| rss2email.ru |
 Обрывки впечатлений- блог о путешествиях  |  Блог о жизни и браке в Европе.  |  КиноМелочи и не только......  |  Скачивайте лучшие фильмы  |
 |  The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) http://www.tuaw.com рекомендовать друзьям >> |
- Dear Apple: What we want to see for iPhone 4.0, part 1
A week ago we asked you, the TUAW reader, to help us tell Apple what you want in the next iPhone: the OS, the apps, the hardware. Within two hours, I had over two hundred emails in my inbox. Within four days, the email total topped 1,100. As I was shifting and sorting through all your suggestions, one thing became clear: you love the iPhone, but you want to see it better, more intuitive, and more versatile - and you know how the iPhone can accomplish those goals.
This is the first of a series of letters to Apple on your behalf, telling the gang in Cupertino what would make their wonder-phone even more wondrous. This letter strictly focuses on the iPhone OS in general - the home screen, navigation, and settings. Future letters will deal with hardware and applications.
There were so many suggestions, I needed to whittle them down. To do that, I tabulated how many times a feature request was made. If more than 50% of you mentioned it, it made it into the letter. If you guys want to see the others (most were one-offs or had less that 15% of you requesting it), perhaps I'll add an extra letter onto the series at the end of its run.
Remember, if you made suggestions about any of Apple's built-in apps (Mail, Maps, Stocks, Calendar, etc) or hardware, you won't see those here, but in an upcoming letter dealing specifically with those areas.
I hope Apple is listening, because the readers of TUAW have spoken, and this is what they have to say:
Dear Apple,
While it's clear the iPhone is the best smartphone on the market right now, you have a lot of competition creeping up. We want to help you blow them out of the water with the iPhone OS 4.0. Here are our suggestions:
1. The lock screen needs to change.
90% of us want a new lock screen. We think the current screen that only shows the date and time, and only the most recent missed call or SMS, is not particularly helpful. If you get a text message, then a calendar alert, and then a push notification, the only one you see is the push notification message. Being able to swipe through them or have a table list would be far more useful. But even then, we still have to enter our four-digit unlock code to see if we've received any new emails. From the new lock screen we want to see all the calls we've missed and the number of new emails and texts we have. We want to see which apps have sent us push notifications, and what appointments are coming up. We want a brief overview of all the new data we've received to be presented to us before we have to enter our unlock code.
Let's extend the features of that new lock screen to ...
2. A new home screen. The iPhone is the smartest phone on the market. Make is smarter. Introduce a location-aware home screen.
Over 90% of us also want a new home screen - and we want it location aware. Let's say we live in London, but travel to continental Europe many times a month. We'd love to turn on our iPhones in the country we just landed in and see the local weather, currency, transit maps, and news displayed right on our home screens. Not only would it save us time and money, it would save something just as valuable to an iPhone owner - battery life. If all these things were displayed on the home screen the first time you turn on your phone, you wouldn't have to open five different applications to get what you want.
Imagine a 'Genius Location' feature as well: the iPhone would show you (through an app like Yelp - or a new Apple-branded app) what restaurants or businesses are around based on your 'likes' in your home town. We know you were granted a 'Transitional Data Sets' patent for a location-based home screen back in February 2008 - let's hope this sees the light of day in iPhone OS 4.0.
3. That new home screen? Let us access it by vertically swiping.
Imagine this: no matter what home screen page you're on, if you swipe up you are presented with a 'feeds screen' that works much like an RSS page. This feeds screen could be set based on in-app preferences so we could fully customize it. Ours might show our latest Facebook posts, last five emails received, our To Do notes, our Mint.com balance, missed calls, text messages, and upcoming iCal events. The guys at teehan+lax have a pretty cool mock-up of this feeds screen, but the killer feature would be how you could access it from any app page - by vertically swiping.
4. Overhaul app navigation.
85% of us think it takes too long to swipe through all our pages of apps. Even though iTunes 9 made a step in the right direction by allowing the user to organize apps and home screen pages visually, there has got to be a better way. Swiping through ten screens to get to the last apps page is tedious.
