Dear Apple
Fighting bad design in Apple products one thing at a time.
The blog went down with a Posterous boat and all the recent posts are lost. I am looking into switching to a self-hosted solutions meanwhile. Sorry for the inconvenience.
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Workaround for missing iOS phone number search
You are not going to believe me, but there is no built-in phone number search in iOS. It doesn’t work from Contacts, doesn’t work from Spotlight. Spotlight however can find messages send from the number you are looking for or attached contact. But you can’t find a person by a phone number this way if you did not exchange any information prior.
So what are you going to do if you need to quickly add a picture to a contact you are vaguely familiar with? Dial his phone number on a numerical keypad in Phone app and iOS will highlight the name (or names if there are multiple entries) under the number. You still won’t be able to get to the actual contact from that screen though no matter if you try to tap the number or Add New Contact button. What you need to do is to press Call and cancel it. Now you can go to the contact data from the Call History screen.
But this works only if you type up the whole number. There is no way to quickly look up the phone to see if you have if already when somebody tells you “do you have my new number with four zeroes at the end”?
Dear Apple, fix it. I don’t say copy the Address book from Android, which by the way can do all kind of tricks (that are not needed 99% of the time). But at the very least can you make Spotlight to index phone numbers as well?
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Fixing the iOS Lock Screen concept
Interesting design suggestion that actually makes sense. I find it unconvenient to slide the lockscreen upwards to get to the camera. Reminds a bit of Adroid, but I think this one is a better idea. From my experience I can say Android is all about distraction, from the lock screen you can go straight to camera, messages, phone and more. Android always throws more and more things at you. More than I can handle at least. And this nice and non-pushy lockscreen fits the iOS concept even better than the one that we see now.
iOS Lock Screen at Brye Kobayashi blog
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Sony SmartWatch: The watch the iPod nano wishes it was
iPad Nano is a really an average product, it has not very nice screen, doesn’t have enough control buttons, so you got to look at it all time to control playback. Thank you for adding hardware volume buttons at least. I have read that Apple was surprised that people are using nano as a watch, and they added more watch faces as an afterthough. Sadly they forgot to fix what makes watch a watch – ability to tell time at a glance. Sony just unveiled some kind of Facebook-Twitter-Nano-Watch, Zdnet reports:
Truthfully, the nano’s terrible as a watch. Case is point is the almost two second latency from the time you press the nano’s wake button to the screen actually lighting up.
The other thing that the iPod nano needs to make it a more viable wristwatch would be a Bluetooth and/or Wi-Fi radio so that you could easily sync music, contacts, calendars, etc. without having to connect it to your computer with an expensive, proprietary USB cable. What is this? 1999?
But forget all that. Sony just ate Apple’s lunch.
Unlike the iPod nano, which is an iPod being forced into being a watch, SmartWatch is an accessory to an Android phone. It connects via Bluetooth so that you can receive email and SMS notifications, answer calls and keep tabs on social networks like Facebook and Twitter — in addition to playing music. Plus it clips to any standard watch band.
This is actually an interesting concept and I wish we had something like this built into iPod nano. It would be a lifesaver sometimes. When you have an iPhone in your pocket and somebody is calling, you can answer using the headset, but to see who is it you got to pull it out of the pocket. Siri can read the latest text message but it can’t tell you what was in the notification you just received, so you got to reach into your pocket again. Besides it is awkward to talk to your phone in public places sometimes. Hope Apple is working on something similar and this explains is why we got the same not-very-good audio player 2nd year in a row.
Check out the full report on Zdnet if you’re interested or this video (the soundtrack is very annoying, be warned).
SmartWatch on Sony.com
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Macbook rubber foot fell off? $130 to fix
Rubber feet on my girlfriend’s notebook fell off, one by one. I tried to glue em, but they are mushroom-shaped and the “stem” simply broke in halp so I went to the nearest authorized service provider. Guess what? Turns out the only way to fix that is to order new bottom plate which costs about $130.
Baffled by this discovery we simply got Speck See-Through case, 2 times cheaper (3 times if you buy directly) and solves the issue. The only thing I don’t like about it is while the bottom part fits nicely the one that goes on top of the lid is having some space between it and the notebook lid. But at least will keep the feet in place.
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Dear Apple, Fix iPhoto. Thank you.
Don’t get me wrong, I like iPhoto. If it would be a less bloated and was working as it supposed to I might even love it. But in it’s current state it’s just a nuisance. This morning I checked the photos and decided to quickly delete bad ones and maybe touch up here and there. And immediately all kind of bad is started to happen.
