Apple
Friday, August 22nd, 2008
by lepton
Everybody seems to be begging for Apple to put select, copy, cut, and paste into the iPhone and iPod Touch. But when you think about it… there isn’t much you really NEED it for.
Sure, sure, you want to copy and paste text in your word processor, to move a paragraph here and there. And, you want to copy some stuff out of an EMail to paste into a note. And, I might want to copy and paste stuff around in this WordPress blog post as I edit on my iPhone. But frankly these are not very common things to be doing on an iPhone. The things that you DO commonly need to do can be handled by other means.
Would you like to copy a picture out of a web page and save it? You can do that already. Touch and hold the picture, and a menu pops up offering to “Save Image” to your Photos application. Want to EMail a photo? Display it in Photos, touch an icon, and a menu pops up offering to EMail the photo, or to send it to a MobileMe gallery. No copying, no pasting, no problems.
It’s the same with many things you might be using copy/paste for on a lesser computer. Save the sender of an EMail message into a contact? There’s a menu command for that. Call a phone number you spot in an EMail or web page? Touch it and the iPhone offers to call the number in one step.
Enter the Data Detector
The last example, calling a phone number that is in an EMail or Web page by touching it, illustrates a feature in Mac OSX known as the Data Detector. The iPhone simply recognizes the text is a phone number, and turns it into a live link that, when touched, will offer to make the call. And this is much better than selecting the phone number, copying it to a clipboard, switching to the phone application, pasting it in to the phone keypad, and making a call.
We don’t need copy and paste so much as we need commands and data detectors to do the same tasks in a single step. We need Apple to expand the data detectors and to add some more commands.
Look, don’t worry. Apple is going to add select, cut, copy and paste into the iPhone. In some cases, we flat out need it. But why did Apple say adding this was a low priority? Because it is not going to be elegant. We need it for a fallback, but it might not be pretty.
How will the mechanics of selecting text work? What guesture will perform a “Copy” or “Paste”. It might take a bit of finger dexterity. It might take more than a sentence in a pamphlet to explain it. It might not be very intuitive. Apple hates this kind of stuff, as they should.
So the priority might be to put in a few more commands, a few more data detectors. This would handle many cases where you would be copying and pasting, intuitively and elegantly.
For example, if a phone number appears on a web page or EMail, data detectors recognize it and you can call it with a touch. But type a phone number into the Notes application (or any other) and it isn’t recognized. You can’t touch and call it. So my suggestion is allow this detection in all text fields.
Did you know that there are several data detectors in your Mac’s Mail application? In Leopard Mail, look at one of the EMail messages you’ve received, for a date and time anywhere in the message. Hover the cursor over it, and you will see a gray box appear around the date and time, with a little drop down triangle in it. Click that triangle and a menu appears - “Create New iCal Event…” and ”Show This Date in iCal” appear as commands. A date data detector recognized it and lets you do common tasks with it, no copy/switch/paste necessary. Try hovering over a name that’s in your address book. “Show in Address Book” is available. Over a phone number, you get “Create New Contact” and “Add to Existing Contact”, Hover over an address and you get those plus “Show on Map”.
This is the sort of thing I believe Apple is wanting to put in our devices. Elegant, intuitive, easier. No weird gestures, no multiple steps, no learning techniques. We will get copy and paste, but most people need data detectors and commands much more.
Wednesday, August 13th, 2008
by lepton
Have you experienced the dreaded white apple of death on your iPhone or iPod Touch? It’s caused by a crash in the software that keeps the device from restarting properly. All you see on the device is a black screen with a white Apple logo in the middle, and the device never gets to the Home screen.
The first time this happened to me, my iPhone 3G was running OS 2.0 and doing just fine that morning, but at one point I felt the phone being unusually warm in my pocket. I took it out, and there was the white apple of death!
Another time, running 2.0.1 I was syncing the phone with iTunes. It was proceeding normally, status messages were saying it was updating this app, and that app, (updates were available for some of the applications I had gotten from the App Store) and right in the middle of this, the white screen of death appeared!
The black screen with the white Apple logo appears as part of the normal starting up sequence for the device. If you turn your device completely off by holding the sleep/wake button long enough for “Slide to power off” to appear, and you do that, and then press sleep/wake again to restart it, you will see the white apple, followed in a moment or two by the regular Home screen.
