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tog on iPhone

January 18th, 2007

Tog makes a great point here about the iPhone’s mail interface:

Of all the iPhone features, this is the one that seems to have completely missed the target. It would be like Blackberry having three lists: One for mail with more than 100 characters, one for mail with fewer than 100 characters, and one for mail sent from more than 3000 miles away. What sense would that make? What Apple has done, when you think about it, is just as random in terms of the user… I should not have to visit three different places on my phone every few minutes to see what is happening.

…I’ve been wishing for a “unified inbox” for years now; this is the one device I’ve seen that might have both the technology and refined user interface to make that happen; he’s right to flag it as a big ol’ missed opportunity.

~jeff

http://joshua.swingpad.com/ Joshua

Right, as usual.

But, then, Apple fired their Human Interface team and honestly, this kind of thing has been sifting through the cracks ever since. Not to mention the things that flatly contradict the HI team’s earlier conclusions without a thought.

And I’d just like to point out that this is why third party software could have had a real place on the device.
http://ldopa.net Jeff

Tog bitches endlessly about the firing of the HI team, but honestly, what were they up to around the time they got fired? Copland? PowerTalk? Cyberdog? Good riddence.

And: I would have to say that this is exactly where I would *not* want to see third-party software — this is something that could only work “right”if Apple integrated it all together. Have you ever seen Chandler? BRRRRR. Terrible. Terrible.
http://joshua.swingpad.com/ Joshua

Have you seen the Macintosh around the time they fired the HI team? Brrr, indeed. There was a lack of direction that seeped into every aspect of the company.

Now that they’re cutting new trails, they need an HI team again.
http://ldopa.net Jeff

I dunno. Maybe. I can’t think of too many egregious HI violations in Apple’s latest products, and you have to admit they’ve produced some masterpieces recently too — like the iPod column interface, like the iPhone interface. I kinda think they’re doing ok.

Constrast that to MS Vista, which takes like eight clicks to delete a shortcut from your desktop (which, if you use Windows, you accumulate a *lot* of). Now *they* need a HI dept.
http://joshua.swingpad.com/ Joshua

Evan, man, not one of those sentences followed the previous one.
Ben

FWIW and IMHO, the Treos don’t have this in one place and I could care less. sms, mms, email, palm calendar, good calendar (mentions blackberry), phone calls, voicemails all populate into an event-driven alert list, and from there you can link directly to the application that’s bugging you.

But, modularity is more important for the Palm since it’s open. I’m not sure the same is true at all for the iPhone.

Is anyone else surprised about the Internet access capabilities? The treo communicates via bluetooth to my iBook to provide modem capabilities. Even in the ruralest of the rural, and off my native network, I can get 20k – 50k worth of bandwidth anywhere I can receive phone calls.