We need an iPhone Dashboard

With new features there is often more user interface complexity. Especially when done one at a time and each in a different way. In recent years, things have been tacked onto iPhone and iOS, messing with the basic, discoverable, approachable approach of the original iPhone. When there was just 1.0, it was nice and simple. Grid of apps. Tap one to open it. Click home to go back home. Hold home to kill an app if it died. That was pretty much it. After the first update or two, double-clicking the home button could be set up to go to phone favorites, iPod, etc., which was really handy, and didn't convolute things.

Now, however, things are looking a little murky. The basic grid of apps has a search page. There's Notification Center for reading notifications and using weather/stock widgets. There's the multitasking dock for switching apps, controlling audio, and locking orientation (and in iPad's case, screen brightness). All those different things need not be split across all those different UIs. It makes the device more complicated than it should be.

Notification Center already has a couple of widgets in it. Why not take it to the next level and make a widget API that developers can tap into? Call it Dashboard, make a section of the App Store for Dashboard widgets, and voila, iOS now has all of the neat tweaky little gadgets that Mac OS X has (well, once developers start making use of it). It could also become the central location for all things widgety on iOS, bringing together multiple scattered functions.

I never quite got comfortable with double-clicking AND swiping to get my iPod controls. Those used to just be a single action. If those audio/screen controls to the left of the multitasking dock were moved to a Dashboard widget, it would then be just a quick swipe to find them. Same with the multitasking dock itself - it can just be a widget docked permanently at the top or bottom of the Dashboard. Same with Spotlight, which would expand into a full screen view if the user tapped on the search bar. Dashboard would be so perfect for all of this.

If all the vertical scrolling started to get messy, it could be made into pages, like the home screen, which can be named. I'd probably do one page for notification center, one page for search, one for app widgets, and one for built-in widgets.

Putting that all into Dashboard frees up the double-click home button to perform other shortcuts the user chose, like it used to prior to iOS 4 (the menu in Settings -> General -> Home Button). Speaking of that menu, make it so Dashboard could be opened with the double-click instead of the swipe, because users hate accidental swipes interrupting their game or their video.

I have tried Android widgets, but I'm not a fan of them. They seem to slow the launcher down, and might use data even if I'm not actively interested in reading them at that very moment. With Dashboard for iOS, there's the best of both worlds. The home screen and home button get back to simplicity, and Dashboard is there on demand to bring up my widgets whenever I want.

iPhone 5 - ridiculous rumor edition

Today is keynote day.

Obviously, since the invite has 4 icons on it, like the home screen of the 6th generation iPod nano, this will be an iPhone nano.

There will be 8 buttons, because Steve Jobs is no longer at the helm, and you will press at least 3 of them in any attempt to pull it out of your pocket or find which side is the one that has the power button.

Since the phone icon has a red 1 badge on it, this clearly means the phone will have enough battery for 1 phone call, and since AT&T drops all your calls up in here anyway, that ain't saying much.

Oh, and the maps icon isn't actually at Infinite Loop in Cupertino. It's in spaaaaaace. At the space station Steve has built to take us all back to his home planet. (what, you think he actually waited for Cupertino's blessing to start building it?)

In all seriousness, I don't expect as much of a jump as from the 3G to 3GS or 3GS to 4. More like from the iPad to the iPad 2. Thinner, lighter, faster, and able to slice food with its sharp edges. The keynote will have a couple of blunders (maybe a wifi breakdown or two), a dozen developers coming out and talking about how amazing they are, and then maybe a song (since this is also supposed to be the iPod event).

Am I the only one who thinks Apple needs to upend their own table and reinvent the phone...again? It's all gotten just a little too predictable and, dare I say it, ho hum. They raised their bar so high with the first one that anything less than such a raise is now merely evolutionary, and maybe in some ways a little disappointing.

iPhone 4-inch screen a big no-no

Here are two things the world thinks a 4" iPhone screen would look like:

Aside from the distended appearance stemming from the quick photoshop job, many people think this means the iPhone can essentially have a 4" screen without drawbacks. But has anybody considered how wrong it would be to increase the size of the screen at all?