Wouldn't it be cool if you could press the home button and see all the home pages on one screen? The guys at Ocean Observations think so. Check out this concept video of what this feature would look like (their 'Cover Flow Multitasking' concept is quite cool as well). Don't want to do it their way? Give us stacks, give us folders, give us App Store-like category views. Just give us something that makes it easier to get around our deluge of apps.
5. 85% of us want multitasking and 3rd party background apps (but not at the cost of battery life).
There's not much more to say on this matter, but Palm does it, and if you can find a way around their battery drain, we want it!
6. Almost 80% of us want Flash, even if it's a bad idea.
No, not camera flash (we do, but that's for the next letter). We want Adobe's Flash Player, though Flash on the Mac is a giant performance and stability headache. Get your heads together with Adobe and make it happen (and fix the Mac version while you're about it, please).
7. We love that you introduced landscape mode across virtually all apps in iPhone OS 3.0, but 70% of us want the ability to selectively turn it off.
Give us a setting to switch off the automatic "turn to landscape mode" when the device is turning. Why? When we lay in bed on our side we can't read our mail. The app is always turning and that's really annoying. A system-wide 'ignore orientation' switch would be a good start; app-by-app options would be better.
8. When we leave an app, we want it to remember where we were.
If we click on a link in an app that takes us to Safari or if we switch apps to copy/paste, 70% of us want the app to remember where we were in it when we come back to it. Some apps do this, some don't. Make this an OS-level feature so they all do it.
9. 65% of us want the ability to remove Apple-branded apps.
That Stocks app? Cute, but the Yahoo! Finance [iTunes] app is so much better. We don't need both on our phones.
10. 60% of us want a universal "documents" folder.
We want one location, accessible to all apps, to store documents on the iPhone. Whether we need to send that PDF via IM through Nimbuzz or via email through the built-in Mail app, it's no problem. Either one can do it because the docs are all stored in one place, accessible to all apps. (We realize this breaks the sandboxing model that prevents one app from blowing away data belonging to another one, but we have every confidence you can make it work.)
11. Better Support for Codecs and Add-ons.
It's not just Flash, you know. WMV and AVI still rule on lots of sites. Let us see them (60%).
12. The iPhone is a hard drive with a screen, so....
Give us Disk mode in the OS. 50% of us want to use our iPhone as an external USB/Wi-Fi hard drive.
FYI, Apple, this is just the start. We've got so many more thoughts to share with you about the next iPhone's hardware and apps. So get ready, and thanks for listening. You'll soon be hearing from us again.
Sincerely,
The loyal readers and iPhone owners of TUAW.
TUAW Readers: The next letter will be published one week from today on Sunday 1/17. We'll be telling Apple what we want from the next iPhone's hardware. Want a different enclosure? Camera flash? RFID? OLED? Email me at tuawiphone [at] me dot com (by mid-day, Friday, January 15th at the latest)!
A big thanks to the 1100+ of you who contributed to this article. iPhone homepage sketch by reader 'Fab.'
TUAWDear Apple: What we want to see for iPhone 4.0, part 1 originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sun, 10 Jan 2010 21:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
iPhone - ITunes - AppStore - Apple - Yelp
Переслать - Manually schedule Software Update 'the OS X way' with launchd
Filed under: Software Update, Terminal Tips
In response to a Macworld article, TidBits' Chris Pepper elaborated on ways to run Software Update, Apple's means of delivering updates and patches, on your own schedule. Beginning with the fact that Software Update schedules its next update based on the time it's currently being run, setting the time for the next update is as easy as running it manually at the time you want it to be scheduled for in the future.
