DearCupertino

Dear Cupertino,

Posted by Ryan Stellato at 3:05 PM 0 comments Links to this post    

First up, hope y'all had an awesome Christmas. Whatever you did, whatever presents you got, I hope you enjoyed your holiday. Anyways, it's back to work now with yet another Dear Cupertino post from yours truly. It's one that has been floating around for a while, so, enjoy!

As usual, if you've got any suggestions for any Apple products that you'd like to see, shoot off an email to Joel: joel.esler [at] me [dot] com is the one you want.

Dear Cupertino,



With iTunes 8, you gave us the Genius feature. It's an awesome feature that is actually, pretty cool. From the Apple website:

The new Genius feature in iTunes 8 creates the perfect playlist. Just select a song, click the Genius button, and iTunes generates a playlist of songs from your library that go great with it. You decide how many songs appear in your Genius playlist — 25, 50, or 100. Refresh your Genius playlist to get new results. Or save your Genius playlist so you always have it.

One thing that the Genius playlist of iTunes 8 lacks is creation of a Genius playlist from more than one source song. Sure, we like it when we can make a playlist based on songs that "go great with it", but what if we're looking for a more specific taste?
Having the ability to create a Genius playlist based off more than one song would be incredibly useful in this scenario.

I can't see why Apple wouldn't implement this - surely it wouldn't involve that much more code.

Thanks,
Benny Ling

Posted by Benny Ling at 5:31 AM 0 comments Links to this post    

Labels: Genii, Genius, iTunes, Multiple

Dear Cupertino,

Now, for those of you that know me, you will know that this is a huge pet peeve of mine.

Email clients that Top Post by default and have no way to bottom post in any setting. One of the biggest email clients Outlook, has this same problem, and it annoys me to all end. (I detail this annoyance here.)

Mail.app does this. You can't bottom post at all.

Top posting means, when you reply to an email, the email client puts your cursor at the top of the email above the Attribution line.

Bottom Posting means, when you reply to an email, the email client puts your cursor at the bottom of the email, above your signature block.

The reason that this annoys me, is because I try to be a good Net Citizen and bottom post. I bottom post because I feel that when you read an email thread you should be able to logically follow it. If you've ever tried to read an email thread that is posted in totally Top posting format, you will know that this makes email threads logically hard to read. I'd like the ability, in Mail.app, much like it is in Thunderbird, to make my default post method Bottom only.

Please?

Thanks,

Joel

Posted by Joel Esler at 1:25 PM 0 comments Links to this post    

Labels: Apple, mail

Just a simple one today, folks. As per usual, if you've got any suggestions, or any thing that bugs you immensely about any Apple product, shoot a rant across to Joel at: joel.esler [at] me [dot] com, and he'll be more than glad to read it.

Dear Cupertino,

User Interface inconsistencies bug me. It is really annoying when the UI in any particular application don't function as you'd expect it to. This is particularly true when UI inconsistencies aren't the same across applications - even when said applications are built on the same set of APIs as one another.

For instance, the search field in the iTunes Music Store is on of those things that is just plain annoying.

The problem stems from the field not being able to "clear and focus" itself at the same time. If you've already got something typed in, and the field isn't currently focused (ie, doesn't have the blue highlighting around it), then you can't just hit the X next to your search term and start typing for another search - nope, you have to click in the field again so you can type in that field.


It's one of those UI inconsistencies that really get up my nose - and I want to see something done about it. Almost every other search field that implements the small X that clears the field and refocuses it so you can start typing it immediately seems to work right - so why not one of Apple's most widely distributed products, iTunes?

Apps that I have open at this moment which manage to do this right include: NetNewsWire and Chax's Log Viewer for iChat. Even Firefox's Google search in toolbar manages to automagically select the text for you when you click in the unfocused field, ready for you to start typing.

Everyone who has an iPod has iTunes (unless they're just plain disturbed), so it's one of those things that you would think Apple would go about fixing - this "clear and focus" functionality seems like a standard object in terms of coding Cocoa applications, but it's broken across the board in iTunes - neither the iTunes Music Store search field or the Music Library search field exhibit any "clear and focus" functionality at all. Poor effort, Apple.


Oh well, I guess I'll just have to wait for 8.0.3.

Thanks,
Benny Ling.

Ed's note: post idea from here. Props to Daring Fireball, Bjango, and the excellent range of ngmoco:) apps from the app store.