First and foremost, from a usability standpoint. It's easy to reach all of a 3.5" screen with one thumb at most angles and grips of the phone. Expanding the screen size by even half an inch increases the likelihood that you'll need to reposition the phone in order to reach all corners of the screen.

What a lot of other phone makers (and apparently aspiring industrial designers mocking up 4" iPhone screens) don't seem to get is how valuable it is to reach all of the user interface with one thumb. Like juggling with one hand while using your iPhone with the other. Or texting while driving. Or something else incredibly stupid like that.

For every millimeter you add to the phone to fit the 4" screen, there are 2 millimeters your hand has to wrap around. That raises the minimum size of hand you need in order to comfortably one-thumb it. Half an inch more diagonally means that in order to use your phone with the same level of comfort and ease, you have to have a hand span that's an inch longer than it is now.

If you don't happen to have a hand extender handy, that means you have fewer (or even no) positions in which you can hold the phone where you can still use it with one thumb. I don't know about you, but I can't just go to the store and pick up a larger set of hands.

Secondly, from a resolution standpoint. Would you increase the resolution to match the size difference in order to keep the 326 PPI? Then you've got a strange screen resolution somewhere in the range of 1080x720 to 1100x733, along with a whole slew of angry developers that now have yet another screen size and resolution to account for in their apps. Or do you just keep 960x640 in the 4" panel? Then you're no longer in "retina" territory, annoying everybody who got used to the appearance of the 3.5" 960x640. That, and you've still got a slew of angry developers, they just have to account for a different screen size.

In either case, there goes the market for ruler apps. I mean, who would bother to code their ruler to check and see if the screen is 3.5" or 4" or 9.7", 320x480 or 960x640 or 1080x720 or 1024x768? Those rulers are pretty handy and I wouldn't want to see them go away. They're right up there with flashlights. But seriously, now, the developers that design their interfaces and touch targets depending on the "nominal" screen resolution would then have twice (or at least 1.5x) the work to do -- accounting for the intended touch target size on the 3.5" iPhone, iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS, and iPhone 4, then the supposed 4" iPhone Macro. For universal apps, there's also the 9.7" iPad to think about.

It's a world of hurt, and I thank the engineering gods that there are people at Apple who have already thought of all of these things to ensure that we're never troubled by a 4" iPhone.

Skype iPhone 3G VoIP finally: pigs fly, seas part, sky falls

In case you're living under a rock and haven't heard yet, Skype for iPhone now allows VoIP calls over 3G.

Here's the catch: there's going to be a monthly fee to make calls over 3G after August 2010. Wait, what?

Upgrades / improvements include:
- Call using your 3G connection. Skype-to-Skype calls on 3G are free until at least end of August 2010, after which there will be a small monthly fee (operator charges for data will still apply).

This is NOT a fee imposed by AT&T, as when it comes to iPhones, they've allowed VoIP over 3G unencumbered since October of 2009. It's a fee that's going to be imposed by Skype, and the only reason I can think of is so that they don't tread on their exclusive deal for VoIP over 3G on Verizon (for which they don't charge, other than the price of the app).

This is utterly uncool, and will contribute to my continued non-usage of Skype on my iPhone. Even when they make it run in the background come OS 4. I can't always be tethered to wifi, and the usefulness of Skype is severely limited when you can't make free Skype to Skype calls from anywhere you are.

I hope this isn't going to stick. Get the word out and make sure you let Skype know how you feel about this. Twitter: @PeteratSkype

iPad wifi speed test

I don't have a problem with wifi signal on my iPad. I have a different, it seems rare, problem. Slower download speed, which mostly affects YouTube and installing apps. It's not only with the iPad, either, which is what is baffling me. I started to notice an issue with my wifi speeds on my iPhone 3GS as soon as I got it, but I didn't start taking data until I got my iPad and had the same issues with it.

I decided to rule out the connection and the router by trying a different router on my connection, a different connection with my router, and vice versa. These tests aren't scientific at all -- in fact I already know I could have been a lot more thorough if I dedicated a whole day to testing everything out -- but the few bits and pieces I've done so far gives me some degree of certainty. I've tried various settings on each one to tweak the speeds up to the max, and ran each speed test several times and logged the fastest result in each scenario.

See the results after the jump.

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