Some more TODO items for Apple's iPhone dev team.

Following up on my previous post, here are some other things that I think Apple's iPhone development team should seriously fix. Note that all these critics do not mean that I don't like the iPhone, it just means that I hope that Apple will address the issues of this new immature product line.

• Generic landscape mode. Already mentioned in my previous post. This is a serious mis-design issue. Go fix your code.


• Total lack of select/copy/cut/paste. I know the iPhone UI doesn't lend itself very easily to these features, but they are critical. You must find a clever way of implementing them, just like you used the clever magnifying glass so we can move the cursor throughout the text easily.


• Absolutely zero control on the underlying FS. I know you try to keep control over it, but come on! We need to use the iPhone as a storage device! We want to store documents on them! Right now if I browse the web and find what seems to be an interesting PDF, I can't even save it on my iPhone to transfer it to my MacBook later!


• On a related note: I can't save attachments from Mail to my iPhone. Even if you decide you don't want to fix the previous item, you can still make it possible to import pictures attached to mails into the iPhone's photo library, maybe in a different roll though.


• Fix your cache use! If I look at the stock or weather, go back to SpringBoard, and look at it again 2min later, it will refresh the data that's only 2min old! For stock refreshing the data after 2min barely makes sense, but if you really want to force an auto-refresh, don't refresh if you know that markets are closed, because this is utterly useless. And you know when markets are closed, because it's mentioned right under the stocks history. Too many apps tend to refresh their data too often due to poor caching policies. You should work to improve all apps on this aspect.


• Make it possible to import ICS from the web to Calendar.app, FFS! Or at least sync up with the Google Calendar team to make it possible to use them read/write on the iPhone!


• Add a video recorder! How on earth could you leave this out?


• Do not resize pictures sent by email when connected on a WiFi network. I guess you resize them to save bandwidth and because EDGE is already slow enough when sending downscaled pictures, but on a WiFi connection there's no reason why you shouldn't send the full resolution one.


• Rotate the fucking pictures! Currently the iPhone always stores the JPG data in landscape mode and only mentions the orientation of the picture in EXIF metadata, but if you upload the picture on the web for instance, then the browsers won't render it properly, because many apps still don't use EXIF metadata. Moreover there's no "easy" way to rotate the pictures on OSX, which is a real pain for the average user, I guess. Personally I used jpegtran to rotate the JPEG DCT losslessly but I won't expect normal users to do this.


• No chat application. No port of iChat or whatever... For a phone with an always on Internet connection, that's ... weird, to say the least.


• No Streetview in Google Maps.


• It's not possible to plan a trip on Google Maps with multiple destinations.

(I reckon that the least two items about Google Maps are also Google's fault, I hope we'll try to do something about it despite the fact that a lot of effort is also being invested in Android.)

That's about it for now, I'll add more TODO items as they come to my mind. Please Apple, make the iPhone perfect! Currently it's only great. It ought to be perfect.