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A little iPhone organization would be nice
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I made a Friendfeed post a while ago about this, and then I realized that microblogging is sucking whatever ideas I have for blog posts right out of my head and turning them into one-sentence blips in the social-networking ether…
Anyhow.
The iPhone interface is intuitive. However, this does not mean that it’s practical, especially when you have numerous icons to keep track of. Wouldn’t it be nice if there were an interface for organizing your iPhone apps? You could decide which menu page your apps showed up on, or even separate them by type or alphabetically. It’s just a total pain that every single time your apps update (at least when you do it from the actual phone) that it dumps the updated apps to the very last page in the iPhone interface. Why don’t they just stay where I told them to go? Why do I have to manually drag them back to where they belong? That method is touch-and-go (heh!) at best anyhow — if you don’t get it just right, the icon just hangs on the edge of the screen, waiting to move to the next page.
Actually, it really would make sense to just build this directly into iTunes. We can already see all the apps that are installed on the Applications page. Why isn’t there some kind of sorting method right there?
And while we’re at it, how about trial periods for apps? I recently purchased Super Monkey Ball for $9.99, and it’s the most annoying game I’ve ever paid money for. I totally have buyer’s remorse. If developers could add a time limit into the DRM wrapper on the app, then it could turn itself off after a certain pre-determined trial period ended. I’m not an app developer, obviously, but this seems more viable than giving your app away for free for an amount of time and then suddenly charging all new customers for it.
Finally, while we’re on the subject of iPhones, my “iPhone Cubism” pool on Flickr has actually gotten some good coverage lately! We’re on TUAW, Valleywag and iPhone Savior (which, I learned, is 100% zombie proof. Nice work!). So if you’ve had an artful glitch on your iPhone, add it to the pool.
(Sorry about the dry spell here on the blog! I honestly think Twitter is killing my blogging… slowly, but surely.)
My first iPhone apps
31Tomorrow the iPhone 3G comes roaring into stores, but we got a lucky break today when the 2.0 firmware was discovered online. The app store is also live in iTunes, so I took it upon myself to download a few apps (mostly free ones) to get a feel for them. Here are my first five:
(FREE) The one thing I’ve desperately wanted out of my iPhone was a chat client that worked on a non-jailbroken phone. I couldn’t find an app that would work like Adium or Trillian, which would cover all your bases in terms of chat. If you’ve come across one, let me know! However, the AIM app works really well so far, even if it’s missing some of the iChat sleekness. UPDATE: However, as Dave Zatz points out you cannot run apps in the background, which makes running an IM client a little more annoying.
(FREE) In lieu of purchasing an Amazon Kindle like I’ve been considering, I took the advice of many to wait for an eReader for the iPhone. Here’s the first incarnation of one that I’ve come across. You can download hundreds of books from sources like eReader.com and FictionWise.com, although I’d still rather have a larger screen for reading if it were for an extended period. My eyes are strained enough as it is! The page flipping is very cool, and I feel like I’m going to get a lot of use out of it.
(FREE) Math? Not so much my specialty, especially when it’s a large group and there’s check-splitting involved. There are serveral web-based apps for iPhone, but this one will come in handy at my favorite restaurant in town that for some reason never has cell reception. The interface is just about as simple as you can get, which will help expedite the paying process.
(FREE) Midomi is a wonderful little app for figuring out that song that’s been stuck in your head for days. Either sing a clip, or type in the few words you remember, and the app will bring up some matches. You can then purchase the tunes or watch them on YouTube. Folks on my FriendFeed are saying that Shazam‘s app works faster and more reliably, but I haven’t given it a shot yet myself.
($2.99) The one app that I’ve actually spent money on is MobileFlickr. I’ve made good use of the dedicated Flickr email for sending in photos from my phone, but this has a lot more obvious functionality built in. You can so just about everything on the mobile version that you can accomplish on the web, short of editing and organizing.
