iTunes Account Sharing

Yes the bosses at Hollywood and the big music companies will hate this idea, but we humans like to share. Who knows what evaluation might have thrown up if we had been purely selfish creatures. That means when my partner downloads a TV show on her iPad, it would be quite nice if we could watch it on my iPad without jumping through hoops. How about a feature to link up to 5 iTunes accounts, so they can all download each others purchases? It would be one more argument for buying DRM protected content as opposed to downloading it for free from other unofficial sources.

Automatic App Updates

More ‘normal’ users don’t religiously check the App Store for updates, so having an Android-like feature whe selected apps can update automatically would be useful. This would need to be user-controlled, as some apps makers have a tendency to make their apps worse over time instead of improving them.

Standard platform for magazine/newspaper content

Digital newspapers and magazines are a mess. Most are custom apps that contain a series of digital images. There’s no ability to email links, lookup words or save out articles. What iOS needs is a standard system for newspapers (and a lesser extent magazines) – that offers a consistent way to navigate articles. When you pickup a newspaper, you expect it to work like every other newspaper. That’s not the case on the iPad. App makers might say this limits their creativity, but I think the egos of software developers can take the hit, and that the written content should take centre stage. It would surey be cheaper to produce for a system like this where all the publisher needs to worry about is the content and not the cogs and wheels that drive the app.

Less Clutter

iOS 5 seems a little bloated in placed. Cick the action button in Safari and the options no longer fit in on one screen on the iPhone. Where we once had ‘Add Bookmark’, ‘Add to home screen’ and ‘Mail link to this page’ we have now options to Tweet, Print and do even more. This is systematic of the OS in many places.

System wide sharing to other apps

Instead of a ‘Tweet’ link hard-coded into the operating system, why not have a share system simular to Android. The UI would need some work and the ‘intent’ be more specific that Android (on my Androird phone, sharing a link brings me a list containing Twitter, Facebook, Dropbox and a File Explorer app, why would I want to send Dropbox a URL?) – perhaps a way for apps to register as social applications ?

Scheduled Notifications

I like the fact my iPad has push email. I don’t like the fact it notifies me of new email at 2 in the morning. ‘Nuff said?

Google’s service, named “Google Drive” (a name I was hoping they would reserve for their exciting autonomous car project) offers tight integration with Google Docs and other Google products such as Picasa (and no doubt their Chrome OS and Android operating systems at some point in the near future). One of the key selling points of Google Drive is it’s search facility – they even use OCR to let you search images. You get 5GB free, and can get up to 1TB of space if you’re prepared to pay for it. Crucially Drive supports sharing files with others, making collaboration on documents much easier. There is support for Windows, Mac, Android and iOS (no Windows Phone).

Microsoft’s SkyDrive has actually been around for a few years, but has always been a web only interface and so despite their initial offering of 25GB free, it was difficult to see how anyone would ever use that if they had to upload files one by one in a web browser (I think they they knew that too, since now it’s more usable it only offers 7GB for free). SkyDrive too has tight integration with Microsoft’s ecosystem – the upcoming Windows 8 will use it to synchronise the data within Apps, and also to keep your settings in the cloud. Office documents can be opened using Office Web Apps and there’s support for sharing files too. There is support for Windows, Mac, Windows Phone and iOS (no Android).

Apple’s iCloud is a rather different affair. There’s no way to arbitrarily use the storage like a folder, as is the case with the other services mentioned here. Instead developers use the APIs to build iCloud into their apps. For many people this is just fine, after all most normal users just want their documents and photos to be safe, and don’t care so much about the file system underneath. For many (including me) this is a major limitation. It’s great if you own multiple iOS devices (say an iPhone and an iPad) because your bookmarks, notes and documents will stay in sync. It’s not so great if you want to share a document. There is no way for example, for two iPad users to work on a spreadsheet using Apple’s ‘Numbers’ app. It just can’t be done. Of course Apple haven’t added support for cloud rival Dropbox to their apps, so it left me continually emailing a spreadsheet back and forth like it was 1998. Welcome to the future. The biggest downer on iCloud is the lack of Windows support. Not that I would be able to open my Pages documents on Windows anyway. However if you have a Mac and live wholly using Apple’s products, it’s not bad.