If there is a severe crash of some software in your device that the system can’t recover from, the device will try to restart itself. If during the white apple part of starting up, where the low level stuff is beginning to run, a problem appears, it can stay stuck on this screen forever, presumably trying and failing again and again to recover.
Is your device ruined? Probably not. Some software most likely wrote in some parts of memory it wasn’t supposed to, overwriting some important part of software or data that the system needs. This could happen from a nasty bug in some software, the operating system, or goodness knows what. But the important thing, is that this is very, very likely a software problem, and that means it can be fixed by restoring the software. Luckily, this is something we can do right at home.
If you get the so-called “white apple of death”, first just sit and wait for five minutes. Perhaps something happened, the device restarted itself, and it will start up normally in a moment. But if it is sitting there for more than five minutes, and getting warm, you might be experiencing the problem.
First, I would try to restart the device. If that fails, you will have to try a “Forced Recovery”. This procedure is very likely to fix everything, but the downside is, it takes a long time since it causes a full restore of all your software and data, and it restores things to the state they were in the last time you completed a successful backup in iTunes. More than likely, you did a backup last night, since iTunes does them automatically when you sync your device. So don’t fret, eventually you should get back to full operating, and nothing lost other than today’s stuff, and maybe even some of that is fine. For example, if you use MobileMe and you entered some calendar or address book stuff, it probably synced to the MobileMe “cloud” at me.com and will be safely restored.
I won’t go through the procedure here. Instead, I’ll refer you to my previous Lepton’s Blog post” “Fixing a frozen, zonked, or dead iPhone or iPod Touch“. Just follow the link and that post explains all the ways to restart or restore your device. You’ll probably end up doing the “Forced Recovery” but check out all the procedures in order, maybe some lesser one will save you.
Good luck, and lets hope future updates to the operating system and applications will banish the white apple of death forever!
Tuesday, August 5th, 2008
by lepton
Are your Apple iPhone apps crashing? Freezing? Is your iPod Touch stuck? There are various things you can try to get back to normal. Here are some of them, in order from least to most disruptive:
Restart
If things appear sluggish, or apps that normally work just quit as soon as you start them, you can restart your iPhone or iPod Touch. Normally, you don’t restart your device, you merely use the sleep/wake button on top of the device to put it to sleep. This will clear out any stray chunks of memory applications may have left behind, re-establish connections, and generally clean things up.
Power Off Screen
To do this, hold down the sleep/wake button on top of the device for about five seconds, until a “Slide to power off” control appears. Slide the control, and the iPhone will gracefully shut down its services, giving them a chance to clean up, and then turn off. This takes several seconds. While it is shutting off, the screen goes black except for a spinning activity indicator.
To turn the device back on, press the sleep/wake button as usual. But instead of instantly coming back to life, the system starts up fresh. You will see a white Apple appear for several seconds, while everything starts. When the Home screen appears, you are in business with some very tidy system internals. Hopefully those apps will be working fine again!
Restarting your device is harmless and seems to help if things seem sluggish, so feel free to do it every once in a while.
Force Quit
If an application seems stuck, you can force it to quit. To do this, hold down the Home button for about ten seconds. If this succeeds, the home screen will appear. This forces the current application to quit immediately, without being given a chance to save what it was working on, so the very last thing it was doing may not be saved. But except for that, everything should be fine and your application and its data should still be ok. This is the same thing as typing Option-Command-Escape on the Macintosh and force quitting an application in the resulting dialog.
Force Restart
If forcing an application to quit doesn’t work - you’ve held down the Home button for over ten seconds and the Home screen hasn’t appeared - you can Interrupt the computer and force it to restart. To do this, hold down both the Home and sleep/wake buttons for about five seconds. The screen will go black, then a white Apple will appear, then after a couple of moments, the Home screen will appear and you are back in business.
This procedure is like a super Force Quit, in that it forces both the current application and the system itself, to quit, without giving either a chance to exit gracefully, save, or clean things up. So like the Force Quit procedure, some of the most recent things that were changed may not be saved. But except for that, everything should be fine once the system restarts.
