iPod Touch: Improvement Ideas

I love the iPod Touch and it's quickly become my favorite little mobile electronic gadget. Very useful. Very fun. Very cool looking. Sleek. Addicting. Lots of smart choices and design decisions went into it. Apple rocks once again.

But it ain't perfect. At least for me. So I'm documenting here a list of problems I've had, or ideas on how to improve it.

I have an iPod Touch 16GB model with the 1.1.3 firmware and the January 2008 Software Upgrade.

Safari

1. a way to click on a link such that it opens in a new, separate tab/window from the current one. This ability is one of the killer features of modern desktop browsers such as Firefox. Actually it's what I do on both Firefox and Safari, on both my PC and my Mac: I frequently scan through a blog-type web page and click on any link that interests me in such a way that it opens each in a new separate tab, without grabbing focus (they begin fetching into a background tab) and I continue reading the original page. Only once I'm done digesting the original page do I want to go look at the other newly opened tabs. Since the fetching for them occurred in the bg, I often don't have to wait once I switch to their tabs/windows: the page has finished loading and rendering so I can begin reading them immediately. This is a time saver and huge convenience and user experience win.
2. hitting the Back arrow should not re-issue the prev request (a refresh) but rather just switch back to the rendering of the prev state. Currently you are forced to wait for a new req/response round trip to finish before you can see/use the prev page. This is unnecessary and annoying. It seems more smart to me that if a user truly wants to refresh/re-issue a page request that he simply hits the Refresh button. This would be more orthogonal and intuitive behavior, and more consistent with how browsers on desktop computers work. It could reduce battery power drain by reducing WiFi antennae use, and bandwidth/traffic on your provider, although in exchange for more memory use on your iPod Touch. ALSO once it has returned to the prev page's view, it should also be focused on the same spot as before. In terms of (x,y) focus and zoom level.
3. issue #2 compounds the problem caused by issue #1, and vice versa
4. double-tapping sometimes does not zoom in as I expected. Instead it seems to bounce or reject my zoom request. I'm then forced to do the two-finger-spread-out-motion technique, at the same spot, to make it zoom in. Not a huge issue, but a minor annoyance as it would be easier and faster to do the quick double-tap. The two-finger-spread makes more sense if I want to control precisely how much zoom in/out occurs. If I don't care, i just want it bigger/closer, the double-tap would suffice. Overall the link/button tapping, and page zooming & panning features of the browser UI work great, and are a joy to use. This is perhaps the only minor issue I can think of offhand.
5. fix the crash bug(s). Safari crashes "to desktop" about once a day or so during use. At least the core GUI/OS stays up and I can usually get back to where I was before, but it's annoying and unnecessary that I take that time and focus hit.

Music

1. smart sound volume limiting. The problem right now is that I frequently have to fiddle with the sound volume when a new song starts playing, because the played volume is either painfully too loud or far too quiet. I've turned on the Volume Limit feature, and tried setting that bar at different levels. No matter what I set it too, it seems to mess up the volume due to the logic it's applying. I've also played with the EQ and selected Loudness as the EQ profile. I did not notice any change nor do I know what the heck that does. I may not have done enough research into this issue so if this problem has an existing solution somebody please let me know. I don't remember having this much trouble with music volume on my classic iPod (5th gen? 30gb, black, video). The rule I want the player to follow is something like, "By default, play the song at the default volume specified in the sound file. UNLESS the maximum volume the player would emit would exceed some arbitrary volume level limit in the user options, in which case, the max volume played should be precisely that limit level, and the rest of the sound's within that file should be automatically adjusted downward in volume by a proportional amount, ideally without distortion (but meeting this goal is not as important as the requirement to cap max volume.) ALSO if the highest volume sound within a file is too low (too quiet) then dynamically adjust upward the volume of the entire sound file, maintaining proportions where possible, such that the highest volume sound is no less than some minimum level specified in the user options. Both the hard minimum and hard maximum volume limits are specifiable in the device Settings. The user can hear a sample tone played in his ear played at the current volume level he's considering, so he can get a sense of how loud or quiet that level is. I don't see any reason why, via hardware and/or software, this behavior can't be enforced. Maybe it's possible and I just haven't RTFM enough yet. Maybe it's a planned future upgrade.