It seems that most of the big names have apps ready to go, like eBay, Twitterific and MySpace. There’s a good number of free ones to choose from already, and while I’d be hard-pressed to spend $9.99 on an iPhone application, the Lonely Planet Japanese Phrasebook does seem pretty tempting!
Veronica on Qik: I’ll try to be more exciting, I promise
34The folks over at Qik were kind enough to outfit me with a Nokia N95, so I could test out their service. I’ve been quasi-resistant to lifecasting of any kind, for a few reasons:
1. My days are typically very boring.
2. I feel bad shoving a camera into people’s faces and streaming them.
3. You wouldn’t like me anymore if you knew just how frequently I speak to my cats.
Jason and Scoble seem to find no end to the things they want to share with the Qik (and by proxy, Twitter communities), but I find myself hesitant to turn on the camera. After some brainstorming, here are some applications that I could see Qik being useful for:
1. Clothes shopping — If I’m out shopping, and I can’t decide which shirt or shoes to pick, why not let the live audience help? I mean, they’re the ones that have to look at the outfit on camera later anyway, right?
2. Company on public transportation — As if there aren’t enough crazies on SF Muni, let’s add one more (me) talking AT my phone (instead of on it) during my commute.
3. Instant support group — If one of my girlfriends is having man trouble, it would be nice to have another hundred or so people to back me up at any given moment to say “Dump the loser!”
I’m only half kidding on some of those. What value do you guys get out of lifecasting? Why is it so popular? Maybe because it’s like reality TV, but without all the convinient editing? I’ve tried a few other services, and none of them have been compelling enough for me to continue to use them. The mobility factor with Qik is a definite plus, so maybe that will help.
TagCow: Who (or what) is tagging my photos?
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I noticed today that Thomas Hawk (and later TechCrunch) are writing about a service called TagCow, which apparently can tag large batches of photos at a time. Anyone who takes a lot of pictures can attest to the immense annoyance of tagging tons of photos, especially when you want to be very specific about them. Sure, you can batch tag when you upload, but then you still have to go back and add whatever other tags are needed depending on the individual photo (like batch tagging all my SXSW photos “sxsw” “austin” “conference” and then going back and adding someone’s name, etc). Pain in the butt, right? Some people (like Tantek) bow to the wisdom of crowds and simply add a “needs tags” note to the photos, but it would be nice to have a service or program that could actually recognize the content of the photo and do it for you.
Is TagCow that much-needed service? Thomas seems to think so, although he admits that he’s not quite sure how the technology works. TechCrunch says that it’s got to be people actually viewing each photo and giving it the appropriate tags, although how someone could go through that many photos is beyond me (says the girl who works for a “people-powered search engine“). Arrington says:
The answer is, humans do it. I note that the TagCow site is careful not to say anything about the tagging process, and never use the word “automated” or anything else that would suggests computers are doing the work. Munjal Shah, the founder of Riya/Like, agreed, noting that it recognized a witch in Thomas’ photo – he says this just isn’t something a computer can do today.
But this makes me concerned about privacy. If I’m uploading 200 photos from my vacation, do I really want a bunch of dudes sitting around an office picking apart each one? No, obviously not. Therefore, I probably wouldn’t use the service. However, since TagCow is being a little vague about how everything works, I’m worried that people will walk into a situation where their privacy could be at stake. Does TagCow keep copies of the photos you send them? Do they live on some server there, even though you’re only tagging them for, say, your personal collection (as opposed to being on Flickr or Zooomr)? TC also writes:
And the business is definitely a little sketchy. Worried about the privacy of your data? Just don’t click on their Privacy Policy or Terms of Use: “Privacy policy is TBD.” and “Legal stuff TBD.” Not exactly a way to build confidence.
Yikes. Anyhow, I’m aware that I’m putting on my tinfoil hat a little early, considering we hardly know anything about TagCow. It could be the answer to our tagging prayers, or it could be a huge privacy-sucking black hole. For now I think I’ll continue adding my metadata by hand.
However, their tagline is hilarious.