Restore
If a Force Restart procedure doesn’t work, your device might really be messed up. If your device seems dead and just plain won’t turn on, make sure it is charged! The charger might have been unplugged, or the cable might be broken or have a bad connection. But if the hardware seems good, you might try recovering all the software to the state when it was last backed up.
If you’ve been connecting to iTunes on a regular basis, it’s extremely likely you have a backup of everything on your device in your computer, as iTunes makes one whenever you sync. So even though a Restore will wipe the device clean, it will immediately afterward load in a fresh copy of the operating system, and all your data, including music, podcasts, video, mail, settings, and everything else. So at the end of this procedure, which can take significant time, you should be in exactly the same place as when you last successfully synced.
To do a Restore, use the cable and connect your device to iTunes. If your device isn’t recognized by iTunes, try the “Forced Recovery” procedure below. In the Summary tab for your device is a “Restore” button. Click it. You are asked to confirm the procedure. Once things start going, just let the device sit as iTunes does everything.
First it will download a copy of the latest operating system if it doesn’t happen to have one. Then it will erase your device. Then it will load the operating system in. Then it will verify that the system was properly written into the device. Then it will restart the device. You will see a dialog box, just let it go, things continue automatically.
Eventually it will show a set up message, asking if you would like to set up as a new device, or restore from a previous backup. You want to tell it to restore from a backup. If there are multiple backups, the most recent one should already be selected in the popup menu. Click the Continue button and away it goes, copying all your stuff back into the device.
After a possibly lengthy process of copying, your device should be good as new! Or at least as good as it was before this mess happened.
Forced Recovery
If your device is so seemingly dead that iTunes won’t even recognize the device exists when you plug it in to a cable while iTunes is running, you can resort to a forced recovery. To do this, turn your device off if possible. Now press the Home button and hold it, then press the Sleep/Wake button, and keep holding both of them until you see the white Apple appear, just like in “Force Restart”. But, don’t let go when you see the white Apple. Keep holding both buttons for about thirty seconds, and eventually you will see a screen showing a USB plug and indicating you should connect to iTunes. At this point you can let go of the buttons. [Update: If you try this and never seem to get to the recovery screen, try it again but with the sync cable hooked up. I believe with the newest system, this might be necessary to get to recovery mode.]
iPhone in Recovery Mode
You have forced your phone into recovery mode. This is about the same state that it was in when it first came out of the box. The device won’t do anything until you plug in the cable and run iTunes. iTunes should display a message that says it sensed a device in recovery mode, and should it restore the device? At this point you can do a restore as described in the “Recover” section. You should be back in business!
Call for a genius!
Wow. Your device seems dead and iTunes won’t recognize it, and it won’t even go into Forced Recovery mode? Then it’s time to call for a genius! That’s what Apple likes to call its technicians over at the Apple Stores. You can make an appointment over at the apple.com site, or give Apple a call at their service line. If your device is a goner, well, you may still be under warantee, and they should swap your phone for a new one, which you should be able to restore to prime condition toot suite, with all your backed up data!
Good luck with your iPhone or iPod Touch!
Sunday, July 27th, 2008
by lepton
I love MobileMe, especially the push EMail, which has been working great for me since the start. But they still have bugs to work out, and one of them is the following.
I use MobileMe mail for my iPhone. I get all my mail through other EMail addresses, and they come into my main computer at home. There, I have some rules set up such that the “interesting” mail, such as from work or friends, gets automatically forwarded to my MobileMe mail account. On the iPhone, that is set up as the active mail account, so that forwarded mail gets immediately pushed to me on the phone. It works great, and in fact I’ve been doing this for years, the only new thing is the instant push.
The thing is, when I read that mail on the iPhone, I delete it. But if I go to me.com and check the mail there in MobileMe on the web, all the deleted mails are still sitting there, in the In Box. Though they are properly in the Trash on the iPhone, on the me.com web site, they are still in the In Box.
If I select one of those deleted mails on the web page, and hit the Delete button, it gets deleted, and poof! All the other deleted mails go away too. In other words, all the mail gets properly placed where it belongs at that point.
So the bug is, deleted mail doesn’t get moved immediately (or at all) into the trash at the mobile me web site until you go to the site and give it a push by deleting some of the deleted mail. Clearly the messages are properly being marked as deletede in the system, but are just not properly placed in the deleted web site folder.
