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10 Things on the iPhone 5 Wish List
We’ve come an awfully long way since the first iPhone was released in 2007. The last three and a half years have seen dramatic improvements in both the hardware and software of Apple’s smartphone. So what more could you ask for? A lot, it turns out.

Well, I have a few modest suggestions. And in the spirit of the holiday season, I’m offering this wish list (along with the one I already compiled for iOS 5) to Santa in the hope that he can put in a good word with Steve Jobs. You never know; it might work.

Advanced Capacitive Touchscreen

This is something I forget about in the summer months, but now that snow is falling, I resent having to take my gloves off to use my iPhone. (Have you ever tried answering your iPhone with the tip of your nose? Far from dignified…) Certain exotic gloves are available that make it possible to use a capacitive touchscreen while keeping one’s digits warm, but they’re often expensive or gimmicky. It might sound too good to be true, but a report last month on Patently Apple suggested just such a technology might be on its way.

Thinner, Lighter, Stronger

Forget glass. Yeah, it looks great but I don’t care if it is made from the same stuff used in helicopter windscreens. Can liquid metal provide us with a super thin, super-strong chassis? Failing that, I don’t mind a carbon fibre composite (which is likely a better material than metal anyway, since it won’t interfere with the iPhone’s many radios.)

Capacitive Charging

This one’s a long shot. The trouble with capacitive charging is that it’s molasses-slow and expensive to implement. But there’s still something alluring about the concept of simply resting my phone on a minimal Apple-branded surface and watching it get charged. A liquid-metal body (see above) would, by the way, make this much easier to implement.

More Sensors! More!

Adding temperature, pressure, humidity and EMF sensors might sound insane, but imagine the apps that would appear to exploit such tech! Incidentally, with a metal chassis, a future iPhone might feasibly contain a heart-rate sensor of the kind commonly found in treadmills and workout equipment. A heart rate monitor in Nike+ would be a great addition to that service… as would a pedometer. Bottom line here – the more sensors we can get in the iPhone, the more versatile it will become.

Impossibly Long-Lived Battery

This is a tough one. See, it’s hard to ask for all these new sensors and next-generation capacitive touch screens and still say I want a longer-lasting, high-performance battery. But still, I’m asking for it anyway. This is a wish list after all. And even if delivering a “miracle battery” means breaking the very laws of physics, well, I’m sure Apple can do it.

Automatic Owner Recognition

If you use your iPhone for every little thing, you probably use the passcode lock to keep your personal data safe. For the curious, the current four digit passcode software lock offers 1,048,576 possible combinations. That’s probably good-enough for most people already accustomed to having to memorize PINs for their credit and debit cards, but I’d like to see this taken much further. A combination of facial recognition, bioelectrical impedance analysis and voice print identification could make an iPhone far more secure than it is today. It would certainly help sell to government customers after the WikiLeaks fiasco.

Multicore Processors

The just-released Infinity Blade is an impressive achievement on the iPhones 3GS and 4, given that they use single-core processors. Imagine what might be possible with dual or quad-core processors in a future device.

Touch Sensitive Bezel

There’s a (sort of) joke shared amongst the Apple faithful that if Steve Jobs could do-away with the iPhone’s single button, he would. Well, he can. In fact, should. The Home button’s functionality could be replaced with capacitive gesture input built into the iPhone’s bottom-bezel which could remain large, but nowhere near as large as it must be to accommodate the hardware button. What’s more, gestures could be added (or edited) at any time to allow for even more functionality, like instant access to the device’s camera.

High Definition Sound

Forget that tinny, crackling mono voice that you hear when you use the iPhone as an actual phone. HD voice calls are amazing and, a bit like HD TV, must be experienced to be believed. This isn’t entirely an iPhone-only thing though – carriers must provide support for wideband audio (as it is more properly known), and precious few have shown much interest in doing so. In the UK, for instance, only one carrier has launched HD voice support, and that was just a few months ago. Good luck convincing AT&T that it should be a priority.

So there you have it: my ten wishes for the iPhone 5. The list surely goes on. I’d love to know what you most want in next year’s inevitable hardware update; share your ideas in the comments below.

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How-To: Turn Mac Parental Controls Into Productivity Boosters
Parental Controls in Snow Leopard are an absolute hit with parents, but the usefulness of those tools don’t just stop at the kids. From blocking websites to tracking time, they can also be used to increase your own personal productivity. Here’s how.

On my computer, I have a normal “everything goes” user account that lets me browse and use applications unrestricted. Unfortunately, that means there are a lot of distractions. However, to focus on particular work, like my GigaOM writing, I also have a separate, writing-specific account. My writing account uses parental controls to lock down certain things, because I can’t always rely on my willpower to keep me focused.

Setting up parental controls is easy. First, create a new account for productivity.
1. Go to System Preferences, and click the Accounts icon.
2. Click the lock icon in the bottom left corner. An administrator authentication dialog box will appear. Enter your administrator account password so that you can make changes.
3. Click the Accounts icon, then the (+) icon and then the New Account window will appear.
4. Go to the drop down menu next to new account and choose “Managed with Parental Controls” from the list.
5. Give the account a name of your choosing. You can set a password if you want, but the account is so limited I leave it blank.
Now it’s time to set the parental controls. Click on the account you just created, then on “Open Parental Controls.” You’ll be greeted with the System setting first. I turn on Simple Finder, which allows me to specify which apps appear in the Finder. Select only critical apps. For writing, I do it all on Google Docs, so I don’t really need many applications. You might opt to turn on Microsoft Word or Keynote depending on your own preferences. If I’m reviewing software, I’ll enable that application as well.