The Straighten tool is impossible to use, but even if you’re lucky enough and managed to hit the spot, say 3.6º, as soon as you let the mouse go it snaps to 3.0º and you got to try again. Needless to say that you can’t rotate with, say, 0.1º increment, you got to use whatever iPhoto thinks is best. And it changes those values on-the-fly, first it might snap to 0.9º then to 0.2º but it doesn’t matter, as soon as you let go of your mouse button it will rotate back to 0º… or 1.2º…
Then goes the built-in email thingy. This is one cruel joke. I wrote about it before and since then Apple “improved” it. In the older times when you wanted to send some photos by email it simply added then in a message in your mail client. But not anymore.
Now you are forced to use this built-in emalish thingy, and since my last post they have added thise “Classic” template that looks a bit like a plain mail. Bit first you got set up the email in iPhoto one more time, you enter your email, password, then you got to see this awful “editor”, you press send, iPhoto huffs and puffs…
Your email did not go through because the server did not reply. What? Sorry iPhoto, this is bullshit, I put in my Gmail accout that I use for years. And it works. It is just you, you don’t know how to send email, how to edit it, so please stop pretending that you do. And folks at Apple should let us send emails like we used to, using E-Mail client, not using photo management tool. It simply not cut out for this task and if you try harder it will tell you that “Your email was not sent” and put the blame on you.
But if you follow it’s suggestion and check the Preferences you will see that even if you have chosen Gmail it uses me.com to send email:
The issue is like one and a half years old I think, since the unveiling of the iLife’11. Guess this is the sign that OS X is a neglected. But never mind, sharing didn’t work out, so let’s get back to editing.
Then this picture was upside down, so I tried to CMD-Rotate it a few times from the zoomed in view, but as soon as look at the other image and go back, it stayed unrotated. So I tried to do this from thumbnails view. Which is by the way is accessible only using a mouse.
You can’t CMD+↑ like you have used to in Finder, it just goes to the previous image. The same if you press left or up, which is wrong from UX standpoint, but nevermind that for now. Nor can you Escape back to thumbnails, now Escape is used to exit FullScreen mode which is kinda strange too. Actually this whole fullscreen business is inconsistent across the board, each App uses it’s own short cut, and some are hijacking the Esc button to go back from FullScreen, some are not. It doesn’t help that on dual-screen systems second monitor shows the grayish linen and you cannot use it when the FullScreen mode is on.
But the joke of it, after hitting Esc hard enough I actually got back to thumbnails view. Once.
In the end, after looking at the warning sign and restarting iPhoto I have managed to actually have the photo in correct position, but now the thumbnail got upside-down with no way to turn it back.
I have created a separate Event for those pictures and despite showing the thumbnails and images count correctly even was empty inside. After restarting iPhoto it disappeared completely along with the images. Yes, you got that right – the images were gone. Convenient approach, as Stalin would say “No Image, no problem”.
But that wasn’t the worst yet. Other weird stuff started to appear. Or, to be more precise, dissapear. Random images did become simply black boxes:
This I found interesting, the Originals were in place but File > Reveal in Finder > Modified File revealed this:
19 images turned to black squares in this folder. I have deleted them, didn’t have backup anyway. But iPhoto isn’t smart enough to fallback to the originals. By the way, If you switch between “broken” photos a hanful of times you can see some interesting visual effects:
There is a way to fix those images though. Edit, Apply any changes and it gets back from the dead. Optionally you can Revert to the Original.
At this point I got completely fed up with the idea of using iPhoto for anything more than storing and deleting images and act as a Photo Stream collector. Maybe got to try Lightroom, I heard it’s the Adobe product that sucks less.
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Can’t create a Game Center account? Just don’t log in.
There is a bug in Game Center that is existing since the introduction of iOS4 in September 2008. Nobody cared to fix it for almost two years now. It’s really stupid, strange that it went unnoticed for so long. Anyway here is the problem and the solution.
When you try to create a Game Center account you can either login to game center with your Apple ID or tap “Create New Account” explicitly. But if you simply log in instead (which is a no-brainer since your have your Apple ID pre-filled already) then it will get stuck on the creation page requiring your password which you have already entered.The problem is caused by the missing password field. So if you can’t create the Game Center account, do not login, tap “Create New Account” instead.
I wanted to get the account for my daughter so we could compete in some games, for a while nowbut it always told me that the password is missing or whatever, at first I thought this is a temporary issue and then forgot about it. But today I gave it another go and it finally dawned on me how to bypass this.
But then there is another issue, the Game Center account I have created this way is not a “real” one. It can’t be tied to an Apple ID or email and it doesn’t support Photos.
All in all this Game Center should be straighten out.
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This game is not recognized by Game Center
Hmm this is something new. What could it mean by the way? Was the game obtained from an unknown source or something? Why do I even have to see this?
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