So who needs Dropbox?

So with all these major players getting involved, I’ve read a lot of blogs and comments to the effect of “Dropbox is doomed” or that there’s no point in it any more. How wrong could they be.

The purpose of these three services is to keep you within an ecosystem. Each has it’s own small limitations that might seem like a minor inconvenience now, but remember this is your data – and one day you might decide you no longer want to be part of a particular ecosystem, how easy will it be to move all those gigabytes of data? Dropbox (and other pure cloud providers, I just happen to use Dropbox) is not out to try and get me to use their phone operating system, or to to make it difficult for me to share with a rival. They are just offering cloud synchronisation, without the platform politics.

Audible

I enjoy listening to Audiobooks while at the gym or driving, and this app makes it so easy. You can download any books you’ve purchased from Audible and the 30s rewind button and sleep timer are excellent additions. The ability to bookmark is also nice. Being owned by Amazon, I’m surprised your position and bookmarks are not backed up to the cloud (as they are when reading a book using the Kindle app) – so this means when I launch the app on my iPad I’m not in sync. Great app and great service.

Call Filter

I don’t like answering calls from anonymous callers – it’s usually someone trying to sell me something I don’t want. This handy little app silently sends anonymous incoming calls to voicemail, meaning anyone who does actually want to contact you can still leave a message for you to call back.

Dropbox

A while back I blogged about a rather convoluted way to mimic the excellent Photo Stream feature found on iOS on Android. That just got much easier thanks to the latest update to Dropbox which can now automatically synchronise photos and videos to your Dropbox account. No more plugging in your USB cable to download all your photos, and if you loose/wipe your phone your precious memories are safe.

IM+ Pro

A great chat application that lets me sign into MSN Messenger, Google Talk and Facebook all at once. The app cleverly maintains your sessions on their servers, and uses a highly efficient Push connection to keep you connected – meaning you can be signed into all your accounts and your battery won’t even notice. (Also well worth getting for iPad)

Dogcatcher

I love podcasts, and Dogcatcher is a great player for Android. I wouldn’t say it has the nicest User Experience I’ve ever seen, but functionality it has everything I could ask for from a mobile podcast player – including automatic downloading of new episodes (you can specify WiFi or Plugged in only). iPhone users should checkout Podcaster which provides similar functionality.

Hope you find this useful, let me know if you have any favourites.

What a great user experience! (and not really true since the Windows 98 days).

I had a dig around to try and find out what was causing this popup so I could stop it, and found a setting to only charge the battery up to 100%

Interesting. Do any battery experts know how doing this improves battery life?

(and perhaps the most pointless blog post ever!)

It was no surprise to me then that when I switched to BT ADSL that both my Kindle 3 and my Dad’s Kindle 4 wouldn’t connect to the Home Hub 3 router. I counted 11 other devices in the house which connected without any trouble; laptops, iPods, Xboxes and phones of different makes – so I knew the problem was with the Kindle. After not getting much help from Amazon (for what its worth, their support staff answer the phone quickly, and were pleasant to deal with) I decided I would just need to go through a trial and error process myself. This was time consuming, because the problem only seemed to manifest itself once the Kindle had put the WiFi radio to sleep, so after making a change to the router’s configuration and reconnecting the Kindle, it would always work, and only after 30 minutes or so when the Kindle failed to connect would I know if there was still a problem.

Anyway, the solution for me was to disable mixed WPA and WPA2 encryption, and set the router to use only WPA2. Contrary to other Internet sites, changing the wireless channel or turning off ‘N’ mode made no difference to me. This fixed worked on my Kindle 3 3G and the new Kindle 4 WiFi. All my other devices still connect fine (event a first generation iPod Touch) so not having the original WPA specification in use doesn’t seem to have any drawbacks.

I hope this is of use to someone – let me know in the comments if you’ve had the same problem.