The next tab is Content. Click “Try to limit access to adult websites automatically” and then click customize. Under “Always Allow,” add websites you know you’ll be using for work. Under “Never Allow,” add time sinks such as Facebook, Twitter, Hulu and anything else that might be a distraction.

The third tab is Mail and iChat. Since I primarily use Gmail, mail isn’t as relevant for me. Whatever you use, I’d recommend against using email entirely if you want to be at your most productive. For iChat, specify a small list of “safe” contacts. In my case, it’s my editors and key sources for stories. That way I won’t get family and friends chatting with me while I’m in productivity mode.

For productivity the next tab, Time Limits, isn’t as relevant. It can be useful if you want to limit your time per day spend working to achieve a healthier work/life balance. It may not pay off directly in terms of productivity, but in the long run it’ll help the quality of your work improve.

Finally, there’s the Logs tab. I use it as a way to balance my writing with other tasks. It’s great for billing purposes, and to see how much time I put into a task. Like many freelance writers, I get paid by the column, not the hours worked. I can then review how much time I spent writing for the week or month and compare it to how much I earned. If you set up accounts for individual projects, you can switch between the accounts and get real-time logs of what you did and for how long, making for a great way of tracking your time that doesn’t require any additional software.

Mac-based office might think about implementing these tips if they want more control over how their employees use the work day. Of course, if the computer is your own, you can easily switch accounts to enable and disable restrictions. But if your desire to procrastinate is so bad that you keep switching accounts or pull out your iPhone to check Facebook, then you may just be beyond help.

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Apple Shows Continued Commitment to Ping With Playlists
Late Dec. 10, Apple introduced new playlist features for Ping, the social music network it introduced as part of iTunes 10. Ping users can now share iTunes playlists on your profile, and let friends collaborate on those playlists by adding songs. The features have already been pushed out to all Ping users, and don’t require a software update.

The new Ping playlist feature plugs right into the existing method of creating playlists in iTunes. You can use your existing lists, or create a new one using the File>New Playlist (⌘N) command. Once you’ve dragged and dropped the tracks you want on the playlist from your library, click the little arrow icon next to the playlist name on the right and a dialog box (shown below) opens up asking whether you want to gift it or publish it on the iTunes Store. Once you choose to publish a playlist, iTunes gives you a chance to choose its name and description, and to reorder songs. Finally, A checkbox allows you to determine whether or not to let other Ping users who follow you to add to the playlist.

You can also create a brand new playlist from within the iTunes Store browser, which could include items not found in your library. The link for this is found on your Ping profile page, under “My Ping Playlists” on the right. You’ll get to choose a title and a description, and add songs by searching the iTunes Store. Again, you can choose whether or not to allow others to contribute to your list.

There are a couple of limitations to the new playlist creation tools. First, if a track on your playlist isn’t available through the iTunes Store, it automatically gets removed before sharing. Just a friendly reminder from Apple that first and foremost, Ping is a sales tool. Second, you can only have up to 100 songs on a playlist. That might seem like a lot, but if you’re collaborating on an all-time “best of” list with many others, you could hit that limit quickly.

The introduction of these features is the latest in a series of indications that Apple isn’t about to just let Ping fall quietly away into obscurity and disuse. Despite the limitations I just mentioned, playlists are a nice addition to Ping that really add to its potential as a genuinely social tool. Allowing users to essentially create mixtapes will allow people to feel personally invested in how Ping is representing their musical tastes. It shows that Apple is paying close attention to what’s wrong with Ping, and devoting resources to correcting those mistakes.

Apple’s introduction of Twitter integration on Nov. 11 helped diminish Ping’s initial sense of isolation from the web and other social services, something Google Wave suffered from. And now you can search your email address books from various services to find contacts, too, making it still more likely that the average Ping user’s network will actually be a network, instead of an island with four or five residents.

Ping seemed like a total disaster when it launched, and an early fight with Facebook over service integration didn’t help that outlook. Apple may not be following my advice for how to fix Ping, but it’s doing a good job of beginning to address its shortcomings. If the company continues to focus on improvement and features that emphasize the social rather than the sales side of Ping, I think we’ll see user interest climb steadily in the new year.

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Official Google Latitude App Arrives in App Store
Google Latitude briefly appeared last week in the Japanese App Store, but disappeared just as quickly. As of early Dec. 13, it’s now available as a free download for all iPhone users. The official app lets you share your device’s location info with contacts of your choosing.

When Google Latitude initially launched in February 2009, it seemed a pretty ideal candidate for the iPhone platform, but Apple apparently didn’t agree. The Mac-maker originally blocked the release of a native app, citing possible user confusion about whether Latitude was actually the Maps app. So instead users got a Latitude web app, which can’t run in the background, limiting the appeal of Latitude’s functionality.

The new app does let you update your location info in the background, thanks to iOS 4′s multitasking abilities. It also lets you disable background updating, set your location manually, or hide your location from specific contacts, in case you’re engaged in some kind of elaborate spy games. You can also choose either metric or imperial units of measurement, and the type of map used to display your contact’s locations.

Latitude is the second official Google app to get a reassessment from Apple’s app review team. The first, Google Voice, was released in the App Store on Nov. 16, after a lengthy period in limbo while Apple “studied” it. Apple’s new stance regarding these apps might stem from its release of App Store review guidelines, but I’m willing to bet it has more to do with a sense that Apple needs to maintain close feature parity with Google’s Android operating system by offering as many Google services natively on the iPhone as it can. It’s hard to believe it’s just coincidence that Apple blocked both Latitude and Voice when it had little to no competition in the realm of app-enabled smartphones, but that now that Android is growing so quickly, there’s suddenly no issue with either app.

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