YouTube

1. specify an existing account on YouTube to use, so that Favorites and Subscriptions are the same or synchable.
2. way for user to manually re-order Favorites, similar to how he can do Safari Bookmarks (unless app is associated with a YT.com account, in which case, use the same order as used there.)
3. smart sound volume limiting (just as I'd like to have in the Music app)

Notes

1. a way to sync content with your desktop computer. Notes is a great tool when I'm out and about to take and see notes. I mostly use it for TODO lists, but sometimes also for recording brainstorms or design ideas. But then the content becomes somewhat "dead" because I can't easily access it from my desktop computer. The email option does not cut it, because it sends a one-way snapshot to the dest address. The data on the far side (the received email) cannot be modified there unless you're willing to create a fork, or lose all new changes (they won't propagate back to your iPod Touch, thereby getting out of sync with the version there.)

Weather

1. 'update failed' should not cause the previous weather report to be blanked out

Stocks

1. graph time-period logic/plotting done by a crack monkey. it literally hurt my brain trying to reconcile the number differences implied between the various period sizes, I saw so many contradictions and non-correlations. Things that should have overlapped didn't. Things that did overlap would report different values for the same time slice. Maybe your app isn't at fault and it's just blindly rendering the data it gets from the source feed. In which case, the data feeds are provided by a crack monkey.

Google Maps

1. way within Google Maps to make it show the location (Pin?) of every contact in your Contacts data that has an address. Since a contact can have an address and Google Maps can show addresses it makes sense that there should be lots of useful 'two-way' connections between these two apps.  What's good already? The fact that starting in a Contact I can click on an address and it takes me into Google Maps focused on that address. That's useful. It would also be useful if I can start with a particular location/address and then make it show (on map, perhaps via pins) or list (in some scrollable report?) all contacts whose address is within X range, for example. This entry is more of a thinking-aloud, nice-to-have entry, and not describing any serious problem or bug I'm experiencing, so no big deal to me if nothing like this ever gets added. Things like the non-cache-using Back button in Safari, or the auto-psychotic-text-clobbering feature of the Keyboard are much bigger issues.

Flash

1. add it! it's missing. and yet it's almost everywhere on the web, used in different roles. I understand what some of your reasons may be for not supporting it (1: to be anti-Adobe, 2: to encourage non-"proprietary" alternatives, 3: to encourage a proprietary Apple alternative, 4: preserve CPU, 5: preserve battery, .... other reasons?) but my web experience is worsened on a daily basis by not having Flash work on your device. You would get me to spend more of my web use time on iPod Touch rather than my desktop computer if you supported it. On a little more personal note (although on one that I'm sure lots of other people share) I have a business that provides Flash-based web applications. It sure would be nice if my customers and also myself as the developer could access these Flash apps on your device. Would increase my market, and increase the usefulness of your device to those folks. Seems like almost everybody would win. Again, unless somehow one or more of the 5 example concerns I cited above are weighted more heavily in your decision-making.

Keyboard

1. option to turn off the autofix/suggestions functionality. In many cases it's annoying and imposes makework on me, imposing a sort of "Microsoft Knows Best" anti-pattern of UI behavior. I often type using personal slang, industry-specific terminology or lingo, acronyms and abbreviations (to save typing) and I am frequently bitten by this autofix/suggest thing clobbering my input, changing it to something else, or otherwise requiring me to perform an additional input task (moving my finger from its original position over the keyboard up to the text body and tapping to dismiss their suggestion, then moving back to the keyboard again), thus unnecessarily slowing me down and annoying me. Fixing what is obviously or very likely a spelling error ('jsut' should be 'just' 99%+ of the time) is a good thing. Clobbering or distorting an acronym ('amd' becoming 'and') is bad. Especially in the Notes app where it's perfectly acceptable if my saved note contains spelling errors, because I will still know what it means. If I could turn off this feature in Notes, and thus increase the number of spelling errors saved in my notes, but also experience less clobbering/distorting of what I really did intend to type, then I would be happy with that tradeoff. If in my save notes the app has clobbered or twisted my input into something that I cannot "work back" or deduce what I intended to say, that is the fault of your software, not me. The autofix/suggest functionality may be a net-win in certain apps/contexts (web browsing & form input, contacts, calendar) but a net-loss in others, like Notes. And I'm sure it would vary by person. A perfectionist with great spelling who uses lots of lingo and abbreviations may hate this feature, whereas the opposite type of person may love it. Make it an option and let the user decide. Easy win!