Later, Pepper delves into the command line method of updating, using thesoftwareupdatetool (which we've talked about on TUAW, too) to run it from Terminal. Taking that a step further, it's suggested that you run the command fromcron, a UNIX command for scheduling tasks, to automate the command-line updates. However, while it still works fine and is perfectly capable of the task,cronhas technically been deprecated in OS X since Tiger. I thought I'd mention the newfangled "Mac OS X way" of handling scheduled tasks, and demonstrate a little of its flexibility.Launchd is Apple's replacement for several UNIX ways of doing things, including
init, rc.d scripts andcron. It provides a uniform, XML configuration method and -- in many cases -- is more secure than the replaced methods. Launchd can trigger applications and scripts at boot time, at intervals or even when a file or the contents of a folder change. It can also make sure a daemon or an application keeps running, with the ability to respawn and throttle it. If that's just a bunch of nerd-speak to you, don't worry, this isn't going to be an overly technical post. You can read more specifics about launchd on Apple's developer site, if you want more geeky goodness.Launchd configuration files, like much of OS X, are XML files. Each process has one, and they can exist just about anywhere. A tool called
launchctlis used to add and remove them fromlaunchd. While these files are technically human-readable, they're not the most fun to create and edit. In the interest of keeping this as non-technical as possible, I'm going to use a very handy utility called Lingon. The latest version (2.1.1) can be found at Sourceforge. It's no longer under active development, but it's working fine in Leopard and Snow Leopard. Grab a copy, put it in either your Applications folder or into Applications/Utilities, and launch it.
You'll see all of your existing daemons and agents in Lingon's sidbar. Unless you know exactly what you're doing, you'll generally only want to edit/add scripts in the "My Agents" section to avoid breaking anything at the system level. Create a new script using the plus button in the upper left, and name it something unique in section 1 of the edit area; I prefix my launchd scripts with my own name, e.g.com.brettterpstra.awesomescript, but anything will work.Section 2 is where our command goes. In this case, we're running the
softwareupdatecommand, and we want it to automatically download any available updates in the background. We'll use/usr/sbin/softwareupdate --download --allin that field.Section 3 gives us the various options for running the command. In Lingon's interface they're pretty self-explanatory, so I won't go through each one. We'll just use "At a specific date:," "Every Day," and whatever time works best for you (and your bandwidth allowances). Make sure the enabled checkbox in the upper right is checked, hit the save button at the top, and you've got your own Software Update scheduler. Change the time at will, or use one of the other options to control how often it runs. If you enable this, you'll probably want to disable the automatic checking in Software Updates panel in System Preferences.
There are other possibilities, too. For example, if you wanted to be notified as soon as possible about available updates, you could write a script that ran
softwareupdatewith the "-l" option (to list available updates without downloading them), parse the output and have it send you an email or a direct message if it found any updates. Run it about every 15 minutes and you could be among the first to know about an update! You can also use the launchd manager (launchctl), or Lingon to disable background processes that other programs have added, but that you don't want running. Whether you're a UNIX user still hanging on to cron, or are just a regular user who wants something besides iCal for scheduling scripts and launching applications, this will hopefully get you started with the 'new' OS X way of doing it.TUAWManually schedule Software Update 'the OS X way' with launchd originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sun, 10 Jan 2010 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
Переслать - Talkcast 10 pm tonight: Looking ahead to Macworld Expo
Filed under: TUAW Business, Podcasts
Talkcast time again! We'll review the week's news, consider the latest tablet tidbits, and then look back at CES and ahead to Macworld Expo.
To participate on TalkShoe, you can use the browser-only client, the embedded Facebook app, or the classic TalkShoe Pro Java client; however, for maximum fun, you should call in. For the web UI, just click the "TalkShoe Web" button on our profile page at 10 pm Sunday. To call in on regular phone or VoIP lines (take advantange of your free cellphone weekend minutes if you like): dial (724) 444-7444 and enter our talkcast ID, 45077 -- during the call, you can request to talk by keying in *-8.
If you've got a headset or microphone handy on your Mac, you can connect via the free Gizmo or X-Lite SIP clients; basic instructions are here. Talk with you then!
Photo by http://www.flickr.com/photos/macinate/ / CC BY 2.0TUAWTalkcast 10 pm tonight: Looking ahead to Macworld Expo originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sun, 10 Jan 2010 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
Переслать
| rss2email.ru | отписаться: http://www.rss2email.ru/unsubscribe.asp?c=6894&u=24004&r=484673635 управление подпиской: http://www.rss2email.ru/manage.asp |