Does something like this happen to you?
Friday, July 25th, 2008
by lepton
I love predicting what great new products Apple might come up with. Recently I came across this document I wrote September 5th, 2004. It had my vision for an Apple Handheld Computer.
Did I get close to predicting the iPhone and iPod Touch years before it happened? Well, I thought the entire front would be a screen, but I also thought for iPod functions it would show a virtual click wheel on it, and I thought you could put membrane switches under the screen to sense finger presses! Sheesh! But I also thought of a full touch screen of the right dimensions, and putting full OS X on it. And I’m still waiting for Bluetooth stereo and Apple Remote Desktop! Here it is:
Handheld Computer Idea
First, let me assure you I am not insane. And, these ideas are solely my own. It is my vision of an Apple handheld computer. Very few things need to be invented to create this design; these will be explained as we get to them. I believe the device could be made in a year or two.
Hardware:
Start with a 4th generation iPod. The clickwheel can be thought of as five membrane switches, one in the center and four at the points of the compass. In addition there is a touch sensitive ring positioned over the four outer switches that senses finger capacitance.
Give the iPod a quarter turn to the left so that the screen is on the left and the controller is on the right. Imagine the screen gone for a moment.
Now imagine a second controller just like the first, positioned to the left of the original controller and slightly overlapping, such that the “West” switch of the original controller is exactly over the “East” switch of the new one. In fact, make them the same switch.
Imagine the touch sensitive rings gone for a moment. What we have so far is an array of nine membrane switches. Ine common one in the center of the front surface, four to the right, and four to the left.
Add one half inch to the width (height actually, since we have positioned the iPod sideways) of the unit. Re=center everything.
Now place a screen over the entire front of the unit, on top of the array of switches. The screen is an OLED type. Such screens are thin, can be on a flexible substrate, are low power, and need no backlight. The screen is thin and flexible enough that you can click the switches below by pressing on them. Essentially, the screen is the top surface of the membrane switches. As in the original iPod, the two “center” switches can have a slight dome shape over them such that you can feel their positions.
A screen with the above characteristic needs to be invented. It absolutely is well within the realm of possibility. Hurdles include making a screen with a good half life, making it flexible enough to allow for membrane switch operation, and allowing for the domes without distorting the image on the screen.
Above or under this screen is a capacitive touch sensor such that your fingertip position can be sensed anywhere on the screen. This may or may not have to be invented.
A metal stylus may be used which “focuses” your finger to make it easier to sense the precise position you are touching. This allows writing or drawing on the screen.
Above all this is a protective coating which is clear, allows viewing, finger sensing, stylus, and, membrane switches.
You now have a case whose front surface has a wide screen aspect ratio 4.5” diagonal image. You can touch, write on, and click buttons on this screen.
Place hard disk, battery, memory, CPU, audio out, video out, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth technology inside.
Software:
Write software to allow the functions described below.
iPod function:
This device is still an iPod. Hold it in the vertical orientation. On the top half of the unit is the usual iPod screen. On the bottom half is an image of the familiar iPod control wheel. Use normally. You have physical click switches in the usual positions, and the touch screen allows the ring-control function.
You can also hold the unit upside down and it can work the same way, since you have switches and controls at both ends of the device.
Video iPod function:
Hold the unit in a horizontal orientation. Playback full screen video. You have invisible iPod-like controls on both the left and right side of the screen, you can use these controls to control the video playback.
Audio output function:
Audio can come through a headphone jack. It may be streamed over Wi-Fi to an Airport Express. It may be streamed over Blurtooth to stereo headphones.
Video output function:
Video can appear on the screen, It can be sent to an I/O connector which can connect to a video device. It can be streamed out through Wi-Fi.
Data I/O function:
Data can be transferred through an I/O connector to a dock. This is the only way to get mass data such as audio and video into the device. The dock also charges the device.
Remote desktop function:
Allow connection to Apple Remote Desktop over Wi-Fi such that the device can be used to see the screen of a Macintosh, and control it. Allow Bluetooh keyboards and mice to connect to the device to aid in this control.
Macintosh function:
Someday, place OSX in the device and let it be a true, stand-alone Macintosh.