General

1. ability to sync readable documents (such as PDF and TXT) from my desktop and read them on my iPod Touch anytime at will, even offline. Basically do for them what the device already allows for images and video. I'd love to be able to have fiction and non-fiction books, as well as reference manuals or guides, on my iPod wherever I go. I could read a book or consult a manual whenever I needed or had the time.
2. Image sync fails on common formats and fails mysteriously. When i sync images some of the images on my desktop computer consistently fail to do so, for no given reason. I just get a popup error message telling me one of the filenames that failed. (A JPEG file, in my case.) I wish it provided more detailed information on exactly what files failed to sync, exactly why they failed. Or, simply, it should "just work". If the reason is simply that the files are an an unrecognized or unsupported encoding, then just tell me that, with details, so I can try to rectify the situation by converting them on my own. I have a sneaking suspicion that I haven't dug into this issue enough yet, however, and so it may be my fault for not doing enough RTFM. But it is one of the issues biting me, so I thought I'd list it for sake of completeness.
   
3. Copy-and-paste text between apps. So I can select a chunk of text on a web page, then switch over to the Notes app and paste that text into a notes document. Or into an entry in Contacts, or Calendar. Etc. I realize the trick is dealing with modality and input commands but there's probably a way to make it work. The 'move cursor with finger' functionality you provide in forms works pretty darn well, so perhaps the implementation could work like that when selecting text.
4. Web page WiFi portals are too manual and crack-addled. Using AT&T WiFi account access to the Internet (the kind where you request anything in a browser, it redirects you to a web login page, you submit your WiFi login credentials, now you're approved, and after that all your web & internet access requests work) has two pain points or opportunities for improvement. Would be nice to have some way where I could store (or it could remember) my login credentials on the iPod, so I don't have to manually type it in and submit a web form every time. And two, I notice that sometimes, when I am already logged in and accessing the Internet successfully, surfing the web, etc, and then I temporarily turn off my iPod (a soft off, not a hard off), to visit the bathroom, for example, and then come back out, sit down and turn it back on again, then try to access the internet, I find that it has de-authenticated me or otherwise forgot that I had an authenticated session, and redirects me to the login page and asks me to login again. This is just stupid. They should be able to use cookies and timeout functionality to ensure that I continue to be authenticated and allowed up to X minutes since I last logged-in and/or issued a request on their network. Simply putting my iPod to sleep for a minute or two should not cause it to throw away my status. It feels almost as if some hard signal or explicit behavior was coded to make it do this. It's bad for users, so don't do it. If the justification was, "Well, since you turned off the device, then turned back on again, the device doesn't know who the human is using it, it may be a different person than the one who originally typed in the login credentials." then that argument is bunk because that argument didn't prevent the Mail app from having a totally automated and trusting auth process. Plus, worst case, you could make the iPod, at the device level, require the user to re-login to the device itself, as whole, if you were concerned about that. But even that should be a user option. If there's some subtle underlying technical reason why my device must lose it's auth status with respect to my WiFi provider then at least give me a way to automate the submission of my login credentials. I realize that part of the issue is the fact that it's a web-based auth system. But I'm pretty sure that's not a showstopper constraint. It's just software. There IS a way to make it work. A thumbnail solution is to automate that form submit, that's a simple HTTP request to a particular address (which could be communicated to it from the Wifi provider, or grabbed from user settings), using a username/password, also stored in the iPod's user settings. Not hard to do.