=Address’ – and yes, congratulations, semantics have not defeated you on this occasion. I remember however, when I purchased Office 2000 (9 years ago!) and it began to underline text in emails that represent addresses. Moving closer to home, Mail in OS X does this very thing – they have the code!

Apple, I love my iPhone, but just because we have Copy and Paste now (finally) doesn’t mean that I want to start feeling like I’m using a WinMo device; I still want an intuitive experience, an Apple experience.

Can we please have directions to an event location?

Thanks,

Chris

This may not be the case this time; all of the updates announced today are relatively subtle. iTunes 8 is a good for-instance. I installed it full of hopes. It looks basically the same in the frame. The new view is nice, but for the first ten minutes made my machine (QX6800, 4GB) hang in a manner briefly reminiscent of installing Crysis on my pre-QuadCore machine.

The Genius feature wanted to spend 4 hours of my life (and 2GB of my RAM) capturing my Play data. And I didn’t find the new visualizations until prompted by a post. Despite all of this, I am now a lot happier with iTunes than I was yesterday. It took hours and I’m almost pleased. This is a new experience for me with Apple products; usually it’s the initial wow which blinds me to other obvious flaws. This time it’s the ‘perfection’ that hides the lack of new wow.

Don’t get me wrong; iTunes 8 isn’t perfect. It’s still nowhere near as fast as it could be on Windows Vista. I would also like to see some sort of attempt at use of Glass in it. I like Look-and-feel native applications. It’s what OSs are designed for.

The new iPod Nano 4G which has been much-rumored was released as expected. It’s a lot better-looking than I expected, although even some of the demonstration shots show Glare on the curved screen. Something that I would be hesitant to introduce! The new software looks gorgeous as ever, and may be tempting enough to push my fatty-nano out of my gym bag!

The $80 headphones announcement was a pleasant surprise and will definitely be finding their way in to an iPod incredibly near to me. That said, I use the wired hands-free for my iPhone a lot as it doubles as my headphones; I wonder if there will be a version of these with the in-line mic? (update: they all do)

I’m not surprised to not see a laptop or desktop line upgrade here; as I posted earlier, ‘Consumer’ is the key. Things that will drive immediate sales this Christmas, with no uncertainty or possibility of postponing purchasing for later features. We all know that Intel is releasing it’s new generation of processors in Jan / Feb which offer huge benefits for mobile computers. This is most likely what we’ll see in the next major revision of all Mac lines. Snow leopard too will not be making any more appearances until next year for the same reasons and I think Microsoft would be wise to take the same approach with Windows 7.

I am very pleasantly surprised by this round of Apple announcements; they show a brilliant matching of form AND function and will genuinely improve the experience of all users of Apple products (especially iTunes, iPod and iPhone).

I will forgo mentioning 2.1 iPhone firmware until Friday when it’s released.

“All of the downloads you were downloading have been downloaded”. It just rings excellence doesn’t it!? Admittedly this is in beta and will now be fixed before a release however the very fact that someone sat down and wrote that definitely highlights a general problem in the way engineers think in comparison to the thought processes of the average user (or human being).

Chris

Like many students, I got given free hosting by Microsoft under their ‘dreamspark’ initiative. It’s a great idea, but the service is unfortunately so crippled that all it did was encourage me to go and hire a linux server and a domain! :s.

It will only execute ASP.NET code from the main folder, getting a CMS to run on it (ASP.NET CMSs are already fairly rare and delicate) is next to impossible and database configuration & any statistics monitoring is impossible.

I will continue to use it to test out ASP.NET development and Silverlight, but if you actually want anyone but you to see any of it then you’re almost certainly going to have to shell out for some professional hosting. Anyhow, this is the road that has led me to Wordpress, and glad I am of that too! In just a few short hours this is all up and running and ready to splurge my thoughts out upon the world.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the free hosting and the idea is great; Microsoft’s recent attention to students is fantastic however in this particular case, don’t expect to actually use the page for anything but testing!

Chris

This Wednesday Hulu’s set to launch; Hulu for those of you in Britain who don’t know is a service created by NBC and News Corporation. It is an online service that allows you to watch any NBC content (with more coming), on any device, for free. All content is free.

This is just the latest in a long string of reminders that we live in Britain and not the US. Our lack of iTunes Music Store access in Starbucks, or free Wi-Fi almost anywhere?! An Edge network for those of us without 3G devices; iPhone anybody?

Huge quantities of licensed content is available on US online services that just isn’t available in Britain; both paid for and free. So, in this day and age when we’re moving more and more towards a global village; why do these companies not welcome the extended market of Europe. The answer to this one strikes me as DWM and licensing although I can’t quite figure out where the bottleneck lies. 

- Ask a copyright holder if they can market it in Britain and the answer would doubtlessly be yes with a hand extended, gesturing shamelessly while they ordered their new Porsche to celebrate the occasion.

-Ask any executive if they’d like to open their products to new markets and revenue opertunities, I would have to imagine the answer would be yes?!

So why does this huge devide exist; I know for one that I like American TV and would be more than happy to purchase it on a legal service such as iTunes, as I’m sure, would many others.

You know what…. I think I may start a company one day targetted at getting the Hi-tech stuff that’s available and implimented in America over here. I shall call it ‘Hi Tech Britain’.

Send your CVs to chris@blogitech.co.uk!

Chris
(n.b. If anyone actually knows the answer to the licensing issues, I would love to know)