Posted by Benny Ling at 5:42 AM 0 comments Links to this post    

Labels: clear, field, focus, interface, iTMS, iTunes, search, user

So even though this site is primarily about what we wish Apple would do, every once in a while it's nice to see some of our recommendations being implemented by the guys at Cupertino.

I'm sure that it wasn't entirely our fault that these features were implemented in products, but I'd like to think that Dear Cupertino has done it's fair share in influencing Jobs and the rest of the Cupertino crew to make these things happen.

It is with great pleasure that I can tell you that Apple is a company that listens to it's customers. Okay - so some of their decisions might not be as glamorous as we'd expect, (nor as popular), but at the end of the day - Steve is looking after you, the consumer.

Righto -- so it's great to see two wishes that have been made true;

1. The Biggest Little iPod In The World
   Wow - the third generation Nano may have come and gone - and with it, the 4GB iteration of the above - but the fourth generation has now landed, complete with 16GB of juicy flash goodness, and in a whole heap of different colors, too!
   We love it - it's another great Apple product.
   
   
   
2. iSights in the Monitors
   So we've now seen the arrival of the new 24" LED Cinema Display, and while some may not be a fan of it's glossy appearance, it's hard to deny the fact that it include an iSight in the monitor - that much is a given.
   However - we're yet to see some really-cool feature by Apple to make use of this second iSight - if you've got any suggestions for this second iSight, we'd love to hear them (just shoot off an email to joel.elser [at] me [dot] com).

If there are any other previous Dear Cupertino entries that I've missed but have now been given the green light by Apple, let me know in the comments.

Cheers,
Benny Ling.

Images courtesy Apple: iPod Nano, Cinema Display.

Posted by Benny Ling at 3:21 AM 0 comments Links to this post    

Labels: fulfilled, iPod, iSight, Monitors, Nano, wishes

Dear Cupertino,

I love Mail. I love the way it handles all my emails, and the fact that I can have a single inbox for all my email accounts. It's fantastic that it can handle Exchange mail servers in the first place - if it didn't, there would be a serious deficiency on Apple's part.


However - there is one flaw that I've recently encountered that can be easily fixed; Mail, in it's current iteration, can only support one Exchange inbox at a time. Just one, and not one more.

Of course, you can see where this would be massively frustrating - if you're at home and you and your partner have Exchange accounts on your company's server, then you're up the creek without a paddle. You then have to resort to using a third party program which does have multiple Exchange inbox support, or worse - use the ugly-as-sin Entourage 2008 client for Mac (which only supports Exchange if you buy the Standard edition, not Home and Student).

However hard I wonder why Apple hasn't built this into Mail, I can't quite seem to fathom why they have done so.

Anyways - I'd love to see this feature in 10.6 - kudos to Apple if they deliver the goods.

Thanks,
Benny Ling

Posted by Benny Ling at 3:08 AM 1 comments Links to this post    

Labels: email, exchange, mail

Righto - more and more suggestions! Keep em coming to joel [dot] esler [at] me [dot] com!

Dear Cupertino,



I love the simplicity of iWork. It's a great alternative to the Microsoft Office Suite for Mac, and, being an Apple product, you know that It Just Works. Creating fancy slideshows in Keynote is as easy as creating professional ones, and writing a letter or a resume in Pages is but one click away. Numbers, while not as fully-featured as Excel, makes spreadsheets easy for the uninitiated.

However, there are two things I'd like to see in the next iWork update:

• The ability to copy and paste data into the graph data box in Pages.
  Why this isn't already a feature I don't quite understand, but graphs in Pages seem a lot harder to do than their Numbers counterparts. Unless I'm missing something profoundly simple, this just isn't possible with Pages graphs. Pages' graphs in general, are not intuitive, they're finnicky, and generally require a lot of messing around to work right.

• One click line of best fit.
  Again, unless I'm missing something that's staring me in the face, I'm not quite sure why it's so hard to draw a line of best fit for the data given in a Numbers graph. Numbers is great in that it automatically shows us the sum, average, max/min values of any selected data, but seriously - why no line of best fit? This is another feature that should have come standard. I mean, sure, it can be done - but it should be easier than that, Apple.

That concludes my rather short list of iWork suggestions. If I've missed anything you'd like to see added, shout out in comments below.

Thanks,
Benny Ling.

Posted by Benny Ling at 7:43 PM 1 comments Links to this post    

Labels: iWork